The Key (The Magnificent 12 3)

“She wha haes vowed tae string a fiddle wi’ mah tendons, then speil a jolly tune ’n’ dae a jig?”

(“She who has vowed to string a fiddle with my tendons, then play a jolly tune and do a jig?”)

“Aye, my love,” Connie said, stroking his Gandalf eyebrows.

They gazed into each other’s eyes with the tenderest of love. Such love.

With sinking heart, Mack faced the terrible truth: Connie had betrayed her fellow fairies.

Which was pretty heinous.

But of far greater concern to Mack was that she’d also pulled the rug out from under him and his friends.

“Seize them!” William Blisterthöng MacGuffin roared.

At first this didn’t trouble Mack too much because he hadn’t seen any minions who might do any seizing. But he soon saw that he had simply lacked imagination. Because the skulls set above the archways—human and not-human—suddenly creaked and groaned and opened their jaws. Yellow torchlight leaped into the empty eye sockets. And, to Mack’s infinite horror, the skulls began to grow necks and shoulders in the very stone of the wa

lls.

Let’s make this clear: the stone itself seemed to soften, to liquefy, and from that gooey stone emerged skeletons, like dinosaur bones rising up out of a tar pit, or Upper East Side society women emerging from the mud bath at the spa.

The hair on Mack’s head stood up.

Stefan went in swinging. He punched the first skeleton so hard the skull went flying like a penalty kick.

But in a heartbeat three other skeletons—a human, something that looked like it might have been a wolf, and something else that looked like it had too many hands and a partial exoskeleton—bore him down to the paving stones with kicks and jabs.

“Ret-ma belast!” Mack cried. Which in Vargran is, “Stop, monsters!”

This worked, but only a little. About a quarter of the skeletons stopped dead. Well, stopped, anyway. The rest kept right on coming.

“Thay aren’t a’ monsters, ye wee twit,” MacGuffin chortled.

Jarrah had leaped to Stefan’s defense and was hauling back on skulls, and Xiao had raced to grab a torch from its sconce and was now swinging it around her so fast it was like a circle of fire.

Dietmar grabbed Mack’s arm. “We need more Vargran!”

“Ret-ma … um … What’s the word for man?”

“Dood!” Dietmar supplied.

“Ret-ma dood!” Mack cried, and at that instant a skeletal fist that had closed around his neck froze. Unfortunately, it froze in place. It froze choking Mack’s throat.

Mack’s eyes began to bulge. He grabbed the skeletal human arm and yanked it wildly back and forth. The elbow snapped and the arm came loose. The grip stayed tight, so Mack twirled and gagged with a bony hand around his neck and a bony arm sticking out, and it’s amazing how quickly choking will drop you to your knees.

The world was swimming around Mack and he knew his time was measured in seconds.

Suddenly, there was Dietmar getting his fingers around the skeletal thumb and pulling just hard enough to let a few pumps of blood reach Mack’s buzzy brain.

But then whatever skeletons weren’t either monster or human knocked Dietmar to the ground.

Jarrah now had a torch of her own and was stabbing it into weird rib cages and up under bony jaws, and Xiao copied that action, and it seemed that, dead though they might be, the bony creatures didn’t like that much.

The Magnifica had used Vargran to stop about half the skeletons, and with their fists and torches they were holding their own … until.

Until MacGuffin seized a massive cudgel—a stick with a gnarled knob of polished wood on one end—and came wading into the fight.

He jabbed the stick with amazing force into Stefan’s chest. Stefan staggered back, clutched at his chest, sucked air, and landed on his back.