Altar of Bones Read Online Free PDF

was ragged, dangerously shallow.
    Quickly, she built a fire using pieces of decaying coffins. Once she got the flames hot enough, she used an offering bowl from the altar to make a thin gruel out of melted snow and bread and fat from her knapsack.
    “You’re not going to die on me, Nikki. I promise. You’re not going to die,” she chanted, like a prayer, but he was out of his head with fever.
    The bowl of gruel trembled in her hands as she looked from Nikolai’s face, white as death, to the altar made of human bones. Skulls, femurs, fibulas, the hundreds of bones fitted intricately together to form an elaborate and macabre table of worship. On top of it, among the stubs of hundreds of melted candles, and battered bronze bowls that had once held offerings, sat the Lady—a wooden icon of the Virgin Mary.
    The Lady’s jewels sparkled in the firelight. Her crown shone and the bright folds of her robes—orange, sea green, and a bloodred—glowed as lush as the day they were painted, nearly four hundred years ago in the court of Ivan the Terrible. And it seemed to Lena that the Lady’s eyes glimmered wet with tears over what she was about to do.
    “I love him,” Lena said. “I couldn’t bear it if he dies.”
    But the Lady was silent.
    “I promised him,” she said. And still the Lady did not answer.
    Lena made sure Nikolai still slept as if already dead, then she brought the bowl of gruel over to the altar and the icon. Because only with the Lady’s help could she be sure that her promise would be kept.

    W HEN SHE CAME back, she saw the fire had warmed Nikolai enough that she could rouse him some. She slid her arm under his shoulders and raised his head so he could drink. He took a sip. Then another.
    His feverish eyes cleared a little and he looked around the cavern. She could see the wonder grow on his face as he took it all in, for this place, macabre and mysterious, had been a burial chamber for her people since the beginning of time. She watched him take in the deep, oily, black pool fed by water dripping from the ceiling, the stalagmites that covered the floor like rows of tombstones, the crude drawings of wolves etched deep in the stone walls.
    Finally, he focused on the hot geyser bubbling and bellowing steam beneath the altar made of human bones, and she heard him suck in a sharp breath.
    “My God.”
    Lena set down the bowl of gruel and leaned over him. “Sssh, love. Never mind.” She brushed the wet hair off his forehead. “They’re just the bones of people from long ago who died during the winter and were put here to be buried in the summer, only some ended up forgotten. And then other people came along and put their remains to another use.”
    “It’s real.” His voice was little more than a whisper, his eyes wild. “It’s the sketch come to life, I tell you—from the Fontanka dossier. I never believed it, not in my heart. A wild tale told in a tavern by a drunken madman? But it’s real … the altar of bones.”
    His gaze came back to her, and on his face she saw not only wonder now, but fear, and a raw, naked hunger. “Give it to me, Lena. Let me drink of the altar. If you love me, you will—”
    But then his eyelids fluttered, and he passed out again.
    Lena sat back on her heels. She could feel the Lady’s eyes on her, but she couldn’t bear to meet them. She looked instead at Nikolai’s pale, fever-ravaged face.
    His lying face.

    I T’S ALL BEEN a lie
. Every kiss, every touch, every word out of his mouth—it had all just been a way for him to find the altar of bones.
    Don’t trust anyone, her mother had warned her, the day she had brought Lena to the cave and shown her its frightening secret. “You will be the Keeper of the altar of bones, my daughter, after I am gone, and your sacred duty will be to keep it hidden forever from the world. You must tell no one, show no one. Trust no one, not even the ones you love. Especially not the ones who say they love you.”
    The ones you