Ridged Mouth Bones Crossword Clue Novels & Stories

Adriano stepped behind me so quietly I barely heard him move. “That's a spreader clamp,” he murmured. “It’s used on the mouth. Keeps it open. You twist the bar to widen it. Slowly.” My grip tightened instinctively, “Oh.” “Would you ever want to try it?” he asked softly, like it was a simple question. Like he was asking me if I liked a song. I bit my lip. “I don’t know.” I set the clamp back on the shelf carefully, and my eyes wandered to the next object, a long black rope coiled beside a glass wand with a curled handle. I pointed at the rope.

Lyra couldn't take her eyes off the stranger. If she had encountered him alone on a road, she might have mistaken him for an ordinary traveler. There was no crown on his head. No armor. No overwhelming display of power. Yet every nerve in her body screamed that something was wrong. The Bone Crown had begun throbbing the moment he appeared, each pulse driving deeper into her skull until it felt less like pain and more like recognition. A recognition older than memory. The man noticed. His faint smile never quite reached his eyes. "You remember more than I expected."

But please don’t let him be the one. Time seems to slow down and my eyes rake over his face and all at once, I notice things about Rhode that I have never seen before. I hear him swallow a gulp and see his Adam's apple bob up and down. There are premature grey streaks of hair sticking out from his sideburns, and a mole rests underneath his lips. He smiles and I see a dimple on the left side of his lips too. Wait, there is a piece of meat stuck between his two front teeth.

Kim leaned closer. There—clear as daylight—sat a second set of canines, deep and oversized, crowned like knives. The maxilla and mandible were subtly wrong: denser cortical bone, a jawline built for torque, faint supraorbital ridging that didn’t belong to an eleven-year-old girl. Human, yes—but edged with something else. Kim’s breath snagged. A whisper not meant for the room: “My God, Jane… what are you?” The bed eased back out with a soft hydraulic sigh. Jane blinked awake, surfacing as if from a deep lake.

The elbow had broken and healed wrong twice, creating two extra joints that bent backward. Her face was unrecognizable. Her right eye had slid down toward her cheek, the eyeball still moving behind sealed-shut lids that had grown over it. The jaw hung open two feet, dislocated and stretched, the skin torn at the corners. Her tongue, swollen purple and too long, hung out the side. The nose was gone—just two wet holes in the middle of her face. Her teeth had fallen out and regrown wrong, some pointing inward, some jutting straight out through what was left of her lips, yellow and ridged like fingernails.

Two women, one of whom it turned out spoke decent English, cooked bones in a broth. The younger woman wanted to know where he was from. He told her. She laughed, saying “Aussie-Aussie-Aussie-Oi-Oi-Oi!” He asked her what they were cooking, and the older woman leaned in close. Too close “These are knuckles,” she whispered. Danny smelled something on her breath. Something familiar. What was it? Yes, licorice. “Do you have arthritis?” “No.” “Too bad,” the woman replied. “Eating knuckles helps sore hands.” She smiled at him once more, showing off the spaces between her missing teeth, tongue pushing up to fill the gaps. “Eat the part that hurts. Where do you hurt?”

A rectangular long-shaped and equally wide at the root and has a slender tip, it looks like a gelatin-based chewable gum in rosy red. "Are you kidding me," I crossed my arms, raised an eyebrow, "you're giving me a gummy tongue?" His hardened jaw and humorless expression are telling signs that he is not joking around. I swallowed a huge lump in my throat. He is dead serious. My stomach twists into an unpleasant tangle.