Chapter 9 The Locked Door
The Locked Door
Irefocused my eyes on the figure standing in my open doorway, and stared into a face that shouldn’t have surprised me, but somehow did.
Leda! Bones snapped.
It’s okay, I told him quickly. It’s fine, Bones. It’s a friend.
“Luc,” I said aloud, bewildered. “I thought you were gone for the weekend?”
“Yeah,” my friend said, scoffing a little. “So did I.”
His hands rested on his hips. I could feel frustration rippling off his magical aura, but it didn’t feel aimed at me.
Lucifer “Luc” Mocking smiled at me in a friendly way, his longish red hair hanging in one eye.
His bright blue eyes shone through his shaggy cut, and his hand rubbed the back of his neck as he stood there.
His primal, a ring-tailed lemur, peered over his shoulder at me and blinked its round, orange eyes.
Luc glanced at the other side of the door behind the wall. He motioned in that direction, too, using his free hand and his jaw.
“Look who I found,” he said.
Nyx stepped out from behind the wall and grinned at me, her hands held up in a “surprise” gesture.
Her pangolin primal balanced its clawed feet on her head, sniffing her hair.
Nyx opened her mouth to speak, then stopped, a startled look growing on her face when she looked past me.
Unlike with Luc, my body didn’t block her view to the couch.
I turned to follow her eyes to where Alaric sat, my cat still sprawled over his lap like she didn’t have a single bone or working muscle in her body.
“Oh, yeah.” I stepped out of the opening and turned sideways so Luc could also see Alaric. “I found someone, too,” I said.
Alaric waved. He didn’t move the cat or the enormous book from his lap.
“Come on in,” I said, motioning them inside.
Luc and Nyx exchanged a look. Then Luc cleared his throat, and motioned with his head for me to come out.
“Actually, we came to fetch you,” he said.
“There’s something I need to show you. We can go to Frumpy’s after.
I’d rather talk somewhere warmer, and with more comfortable couches…
no offense.” He looked past me, nodded in a friendly sort of way to Alaric, then raised his voice slightly.
“You too, Greythorne,” he offered. “You should come. This might interest you. And there’s still central heat in the Mansion. We can order lunch there.”
Alaric clutched Wraith to his lap as if Luc had just threatened to eat her.
“I can’t possibly leave her,” he said, a faint panic in his voice.
“Bring her along,” Nyx said cheerfully. “She’ll love Frumpy’s. We can light all the fireplaces so she’ll be toasty warm. I’m sure no one will mind if we let her run wild in there. We can ask the Goblins to bring her food.”
I found myself nodding, and not only because the picture they painted sounded nice.
If anyone would know about obscure blood curses and magical possessions, it would be Luc, wouldn’t it?
Well, it would be Bones, really, or Alaric, but apart from the two of them and their twisted royal-blood families, wouldn’t it be Luc next?
Didn’t he petition Professor Blackstone to take his upper-division Talismans class at the end of last year?
And for that current super-secret research project of his, his advisor was also Blackstone, which meant it was likely something esoteric and dangerous, and probably financially lucrative.
I knew less about Nyx’s particular academic specializations, but I knew she was smart. Luc had told me, more than once, she was the person to beat in his Alchemy and Magical Objects courses.
Maybe it was time to have a wider study party on some of the questions I’d been struggling with for the past two years.
Alaric insisted on carrying my cat.
He filled a backpack I had in my closet with a small bag of cat food, two of Wraith’s bowls, a pink blanket Wraith was partial too, and Wraith herself, who he promptly wrapped in the blanket like she was a fuzzy cat burrito.
Wraith let out a confused meow or two, but mostly was patient with Alaric’s fussiness, and his insistence that she stay in the backpack.
Only once he had her situated and the top buckled on the backpack (with plenty of air holes in the fabric, I wasn’t worried), did he quickly throw on his own jacket and boots, which had both mostly dried in front of the fire.
He wrapped one of my scarves around his neck last, then joined us all at the door after hefting the cat-pack onto his back carefully, jostling it as little as possible.
I found myself smiling at his worried expression as he kept looking back at the pack, as if afraid Wraith would change her mind and claw her way out of it.
We ventured back out into the snow, and it hit me that Luc had been right about how cold Valarian was when I felt how warm it felt under the afternoon sun.
Even with that sun dipping well past the highest point in the sky, and the depth of the snow sparkling under the sun’s rays, I felt something deeper than my skin begin to warm as we walked carefully down the hill from the colleges and towards the Mansion.
I considered trying to contact Bones, then didn’t.
He’d said he was busy today. He’d told me and Alaric he had things to do.
I should leave him alone.
If he wanted to see me, he would contact me. He’d never been shy about that kind of thing before; I couldn’t think of any reason that would’ve changed.
Instead of walking us towards Frumpy’s or even Blackstone’s offices, Luc took us west, towards the central building of the Mansion.
I felt like I was retracing my steps from the previous day, even before he walked us straight through the middle of the central building, and took a left down the northern corridor of the west wing.
Alaric and I exchanged looks.
“Where are you taking us exactly, Mocking?” Alaric asked before I could.
Luc let out an apologetic-sounding laugh. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at me and smiling.
Alaric and I exchanged looks a second time.
“Try us,” Alaric said, as we began closing in on the Northwest Tower, the same one we’d both spent the night in the night before.
“Well,” Luc said, walking directly towards the slightly hidden door in the dark part of the corridor that curved around the lowest part of the tower. “You know I’ve been doing this project with Blackstone,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. “Well, when I met him this morning, he had company.”
My eyebrows rose higher.
Again, I exchanged looks with Alaric.
“Who?” I asked finally.
“Caelum Bones,” Luc said, smirking as he looked back at us. “Blackstone had already asked him to assist me. And you, too, Leda. And Nyx. And you, Greythorne, assuming you were willing.” He quirked an eyebrow at me. “Imagine my surprise that Bones readily agreed.”
Luc stopped in front of the wooden door.
He raised a hand, and purple and red magic sparked around his fingers and through his ring-tailed lemur, which flicked its stripey, question-mark tail.
I glanced down and saw my monocerus primal in some sort of silent staring contest with Alaric’s centaur.
Nyx’s pangolin was sniffing the centaur’s flank.
The door swung outward with a creak and a pop.
I glanced up.
“Anyway,” Luc said. “Turns out the private lab Blackstone’s had me using for the past three months actually belongs to Bones.
Blackstone requested special permission to use it and Bones granted it with some stipulations last term, without knowing what it is we were working on, of course.
But Blackstone thought of him, naturally, when I asked for additional help.
Apparently it’s an area Bones had some interest in already… ”
He hesitated, glancing over his shoulder.
“Well, long story short,” he went on, clearing his throat. “I was told it was safe to share it with him. And with all of you, if you’re interested. Since we’re all here together over the break, Blackstone thought we could form a kind of research group.”
Alaric snorted. “And, if we don’t want to spend our winter holiday helping you win the Magical Royal Endowment Medal, or coax a few dozen rich donors to shovel gold into your pockets, Mocking?”
He said it good-naturedly, even teasingly, but I wanted to smack him with my elbow, anyway. His words didn’t seem to bother Luc.
“No obligation,” the red-haired mage said.
“None. But you might want to actually see the project, first.” Luc glanced at me.
“Bones seemed pretty keen to be involved. He thought you two would have an interest as well, once you understood what it was about. You, especially, Leda,” he added, one eyebrow rising.
I didn’t try to answer the unspoken question there.
Alaric widened his eyes at me, but I only shrugged.
If either of them thought I’d have any insight into Bones wanting to pull us into Luc’s bizarrely secret experimental magic project, they couldn’t have been more wrong.
I hadn’t the faintest clue.
Luc didn’t take us all the way to the top of the tower.
He stopped at the second flight up, in front of one of the green-painted doors I’d assumed up until now led to some kind of storage. I’d also assumed those rooms were unused by Bones himself, even if they technically belonged to his family.
But just now Luc mentioned a “private lab” Bones owned, and we were standing in front of one of those doors, which made my pulse rise even as I felt a flicker of irritation. Did Bones really have his own lab? And if so, why the hell hadn’t he ever once mentioned it?
All of that passed through my mind as Luc murmured a low spell that sounded like Sanskrit. Once the last syllable left his mouth, the green door popped open with a faint creak.
I watched Luc grip the brass handle and the door’s edge and tug it open all the way, revealing a green and gold light, not dissimilar to the one I’d thought I’d seen from the snowy hill the day before.
It looked exactly like the green and gold firelight I associated with Bones’s bedroom, two stories above.
I frowned and glanced at Alaric, but he looked as surprised as me.
“Welcome,” Luc said, smiling as he waved us all inside.
His ring-tailed lemur peered worriedly into the room, blinking its orange eyes. It watched the rest of our primals as they trotted into the room ahead of us.
I passed through the low door and into a dark hallway.
Instead of stone, dark green tile ran in a slow circle spanning from floor to ceiling, curving around gently alongside a nearby wall.
Ahead, a torch burned in an iron bracket, right where the corridor appeared to open up into a larger space.
I walked towards the torch cautiously, only pausing when I reached the end of that curve, and found myself looking at a room around half the size of Bones’s quarters.
I quickly realized those proportions were deceiving, however, when I saw a doorway to my left, and realized there was a whole second room separated by a second wall.
The room I’d walked into didn’t exactly remind me of a laboratory back home, meaning on Earth, but it did feel strangely sterile compared to most Magical spaces.
A long work table stood in the center, covered in glass jars, burners, and beakers of various sizes, including some hanging from metal clamps and others lining metal stands.
Some of those stands didn’t look to be steel or iron, but rather to be made of copper, silver, or even gold.
Built-in shelves on the other side of the table held more jars than I could count, filled with liquids, powders, and other substances, all labeled with a neat, familiar script.
I was still staring around, and peering at the odd-colored liquids inside those various containers, as Luc, Nyx, and Alaric entered the room behind me and began doing the same.
All of us but Luc walked over to the shelves and began reading labels.
I noticed drawers all along the walls on that same side of the room.
Not just one or two, but what looked like forty or fifty, built into the wall with metal doors, each labeled and with a sliding ladder to reach the higher ones.
I opened my mouth, about to ask Luc where Bones was now––
When a tall mage emerged from the other door I’d seen when I first walked in. In the dim light, I had to blink at him briefly, but his platinum blond hair made him easy to identify, even with only torch fires flickering against the mirrored tile walls.
“Mocking,” he said, coming to a stop.
Then he looked at me, and somewhere in that, my magic did something I couldn’t explain, much less stop or even slow down.
It slammed out of me without warning. I felt it coil into and around his without an instant’s hesitation.
I tried desperately to pull it back, to stop it, even as his magic collided with mine, both sides acting with a suddenness and aggressiveness I had no way to hold back whatsoever.
There was an instant where I froze, paralyzed by heat, blinded by it, as I tried to wrestle that part of me back under control.
I struggled to breathe.
My heart felt like it was exploding in my chest.
Then, before I had any idea what I’d done, I collapsed on the stone floor.