Chapter 10 The Magi-Scientist
The Magi-Scientist
“We have to get her out of here!” a voice exhorted roughly, right at the instant when my vision decided to swim back into focus. “It had to be something from the last mixture we made. Something in the air, something we missed and she picked up on in her magic––”
“You don’t know that,” another voice said. “How could she feel it if we don’t?”
“She’s got…” The first voice struggled briefly. “She’s sensitive. She’s fucking sensitive. She can feel things we can’t. You have to know that!” the voice snapped. “She picks up on things you might’ve missed, Mocking.”
“Bones is right,” a third voice said. “We should get her out of here––”
“No,” a fourth voice said, surprising me with its nearness.
I realized a breath later that it had been my voice.
I swallowed, feeling foolish as I focused on the four faces hanging over me, all of them peering down with worried eyes. Bones, Nyx, Luc, and Alaric blinked back.
“No,” I repeated into that silence. “No, I’m fine. It’s okay. I can get up.”
“You’re not fine,” that first voice growled, the words and their meaning now attached to a platinum blond head, gold eyes, and a faintly pursed mouth by a taut jaw. “You just fucking collapsed on the floor. You’ve probably hit your head––”
“Give her some space, Bones,” the second voice said. I followed that one to Luc, who sounded uncharacteristically irritated, even though his expression looked closer to exasperated. “Let her tell us what happened first.”
“We don’t need her to tell us,” Bones snapped. “We all saw her fucking collapse. How the hell would she know why she collapsed? She wasn’t in here when we––”
“It wasn’t chemicals. Or potions,” I amended, realizing my mind was still making this a human-style lab. “I’m fine. Really. It was something else.”
“What?” Bones asked, his voice faintly accusing.
I looked at him.
You, I thought, unable to answer anything else.
I didn’t really aim the word at him, or mean it aggressively, but his eyes flinched, and some part of his expression subtly shifted, in a way I couldn’t read. He was back to clenching his jaw an instant later, right before he looked away.
“Whatever,” he muttered, still looking at anything but me. “If she wants to stay in here, even if it might be poisoning her, who am I to argue?”
He and Luc caught hold of my arms, and carefully helped me to my feet.
Despite his dismissive words, Bones continued to hold onto me even after Luc let go.
He hovered over where I stood, watching me warily as if he expected me to collapse again.
Only after Luc, Nyx, and Alaric walked over to a different part of the floor, and started picking up the ingredients Bones had apparently dropped and spilled when I collapsed, did Bones lean his mouth down to my ear.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Really?”
I nodded, looking up at him. I had difficulty holding his gaze for some reason. “I’m fine. Promise.”
“What the fuck was that?” he asked, his voice still tense.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You said it was me. How was it me?” He paused. “You threw up the first time you saw me today. Then you nearly cracked your head open on the floor? Is this your not-so-subtle way of telling me I should stay the fuck away from you?”
I gripped his arm. “No.”
There was a silence where he only looked at me. I still struggled to hold his gaze, but I didn’t let go of his arm.
“You look pretty,” he said next. “Even if you are concussed.”
I flinched, more bewildered than anything.
I glanced down at myself, maybe to remember what I was wearing.
I’d changed my clothes after I’d gotten Alaric my backpack, and while he fussed with packing up my cat and her bowls and food and blanket.
I wore red trousers, boots, the same large jumper I’d put on when I first got out of the shower, and a long black coat I liked.
“Thanks,” I managed, not sure what else to say.
I really didn’t want to talk to him in front of everyone else.
“Me, neither,” he murmured, his lips back against my ear.
“After I talked to Blackstone and then Mocking, it occurred to me you’d probably want to hear this, and sooner rather than later.
Otherwise I’d have taken you upstairs and asked very nicely for permission to fuck your brains out for the next four hours––”
“Bones,” I whispered, mostly because we were no longer alone, even in that part of the room. Alaric had walked back to us, now holding Wraith in his arms, who meowed plaintively when she saw me. Alaric looked wide-eyed and worried as he looked at me.
“Are you okay, Leda? You look pale.” He glanced at Bones, his eyes flickering to the ring-clad fingers wrapped around my arm, then back to my face, pausing again to study my eyes. “So does he, of course. But it’s normal for him to look a bit corpse-like.”
Bones leaned away from my ear, but I practically felt him scowl.
“Fuck off, Greythorne.”
“Touchy, touchy,” Alaric said, but I was glad to see him smile as he said it, even as his fingers compulsively stroked my cat’s ears. “Am I no longer allowed to point out the obvious? Or is it me pointing out the obvious in front of your witch that has you all wound up?”
Nyx glanced over at that, clearly hearing the emphasized portion of Alaric’s words. I saw her eyes flicker down to Caelum’s hand on my arm, right before her lips twitched.
Great. Was I going to have to talk to Nyx now, too? The last thing I needed was her sending letters via drakai to Draken, Miranda, or whoever else about me being found in Alaric’s, Bones’s, or anyone else’s bed, true or not.
Caelum’s glare remained on Alaric.
“You really are asking to get tossed out a window today, Alec.”
“Did you think she didn’t notice how pale you are, Cal? Perhaps you’re hoping she sees past your blindingly white skin to your sparkling personality?”
“I think if you weren’t holding that cat, you wouldn’t feel so confident right now that I’d forgotten whose bed I found you in this morning––” Bones growled.
“Can I explain this now?” Luc raised his voice from the other side of the room, just enough to get us to all look over.
He still sounded a touch exasperated as he set down the box of potion ingredients and whatever else Bones had held in his arms before I passed out.
He arranged it on the green tile counter by all those rows of drawers.
He gave Bones a faintly warning look before going on in a sharp voice.
“…You said she’d want to hear this, Bones.”
“She will,” Bones said dismissively.
I’d just looked away from Nyx, whose eyebrows rose even higher when she heard what Bones had just said about finding Alaric in someone’s bed. She glanced at me, Alaric, Bones, and then me again. Her lip twitch grew into something closer to a full-blown smirk.
Exhaling out my own exasperation, I disentangled myself from Bones’s fingers, even though it brought another sharp pain to my chest when I moved outside the immediate orbit of his magic. I kept my eyes on Luc as I walked over to where he stood, my arms folded.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Okay, so I should probably start off with talking about why I can’t have anyone talking about this, outside our little holiday group here.
” Luc turned around, looking not at me that time, but at Alaric and Bones, right before he motioned around at the rest of us, indicating that we were the “holiday group.”
It was also pretty clear who he saw as the potential problems on that front.
“I’m trusting Blackstone’s judgment on widening our group to you four,” Luc went on, a touch warily.
“He suggested I bring Bones and you in on this, Leda, and Bones suggested Alaric after I also mentioned Nyx. Originally, it was only going to be me, Blackstone, and Forsooth who knew all the particulars, but I’ve since been informed there’s a time element involved.
Because of that, I requested additional help, and luckily, Blackstone agreed. ”
Luc rubbed the back of his neck, and his lemur licked his face with a long, pink tongue as he added, “Honestly, I could use as many minds that are good at problem-solving as I can get, as long as we’re able to keep this between us.
” He tilted his head towards Nyx. “Minh’s been my research partner outside of this project for a while now.
She knew about some of the foundational work already, this is just me telling her the rest of it––”
“Just tell them, Mocking,” Bones broke in, impatient.
I glanced over at where he’d moved forward to stand next to me again. He left a space between us, which both allowed me to relax slightly and brought up a ripple of annoyed frustration. I wished my stupid magic would just calm down.
“There are political issues,” Luc was saying now. “Which should become pretty obvious in a minute.”
He walked around to the other side of the tile counter as he spoke, rummaging around along the back wall. He bent down, opening drawers, and brought out a number of vials which he lined up on top of the counter.
“I’ve gotten special permission to work on this, despite those issues,” he continued.
“But generally speaking, Magiancestry as a discipline is frowned upon as a whole. That entire area of study has been abused over the years by blood supremacists, advocates of enslaving humans, and other heinous ideologies. It’s one of those subjects that also tends to collect dark sorcerers who harbor strange ideas about the Separation.
As a result, most academic institutions finally just stopped studying it altogether…
directly, at least. Malcroix doesn’t offer it as an area of focus, or even have a class that addresses it specifically. ”
Magiancestry.
I admit, my reaction wasn’t enthusiastic.
The small amount I’d read about that sounded exactly how Luc described it. It reminded me of all those debunked eugenics theories on Earth, the ones racists used in the early part of the Twentieth Century to “prove” that some races were genetically superior to others.