Chapter 25 Last Day At The Tower
Last Day At The Tower
He sat inside a bubble of what looked like green, writhing plasma, cross-legged on the black stone.
A thick book lay on the floor in front of him, and he rested his jaw on a hand as he read, occasionally flipping pages and turning his head sideways to stare at diagrams, sets of symbols and ritual circles.
“This isn’t it, either,” he said, annoyed, looking up at me.
“The symbols are all wrong. And there’s no mention of tattoos, gold or otherwise…
” There’s nothing at all on caelum ignis in any of the books I’ve found back here, either, he added in my mind.
If it was ever here, Malefic must have moved them.
“…Any luck with the diaries?” he asked aloud.
I shook my head. “No.” Does he have any other crypts or storage spaces on the grounds, anywhere he might hide things?
I don’t know. Probably, Bones thought back, sounding even more annoyed.
But I don’t like my odds of finding them before the term starts.
He glanced behind him into the dark bowels of the crypt stretching under the castle.
Not that I’ll get through a significant fraction of this, either, he added, gruff.
He was right. The part of the crypt where Bones sat stretched easily five or six times the length of the area where Alaric and I were.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t go to where Bones was and look with him, and he’d already informed me he couldn’t bring any of the books from inside the protective barrier out.
Bones’s father, his father’s father, and at least a dozen more Bones ancestors had maintained a blood-shield over that part of the crypt for centuries, likely since the Tower was first built.
Even Bones’s mother couldn’t get in there.
The Praecuri never got in there, either.
Bones himself couldn’t pass through the barrier until a few days ago, when his mother transferred ownership of the entirety of the Bones holdings into her son’s name. If his father ever came back and found a way to legally reverse that decision, Bones would be locked out, too.
Only the family patriarch was allowed inside.
Right now, as much as he seemed to be in denial of the fact, the family patriarch was Caelum Malefic Bones I.
While Bones rooted around in trunks full of books and artifacts behind that shield, we could speak to one another, at least, and he could speak to Alaric, who’d decided to stay at the Tower until Bones and I went back to school.
Bones sent me detailed images of ritual circles and symbols via his mind, but it was still frustrating, not being on the same side of that barrier, and everything felt slower and more cumbersome as a result.
Not that both of us weren’t feeling edgy these days.
As it turned out, Varya was on the traditional side when it came to us sharing a bedroom while we were unmarried and neither one of us was in a coma.
Caelum might be the new patriarch of the Bones family, but he wouldn’t be “defiling” respectable witches inside the family home, not if his mother had anything to say about it.
She instead made frequent and increasingly overt hints that Bones should be courting me “like a gentleman,” instead of disrespecting me with his “urges.”
She seemed to care a lot more about my family name than my blood, which was both refreshing and elitist, if in a somewhat less racist and obnoxious way than most British royals. Of course, that was less surprising now that we knew Varya’s own family blood-history.
It also made me wonder just how many hybrids really existed in Magique.
I was beginning to think that number might be shockingly high.
Regardless, while Varya seemed to have fairly progressive views on human blood, Earth, and mixed marriages in general, she remained rigidly old-fashioned about premarital sex.
After Bones and I disappeared after dinner on Yule that night, prior to our gift-exchange, Varya seemed determined to save my virtue from her son, which, again, would have been funny if it wasn’t also oddly endearing and vaguely offensive.
“She was married at seventeen,” Bones said dryly, after she first informed us we wouldn’t be sharing a room. “I don’t think she’s got the background to gauge appropriateness properly.”
I blinked in surprise. “Seventeen? That’s really young for a Magical, isn’t it?”
“My father had decided on her.” Bones shrugged, leaning against the balcony railing as his mother ooh’d and ahh’d over the unicorn he’d brought her for Yule.
“Malefic more or less approached my maternal grandfather and informed him when they would be married. He asked her only as a formality afterwards.”
I nodded, pressing my lips together to keep my opinions to myself.
Bones laughed humorlessly, his eyes slightly colder.
“You can say it, Shadow. My father is an abusive, perverted prick. Did I mention he was thirty-seven years old when he did this? He bought my mother from her father when she was sixteen years old, and married her a week after she turned seventeen. That’s not even adulthood in Magical Britain,” he reminded me.
“There normally would be a certification hearing for any wedding occurring where one of the participants was under nineteen, but since he did it somewhere in rural Romania, he got away with it.”
His voice grew colder still. “Unfortunately, the authorities tend to look the other way when it comes to royals and their matrimonial ‘quirks.’”
I winced, but didn’t know what to say.
I thought about his mother, how young she looked, and realized it was because she really was young. Not just for a Magical, but for anyone.
“Did she say yes, when he asked?” I ventured finally.
“She was sixteen,” he scoffed. He looked down at me, then conceded with a shrug. “But yes. I’ve been told by a number of friends that my father is ‘hot,’ so I doubt it was a particularly sophisticated decision on my mother’s part.”
I snorted, but I couldn’t help thinking about that.
Caelum’s father was attractive.
He was a psychotic, cruel, narcissistic, violent racist with a severe power fetish, and apparently a borderline pedophilia kink, but he looked almost exactly like Caelum, apart from his coloring.
Where Caelum’s hair was platinum blond, his father’s was black.
Caelum had gold eyes, his father’s were silver.
But the shape of those eyes, the mouth, cheekbones, jaw, and overall stature were nearly identical.
They even stood at roughly the same height.
A sixteen-year-old Varya likely would have been completely awed by him, between his looks, wealth, his family name and bloodline, not to mention what sounded like an unswerving entitlement to have her.
She wouldn’t have stood a chance.
“Mummy Bones very much wants Leda Shadow-LaFey as her daughter,” Alaric hummed, flipping a page in the book in his lap from his armchair on the other side of mine.
“She is trying to deprive you of sex to get you to propose, Cal. She’s not even being subtle about it.
She’s imagining cute little Leda-Caelum babies with curly white hair and terrifying magic. ”
I let out a low snort, but felt my cheeks flush.
“Fuck off, Alec,” was Bones’s only comment.
He didn’t look up from his book, and Alaric only chuckled.
He was right, though. Varya was remarkably persistent.
She made a point of guiding me to my assigned bedroom every night, and staying up with me talking until Bones had retreated to his own room.
Bones informed me she’d also done something to charm both of our door handles.
Whatever the exact spell she’d used, it appeared to have the following effects: one, making it basically impossible to enter the other’s room without setting off a very loud alarm, two, leaving a bright pink stain on the intruder’s hand where they touched the offending doorknob, and three, instantly waking Varya if one of us attempted to break into the other’s room.
Alaric thought it was hilarious.
Bones was significantly less amused, and I’d overheard snippets of a few fairly heated arguments between him and his mother, although I’d done my best not to listen.
Bones was still nervous about using his “phasing” abilities.
He explained to me over breakfast that he struggled to control where he ended up when his magic wasn’t right, and he still wasn’t back to normal.
He’d had a few unpleasant surprises over the years, trying to phase when he was sick, injured, overtired, or otherwise weakened.
Apparently his magic would sometimes take him where he was most afraid of going in those situations, rather than where he wanted to go.
Like, for example, his father’s cell in the Pyramid.
Or to the house of one of the Dark Cathedral people who wanted him dead.
From what he described, his magic had difficulty discerning the meaning of emotions, and tended to default to the most intense ones when he didn’t have enough magical strength and concentration to direct the endpoint firmly.
Unfortunately, the problem compounded when he knew there was a risk.
For the same reason, he avoided using it for anything other than emergencies when his magic felt at all depleted or unstable.
I absolutely agreed with that decision.
I told him under no circumstances should he experiment with that right now.
But it meant we weren’t getting a lot of time alone.
Varya was immovable. She also seemed dead-set on Bones marrying me before we had sex, which I suppose wasn’t surprising, given how she’d been married herself. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that ship had sailed, even in relation to our christening the Tower.
I highly doubted she wanted to hear that Bones and I first had sex after not having gone on a single date, much less “courting” of any kind.
Bones looked over at me, his eyebrows raised.
“We didn’t?” He stared at me. “That night––”
I scoffed at him openly, unable to help it.