Chapter 25 Last Day At The Tower #3
I don’t know if she thought that person was me, but if so, I didn’t want to disappoint her, so I just nodded and smiled. The idea that I would have any influence over her son, or over his worrying about her, was frankly wishful thinking on her part.
Anyway, I was completely with Caelum on this.
I wanted her to be far, far away from the Tower, and away from Dark Cathedral, and away from any of the mages or witches who tried to kill Caelum in Tunis that night.
He hadn’t told Alaric and me very much about that, but he mentioned a few names that made Alaric grimace, and the few details he gave made my stomach hurt.
Varya did tell me she would go see her sisters for a few weeks to visit, and seemed frustrated that hadn’t satisfied Caelum, either.
Again, I was with Bones. I thought “a few weeks” wasn’t nearly long enough for Varya to be in Russia, and I understood completely why Bones felt the same.
I wondered if he was writing to her sisters or her mother, or maybe all of them, hoping to convince them to try and keep her there longer. I strongly suspected he was, and probably telling them in detail exactly why his mother wasn’t safe.
“I’m trying,” Bones muttered under his breath.
When I glanced over at him, he gave me a wan smile, dipping his quill in the ink.
I made myself walk away, over to the couch where Alaric was curled up, reading through another monstrous tome of a diary, this one by Malefic’s great-great grandmother.
The diary in this case was half-burned, by her husband, according to Bones, during a particularly vicious fight.
Alaric informed us it still had lots of “juicy” information.
It hadn’t proved incredibly useful in regard to the things we were trying to learn, like the ritual, but I admit I found some of the passages he’d read aloud fascinating.
“Anything worth sharing?” I asked. I plunked down on the couch next to him, glancing over to see Bones scribbling away with the pen.
Alaric shrugged. “Her husband was a prick. Completely obsessed with your great-great grandmother, and didn’t hide it from his wife.”
I grimaced and shuddered a little.
Valefor Bones had been having an affair with my great-great grandmother on my mother’s side, Morticia Ankha La Fey.
The same great-great grandmother my aunt tried to resurrect in my body.
“He was obsessed with living forever, spells that extend life,” Alaric added.
I nodded. He’d told us that the night before. “Anything new on that?”
“He got more obsessed as he got older.” Alaric shrugged. “Not super surprising, I suppose. I’m almost to the point where he kills her, I think…”
“Kills her?” I looked up from the alchemy book I’d just cracked open. “Seriously?”
Alaric looked at me, surprised, but his surprise quickly faded.
“Ah,” he said. “Of course. You seem so at home here, Leda dear, I forget you didn’t grow up with the stories Cal and I grew up hearing.
We all know the tale of Valefor Bones and Morticia La Fey.
Royals have all kinds of fuckery in their marriages, everything from multiple wives, locking spouses in towers for decades, curses that turn one or the other of them into animals, reams of other abuses, betrayals, torments…
but actual murder is and always was highly frowned upon in royal families, particularly of spouses after royal children have been produced.
As a crime, it’s also one that generally didn’t get overlooked by the authorities. ”
Alaric gave me a wry smile over the half-burned book with the curling cover.
“That was true even back then,” he added. “Maybe more so, really, since other laws weren’t exactly enforced against those within the royal bloodline. They placed much harder lines around actual murder, at least when it was one royal murdering another.”
I snorted, unable to help it. “So it was fine if they murdered a commoner, I take it?”
“Of course,” Bones muttered distractedly from the window-side desk.
I glanced at him, but not with a lot of humor.
“So Valefor killed his wife?” I said. “And he was arrested, I take it?”
“He was, yes,” Bones said.
He appeared to be finished with his letter. I watched him sign the bottom, then use a mudra and a murmured spell to dry the ink. He glanced over at us as he began rolling it up swiftly with his hands.
“He was then murdered in prison by his wife’s family,” Bones added. “Morticia was killed, too. Not in prison, but same night.”
My eyebrows rose. “Ah.”
“They had strict instructions on what was to be done with their bodies,” Alaric continued.
He flipped through the pages of the diary.
“Valefor’s wife, Athena, talks about that.
She was furious when her husband insisted that Morticia be buried next to him, and that their remains be preserved using a number of Ancient Egyptian embalming techniques.
She threatened to have both of them cremated and scattered into the ocean, which might have been why he murdered her, honestly. ”
Alaric flipped through the pages, frowning.
I’d been watching Bones drip wax on the letter he’d finished and press his skull signet ring over the seal, but now I looked at Alaric.
“There wasn’t a fully embalmed body left when my aunt tried to use Morticia’s remains for a spell,” I informed him.
Alaric looked up, his eyebrows arching higher.
It occurred to me suddenly that I’d never talked to him about that night.
Alaric had no idea I’d ever been back to Earth, or that I’d been there when my aunt died.
When I glanced at Bones, he raised his eyebrows at me, too.
I didn’t get the idea he disapproved, exactly, more that he’d assumed I’d told Alaric at least some of that story already.
“No,” I said to Bones’s unspoken question. “I haven’t told him.”
Bones leaned over the desk to unlatch the window and push it open, then made a more complex mudra with his hand. A drakai appeared in the opening almost immediately. I recognized it as Vixen, the female drakai I’d used a number of times myself.
“Take this to the Parshukova Palace outside St. Petersburg,” Bones told her. “It’s for my mother’s sister, Artemis.”
The flaming drakai, who didn’t really have a separate head to nod, bowed formally instead, her fiery body rippling in the wind.
She took the rolled parchment from Bones, and somehow disappeared it inside her body (her clothes? did drakai wear clothing under all that orange and red fire?), all without singeing or scorching the parchment in any way.
I supposed that made sense, since the fire never singed or scorched the drakai either, nor the hair on their heads, but it was puzzling. I wondered again what that fire even was, if it was just an optical illusion, or some kind of visible magical aura.
The drakai vanished out into the falling snow, and Bones pulled the window shut and closed the iron latch.
He walked over to the two of us, and, after looking at where we were, sat on the opposite side of the couch as Alaric, so that I sat between them, but mostly on Alaric’s side.
Bones didn’t wait, but leaned in my direction, wrapped an arm around me, and pulled me gently over to his side of the couch.
I don’t know how he did it exactly, but I felt a definite asking-of-permission in the gesture, one I leaned into completely.
Frankly, after a week of mostly talking to him from the other side of that magical wall in the archive, I was probably a little too relieved to have him touching me to care.
By the time he finished pulling me closer, I rested halfway in his lap. He left his arm draped over the back of the couch, but low enough that his fingers rested on my bare arm. I felt him relax slowly, once my magic was in his.
When I glanced up, he returned my look.
“My mother’s on her way down,” he commented.
I heard the subtext in his words, and sighed, leaning my head on his lap. “Does it really bother her so much?”
Alaric snorted a laugh. “Considering she’s already planning your wedding, I’d say yes.” Alaric winked at me when I flushed. “She’s positive Cal is completely screwing this up, and is determined not to let him.”
I didn’t really have anything to say about that, so I didn’t.
I could feel Bones watching me, probably trying to see how I’d reacted to Alaric’s comment, so I closed my eyes, making my mind as blank as I could.
I wasn’t about to talk to either of them about Varya’s very old-school, and extremely awkward-for-me views on marriage and dating.
I especially wasn’t going to talk to them when they were so clearly trying to get a reaction out of me.
“I’m not,” Bones said, gruff.
I glanced up at him.
“I’m not trying to get a reaction,” he said. “Honestly, I wish she’d stop.”
I scoffed. “Imagine how I feel.”
The silence returned. Bones lightly stroked my hair with his fingers.
“You don’t want to be the next Mrs. Bones?” Alaric teased, immediately making things awkward again. “Cal’s disgustingly rich now. Surely, he’s got to be more appealing than he was a few weeks ago, before he became one of the richest wizards in Magical England?”
Bones and I both gave him death stares.
I felt actual anger on Bones, and clutched his arm.
“Don’t worry,” I told him, smiling as I made my tone light. “I find the idea of being your wife just as unappealing as I did before your mother gave you all of your father’s money.”
Alaric laughed.
Bones snorted a half-laugh, too, but I felt a whisper of something else on him.
Likely just his own awkwardness around the topic, given his mother’s current obsession.
I know if it had been my mother pressuring me to propose to him, or court him, I’d probably be pretty horrified, too.
Especially if she was doing it where Bones could hear it.
He tugged on my hair, not playfully, but not painfully, either.
Alaric opened his mouth, but Bones turned, and immediately cut him off.
“Another fucking word, Greythorne,” he warned. “And I promise you, I’ll curse you with weeping, pus-filled boils. I’ll make sure they hurt bad enough that you won’t sleep, or be able to sit down normally, for at least a few days.”
Alaric, wisely, closed his mouth.