Chapter 6 Worried
Worried
Present Day
Eustacia Morwormer Hall
Malcroix Bones Academy
Ihated that I caught myself staring at him again.
Fork in hand, my gaze focused with stalker-like precision. I had no idea what my actual friends were laughing about, right next to where I sat. I kept my eyes and magic instead glued to a person all the way on the opposite side of the enormous hall, a hall I shared with him only as a technicality.
I hated that I kept noticing things about him, things that made me increasingly uneasy.
I hated the compulsion of it, my seeming inability to look away.
That compulsion annoyed me at a level I couldn’t fully explain, but the depth of how much it bothered me felt like part of the exact same problem.
Gods, I should be better than this.
I was better than this. Wasn’t I?
How much clearer did he need to make things? How much more obvious and unambiguous did his message need to be?
Unfortunately, I knew the answer to that.
He’d been clear. He’d been more than clear.
Caelum Bones wanted absolutely nothing to do with me, and hadn’t for nearly a year.
Somehow it was that thought, those memories, the rehashing of those first weeks and months after my aunt’s death, that finally pulled my eyes away from the table all the way across the room.
That was hardly a new development, either.
He always made sure to never sit anywhere near me now, or anywhere near my friends. That fact would remain true, apparently, even with the summer break between now and the last time I’d lain eyes on him at all.
Message sent. Message received.
So why couldn’t I ever truly leave him alone?
Was I actually mentally broken in some way? Was it lingering shock? Trauma? Some bizarre manifestation of P.T.S.D.? Had my mind attached itself to him in some unhealthy way, after he’d saved my life in my aunt’s sitting room in Southampton?
Before I could fix whatever this was, I had to admit I had a problem, didn’t I?
But that was wishful thinking, too.
After all, I’d been admitting to myself I had a problem for a while now, and I still had no idea what to do about it. I found myself picking around the edges of it instead, trying to understand, or maybe just using that as an excuse to try and understand him.
Was this because I’d never had a real relationship? Had my mind somehow made our bizarre interactions over those handful of months into something approximating one? Was I such an uncompromising perfectionist within myself that I couldn’t accept rejection?
I found him physically compelling. I could admit that to myself.
He had interesting features.
Gorgeous features, if I were being honest. It was difficult to not see him when he entered a room, and not only because of his platinum-blond hair.
Then there were those damned, feline-gold eyes, and something riveting about the way he moved, the way he took up space.
He had a kind of athletic grace to him, even apart from the harmony of his features.
The fact that I occasionally thought I saw something in those leonine eyes that didn’t quite resonate with the rest of him, or fit the sneer at his lips, or the utter indifference on his face, didn’t make that perception real.
There had to be a ninety-nine percent chance that any glimpses of emotion I thought I caught, any hint of actual feeling flashing in those irises, came from pure wishful thinking on my part, if not outright delusion.
That, or maybe one of the other royals was having a good laugh at my expense, twisting my reality and perceptions with a skillfully-made chimaera, one that apparently made me even stupider and more delusional than I was already.
I swore his eyes danced with gold and green flames more of the time now.
Delusional. No one else seemed to notice, if they did.
Other witches and mages surely would notice, wouldn’t they?
He was the richest person currently enrolled in Malcroix, not to mention the unofficial male slut of our year, so I definitely wouldn’t be the only one to notice if his eyes started rippling and morphing with supernatural fire every other handful of minutes.
I swore he’d gotten taller over the summer.
More delusion.
No one gained height at twenty-two years old, or however old he must be now.
He did look taller, though. As much as I scoffed at myself for imagining things, I swore his shoulders looked broader too, compared to how they’d looked the previous year.
He was also definitely limping, and moving strangely, especially for him.
He looked exhausted.
He looked positively awful to me, throughout the entire banquet. Although I’d thought I noticed it in the carriage, it was impossible not to see it here.
Dark circles hollowed out his eyes, and made the gold irises appear paler, even with those disconcerting flames. His skin looked paler, and his body, despite being more muscular than I remembered, struck me as leaner than it should be.
His features looked more angular, too, even with his added bulk, and something about the way he sat there, oddly still and straight, yet a little apart from Alaric and the rest of the royal clique, made my chest clench, maybe even in… Eye of Ra, was I worried about him?
If that wasn’t delusional, I had no idea what was.
But I’d scarcely seen him eat throughout the fancy, beginning-of-term feast.
He’d pretended to eat, picking at the Beef Wellington-type thing on his plate.
He’d smiled wryly at things the other royals said, and sipped at his glass of wine.
His expression remained fixed in a careful, knowing smirk, his fingers toying at the stem of his glass.
But, despite all those things, I’d rarely seen the fork make it to his lips.
He’d barely looked around at anyone from his corner of Worm Hall.
Given that the start-of-term banquet was, by a good margin, the best meal we’d be served at school all year, I couldn’t help but find it odd he’d choose to skip it.
Unlike the other royals Bones spent his time with, I’d never once seen him leave campus to eat at one of the posh restaurants in Bonescastle, not even for a coffee, not even on a weekend, nor with a single one of his numerous sexual conquests.
He never left the school grounds at all, from what I could observe, for reasons I’d never managed to puzzle out, not in the entire previous year.
Then again, I didn’t exactly have the inside track on his comings and goings.
He’d ignored me, and outright avoided me the entire second half of the year, which included keeping as far away from me physically as he possibly could.
That seemed doubly true whenever he was forced to share the same room as me, like now.
I told myself, over and over, that I couldn’t care about this anymore.
So much time had passed, why should I care?
I’d absolutely no reason to give a toss about the prince prick, other than to know if he was the mage behind the Priest. I certainly had no reason to wonder what was wrong with him, or whether he’d hurt himself somehow, and that’s why he sat so straight, or why he’d even bothered to show up for the banquet at all if he didn’t intend to eat the food, or if he had a single friend among the royals he could confide in.
Alaric was that friend, wasn’t he?
He confided in Alaric. He must.
I was still staring at him, somehow, despite all those thoughts, when whispers broke out on the side of the room where the main doors to the Hall lived.
My eyes swiveled that way with the rest of them.
I flinched when I saw the four mages and three witches in black uniforms who’d just entered the hall, walking in military-straight lines, with one in front, and three and three behind. I immediately knew what they were, if not who.
Praecuri.
What were the Praecuri doing here?
There was no question of what they were. I recognized the uniforms, the symbols they wore. The intersecting worlds insignias on their arms and chests were difficult to miss.
Instead of looking windswept and field-weary, sweaty and dirty, or even combat-ready but clean, like they had in the various memories I’d seen in Anhka’s mind, they wore what looked like dress uniforms, complete with black capes with silver undersides.
Their hair showed not a strand out of place, as if their heads had all been magicked by the same spell into perfect, sleek shapes.
I blanched when I realized they were walking straight for our table.
That’s when it really hit me. The Praecuri had come here, to Malcroix Bones Academy, in the middle of our beginning-of-year banquet.
Was this it? Had they finally learned something that tied me to my aunt’s death?
Had they come to arrest me?
I did a double-take at the face of the mage in front.
He was tall. He had to be a few inches over six feet.
He stared back at me with stunning, pale-green eyes that were difficult to look away from, that sharply contrasted his midnight-black hair.
A long scar bisected one side of his face, the only imperfection overlaying features that still managed to be ruggedly beautiful.
A full, perfect mouth stood out above a square jaw dusted with dark stubble.
It wasn’t just that he was attractive, though.
He was familiar, somehow.
I realized he was looking me over with a less tense but equally curious scrutiny. His eyes locked back on mine, right as he came to a stop, a few feet from our table.
“Hello.” He gave a slight bow. “Ms. Leda La Fey?” He inclined his head. “Or is it Shadow?”
“Shadow,” I said automatically.
I grew aware that everyone in the hall stared at us now.
They probably wondered if I was about to be arrested, too.
My friends had gone silent along with everyone else.
I could feel their eyes shifting between me and the tall mage with his Praecuri entourage.
Jolie and Darragh, who’d had their backs to the front doors, turned all the way around in their chairs, and stared up at the uniformed Praecuri with blank, confused looks on their faces.