Chapter 26 I Don’t Know
I Don’t Know
Ididn’t have to wonder whether Bones had been listening to the meeting, not for very long at least. He waylaid me before I’d even managed to get out of Malcroix Mansion, pulling me into an empty classroom and making me yelp, right before his hand clamped over my mouth.
I found myself relaxing somewhat when I saw who it was, right before I smacked him in the chest, shoving his hand off my face.
“What is the matter with you?” I hissed quietly. “You shouldn’t be here. Don’t you realize where I just was? You might’ve been seen!”
His gold eyes glared down at mine, filled with so much fury I could only stare back. Realizing he was struggling to speak, that he was having difficulty forming actual words, I felt the blood drain from my face.
He looked pale, too pale.
His skin nearly glowed under his gold eyes.
“What?” I asked. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
His jaw clenched, right before he averted his eyes.
When he looked back at me, his hands gripped his hips, and he seemed to be trying to control his facial expression.
“What the fuck did you just do?” he asked roughly.
He practically bit out the words.
“Are you absolutely out of your mind?” he forced out. “Or are you really, genuinely suicidal, and not just painfully stupid, as I’d assumed?”
I stared up at him, feeling my muscles tense.
I had to stifle the impulse to hit him again, completely knocked off-balance that he’d risked us being caught just so he could pull me into yet another dark room and insult me.
Before I could decide how to even respond, he practically bared his teeth.
“Was it really absolutely necessary for me to spell out to you in advance why it would be a bad idea to tell a roomful of wizards and witches absolutely… fucking… everything… you’d been up to with Greythorne?
” Bones demanded in a low, controlled snarl.
“Do you think they will magically rescue him for you, if you cut deeply enough into your own wrists and bleed hard enough?”
At my bewildered look, Bones’s expression darkened more, turning into a near-mask.
“Why the fuck would you do this, even if the two of you…” He trailed abruptly, as if forcing himself to stop. His gold eyes met mine, and now seemed to be glowing a shade brighter in the dark.
“They probably know about you,” he growled. “Dark Cathedral. You realize that, yes? If they didn’t know before, they’ll sure as fuck know now.”
When I didn’t answer, he stepped forward, abruptly, causing me to step back.
“They’ll know you’ve been playing footsie with them and Alaric.
” He gestured furiously with a hand. “Who do you think they’ll take it out on first?
You, who Forsooth’s got eyes on all the time?
Or Alec, who’s already with them? And how long do you think they’ll leave you alone, Leda?
Or your brother? Or that cousin of yours, if they can’t get to either of you? ”
I paled, staring up at him in shock.
“You’ve just told that entire group… that entire fucking group…
that you and Alec were spying on Dark Cathedral for months.
For fucking months. You told them you’ve researched them, transcribed their messages, spied on their fucking members.
You actually told them you saw the rooms the Priest broadcasts from. You told them that!”
He was breathing harder. As if he didn’t know how to express the emotion there, he motioned again sharply with a hand.
“You’ve deciphered their codes, recorded their fucking ‘Priest’s’ every word, conspired against them, listened to their conversations, tracked him… and now you’ve just blithely handed over all the proof of that to Forsooth?”
“I told you all of this,” I began coldly.
“The hell you did!” he snapped out. “You didn’t tell me you kept records, Leda! You didn’t tell me you saw the Priest’s fucking house!”
“Forsooth is trustworthy,” I managed, still staring up at him. “You’ve admitted that. You said it yourself, just the other day. You said he was probably the only teacher at the school who actually lived by his ideals. That he was one of the few––”
“Fuck Forsooth!” he snarled. “He wasn’t the only one in the room, Leda! You have no idea who’s even in there! You don’t know these people! You have no way of knowing if you can trust any of them! Dark Cathedral has spies. They have spies fucking everywhere! They likely had spies there tonight!”
He blurted it out in a disjointed, half-rushed, half-vicious rant, and I could only blink at him as I made sense of why he was so angry.
I opened my mouth again, but he cut me off.
“Corvid Blackstone makes the potions my father requires me to take,” he said coldly.
“The ones that dampen my magic.” He gripped my arms, dragging me closer to him, even as he backed me towards the classroom wall.
His hands tightened, frustration bleeding through his fingers.
“I have to meet with him once a week. He works for him. Do you fucking get what you’ve done? Gods damn it, Leda!”
I stared up at him, now breathing harder myself.
I didn’t feel violence on him, though.
Fear, frustration, grief, anger, despair… but not violence.
It still wasn’t him I was afraid of.
“Why aren’t you?” he snapped in frustration.
“What in the gods is the matter with you? Even after I stopped talking to you, you still didn’t turn me in, not even to Alaric.
Even after I treated you like garbage for months.
I let you worry about being arrested. I let you believe I’d let you take the fall for her death.
Fuck, I even seduced one of your friends… ”
I flinched, paling, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“…I’ve done everything I fucking could, everything I could think of, short of actually hurting you, to keep you away from me. Is that what it’s going to take? Why in the gods would you trust me? Why would you tell me any of this?”
I looked between his gold eyes.
His hands were shaking.
His face contorted as he fought to control whatever was going on behind his clenched jaw and tensed muscles.
Even more than his words, I could feel it on him now, some denser, harder fire that seemed to be spiraling out of control.
Had he really meant to say any of that to me?
Was he having some kind of mental breakdown?
I saw gold light shining through the fabric and collar of the black shirt he wore, and my mind skipped in its tracks.
Gods. He was overloading.
He was overloading, possibly even as some form of Magical panic attack. Fear, anger, anxiety, stress, disbelief, horror––whatever the exact volcanic brew of feeling he was struggling with, it was overloading his magic.
He was losing control over it right in front of me.
I laid my hands on his chest, more from instinct than thought.
“Hey.” I rubbed his chest, to calm him, to get him to focus. When that didn’t work, I gripped his shirt tighter. “Caelum. Look at me.”
His eyes flickered, locked on mine.
“Caelum again?” He let out a harsh laugh. “Really, mongrel? I thought I was ‘Bones’ now. That’s one difference you’ve made crystal fucking clear since––”
“Give me some of it,” I urged him. “Give me some of your magic, and we can talk. We can’t talk like this.”
“Fuck off.” He started to pull away, but I gripped him tighter, yanking him back.
“Bones.” That time, I shook him a little, my hands fisted in his shirt. “Give me some of it. You can yell at me all you want afterwards. But you can’t go back out there like this. You can’t, and you know it.”
He stood there, breathing hard, struggling with each breath.
He was nearly panting as he stared up at the ceiling, his expression half-contorted as he held whatever it was back.
His chest was glowing brighter now, illuminating the two of us in the dark room, and his eyes were brighter, too.
I saw the conflict worsen on his face, and I was about to argue with him again, when he turned abruptly, and wrapped a hand around my throat.
He pressed me roughly into the wall between the counter and the classroom door.
Then, without speaking a word, he leaned into me and exhaled.
I watched, fascinated, as the tension bled out of his features.
He groaned right before it hit into me, a heavy, relieved sound that came from deep in his chest. It was loud… loud enough that I worried someone might hear it on the other side.
Then his magic reached me, and I couldn’t think about that, either.
I let out a choked gasp when it swam into my chest and arms.
My vision whited out.
Heat flooded through me like lava, making me writhe where he held me, then gasp again, louder, when he stepped into me, still holding me against the stone wall.
Hot pulses of his magic ran into my belly, legs, arms, my fingers, my face, my sex, and his presence was so strong through all of it, I couldn’t think past it, or him.
It felt like having him all over me, which it always did, to some degree or another, but somehow, it still managed to feel worse each time we did this.
I felt more of him every time he asked or needed it, it grew more disturbingly intimate, more difficult to fight, more difficult to keep any part of him out.
It had ratcheted up violently in intensity, even in only a few weeks.
For a long-feeling few minutes, I couldn’t do anything but take it.
When my eyes finally swam back into any kind of focus, I was sweating, my hand gripping his wrist, my other hand wrapped around the back of his neck.
His skin was hot, his hair damp. He was leaned into me, his other arm wrapped around my waist. That hand gripped my side under the jumper I wore.
He was breathing even harder than me, and I felt him fighting to pull it back, even now, to choke it off.
I wasn’t even certain his magic was done expelling itself.
It had only been a few days.
I had to believe it was because the meeting freaked him out, igniting all his paranoia and the fear he obviously had around Dark Cathedral and his father, but normally suppressed to the point where I forgot it was there.
That constant, tightly-controlled suppression probably messed him up even more.
Maybe that was the real reason he’d lost it.
I looked up at his face, and found him already looking at me.
His expression looked frustrated, but I saw another look there, too.
He looked at me like he had no idea what to do with me.
His irises had dimmed somewhat, and his skin looked flushed, less of that deathly pale I associated with his magic being on the verge of exploding out of him.
His hand loosened, and his thumb stroked along my throat, compulsively almost, as his fingers tightened on my bare waist. I didn’t let go of him, either.
I couldn’t even bring myself to want to.
I was still looking at him when he lowered his face to mine.
“Are you coming?” he asked softly, right against my ear. “Thursday. To my room.”
I fought to understand, but when I did, I nodded. “Yes.”
“I can’t promise I’ll behave,” he said. “But I want you to come, anyway.”
I swallowed, but didn’t answer. Neither of us had really moved. I just stood there, gripping his arm and the back of his neck as he stroked my throat and the bare skin just below my ribs. His fingers were shockingly gentle.
“Why can’t you leave the school, Bones?” I asked.
He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know.”
“You do know.”
There was a silence where he only stood there, breathing.
“Not really,” he said. “There were always rules, Leda. I’ve never not known his rules.
It’s not like he explains them to me, or tells me what they’re for.
” He shocked me, kissing me lingeringly on the side of my face.
“He hid me away for most of my childhood,” he murmured in my ear.
“I couldn’t play with other kids. I wasn’t allowed to talk to other people, or leave my room.
And now I can’t go anywhere on my own outside the school… where he pays people to watch me.”
My jaw slowly tightened as he spoke. I didn’t look away from his face.
“Bones.” I made my voice as soft as I could. “You’re an adult.”
His fingers traced my skin. He took a step closer to me, cupping my face in his hands.
“It’s complicated,” is all he said.
I watched him stare at the wall behind me, now fighting a tightening in my throat.
Gods. I believed him. I really believed him.
I couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t make sense of any of it, but I knew, without really questioning how or why, that he was telling the truth, that it was even worse than he was saying.
Maybe it was just that I could feel some part of him breaking down as he said it.
It felt like it was breaking some part of him to tell me even that much.
I honestly couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or not.
“He’ll kill anyone who gets in his way,” he said next.
His eyes flickered to mine. “He’d have killed you a long time ago if he had the faintest inkling of how much I need…
” He faltered, his voice wavering before it grew hard.
“Yet I still can’t seem to stay away from you.
I still find excuses, even when I don’t need it. What does that make me?”
I stepped into him, and wrapped my arms around him.
I don’t know what I intended, if I’d planned to hug him to comfort him, or tell him I believed him, or if I’d even thought that far ahead.
All I know is, when I held him in my arms, he was hot, like he was burning up from within.
I looked at his eyes, watched the gold and green flame ripple through his irises.
“Hey,” I said, quiet. “It’s all right. I’m not going to tell anyone.”
He let out a low, strangled laugh.
“It won’t matter,” he said, bitterly.
I stared up at his inhumanly beautiful face with an intensity of feeling that I knew was dangerous, if not outright delusional. But I couldn’t seem to lie to myself about that anymore, either.
“I’m not going to tell anyone,” I repeated. “Not unless you want me to. I’m going to help you.”
I half-expected him to laugh. Really, he probably should have laughed.
He didn’t laugh, though.
He leaned down, and pressed his face to mine, right before he kissed my neck. He closed his eyes briefly as his fingers traced my features, then his arms wrapped around me like I’d done to him. He held me against him, almost tightly.
Then, all at once, he let me go.
I remained standing there when he stepped away. I let go of him the instant he did, my hands flattening on the wall behind me, but otherwise, I didn’t move. I just watched, silent, as he disappeared through the classroom door.
I don’t know how long I stood there after he left.