Chapter 36 Unwelcome Awakening
Unwelcome Awakening
Present Day
Caelum Bones’s Living Quarters
Malcroix Bones Academy
“Leda!” Bones’s voice, whispered, nearly harsh. His hands gripped my shoulders. He shook me, once, hard. “Leda! Get up! Now!”
I fought to drag myself back to consciousness, even though not a single part of me wanted that in any way.
I was warm, insanely comfortable, completely naked except for my birthday present, and covered in thick, warm, achingly soft bedding that felt like sleeping inside a cloud.
I must have caught enough of the panic in Bones’s voice to make the effort, because I doubt I would have otherwise.
“Leda!” He shook me again, harder, and my eyes flipped open. “Wake. Up.”
I stared up at him.
I got lost briefly in the look on his face.
I barely recognized the mage who stared back.
It wasn’t the version of Caelum I’d met at the base of the tower on the night of my birthday, but something about it struck me as nearly as foreign.
It certainly wasn’t anything like the person I’d been talking to when I drifted off to sleep the night before.
His face looked disturbingly blank, like he’d flicked some kind of switch and shut everything down.
Only his eyes showed any hint of the person behind that wall.
I saw panic there. Maybe something deeper than panic.
“Do you have your crystal?” he murmured.
I nodded. “It’s on my costume. I made it part of the belt.”
“Get it,” he said. “I’ve put your clothes in the closet. You have to hide.” His face remained unnervingly empty. When I didn’t move, his fingers clenched on my shoulders.
“Leda. Now. Now.”
I sat up, fully awake, and breathing harder, clutching the duvet to my chest. “Bones, what’s wrong? What happened?”
His throat moved in a swallow, but his gold eyes remained flat, empty of any hint of that fiery glow I’d grown completely used to seeing.
He looked like a cardboard cutout of Bones, not Bones himself.
Then he met my gaze, and I saw something I could only describe as terror, but so intensely suppressed, it looked more like an echo.
“My father’s here,” he said.
I’d just hunkered down in his walk-in closet, behind a row of winter coats, when I heard the main door to his residence open.
By then, I’d managed to shove my legs into a set of Bones’s workout joggers.
I hadn’t dared use magic to shrink them, so I just yanked them up and tied the ties, tightly enough to stay around my waist. I was listening with everything in me as I buttoned up one of his shirts over my bare torso.
Leaning over my dress, which he’d tossed in a corner of the closet, I ran my fingers all over it until I found the belt, then the crystal.
When I heard the door open, I still had it gripped in my hand.
I froze.
The closet door remained slightly open, presumably because Bones thought it would look more suspicious if it wasn’t.
I couldn’t see anything but a strip of the far wall near his desk, but the sounds through that opening between the wall and the closet door were loud, as if I stood right there in the room with them.
That’s why I heard the crack and thud of the blow, Bones’s grunt of pain, and the crash when he stumbled into something, and knocked something to the floor.
I rose to my feet, breathing harder.
It never once occurred to me that Bones wasn’t the one who’d gotten hit.
Panic and adrenaline shot through me. I stayed totally silent, and didn’t move other than to straighten, but every nerve in my body seemed to ignite in that same instant. The sound was unmistakeable. I knew what I’d fucking heard.
Rage boiled through me, so intensely I had to bite my tongue to remain still.
I heard the voice then, and that’s when I knew. I fucking knew, somehow, that it was him.
Not just Bones’s father.
That prick I’d met at the base of the tower on my birthday.
I recognized his alien presence in every cadence, every sneer, every tone drop and lift, even his word choices and his silences. It was him.
I didn’t just think it. I knew it.
“How dare you,” the slow, low, dangerously cold voice hissed. “How dare you defy me. If I had the time, I’d beat you unconscious, you disgusting, ungrateful animal.”
Another crack.
“Where were you?” he spat. “Why did you not answer? Over and over I called. Over and over, only to receive nothing but your insolent silence.”
Another crack.
“Answer me, whelp, or I’ll break your jaw. Then beat you until you answer me with your mind.” His voice darkened with rage. “How did you do it? How?”
Blood rushed into my face. My fingers clenched around the crystal, hard enough to hurt.
I stood there, shaking with fury, with adrenaline.
Also with disbelief.
Why would he allow this? Why wasn’t he fighting back?
It couldn’t be the money. His father didn’t give him any money, not in a way that actually mattered.
Was belonging to the infamous Bones family that important to him, that central to how he saw himself, that he accepted this, as part of the cost? Was it something to do with his mother?
Did his father have something else over him?
Why the fuck would he tolerate this?
Stay out of it, Shadow. The thoughts were a bare whisper, but I flinched, my heart hammering in my chest. I couldn’t mistake the fear there, the terror. Please, gods, stay out of it. Don’t make a fucking sound… please, darling, please.
I paled.
Another crack.
That time, I heard Caelum gasp. The pain in it was unmistakeable.
“What did I do?” he gasped. “I’ve been here. I’ve been here. You know I can’t––”
“You have the gall to ask me that?” that voice hissed. “Do you think me a fool? Perhaps you think me as easy to manipulate as your ridiculous friends?”
“I don’t know what you––”
Another crack, and Bones gasped again.
“Your magic,” his father spat. “What did you do to keep me out of your magic, you sniveling, ungrateful, disobedient whelp? Why can I no longer access it?”
I realized I could feel Caelum, even now.
Some part of me must be straining for him, or connecting instinctively with that strange magic of his, but I felt his bewilderment at his father’s question, his confusion, as if from far away.
I remembered his black, flaming, crystal primal, and closed my eyes.
I reached for the sun that blazed over my head.
Gripping my mother’s crystal tightly in my hand, I tried to see both things, to bring them closer together.
The sun burst out of the darkness first.
Tiny solar flares arced off the sides as it rotated grindingly in the aether.
I focused my attention on Bones’s primal next, his real one, and, with seemingly no effort at all, the flaming, black, smoking crystal rose silently in the darkness.
It sparked in front of me, entwined with the sun, as if somehow a part of my magic, too.
Something about that feeling closed my throat.
I felt him there, in the darkness, and a wave of protectiveness came over me, so intense I clenched my jaw, fighting to breathe.
I’d never felt anything like it, except maybe for my brother, and not really even then.
This was different somehow, in a way I couldn’t comprehend.
For a long-feeling few breaths, I just swam there, in that no-time space between him and me. I felt the vulnerability there, his inability to act for himself.
I didn’t understand it, but I felt it as real.
He couldn’t fight back. He couldn’t.
I fought to see why, but the reasons wouldn’t come clear. When I focused on his primal, I saw the sorcerer in the temple carving hieroglyphs in his chest, covered in another’s blood. I saw smoke swirl around him, heard the guttural chants ring in the air.
My eyes slowly refocused in the dark.
I found myself standing in the darkness again, trembling from the charge sparking over my skin, the green crystal clenched in my fist.
“Was it a ritual?” his father hissed. “Some kind of protection trinket one of your debauched friends found for you? I know it wasn’t Greythorne…”
There was a banging sound, then the sound of things falling, of glass shattering and other things breaking when they hit the stone. In my mind, I saw the looming form shove Bones into a table, or maybe his desk.
“How did you do it?” his father demanded viciously.
“I was forced to go into the Sanctum Occulus without you last night, do you realize that? Do you have any idea what that could have meant? What was risked, in my being forced to accompany them without you? Do you understand, you ungrateful, irresponsible child, what the movement could have lost, had I been exposed, all because of you?”
My heart rose to my throat, choking me.
The Sanctum?
Had they taken Archie?
“We could not cancel,” he snarled next. “The plans were already in motion. Guards who changed the chimaera locks, who let us in… it would all be exposed, and we would miss our window. I had no recourse, and no way to reach you in time physically, so I had to operate the best I could. Several in our party were caught,” he spat, his voice a growl.
“They were picked off by the Sanctum Guard, and taken into custody. Do you have any idea what this means, you disobedient cur?”
“Sanctum Occulus?” Caelum spoke through gritted teeth, his voice hard. “I have no idea what you’re even talking about. What plans? I wasn’t aware I was supposed to be anywhere, or how I could have been anywhere, even if––”
“Silence! You traitorous little leech!” His father’s voice darkened in disgust. “You must think me a fool. I knew you would figure it out eventually, and obviously you have.” His words grew colder.
“I would very much like to know how that occurred, too. Was it that needy little whore I found, sniffing around for you the other night? Is that how you pieced it together?”
There was a silence, and in it, I held my breath.
Caelum did know. He knew exactly what his father was talking about.
I felt the understanding there.