6. Alone
Alone
Still standing vaguely by Bones’s coffee table and fire, I stared at where the bear and the professor had been. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so exhausted.
I willed myself to move.
I desperately needed a shower.
Eventually, the need to deal with how sticky and gross and filthy I was overcame the utter lack of desire I had to go through the effort of cleaning myself.
I began to walk, moving stiffly in the direction of the loo.
A lot of the adrenaline, or anxiety, or whatever had been keeping me moving urgently forward all day, seemed to be finally wearing off.
I could feel my whole system starting to crash.
The shivering had gotten worse.
Had I been doing that the whole time I’d been talking to Forsooth? If so, that might explain why the professor seemed so worried about me.
He’d always been unnervingly observant.
I fought not to think about Bones. Somehow, until those last few seconds with Forsooth, I’d managed to forget not only his words, but what I’d felt behind them.
Now it all came rushing back: the darkness, the metal on bone, the emptiness behind Bones’s presence, the horrible pain on him I’d felt, the effort to speak, the viciousness of his words.
Everything else that happened that day came crashing down also, including, maybe for the first time, the parts that happened to me.
I hadn’t come out of that fight in the garden unscathed.
Emotionally, I’d known that.
Now the physical side of things seemed to be catching up, too.
My hands were bruised and cut from where I’d smashed my fists into the mirror.
The back of my head throbbed from Isis knew what.
I had burns on my arms and hip from magical fire, my back hurt worse than my head and jaw, and one of my knees had swollen under the trousers I wore.
I also seemed to have nicks and cuts all over my face and neck.
Other than my coat and boots, which I’d left by the door, I still wore the same clothes I’d worn to brunch that morning.
Bones’s room looked enormous to me suddenly, much bigger than my dormitory in Valarian, even if I included Jolie’s and Miranda’s rooms. Bones’s study with its enormous desk, the tall windows, the half-dozen curved bookshelves and how high they rose up the wall’s height, magical file cabinets with odd, interlinking locks, magical curios and talismans, thick sheafs of paper and parchment, rows of bottles filled with potions and ritual ingredients.
Even his kitchen, which I’d always thought of as small, was larger than I’d realized, nearly the size of my bedroom in Valarian if I excluded the closet and loo.
My bedroom.
That room in Jolie and Miranda’s Valarian suite, the one I got assigned at the beginning of the year, was no longer mine though, was it?
The largeness of this new space made me feel very alone.
Maybe some of it was the uselessness I felt.
As Forsooth so helpfully pointed out, I didn’t have anything left to do.
Not tonight, at least. Not that I was capable of doing.
Realizing I hadn’t thought of clothes, I turned around just before I reached the loo and walked back to Bones’s walk-in closet. I stood there for a ridiculous amount of time, trying to decide what to wear to bed.
I’d definitely fallen on getting Wraith tomorrow.
As much as I wanted her with me, I was in no condition to deal with Miranda right then, and I knew it.
I doubted I could have handled Jolie, much less Miranda or Draken.
So even though I wanted my cat––and, if I was being honest, I really wanted my friends, too––I needed to wait until I’d gotten at least a few hours of sleep.
In the end, I looked for clothes in Bones’s part of the closet.
I didn’t let myself think about why I wanted his clothes, and not mine.
I eventually picked out a jumper, a long-sleeved shirt, a pair of soft joggers, and a clean pair of knickers. I entered Bones’s tile-walled lavatory and shut the door.
It was too cold to linger by the sink, so I turned on the shower after dumping the pile of clothes on an in-built shelf. I set the temperature hotter than I would normally, and immediately began to strip off every article of clothing I wore.
I was only halfway through shedding everything when a sparking, rippling signal shivered through my magical aura, lighting up the sun primal over my head.
It was like a small chime had gone off.
Bones’s equivalent to a doorbell.
Or maybe the Praecuri had done that, tweaking whatever Bones previously had in place.
Either way, someone was there, outside the door.
I’d frozen in place at the tower door’s warning system, my shirt and bra already off, my trousers halfway down my thighs.
I glanced in the direction of the door.
My monocerus, which naturally followed me into the bathroom, stamped its foot and snorted, pawing the tile with a hoof. He didn’t seem overly agitated though, or alarmed at whatever he felt through my magic.
Like me, he was just reacting to someone being there at all.
I didn’t want to put my clothes back on, much less deal with another person in my personal space, so I felt a bit like stamping my foot and snorting, too.
Had Forsooth come back? Could he have heard from Blackstone and the Praecuri already? It seemed unlikely. Only a few moments had passed since he left. Morag had to fly all the way to Exmoor and back, didn’t she?
My magic snaked out, looking for more information, and immediately found Forsooth in his tower on the other end of the castle. I retreated rapidly from his magical aura, hoping he hadn’t felt me, and aimed my presence at the door at Bones’s tower’s base.
I looked at the witch or wizard who’d triggered the chimaeras.
They stood patiently outside Bones’s front door, waiting.
After a bare pause where I wound my way through the new security layers around the tower for the first time, I found I recognized him within seconds.
Alaric.
Relief made me close my eyes, mixed with a disappointment so intense, it felt like a metal hand clenched viciously around my lungs and heart.
The realization that nothing had changed, that no one was coming with good news about Bones, much less to tell me he’d been rescued and was on his way back, caused me to crash so intensely I let out an involuntary groan.
I hadn’t even known the hope lived there until after it got crushed.
Then I just stood there, mostly naked, my fist pressed to the middle of my chest between my breasts. I fought to breathe, to control my galloping heart.
Gods-damn it.
As much as I desperately wanted a friend there, especially Alaric, who wouldn’t be shitty to me about Bones, all my impulses brought back a hard no. No, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. No, I didn’t want anyone to talk to me. No, I didn’t want company. No. Just no.
If it wasn’t Bones, I didn’t want them. I wanted everyone who wasn’t him to go away and leave me alone unless they had Bones with them.
But that initial reaction didn’t last long.
That maddeningly practical part of my mind and magic insisted on seeing Alaric through the lens of how he could help me bring back Bones, too.
I would need someone who knew Bones, who knew the grounds of the Bones Estate, and especially a detailed layout of the Black Tower.
I needed someone who knew about the types of chimaeras wealthy people used, especially the older, more entrenched variety, like the kind you’d find on a royal estate, particular a royal estate close to the King’s lineage.
I needed someone who knew about arcane, highly-illegal forms of magic.
I needed someone who knew about Dark Cathedral.
I needed someone who might know something about Resurrection.
I needed help.
Come in, I told him, after that too-long silence. I’m about to jump in the shower, but make yourself at home. I’ll be out soon.
I honestly had no idea if he would hear my actual words.
I’d never really tried talking to most people in their heads.
I’d tried with hardly anyone apart from Bones, except in a few dire emergencies when Bones wasn’t letting me talk to him.
I’d sent messages to Forsooth with my primal and with other spells, but that wasn’t the same thing, and anyway, it was Forsooth.
If the person outside Bones’s door heard me, they didn’t answer.
I stepped the rest of the way out of my trousers, and dumped them on the floor with all of my dirty clothes. As I did, I whispered the incantation I’d been given by Forsooth to open the chimaeras that locked anyone unauthorized out, and unsealed the door that led to Bones’s upstairs apartment.
Then I climbed into the tile shower.
I let out a gasp at the welcome heat. Even the pain of the water pressure felt good. It made me hiss and gasp as I turned my body around under the wide shower head, but something about that pain felt welcome, even necessary.
I could still feel him.
I’d been in denial of that, maybe because I couldn’t handle thinking about him in front of Forsooth without being in danger of breaking down.
I could feel him. I knew where he was.
I felt the heaviness of his body, a horrible constriction in his chest, pain in his ribs and arms, pain in his legs, pain in his head and jaw, a much hotter pain at his throat.
I felt anger and exhaustion and a wanting of it all to end.
I felt defeat on him, which scared me. I could feel his knowing that he couldn’t just end himself, which only made the defeated feeling worse.
He wanted me far, far, far away. He wanted it so badly his anger burned at me, even across all that distance, even with the ritual closed.
He knew it was futile.
We both knew his demand wasn’t just unrealistic, it was entirely irrational. No matter how much he or I pretended my connection to him was something we could resist, or even alter in some way, that wouldn’t make it true.
He couldn’t stop himself demanding it anyway.
But I got too close again, and felt a shock of that hotter pain run through me.
Fuck, Leda… don’t. Please. Please, darling…
Begging that time. Pleading with me.
Gods, that was so much worse.
It was so, so much worse.
I immediately threw myself backwards, out of his magic and mind.
I opened my eyes to find myself leaning against the shower wall, my head tilted up, my throat closed, tears streaming down my face. The hot water beat down on me, and the room was so full of steam I couldn’t see.
I forced my head off the tile, despite the painful throbbing behind my eyes.
Briefly, I could only stand there, but that was unbearable, too.
I forced myself to move, to blank my mind.
I scrubbed all over my body with soap. I did it more than once, losing track of how many times.
I washed my hair with shampoo a few times, too, barely conscious of what I was doing.
I used some of Bones’s conditioner, mostly for the smell, and finally rinsed everything off, examining every cut and bruise thoroughly in the inert, non-portal glass on the shower wall.
By then, my fingers had thoroughly pruned.
Alaric was out there.
I needed to get out.
I twisted the porcelain handle to turn the shower off, stepped out, and grabbed one of Bones’s teal towels. After spending a few minutes drying off, I hung up the damp towel and began pulling on the clean clothes I’d gathered from Bones’s closet.
I sent out a few flickers of magic as I did, and still came back with the same answer.
Alaric Greythorne.
It felt like him in every particular.
I yanked the thick jumper over my head. My jaw clenched. My magic felt hyper-charged, like there was too much of it, like it was slightly out of control, despite my exhaustion.
Some part of me wanted to blame Bones for that, too.