24. The Undoer #2
Blackstone also told me there were an increasing numbers of defections, another fact the newspapers didn’t mention. Warlocks, trained military sorcerers, battle witches, and even some Praecuri had peeled off from the side of the King to join Malefic’s ranks.
I could only take reading so much about it.
Everything I read, even with all the omissions, struck me as very bad.
I really should be meeting with Luc, Nyx, Alaric, and Jolie tonight, and even potentially the larger group, which now sometimes included Luc’s roommate, Darragh, and Anya Nordburg, a friend of theirs who was also studying bloodline magic, and a number of others from Valarian who were worried about Dark Cathedral.
I knew I should be there, that our time wasn’t just short but basically nonexistent, but I couldn’t face it.
More than anything, I wanted to scream at the thought of yet another long, increasingly pointless strategy session that never went anywhere.
For one thing, it was impossible to plan a raid on the Black Tower when they were never there.
That said, I couldn’t handle a real night off either.
The idea of truly doing nothing, like I might’ve done back on Earth, watching television with Archie, or walking to one of the local theaters to see a movie on the big screen, felt utterly alien to me. I didn’t want that.
Really what I wanted was a night alone.
I wanted a night where I didn’t have to put on a false front, or try to convince anyone I was all right.
I knew most of them thought Arcturus was dead.
I needed a few hours where I wasn’t constantly having to see that in their eyes, or the pity in their expressions when I told them Bones might still help us.
I couldn’t help but see the relief on their faces when I told them I wouldn’t be there.
I couldn’t even blame them, really.
Luc looked exhausted, and I knew he was worried about exams, not to mention all the time his individual course of study still needed.
He’d gone back to working on that with Blackstone a few nights a week, and that project, plus a full course load, wiped out a lot of the energy he’d brought to the work we’d been doing those first few months, trying to get Bones out of the Black Tower.
It was more than simply exhaustion, and I knew that.
Luc was reading the news along with the rest of us, and likely losing any interest in helping Bones.
I knew he still wanted to stop the ritual, and Malefic, and Dark Cathedral, but I suspected he was losing hope it might be possible, at least the way we’d been approaching it.
He talked more about European alliances now, and how the Americas might respond.
I suspected all of them felt that way, at least to a degree, even Jolie and Nyx, who tended to cut Bones more slack than anyone except maybe Alaric.
Despite the frustrating lack of information, I read everything, too. There was no way to connect to Bones personally in any of it, not even through photos. The few images of him tended to show him from a distance, masked, and usually hooded.
Bones was his father’s instrument now.
Faceless. Unknowable.
Murmurs had begun to circulate about how he was doing what he was doing, and I had no doubt those speculations were a lot more explicit inside the halls of power. If they didn’t definitely know he was a caelum ignis by now, they must suspect it.
A few of the more detailed articles I’d read described structures exploding under ice and flame, entire estates wiped out with a single casting, clouds of noxious gas felling an entire battalion before the fighting had even begun.
Those weren’t normal spells.
Regular Magicals couldn’t do what hundreds, if not thousands, of witnesses had now seen Bones do with their own eyes.
Blackstone told me the only way normal Magicals could accomplish similar feats would be through dark rituals, traces of which would be visible to Obeahs and Oracles who looked over the scenes in the aftermath.
Ritual magic inevitably left magical fingerprints, not to mention physical evidence of the ritual itself.
None of those fingerprints had been found.
Further, the attacks were coming too close together.
All of which meant Malefic wasn’t trying to hide it anymore.
He wanted them to at least suspect what Bones was. Utilizing his abilities in this way would of course draw attention, and Malefic hadn’t even attempted to hide the fact that one Magical was inflicting most of the damage single-handedly.
He wanted Magique to fear his son.
He wanted them to fear his son’s leash-holder even more.
Alaric had recently taken to spying on what the other royals were saying, specifically the ones loyal to Malefic and Dark Cathedral. He spent more time in the common areas and dining room of Valarian as a result, trying to overhear what he could.
From his eavesdropping, he told me the overall view of Bones had changed dramatically among the Dark Cathedrals at the school, not long after the raids began.
Bones’s blood status as a caelum ignis hadn’t come up that he’d heard, but there was a lot of speculation about how he was pulling off what he was doing.
Most of the discussions involved a lot of bragging about victories out in the field, and questioning what Malefic had done to make Bones’s magic so strong.
Alaric assumed this was because none of them had heard of caelum ignis, and hadn’t bothered to do the research into what could actually make a wizard capable of doing what Bones could do.
Also, he admitted, it had taken me over a year to find it, and that was with access to the Bones Estate’s well-stocked libraries, not to mention prodding from Forsooth.
Most of the royals weren’t interested enough in the particulars to dive into historical archives that might explain Bones’s unique magic.
In their minds, the important part was Bones had gone from being a blood-traitor to something more akin to a folk hero.
They crowed about him, cheered his victories, speculated on where he might go next.
Alaric said in disgust they could’ve been cheering on a Skyhunt Team, not their favorite mass-murderer.
He’d heard some call Bones “Abaddon,” a kind of destroying angel. They’d also called him “The Undoer.” Both names pointed towards Malefic’s twisted ideology on how to fix the Magical world, by collapsing the dimensions and then stamping out the “infestation.”
Of course, Bones’s change to hero status in no way extended to me.
If anything, Alaric warned me, it made them more hostile to me, not less.
They all saw me as having “compromised” Bones, seducing him, tricking him into marriage, twisting his mind into feeling sympathy for the humans, filling his head with human nonsense.
Their proof was the radical change in Caelum since Malefic “saved” him from me, and my filthy, corrupting, human influence.
I tried not to think about it, but it was hard.
I didn’t want to consider the fact that Bones might actually agree with them.