31. Recovering
Recovering
Ispent the entire weekend in my old dormitory with Miranda and Jolie.
It was wonderful and strange being back there, suddenly thrust back into their lives full time.
I rocked between happy and wonder as I caught up on everything going on in their lives, everything Jolie and Nyx hadn’t felt comfortable telling me, given the strangeness of our old group dynamic.
Relief suffused me to have them all back in my life again.
I also ended up feeling incredibly sad at how much I’d missed.
Draken and Jolie were dating, as it turned out.
So were Luc and Miranda, which honestly shocked me more.
I’d definitely known they were spending a lot of time together, if only because I felt Mir on Luc’s magic so often. I’d also long suspected Luc had feelings for her, although I’d never been entirely sure how she felt about him.
Now that I knew about both couples, everyone involved just seemed to relax.
It hadn’t even occurred to me in all of those months that at least some of the tension I’d picked up on with Luc and Jolie had been them feeling torn in their loyalties and unable to tell me important things going on in their lives.
Everything came out all at once now.
Nyx had also been seeing someone, a witch she met in Bonescastle who ran an apothecary and potion ingredients supply store a few blocks north of Academy Square.
I sat at the base of one of the common room chairs while Nyx braided my hair, and watched Jolie lean against Draken while Luc sat on the couch with a stretched out Miranda, casually massaging her feet.
None of them stopped talking while we sat in roughly those spots, and did roughly those things, and all of it felt so domestic and normal, I felt like the odd one out, given I was the only one having to accustom myself to the new dynamic.
No one asked me about Bones directly for all of Saturday.
Sunday morning, when Miranda brought brunch for all of us up from the dining room (I’d still shied away from going down there with the rest of them), I happened to see the Sunday edition of the London Twilight on her chair and opened it up.
Bones took up the entire front image of the news.
The “photograph,” or video, really, was one of those images that had been animated by magic, probably because they knew the drama of the image would compel people to buy the edition.
In that moving image, Bones was on an endless loop, his hands moving gracefully in a series of mudras executed so quickly and smoothly I couldn’t even pull them all apart.
He wore the mask I’d seen him with when he appeared in my bedroom, which I knew to be gold, but that merely shone as metallic in the black and white image.
His eyes glowed through the holes of the mask, and his hood was down, showing his white hair, shaggy and longer than it used to be, whipping in the wind from nearby fires.
He looked utterly inhuman.
In the foreground, the image only showed the back of someone, the clear target of his spell. The end of the loop was that person being slammed backwards by the force of the spell Bones threw at them.
It looked like an image of Bones murdering someone.
It was difficult, even for me, to deny that’s what it was.
I hadn’t asked him exactly what he did during those attacks he conducted for his father, but I knew people had died in those raids. The death counts showed up in newspapers after each one, and a few had gone over one hundred for larger cities.
The headline at the top of the paper read: Magus Imperius “Willing to Talk.” The subtitle directly below the bold added: London Government looks to end “Royal Rebellion” and restore order in negotiation conference to take place this afternoon.
I skimmed through the story to find the raid the night before took place in Guildford, right outside of London.
Clearly, the government was getting nervous about a direct attack on the capitol.
The image of Bones didn’t have a caption of any kind, but I looked through the rest of the paper to try and find out more about the attack of the night before, who the other person was in the image, whether they were one of the dead.
There was nothing specific about either, only a paragraph in the main story that listed out deaths (24), and injuries (148) from the previous night’s attack. It was part of a running tabulation that also included damage to prominent buildings and estates.
The only other thing I found, in that newspaper, at least, was a related story about attacks occurring across Magical Europe, including in the vicinity of the Ethnarch’s palace.
I bit my lip, thinking.
At the Black Tower, that mage had said the Great Ritual would be happening soon.
Something told me the date of their supposed “Great Ritual,” was fast-approaching.
Everything Malefic was doing right now seemed to be leading to something, something that felt a lot bigger than just threatening London or even the Ethnarch.
I didn’t fully realize that I’d just been standing there, in my old kitchen, staring down at the front page of the newspaper, until I noticed the silence in the rest of the room.
I glanced over at all of them, and they all looked away, seemingly in the same instant.
Everyone but Nyx, who walked over to where I stood, and wrapped an arm around my waist.
She didn’t say anything, but I didn’t really need her to, or particularly want her to.
Rather, the two of us just stood there, looking down at the looping, black and white image of Bones right before magical fire left his hand and exploded into the chest of the hooded stranger, over and over and over again.
I went back to the tower that night, just before it got dark.
Luc and Miranda insisted on walking me, and in the end, Jolie and Draken came along, too, while Nyx left for Bonescastle to meet her girlfriend in one of the pubs, a last chance to see her before classes started up again.
I wasn’t too proud to accept the escort back to Bones’s tower.
I also asked Nyx if she’d drop my mangled wings off at the Wing Emporium the next morning on her way back, and see about having them fixed and re-feathered, since the ones I’d had with me that morning were pretty mangled when I fell down that hill.
I didn’t like the idea of having to rely on my spotting phasing skills if I needed to get out of the tower in a hurry.
Having a reliable pair of wings near the largest window with a latch was a much preferable backup solution than accidentally propelling myself backwards in time a few thousand years, or finding myself in the Pyramid, or Malefic’s audience chamber.
Nyx just winked at me before she shrank down my broken wings to fit them in her bag. She then hoisted her satchel over her shoulder and held out her arms, asking me, Jolie, and Miranda for our opinions on how she looked.
She’d changed her hair colors to black with hot pink ends, magicked on make-up that made her eyelids and cheeks sparkle and her lips glow the same rough shade as the pink tips of her hair.
With the make-up and new hairstyle, she wore a long, slinky, and form-fitting burgundy dress with combat boots.
Miranda cooed over her, then, Miranda-fashion, added a few touches of her own to make Nyx’s hair smoother and to add faerie-like sparkles to the pink ends.
After stepping back to assess her, mouth pursed, she did a third spell to make her lipstick match the sparkles in Nyx’s hair, and then a fourth to thread a few more sparkles evenly over the burgundy dress.
“Perfect,” Miranda beamed.
Jolie and I glanced at one another and smiled, then nodded to Nyx.
She really did look stunning.
We walked her as far as the Mansion, and then I got worried about her being out on her own, all the way to Bonescastle without a single other person with her.
“Are you sure you don’t want us to come with you into town?
” I asked. “You could come with all of us to the tower, and then Draken and Luc could walk you to the square, at least.” I bit my lip, trying to sound less nervous for her than I felt.
“Or we could all just go together, and wait with you at the pub until Glinda gets there.”
Nyx smiled at me in a way that made it clear she knew why I was asking. She even looked a bit touched by my worries. Then she waved a hand, and her face changed, her hair color turning a stunning red and cascading down her shoulders and back.
“I’ll be fine,” she told me, winking again.
“You’re definitely spending the night?” I asked.
“Definitely,” she said, her smile twitching higher.
I felt marginally reassured.
Even so, I watched her for longer than was probably necessary as she made her way down the Promenade in the direction of the school gates.
I fought to suppress my anxiety as I looked around at the gardens and the path, and even the windows of Malcroix Mansion that overlooked where we stood, hoping no one saw her change her appearance.
Other than a brief curtain twitch on one of the higher floors of the white tower, I didn’t see anything. I definitely hadn’t noticed anyone watching us from the school grounds.
I couldn’t entirely shake my nerves, anyway.
“She’ll be okay,” Miranda assured me, looping her arm through mine. “You know Nyx. She’s a beast at dueling. And she’s got some of the best protective spellwork I’ve ever seen. Even the royals leave her alone in Offensive Magic practicals.”
I nodded, and made myself smile back.
I didn’t say anything as I followed the others to the massive doors of the main entrance on the first floor of the mansion.
I so rarely entered the mansion this way, it was strange to look up at the giant staircase from that angle, which showed off the waterfall design all the way up to the second floor, which was high given the ceiling height of the first. I gazed up the opening to glimpse even higher floors, where a lot of the smaller classrooms lived, along with the offices and residencies of the dozen or so instructors and professors who lived on campus.
Luckily, being nearly dinner time on a Sunday, the place was mostly deserted.
My four friends walked me all the way to the base of the tower and then said goodbye, after I insisted that they not miss dinner at Valarian.
Truthfully, by then, I needed to be alone.
I thought about that as I walked slowly up the stone steps, still feeling physically beat up, despite all the potions and creams and spells I’d been given over the past three days, and not only by Jolie.
I knew I was mostly healed. My wrist was no longer broken.
My shoulder socket worked almost normally again.
My cracked and broken ribs had all been mended by Blackstone with one of his more disgusting potions.
But my exhaustion from the damage done by the lightning spells had been harder to shake. It was a bone-deep, pervasive kind of tired I couldn’t localize to any one part of my body.
Blackstone warned me I’d likely be feeling that end of things for at least a week, and probably longer.
He also told me the amount of current Mordopast used on me––that last, continuous spell especially––would have killed a human, and even most Magicals.
Blackstone seemed to think my “god primal” kept me alive, probably by being able to siphon off some of the excess charge before my system overloaded, or my heart gave out.
Whatever the cause, I walked up those stairs at about half-speed.
I also felt about eighty years old.
I was just approaching the second floor when something hot and burning on my skin, just below my collarbones, made me jump and flinch back.
I jerked back so violently, I probably would’ve lost my balance and gone toppling down the stairs if it hadn’t managed to reach out in time and grip the stone wall. Once I had myself securely upright again, I gingerly plucked the amulet Blackstone had given me off my skin.
I immediately let it go when the heat seared into my fingers.
It didn’t matter; it had done its job. I’d completely forgotten it was there, but now I remembered what it was, and why Blackstone had given me it.
Someone who’d taken the oath to Malefic was near me.
A Dark Cathedral was within distance of the amulet’s magic.
My breath stopped.
I looked up the circular staircase, and all around me.
I craned my head and neck around to look behind me.
I could see the door below, and it was closed.
I highly doubted anyone could have opened that, even invisible, without me noticing.
I would have heard it, if nothing else; the door was loud, especially in the acoustics of the tower.
Even if they’d spelled the hinges silent, I would have felt the air when it got pulled up the stairs.
That meant, whatever waited for me, it was likely in front of me.
The door to the laboratory was just a handful of steps above.
I froze, staring at that door, breathing hard.
I fought to decide which direction was shorter, which wiser.
Was it dumber to risk running upstairs, where I might be trapped? Or were they counting on me retreating back down to the main halls of Malcroix Mansion, where there might be more of them, and where I was less likely to have the magic to effectively lock someone out?
I decided running upstairs was more risky.
I would try to make it to Forsooth’s tower.
He should be there. Blackstone said they were both back for the weekend. He also said Forsooth wished to speak with me, as soon as I felt well enough.
I took my first step backwards on the stairs, making as little sound as I could.
I took another step.
Then another.
I was about to take my fourth step––
––when a tall, black-clad form emerged from the stone wall right in front of me.
I let out a shiek, right as an arm tightly circled my waist.
There was a flash of white light.
Then everything around me disappeared.