Page 28 of Malcroix Bones Academy (Bones and Shadow #1)

I bit my lip, forcing myself to remain silent. Interrupting him every five seconds was only prolonging this. I’d hear him out, then maybe he’d let me leave.

“I know you can see me,” he said, his voice a touch colder. “Just like I can see you.”

At that, I felt a strange sensation in my gut, something between panic and excitement.

Despite my previous resolution, I spoke without thought.

“See me how? Do you mean above your head? Or is there?”

“Diana’s bow, you don’t quit, do you?” he cut in, annoyed. “Stick to your initial thought and hear me out. Just give me a damned minute to explain.”

When my jaw hardened, he scowled.

“Yes, that’s what I meant,” he said, as if giving in. “You can see the flame over my head. The crystal. Can we just start there? You see it, right?”

That ripple of excitement returned. I understood. Finally. “Yes.”

“Well. No one else can. Just like no one can see your true primal. Understand?”

I thought about that, then shook my head. “No.”

His jaw visibly clenched. “Are you simple-minded? Did your mixed blood make you an idiot? What I said was perfectly clear.”

I stared up at those gold eyes. What in the hell was wrong with him? Why was he so bloody angry about this? Why was he acting like I’d done something to him, when I was honestly excited about the fact that we were actually talking about?

“You can see me.” He still sounded irritated, or maybe frustrated. “I knew that, after the tea shop. Then I find out last night, you can also deal with my magic.”

When he didn’t go on, I felt my patience fraying.

“How are you so bad at this?” I asked, annoyed. “What in the gods?”

“Just let me try something,” he cut in. “Can I bloody well try something? I don’t think it will hurt you. It didn’t last night.”

“Hurt me?” Alarm reached my voice.

He was already gliding closer.

That time, he backed me up to the wall of the cramped utility room.

I stood there against it, my jaw tilted up, and forced myself to hold his gaze.

Up close, he didn’t look angry exactly, or particularly aggressive, but something in his eyes made me nervous.

That same something was mirrored in the eyes of his dragon primal, which didn’t exactly reassure me.

There was a strange light there, an eagerness mixed with a sparking charge that looked slightly out of control. Reckless, anyway.

Like he knew what he was about to do wasn’t a good idea.

“Wait?” I began.

“Just… please.” His voice grew rough. “Gods. Do you always think this loud?”

Before I could make up my mind whether to answer that, or to push back for real, his hand and those long fingers wrapped lightly around my throat. He moved so quickly, I jerked my head back. In the process, I managed to smack it against the wall.

“Ouch,” I complained.

“Just fucking relax!” he growled. “You’re going to give yourself a bloody concussion! I’ve already said I won’t hurt you… I’m not going to hurt you, all right?”

I glared up at him. “What are you going to do, then?”

“What I did last night.” He cleared his throat, stepping closer. “More or less.”

“What’s the more part?”

“Can I do it?” He frowned. “Or not?”

I stared at him in disbelief. He’d wrapped his hand around my throat, and now he was asking my permission?

Still, some part of me wanted to know what he meant to do.

Like the night before, his fingers didn’t hurt.

They were tense, taut, but he didn’t squeeze.

If anything, he seemed to be holding me carefully, as if afraid to bruise the skin more than it already was.

But he was standing uncomfortably close, and I still felt that reckless thing all over him.

“I’m going to do it now,” he said. “If it hurts, I’ll stop. All right?”

I stared at his eyes, still having competing feelings about this.

“Can I?” he repeated. “Say yes, Shadow. Or say no.”

“Yes.” I blurted it without thought.

I considered asking him more?

?when something hot and liquid flowed like an open faucet into my throat.

I gasped, half-choking on it, but my lungs only opened in the gasp, taking in a deep breath that drew that heat further into me.

I stared down at his arm, then at his chest, directly in front of me, which appeared to be glowing through his shirt.

His dragon primal’s eyes sparked a brighter black, writhing with living fire.

I looked at Caelum’s eyes next. His irises were glowing.

The colored veins appeared dense, sightless with liquid gold.

His expression hardened then softened as I watched. That feeling of losing control grew more tangible as the heat in my throat intensified.

“I… I’m going to open it for real now, okay?” His voice was breathless. “I’m going to try, okay? I’ll be careful.”

I might’ve said something rude to that, if I could have made any sound at all.

Nothing about this felt careful.

I considered kicking him off me, even kneeing him in the groin, but something about what he was doing drew me in, too. Truthfully, it felt good.

It felt good enough to make me stupid. Complacent, at least.

Then, everything about it changed again.

A second wave hit into me, pure light, mixed with a complex, confused, drugged-like, and, yes, pleasurable sensation I couldn’t think past. It felt too damned good to fight. It whited out my vision, brought a low groan to my throat.

Or maybe it was him groaning… that part definitely felt blurry.

Either way, it made my knees weak, until it felt like only his hand held me up.

I gripped his wrist, and heat flooded into the part of my chest I used to do magic, turning it boiling hot.

I couldn’t see him anymore, but I writhed under his grasp, not to get away so much as to somehow deal with the intensity of it, and the uncomfortableness of experiencing it with him.

It felt too vulnerable, too intimate, too overwhelming, but I also didn’t want him to stop.

Magical charge coursed through every part of me.

It seemed to reach into my cells, down to the very atoms.

Just when I thought I might start screaming for real, the wave crested in an odd way, and slowly began to roll back.

That was difficult to deal with, too.

The relief I felt mixed with a reluctance to let go. Heat continued to roll through me, but gradually gentler, until I could eventually take full breaths again. I felt him in that somehow, but I felt me, too, maybe a truer, more tangible part of me.

I just stood there as my vision slowly regained color.

I felt him struggle to withdraw.

I felt the effort behind it, the attempt at control.

A long-feeling time passed before my eyes fully registered the dark room, with the greenish-gold flames hovering and flickering in the air.

His face was tinted green once more, but he looked damp with sweat.

His bone-white hair stuck partly to his face and neck, and his eyes looked glassy, still glowing with flickers of that internal light. He was breathing hard.

Gods, I was breathing hard, too.

If anyone had come in there right then, they would have thought?

“Fuck.” His voice was harsh. “Fuck. That worked a lot better than I thought it would. I completely lost control for a few seconds, and you still took it.”

His eyes held mine.

I fought to make sense of his words.

I was still turning them over when he released my throat.

My knees buckled. I managed to catch myself by placing my palms against the wall behind me. I tried to slow my breathing, feeling shock, maybe even shame, or embarrassment, as I tried to make sense of what just happened.

I hadn’t wanted him to stop. I still didn’t want that, really.

When I looked at him next, he was wiping his hands on a handkerchief, his expression hard once more, unreadable. He still looked sweaty, but seemed to be breathing more normally now.

“I have trouble controlling… that,” he said, his words holding distaste.

It occurred to me that the hand he’d been wiping off with that grimace was the one he’d wrapped around my throat. He’d just done that to me, and he was still worried about me contaminating him with my hybrid germs?

Disgust made my lip curl. What kind of a mental case was he?

“What did you do to me?” I asked.

He shoved the handkerchief back in his pocket, and his hands with it. He stared down his nose at me, his eyes cold, unreadable.

“That would be difficult to explain,” he said. “But it’s what I want from you. I don’t have an easy way to deal with that on my own.”

I frowned, now back to being confused. “Deal with what?” I asked, letting annoyance reach my voice. “You still haven’t explained?”

“I don’t need to explain anything to you,” he cut in. “And part of the deal is that I won’t. And you won’t tell anyone that I come to you for this.”

I stared at him, now utterly incredulous. “And if I tell you to shove it up your?”

“I don’t expect you to do it for free, mongrel,” he sneered.

“I’m willing to negotiate. And be generous.

But part of the deal on my end is that no one knows.

That’s non-negotiable. You don’t agree to that, and our negotiations end here.

I erase your memory of this little event, and life goes on as before. ”

I stared at him. Now I found myself fighting to sort through not so much what he was saying, but what he wasn’t.

“But you need this?” I clarified.

Discomfort flashed in those gold eyes. “Yes.”

“And anyone else you’ve tried it with, you’ve hurt?” I pressed, wary. “But it doesn’t hurt me. And you think it won’t hurt me, because we have those… things, in common…whatever it is you see above my head and I see over yours. You think that makes me different.”

Irritation flashed in his eyes, but I got the impression it was because I was right, not the opposite. Before I could press the point, he nodded, once.

“Yes,” he said.

“And no one else can know because…?”

“That’s not important,” he said.

“Obviously, it is,” I observed.