Page 37 of Malcroix Bones Academy (Bones and Shadow #1)

Seeing Arts

“Find a partner.” Professor Vivian Underwood’s voice was smooth, a rolling purr.

The Seeing Arts teacher moved like a panther around the classroom, watching us with silver irises and vertical pupils.

“Challenge yourselves,” she advised. “Find someone new to pair with this week. The more different the minds you work with, the more you will learn…”

It was the fourth week of class.

I could scarcely believe a whole month had gone by, but I also struggled to remember what my life had been like before. As for my academic schedule, things had ramped up exponentially from when I started.

My teachers were growing more demanding, as were the assignments.

I’d also noticed that expectations on me, personally, seemed to be growing.

Maybe it was a sign they were taking me more seriously…

or maybe they were all looking for me to trip up, or possibly crack under the strain, given my schedule.

Either way, I no longer got any leeway for not having grown up in Magique, and not having attended magical classes before now.

They treated me like any other student, which was both validating and terrifying, possibly in equal measure.

In some instances, like with Forsooth, they seemed to expect even more from me.

When I wasn’t in class, or eating, or showering, I was in the library.

That, or I was asleep with spells cast to continue to read magical texts while I dreamed.

Or I was out practicing offensive and defensive spells with Miranda, Jolie, Draken, Darragh, and Luc, and whoever else decided to join us.

Or I was flying with Miranda and sometimes Graham Strangemore.

Graham had asked me out.

So far, I’d put him off, but it had been flattering.

I’d been asked out by other mages, too, but most of them only seemed interested for the reasons Alaric warned me about over the summer. Namely, they assumed I’d be a degenerate, and an easy lay because I was half-human.

Graham might actually be different.

In any case, he hadn’t seemed overly discouraged by my refusal, and continued to ask me to go flying with him.

It turned out he was a seriously big deal on the Skyhunt team, and the Skull’s youngest first-string player.

His father owned one of the big teams in Ireland, so he’d grown up around the game; they’d recruited him onto the Skulls before he’d even arrived.

He had aspirations to go pro, but in the meantime, he was studying experimental magic to patent his own commercial spells, which he jokingly referred to as his “side” gig.

I absorbed all of this with interest.

I didn’t know enough about the different job categories in Magique to have any idea what I might do myself, but I liked the idea of being self-employed.

Graham seemed ambitious, which I admit, I liked.

He also came from new money, which I suspected had less or different baggage than the older variety that seemed to despise me so much.

Alaric still didn’t acknowledge me when he saw me, not overtly at least.

I tried not to care, but honestly, it hurt.

After being inseparable for most of the summer, it felt like losing my first real friend, and not only in the magical world.

Moreover, I’d really liked Alaric. He was funny and clever and ridiculous but also incredibly thoughtful, perceptive, and (I suspected) maybe the smartest Magical I’d met, apart from Forsooth.

It hurt that I might’ve been wrong about him. It hurt even more that I hadn’t mattered to him at all. But I had to face facts, and it seemed increasingly likely I’d been the summer friendship fling for a bored, rich mage who happened to live at the Keep the same time I did.

I dreamed about magic now.

I’d woken myself up in the middle of the night, trying to perform spells.

“Hurry now!” Professor Underwood clapped her hands. “We have a lot to cover today! I want to observe your ability to not only read minds, but to shield yourself from penetration… or, better yet, to turn the invasion back on your attackers…”

I started to turn my head, to glance around for a new face…

…when someone sank heavily into the chair across from me.

I looked up to meet gold eyes, an irritating smirk, and an even more irritatingly handsome face. He really must use some magic-infused product on that platinum hair, I thought, maybe for the fiftieth time. No one’s hair had any right to look that perfect.

His smirk widened a touch, almost like he heard me.

“Partner with me, Shadow.”

I started to tell him off, then glanced around to see that everyone else in the room already sat across from someone. I caught Alaric’s eye long enough to see him blink at the two of us, his expression faintly worried.

To hell with pride. I needed to have a little chat with Alaric Greythorne, and soon.

“Fine.” I turned to face Bones, and exhaled. “Get it over with.”

He quirked an eyebrow. “Get what over with?”

“You and your… just your general you-ness,” I said with an annoyed hand-wave. “Your compulsive need to make me feel about a centimeter tall by showing me just how much better you are at everything than I am.”

His eyebrow quirked higher. He tsk’d at me, shaking his head. “I just thought you might want to try pairing with someone who isn’t falling all over themselves to get in your good graces… by which I mean your knickers, Shadow. In case that wasn’t clear.”

My lip curled. “And here we go.”

“What? You’re a serious student, are you not? I’m honoring that, aren’t I?”

I snorted. “Right. Like you don’t read everyone’s mind around you already. You really do think I’m an idiot, don’t you? As if I can’t tell when someone’s?”

He snatched my wrist out of the air, startling me.

He leaned closer, until his face was abruptly in mine, eyes hard.

“You shouldn’t make unfounded accusations like that, Shadow,” he said softly, gold eyes flashing. “That kind of talk doesn’t go over well with the faculty here. You should know that, even if you’re new. Aren’t you taking Magical Ethics?”

I rolled my eyes, leaning back from him and extracting my wrist with a jerk.

“You’re really asking me that? You’re in my class.”

“Then, as you and I both heard in lecture this week, you’ll already know it’s illegal to read the mind of a fellow Magical without their permission unless it’s an emergency.

Which is difficult to prove in court, by the way.

” He gave me a flat-eyed stare. “Are you saying that I find the contents of your mongrel mind so intensely stimulating, I’d risk expulsion and possibly a criminal sentence, just to get a glimpse? ”

“Right,” I scoffed. “Of course not.”

Even so, my lips pursed.

He was reading my mind pretty constantly, though, wasn’t he? It certainly seemed like he was. It was a very small part of the reason why I’d decided I absolutely couldn’t drop this class, even for a single term. Why would he risk doing that, if he was worried he might get caught?

It’s not like he’d made much effort to hide it from me.

“You try me, then,” he said, his voice all business. He motioned me forward with a graceful wave. “Come now. You want to learn this. You said you want to learn this.”

“I didn’t say anything,” I muttered.

“I’m giving you my consent.”

Again, I scoffed at him.

I faced him more squarely, though, both daunted and tempted to try.

I blanked my mind carefully, and focused on my primal.

I still had to remember to keep my attention mostly on the one below my chair, rather than the one over my head, at least in front of other Magicals.

The monocerus had its legs folded under it, but I could feel that it was alert, and paying attention.

More importantly, I felt the gold-white sun ripple through it, and the presence I was slowly getting more and more acquainted with.

Unlike most of my classes, Seeing Arts required very few spells.

From what Professor Underwood said in her opening lectures, most of our homework would involve meditation and other sight exercises, and documenting what we found.

She’d recently started giving us assignments that included attempting to find things and people through the magical space my professors called The Aether.

She’d said the next set of assignments would involve us attempting to find and witness important incidents that occurred in the past, something that obviously appealed to me.

“You can see anything through The Aether,” Professor Underwood had intoned when the class settled down on that first day.

“Bones, muscles, plants, blood, under the soil of Magique, the filament structures and archaic symbols that make up a large or complex chimeric field. Not to mention the most well-known and notorious targets of sight work: the thoughts, emotions, faces, and conversations of your fellow Magicals. If you grow proficient in these arts, you will be able to explore distant lands without leaving your house, witness events and people in the past, present, and sometimes even the future. And yes, you will be able to spy on others from across the world, assuming they aren’t shielded well enough to thwart you.

You will be able to see lies as tangibly as you see truths, without your targets voicing a single word… ”

I had to admit, that all sounded interesting.

I was used to hiding my thoughts, at least.

From what I’d read ahead in my textbooks so far, that would help me when we got to psychic shielding and subterfuge, which apparently we’d be starting work on next week.

It turned out that shielding in the Seeing Arts wasn’t so different from hiding a thought from my own mind, or keeping an emotion off my face.

“Will you try?” Bones asked. “Or not?”

I let out a breath, rested my hands in my lap, and focused on him for real.

For a long few seconds, nothing.