Page 41 of Malcroix Bones Academy (Bones and Shadow #1)

Wings

Iwas drunk.

I was really, really drunk.

We walked through the second boundary onto the school campus, and I burst out in a laugh when the forest reappeared around us, twinkling with violet and gold fairy lights that floated among the branches of trees.

Calling on my magic, I breathed out a handful of dragonflies as I walked, their wings glowing the same color as the lanterns, and grinned when they buzzed quietly among the leaves.

My monocerus trotted along next to me, tossing its head and occasionally kicking up its clawed heels. I watched it fondly, wondering if it might be drunk, too.

Draken and Miranda walked on either side of me.

Jolie had left with a friend of hers from secondary school, at some point while I’d been downing goblin-bangers with Alaric. Luc had gone off with Darragh, apparently to look at some famous stained glass window in the moonlight, in a building rumored to house a whole family of ghosts.

I’d been tempted to go with them after Alaric left, but in the end, decided it was too late.

Also, Miranda promised me that hangover cure.

I strongly suspected I would need it, if I didn’t want tomorrow to be a wash.

“You didn’t seem to know him before,” Draken repeated stubbornly, his deep voice slurring as he bumped into me drunkenly as he walked.

“I just don’t understand… if you’re such great pals, why didn’t you so much as wave to one another for four whole weeks?

And why did he just sit there, like a paralyzed gnome, while his pal, Bones, spewed vile garbage in your direction every time he laid eyes on you? ”

I didn’t have a good answer for that.

I didn’t have a good answer for any of it.

My spinning mind swirled around Draken’s questions.

In the end, I only shook my head, and lifted up both hands.

“No idea,” I declared. “That’s why I went over there. To ask him that.”

“And what did he say?” Miranda asked. Unlike Draken, she sounded curious, not annoyed. I definitely got the sense the Alaric connection fascinated her.

“He didn’t give me a real answer,” I admitted.

“Something about ‘paranoia’ and not wanting to make me even more of a target. A bunch of nonsense, if you ask me. But he is sweet, Alaric. He’s nothing like that moron…

his friend…” I motioned towards my own hair, scowling.

“Stupid perfect hair guy with his dumb sneers and stupid everything…”

Miranda broke out in a snorting laugh.

Draken still sounded sulky.

“So Alaric Greythorne’s decided, in all his noblesse oblige, to be friends with the lowly hybrid, despite his grand misgivings due to her precarious social position?

” he asked, annoyed. “His parents will probably pull him out of Malcroix if they hear about it. His father’s rumored to be the bloody head of the Dark Cathedral. ”

I squinted up at him, fighting a wave of dizziness. “Dark Cathedral?” Draken caught my arm when my legs didn’t fully cooperate. “That sounds familiar. What is it?”

“A stupid rumor,” Miranda said firmly. “No one even knows if it truly exists. It’s like a boogeyman to scare us lowlys into thinking the royals are more powerful than they are.”

“It exists,” Draken insisted.

“But what is it?” I asked.

Miranda raised her hands level with her face and waggled her fingers at me menacingly.

“A super-secret cabal of dark magicians plotting to take over Magique…” she said in a mock-ominous voice.

“…led and funded by the richest and oldest families in Magical civilization. Infiltrating every Magical government across the world, with their tentacles in all levels of society, spying on light magicians and scholars, recruiting and knocking out the enemies to the Sanguis Regum, meeting in dark, smoky rooms plotting to kill race traitors and wipe out humankind… MUHAHAHAHAHAHA…”

She lowered her hands, and broke into a real laugh.

“It’s utter nonsense,” she declared. “A bunch of paranoid hoo-haw.”

I smiled back. Even so, a shiver of unease went through me at Miranda’s casual use of the term Sanguis Regum. Hadn’t Alaric said some of the “bigger arseholes among our kind” called themselves that? He’d definitely made it sound like those beliefs were still around.

“We had conspiracy theories in Overworld, too,” I said only.

“It’s real, though,” Draken muttered under his breath.

“How would you know that?” Miranda shoved at his muscular arm.

He stumbled sideways then caught himself, and gave her a drunken stare.

“My dad runs into them now and then,” he countered.

“They’ve tried to recruit him. Numerous times.

He gave me a whole speech about it again this summer, warning me to steer clear of them.

Apparently they’ve been getting more aggressive. ”

“With him?” Miranda asked, blinking in surprise. “Or in general?”

“Dunno,” Draken said. “Either? Both?”

“Why do they want to recruit him?” I asked, fascinated and a little horrified. “Just because he’s famous?”

“That, and, well, it’s not that well known, but he’s actually quite good at magic,” Draken confessed.

“Better than it says in his press releases. He made the decision a long time ago to keep that aspect of himself quiet.” He looked between me and Miranda.

“He’s got a high magical rank. Higher than it says in his bios. Higher than most Magicals.”

“How high?” Miranda asked.

“Promise you won’t tell?” Draken slurred. “He’d kill me.”

“Promise!” Miranda and I said together. I crossed my heart with a finger.

“He’s a nine,” Draken said, his voice a little smug.

I had no idea what that meant, but Miranda’s jaw dropped. Her blonde-colored eyes went comically wide. “You’re lying,” she accused.

“I’m not.”

“That’s like… almost unheard of.”

“Three-point-six percent of the population,” Draken agreed.

“And they let him be an actor?” Miranda demanded, like she thought that was an unholy travesty. “He could have done anything with a score like that!”

“Let him?” Draken scoffed. “He wanted to act.”

“Okay, right,” she conceded grumpily. “Still. That’s almost unfair.”

“Try being his kid,” Draken grunted.

I’d walked a little bit in front of them during their back and forth, and now glanced back to grin at them.

“You guys squabble like siblings, you know that?” I teased. “I’d swear you were related, if you didn’t look so completely different.”

“I’m half Japanese,” Draken said.

“Really?” My drunken mind tried to make sense of that. “I thought Miranda said your family was from Hong Kong?”

“They were immigrants. They came over from Japan. My grandfather on my mother’s side opened a business in Hong Kong, and brought the family over.”

“When was that? Hey…” My drunken mind pulled my thoughts in another direction. “Was there a World War II in Magique? Have you had any World Wars? Or is that just a human thing?” I continued to think aloud. “Are wars and all that why most Magicals think humans are barbarians??”

I’d meant to elaborate on that, but an enormous shadow dropped down on me, jerking my eyes up.

Wind gusted in my face as something dove into me like a crashing boulder.

I threw up my arms, both to shield myself and to try and see what it was, but the shape hit into me too fast for me to focus on it.

A hard band wrapped tightly around my waist.

It felt like iron.

I reached for it, but once it had me, it yanked.

Miranda let out a shriek as my feet left the dirt road along the forest floor.

Then I was in the air, climbing fast, rising above the trees.

If Miranda shouted after that, I could no longer hear it.

I couldn’t breathe. Whoever had me, they held me so tightly I could scarcely move.

It was too late to try that, anyway.

Writhing free meant plunging dozens of feet to my death.

The freezing air and the abrupt, sickening rise snapped me out of the worst of my mind’s fuzziness from the two and a half goblin-bangers Alaric talked me into drinking, on top of what I’d had at the bar with Draken, Luc, Jolie, Darragh, and Miranda.

That clarity was enough for me to go totally still, to assess my options.

My eyes teared from the whipping wind.

My hair blinded me, making it hard to see anything.

I could feel it now, though.

The thing around my waist was an arm.

I looked up, and tried to see who had me, but only a glint of metal, and black, feathered wings were visible through my whipping hair.

The wings beat steadily over me, and when they tilted gracefully to my right, turning us with gut-swooping grace, the moon caught the upper body of the black-wearing figure between them.

Even with the full moon, I couldn’t see enough, just a hooded shadow in a metal mask that glinted in the blue light.

It looked to be made of brass. Maybe gold.

I couldn’t see my captor’s face, or determine their height, but the hardness of the body behind me, and the size of the muscular arm convinced me they were male.

Whatever they wanted, it couldn’t be good.

I geared up my magic, hoping my kidnapper wouldn’t notice.

On the surface, I kept my mind as blank as I could.

If I’d learned one thing in the past month, it was that I had to assume anyone here might be able to read my thoughts.

In a smaller, partitioned part of my mind, I watched what passed below, gauged our height, my chances of surviving a fall.

I scanned for an option that wouldn’t be suicide.

The arm around me tightened, and I sucked in a breath.

I never stopped watching between my feet, shivering in the cold as I looked for an opening.

I needed a landing that wouldn’t kill me: the lake, ideally, or maybe the river, although that would be dangerous for other reasons.

I had to hope at some point, a change in elevation would bring us low enough, over the right terrain, where I could risk trying to force him to let me go.

Of course, without the water, or even with it, he might just dive after me.

He changed the orientation of his wings.