Page 44 of Malcroix Bones Academy (Bones and Shadow #1)

Research Partner

The stack of thick files landed on the table in front of me with a loud WHUMP. As he’d come from behind me, moved like a bloody ninja, and hadn’t so much as cleared his throat, I jumped a foot. I looked up, and immediately glared.

“What’s the matter, Shadow?” Bones sneered. “Hung over?”

Lowering my eyes to my open theurgy book, I gripped my quill more tightly in my hand. “I’m shocked you’re even awake,” I retorted. I checked my father’s watch. “What service am I expected to perform for you now, your highness?”

I realized my mistake even before I heard his delighted chuckle.

“Oh, I can think of a few, mongrel. Are you really offering?”

“You’re a pig.”

“Am I? I’m not the one who just offered to service me.”

I craned my head and neck around and glared at him over my shoulder.

“Isn’t there anywhere else you could be right now?” I asked scathingly. “I’m sure Warrington would positively salivate at the prospect of sullying herself with you. Why not go bother her? Or are you like one of those dogs that only wants attentions from the person who despises it?”

He grinned back and stuck his tongue in his cheek suggestively, winking.

I couldn’t help noticing he looked irritatingly well-rested and healthy for eight o’clock on a Saturday morning, particularly since he’d kept me up nearly until dawn.

He looked like he’d just gotten out of the shower after a nice long kip, followed by a leisurely breakfast and coffee.

He must’ve used magic or a magical potion to fix his busted lip and bruised jaw, along with whatever I’d done to his head the night before.

I winced a little at the memory.

Miranda and Draken had been in the downstairs common room when I got back, arguing with the prefect about calling security to go look for me.

When I walked in the front door of Grathrock, bedraggled and grass-stained, with torn stockings and apparently what looked like red finger-marks on my neck, both of my friends had been near-hysterical.

I managed to calm them down, and without using Bones’ name.

I told them a friend of mine thought it would be funny to take me on a joyride, and crash-landed the two of us in the middle of the Great Lawn.

Neither Miranda nor Draken seemed particularly satisfied by that story.

Miranda, in particular, looked at me with open skepticism in her eyes, fists perched on her hips as she seemed to be trying to read my mind without actually reading my mind.

Draken’s suspicions were far less subtle, and much more specific.

Halfway through my story, he asked me, point blank, if Alaric Greythorne had been that “friend.”

I scoffed at the question without really answering it.

Truthfully, I’d already considered whether I should ask Alaric to lie for me, even before Draken asked. Now I wasn’t sure if that would help matters, or make things worse. Alaric would definitely want to know who he was covering for.

He’d also be far less likely to be satisfied with a lie.

“You know,” I said, propping an arm on the back of my seat.

“If you want me to keep my end of this ‘deal’ of ours, you might want to stop accosting me in public.” At his wider grin, I added haughtily, “I had to lie to my friends last night about which lunatic it was who swooped out of the sky and abducted me… and now, not eight hours later, here you are again. Didn’t you say a big part of our agreement was no one knowing about it? ”

His grin faded.

He folded his arms, and his haughty, arrogant expression returned.

“What are you doing today, mongrel?” he asked in a clipped voice. “Besides stroking Hollywood’s whatever to ease his pride from last night?”

I rolled my eyes. “Should be pretty obvious what I’m doing, given you’ve found me in the library with an open book in front of me. Why are you here, Caelum?”

“Answering your accusation from last night, Leda.”

I frowned, biting my lip to remain silent, knowing he was baiting me, that he wanted me to ask. After an annoyed huff, I asked anyway.

“Which accusation?” I scoffed. “There were a number of them, as I recall. Along with a number of extremely valid complaints?”

“The one about the one-sidedness of a certain agreement,” he cut in. “About me not holding to my word.”

That took a few seconds to compute.

Once it had, my eyes widened, right before I met his gaze.

He jerked his jaw towards the files, and I followed his stare to the pile of paper he’d just tossed in front of me. The stack was over a foot thick. I set my pen on the quill stand, and reached for the top file.

I was just opening it when a large, pale hand slammed down on top of it.

“Now, now, Shadow,” he tsk’d at me pleasantly. “Don’t get impatient. Don’t you want a high level summary of what I’ve found, first?”

I glared up at him. “How long have you had these?”

“Since last Sunday.” He tossed his head a little to get his white bangs out of his eyes.

“Why am I only hearing about them now?”

“It’s your first term of Magical university,” he said haughtily. “I wasn’t going to get in the way of your precious studies. I’ve a bit more free time than you, since a lot of these early subjects are essentially review for me.”

“Arrogant prick,” I muttered under my breath.

I started to pull the top file off again, but he slammed his hand down harder.

“Don’t be rude, mongrel,” he admonished. He glanced around at the nearby stacks, and lowered his voice. “We shouldn’t look at these here,” he added in my ear.

My eyebrows rose. Without looking back, I lowered my own voice.

“Where, then?”

He bent down from behind me, crowding my space, and sorely tempting me to elbow him, hard, in the solar plexus. Instead I sat there, arms crossed, while he wrote with his elegant script on my notebook under my last set of theurgy questions.

EMS #4 / C1 / 11a?

“That one is ‘by an exponential factor of four,’ incidentally,” he said, pointing with my quill feather at the question I’d written just above his note.

“To raise a paired primal a single increment higher on the level of resonant frequency according to Frick’s scale, you have to sustain a higher frequency in your own magical output for a sustained period of no less than a year, with over half of your magical output, minimum six times a day, to an exponential factor of four?”

“I didn’t ask, you absolute twat,” I snapped.

Some part of me was grateful for the answer, as it meant I didn’t have to waste time looking it up, but Eye of Ra, he was maddening. Why did he have to be so disgustingly competent, while being such a repellent idiot?

“You’re very welcome, mongrel,” he said, smirking.

It occurred to me only then that he hadn’t moved away.

His face was inches from mine.

I jammed my elbow into his chest, and he laughed, straightening.

He dropped my quill on its stand and scooped up the files he’d brought to tantalize me with.

My jaw clenched as I watched him walk out through the stacks.

It was infuriating to realize he’d found me so easily, despite my attempt to hide in an relatively unused area of the reference section, on the fourth floor of the library named after his stupid, racist family.

It didn’t help that he was practically whistling as he walked away.

Only after he’d gone did my eyes return to the scrawl of cryptic writing he left in my book. I understood the note, at least. Without the abbreviations, it read: “Experimental Magic Shed No. 4 / Compartment 1 / 11:00AM?”

I frowned, cursing him under my breath.

But I already knew I’d be there.

It was Saturday before noon, and quiet in many areas of the grounds, but the experimental magic sheds were busy, as always. I could already see students and mastery-level student teachers waiting outside shed compartment doors as I walked down the path by Vulcan Lake.

It would only get busier as the day progressed.

I had my second practical of the week for Offensive and Defensive Magic that afternoon in Shed #1.

Because the sheds had the most complicated chimeric fields on campus, designed to make them soundproof and virtually invisible on the inside, not to mention heavily shielded against magical explosions?both intentional and accidental?what went on in those compartments was fairly private, and couldn’t be seen on our magical maps.

In our first week of school, several professors outlined detailed schedules for the sheds, listing which hours and days we should try, if we wanted to reserve a slot.

For regular students, you needed a group of four or more to make a reservation, unless it was a highly unusual circumstance, and those required special permission.

Professors, obviously, had use privileges students didn’t.

So did doctorate and mastery students, particularly those working as student teachers. A number of time slots were blacked out for those groups’ sole use.

I’d been told smaller sheds existed in the city of Bonescastle that could be rented out, as well, but those were also in high demand, and expensive to boot.

I’d also heard a few professors had their own, private, much smaller sheds.

Which all went to say that it figured Caelum Bones could reserve a shed compartment for his own personal use on a weekend morning and no one would bat an eye.

As I approached the southernmost of the buildings, it struck me again that “shed” was an odd thing to call them.

Made almost entirely of stone, all but the sides of the gabled roofs, which consisted of bronze metal plates laid in dragon-like scales, the structures were probably eighty feet long and twenty wide.

They made me think more of airplane hangars or Native American longhouses than anything I would call a shed.

I’d never been in the fourth building until now. The stones were darker here, maybe from proximity to the lake, or maybe because it had been built earlier. The sides and roof shimmered with faint blue and gold from all the layers of protective magic.