Page 49 of Malcroix Bones Academy (Bones and Shadow #1)

In the end, I opted for a shower and masturbation, but even after two, shockingly intense orgasms at three in the morning, I still hadn’t been able to relax enough to go back to bed.

I ended up pulling on clothes in my closet in the dark, and grabbing my mum’s journal off my bedside table.

I filled the rest of my leather satchel with textbooks for class and files about my parents’ deaths, then headed for the common room downstairs.

In the end, I didn’t opt to stay there, however.

I had disturbing visions of Bones showing up before I was ready to see him, possibly with the rest of the royals in tow, so instead of risking that, I grabbed my coat and walked outside, trudging the however-many steps it took to bring me to Malcroix Mansion.

There, on the second floor of the east wing, I found Mortimer Frump Common Room unlocked, or “Frumpy’s,” as it was generally known.

I hung my coat up by the door and sank gratefully into a leather armchair when the fireplace on that side of the room roared to life. I felt an even stronger pulse of relief when a pot of herbal tea and a small plate of pumpkin biscuits appeared on the table by my arm.

I probably should’ve studied coursework, but I ended up rereading passages in my mother’s diary instead. Most of the material Bones collected remained in Compartment One of Experimental Magic Shed No. 4, but the diary stayed with me.

I still got anxious over the fact someone had given him the diary at all.

Were they an enemy, or a friend?

If they weren’t friendly, why would they want me to have Mum’s diary at all? Was there something in it they hoped might mislead me? Or did they not know Caelum and I were working together? In which case, maybe they hoped he’d use it against me?

Honestly, that didn’t ring true, though. It didn’t even make much sense.

Conversely, if they weren’t involved in my parents’ deaths, if they were even friendly towards my attempt to find the truth, how did they get the diary in the first place? And why wouldn’t they just give it to me?

Why on earth would they leave it with Bones, of all people?

I’d been through every page by then, reading some passages multiple times. I still hadn’t found anything useful, not in terms of knowing who murdered them.

The whole investigation felt like a giant dead end.

Caelum told me the teachers were still keeping a close eye on me, even now, months past when I was first attacked.

He also told me they’d tightened security around campus in general, particularly around the kitchens and dorms. I didn’t ask how he knew either thing.

If it was true, it was likely why I hadn’t been attacked since.

I took a sip of tea, and cracked open the diary.

My mother’s perfect, disturbingly familiar script haunted me, even as it drew me in like a drug. It was like hearing her voice, even if I didn’t understand what a lot of the words meant.

She had whole passages written in symbols my magic couldn’t translate.

Whatever the origins of that language, it looked nothing like the one I normally saw here in Magique, and didn’t appear either Ancient Egyptian or runic in origin.

I wondered if those passages might even have some kind of localized chimera cast on them, but the rituals I’d conducted to lift protective spells hadn’t done squat.

Of course, that didn’t prove anything; I wasn’t exactly experienced, nor had I studied that type of magic to any real degree.

A chimerist who specialized in such things would likely have more luck, but I didn’t have anyone I trusted enough to ask.

Even the parts written in English were often so vague as to be nearly written in code.

Of course I don’t want to go. Why would I want that? Our life is here. Our everything is here. None of us really wants to go. Not to mention, Bobby’s instincts have him telling me every few hours that it’s a trap, that we’d only end up caught if we risked it.

But how can I simply let this go?

We can’t ignore it, as much as I wish we could.

They’ve been preparing for this “war” of theirs for hundreds of years.

We can’t escape it here, any more than anyone else can, in either of our two worlds.

And even if we somehow could, I can’t. Bobby can’t.

We aren’t those kinds of people. I would hope my children would never want me to be.

My jaw clenched. I could practically feel the fear vibrate off the ink left by my mother’s hand. I could feel the anger, too, and the determination.

The last week of entries were all like that. Vague to the point of maddening, even though they clearly referenced whatever brought them back to England. It might’ve been useful if I had any idea what she was talking about.

I forced myself to read on.

C. is an odd, off-beat little duck. It’s difficult, even now, to know which way he’ll go.

And then there’s T, who’s getting harder and harder to hide.

It’s as if somehow Bobby’s own, strange ability created a chain reaction, building something with elements of both, maybe something entirely new.

If they figure that out, there’s no place we can go that’s far enough, especially if it means what I think it means.

I’d read that paragraph probably twenty times now, and I still didn’t feel any closer to understanding what it meant.

My mother hadn’t felt safe writing specifics down about much of anything, particularly not about her children, or her husband.

She used nicknames and family jokes for everything.

I knew my father, Robert Shadow, was “Bobby,” which I now realized must’ve been a play on words with his policeman background.

In real life, my mother never called him anything but “Robert” that I remembered.

T. and C. were me and Arcturus.

I’d been “Tigris,” after my father teased that I had tiger living inside me. My brother had been “Chaos,” because he was chaos, even back then.

But the references to my father’s “strange ability” baffled me.

Had my father been part Magical? If so, that maybe explained some things.

But why had my mother worried about “T.”, me, being “harder to hide?” Did it have something to do with my strange primal? Maybe that was a La Fey thing, the same way Caelum’s must be a Bones thing?

Gods, why couldn’t she have been more clear about what brought her back to England? Or at least who she’d spoken to in the Magical world about her return? If we could at least figure out who the informant was, I might have a better idea what this was about.

I’d read those same passages aloud to Caelum, but he hadn’t seemed comfortable saying much when it came to my mother’s words. In the little bit he did say, he repeated his strong suspicion that the “them” my mother wrote about was likely Dark Cathedral.

That still didn’t entirely explain what compelled her to return to England, or who’d been waiting for us on the other side.

I already knew it wasn’t my Aunt Ankha. She’d been in Magical Egypt at the time, according to the Praecuri, which aligned with my own memories.

My brother and I had to wait in a human orphanage for days, and when Ankha finally appeared, she’d been tanned, annoyed, and extremely vocal that she was only taking us in because she had no choice.

Anyway, I highly doubted Ankha was the person Mum trusted enough to tell she’d decided to bring her family back to London. The few times my mother mentioned Ankha in her journal, it was clear they hadn’t gotten along.

Setting aside the diary, I pulled out a book I’d found on my own, a history of the La Fey family from the shelves of Bones Library.

I flipped through the thick pages, pausing on photos and drawings of old palatial estates in France and England, portraits of vaguely familiar faces, some painted and some caught in time by light and photographic plates.

It still felt unreal that this was my family.

My mother always called herself an “orphan” when I was young.

I stopped on an image of a woman who looked a bit like Ankha, only much more beautiful and even more terrifying.

She had the same cold, forbidding face, the same iron-grey hair and intense blue eyes, but somehow those features came together very differently on her. The painting made me think of wicked witches from old children’s tales I’d grown up reading in Overworld.

She wore a deep black crystal around her neck on a familiar, antique chain.

The caption read: Morticia Ankha La Fey, depicted here in 1888 wearing the La Fey Stone, after the death of her husband, Argus Mephistopheles La Fey.

Two pages later, I stopped on another image of the same woman, only young, maybe in her early twenties.

The clothing style reflected the earlier period, as did her softer features.

She was positively stunning at that age, with a perfect, oval face and calmer, happier eyes.

She sat in a throne-like chair. Her hand rested easily on the fingers of a dark-eyed man with a handsome but scowling face who must have been her husband.

These were my great-great-grandparents.

It was a strange thought.

My eyes caught something else.

A gorgeous, green crystal hung from a bronze necklace around Morticia La Fey’s neck.

The crystal glinted, touched by a beam of sunlight captured by the painter’s careful strokes.

The familiarity of the stone, of the exact shape and size of it, where it hung on its setting to touch the top of her cleavage, startled me.

I flipped back to look at the black version of the stone, on the more aged version of my great-great-grandmother, and frowned.

The stones were identical, apart from the color.

Alaric had said it was family jewelry, didn’t he?

And wasn’t this the generation Caelum said had a falling out with the Bones family?

I skimmed through what the chapter had to say about Morticia La Fey.