Page 54 of Malcroix Bones Academy (Bones and Shadow #1)

“Not exactly.” Draken glanced at me from behind his glass. Thinking, he amended, “Well, it’s one goal. It’s more complicated than that?”

“There’s an offensive team, and a defensive team,” Miranda explained, her eyes still following the players. “For university level, they only play one round each. The pros get three rounds, and sometimes the matches go on for days?”

I felt very glad this wasn’t a professional match.

“There’re twenty players per team,” Draken added, tag-teaming with Miranda.

“In the first part of every round, you can only use bows and arrows, like you just saw. As soon as one team is down seven players, they can switch to magic. You can use offensive or defensive magic at that point. Arrows are more reliable at the beginning, when everyone’s moving this fast, but it also levels the playing field a bit?”

“One team protects this magical animal?” Miranda continued.

“An arakkus,” Nyx supplied, biting off a piece of a pink, candy wing on a stick.

“They’re bred especially for it. The defensive team defends them…

see, over there?” She waved her pink wing in the direction of The Eyrie.

“That’s why The Eyrie’s shaped like that.

There’s only one way in and out. It makes it harder for the offensive team?”

“The offensive team has to get past the defenders,” Luc continued, motioning towards the Malcroix Bones flyers. “While the defensive team…” He motioned at the Bavarians. “Tries to neutralize them. The team with the most points at the end wins.”

“The tally of points is up there,” Jolie added, motioning at lit numbers that floated in the sky.

“We’ve got offense to start. Which is good and bad.

There’s more opportunity for points on offense, but that cuts both ways.

We don’t know how high we have to go to beat them.

And you can lose a ton of points as the offensive team, too.

But if you start off as offense, you can drag things out, and exhaust the other team. ”

I frowned, trying to take that all in. “So the first half of the game ends when the offensive team captures the dragon thing?”

“Arakkus,” Nyx corrected.

“?Or someone runs out of players?” I guessed.

Draven shook his head, but not exactly in a no.

“That’s two ways it can end,” he corrected.

“Technically, a round ends when one of the following happens: the arakkus is captured, killed, or fatally wounded, any of which earns the offensive team thirty-six points. Or, after three solid, non-fatal woundings of the beast, which is worth twenty-eight points. Or, if the offensive team runs out of players. If the defense runs out, the offense has to keep going after the arakkus until they catch, kill, fatally wound it, or non-fatally wound it three times.”

“There’s also a thing where they can capture the beast with no player deaths, and without killing the arakkus,” Miranda added.

“But that’s a total unicorn play. It almost never happens.

They call it a ‘bloodless catch,’ and it wins the team that pulls it off ninety-three points.

I can’t remember the last time it’s happened, though. ”

“There are point awards for other things, too,” Jolie added, grabbing a handful of chocolate bats when Luc offered his bag to her. “A completely bolloxed attempt to wound or kill or capture the arakkus is negative ten points for the offense?”

“And if the offensive team fails to neutralize the beast before they run out of players, or if they take too long after all the defensive team is knocked out,” Draken chimed in.

“It’s considered a lost round and they lose another twenty-eight points, in addition to whatever the other team earned by killing and wounding their players. ”

I frowned.

“No wonder it goes on for so long,” I commented finally.

Draken laughed. “Well, it can go either way. I’ve seen a few tournaments that were over shockingly fast. If the teams are really unbalanced, it can be a bloodbath.

That’s another reason they divvy up the university teams the way they do.

We’re pretty lucky right now, in that all eight of the top schools are shockingly good. ”

I smiled, a little bemused by all of their enthusiasm.

Even Luc was the most animated I’d ever seen him outside of school.

“Do we have a rival?” I asked next, quirking an eyebrow.

Miranda grinned and exchanged looks with Draken.

“Depends on who you ask,” Jolie said, from Miranda’s other side. “Just about everyone hates the Russian team… there’s a whole history there,” she added, waving off my questioning look. “But we’re pretty competitive with Tokyo, and that’s been true for a while.”

“And California,” Miranda added, nudging Draken.

Draken rolled his eyes.

He opened his mouth, about to speak, when a crash over us jerked our eyes upward.

I gaped up with the rest of them, shocked when two pairs of wings, one deep black, the other coppery-brown, half-entwined as they slammed into one of the banners over our box. The crash got louder when their armor collided as they began fighting with fists, too close to use bows and arrows.

I flinched and crouched down when they careened back over the box, hit into another flagpole and nearly dropped into the box itself, before they both tumbled off the edge, still fighting hand to hand.

Everyone in our box stood up.

That’s when I fully realized what I’d seen.

“Aren’t they both… ours?” I asked. I turned to stare at Miranda.

Miranda blinked, then looked up at the screen over our box.

“Gods,” she muttered. “She’s right. What in the underworld?”

“It’s that maniac, Bones,” Draken said, his voice suddenly furious. “That’s his number, isn’t it? 13? Only that psychopath would decide to attack the best bloody player on his own gods-damned team…”

I felt myself pale as Draken’s words sank in.

“You mean Strangemore?” I asked in disbelief. “Bones attacked Graham?”

Draken gave me an annoyed look, right before his eyes returned to the screen. I looked at Miranda instead, and the currently pink-haired witch with pale pink irises nodded, her lips pursed as she went back to staring at the screen alongside Draken.

“Strangemore’s number 8,” Luc confirmed, when I glanced at him.

I followed their stares back to the screen.

I hadn’t talked to Bones in days.

I’d deliberately kept him out of my head since Wraith showed up with that hand-written card.

I hadn’t wanted to hear him jeer at me in person, or gloat over the fact that I was having sex dreams about him, which he clearly knew, and obviously found to be positively hilarious.

I didn’t particularly want to see the disgust in his eyes while he contemplated me fantasizing about him, either, or whatever he’d decided was happening.

I’d ignored the one note he’d sent me at Frumpy’s to meet him in his Experimental Magic shed compartment, and the other note he dropped on my desk in Theurgy, telling me he needed to talk to me.

I didn’t intend to terminate our deal entirely?I couldn’t, really, given how invested I was now, and how much access he’d proven he had?but I definitely needed a break from it, and I didn’t much care if Bones had a problem with that or not.

If nothing else, I needed to feel a little less utterly mortified by all of it.

Both players crashed into the river as I watched the end of the dive.

They popped up on the screen, and I saw Bones’ actual face. His mask had come off, and his jaw was bloody again. He wound up and punched what must have been Strangemore over the mask, and the audience on both sides let out a collective, shocked cry.

Behind me, I heard a distinct tsk of contemptuous disapproval.

I didn’t have to look back to know where it came from.

What must have been a referee or some other official darted down to that part of the river, blowing a whistle and waving them off.

But two members of the Malcroix Bones team had ahold of Bones by then and were dragging him out of the water, waterlogged wings and all, while two other players pulled Strangemore in the opposite direction.

Strangemore shoved up his own mask then, and his mouth was moving, his hand gesturing angrily as he shouted something at Bones. His face looked bruised and was already swelling. He looked positively livid, far more angry than anything else.

“It looks like we’re losing a player early today, Skyhunt fans,” the voice boomed over the loudspeaker.

“Number 13 on the Malcroix Bones Skulls, Caelum Bones, has just been officially fouled out. The ref issued him a card for unsportsmanlike behavior. He’s out for the remainder of today’s tournament?”

Draken, still on his feet, clapped and whistled.

He wasn’t the only one, although I heard a number of boos from the stands below, as well.

I glanced at the three trolls sitting at the front of the box, and wondered how close they’d come to being knocked out of their seats and down onto the pitch by the dueling mages.

If they resented that fact, it didn’t show.

Far from booing with the others in the crowd, they were laughing.

Norrick grinned at me and winked before returning his eyes to the screen over their box, and chuckling again.

Scar was still drinking off his flask, and smoking, ignoring the disapproving look he got from an older couple sitting behind them, waving the smoke out of their faces.

I decided it would be deeply impolitic to look back at Caelum’s parents.

I heard someone in that group say something jokingly, likely to diffuse the tension. I only caught part of it: “spirited,” “decent right hook,” “just like his old man.”

No one laughed apart from whoever’d said it.

My eyes refocused on the screen.

Caelum was as red-faced as Strangemore.

They still appeared to be yelling at one another, throwing words back and forth as their teammates separated them. Caelum’s eyes flashed with a strange light as I watched, a black, silvery, rippling glow that reminded me of something.

Had anyone else noticed that? Was that normal?

I didn’t remember seeing other Magical eyes doing that, not even in the midst of conducting spells.

It’s his primal, my mind whispered.

Gods, that’s exactly what it was. It looked just like the flashes of lightning his black crystal and flame primal gave off over his head. Was he overloading? Was this what it looked like, when he lost control over his magic?

Bones was leaving the area of play entirely now.

He disappeared off the screen, and my last glimpse of him showed him walking away, baring his bloody teeth as he stared over his shoulder and wings at Graham.

Once he disappeared into a tented, gold, violet, and green structure on the ground, the referee blew the whistle a second time.

Within seconds, arrows and wings once more filled the air.