Page 55 of Malcroix Bones Academy (Bones and Shadow #1)

Poetry

“Who would do this?” Jolie sounded upset, on the verge of tears.

“Did they really come in here during the match, just to destroy our room?” Her bird of paradise was flying around the walls, agitated.

Jolie’s light-brown eyes brightened and her jaw clenched as she stared around at the torn papers and ripped clothing covering our floor.

“Is this supposed to be a prank? Because it doesn’t strike me as particularly funny.”

“I don’t think it was a prank,” I said numbly.

I wished there was something I could say to Jolie.

I also wished I didn’t know Jolie wouldn’t have had to deal with this at all, if she’d had literally anyone else as a roommate.

We’d found the room that way when we got back from the Skyhunt match.

Our clothes had been cut with scissors and strewn all over the floor.

Both of our mattresses had been flipped and cut, our night tables and desks roughly emptied, broken glass covering part of the rug.

Most of the damage was on my side of our shared room, but whoever did it also ripped the medical posters off Jolie’s wall, and ran a knife through her bird of paradise painting.

They also destroyed some of her clothes, including a pale blue dress I happened to know she loved.

“Absolute fuckers,” Jolie muttered, hands on her hips.

She didn’t swear all that often, and it landed harder when she did now.

“I’m so sorry, Jolie,” I said.

She looked at me, startled. “This isn’t your fault, Leda.”

I didn’t answer. My eyes returned to my side of the room, and landed on the carved, wooden box with iron and glass inlays I’d found in an antique store in Magical London.

I’d been using it as a jewelry box. I’d really liked the unusual design, which made it look like a gothic church window.

Now it lay facedown on the carpet, its contents spread all over the floor by my nightstand and closet door.

A pair of glass earrings I’d just bought had been crushed to powder under someone’s shoe.

Staring at the wooden box, something else occurred to me.

I felt over my chest, then my pockets, but I already knew it wasn’t there.

I’d stopped wearing the green crystal since that night in the Kink-Tailed Cat.

I’d even built a hidden compartment inside the wooden box, and cast shield and illusion chimeras over it, to keep it safe.

I walked over and knelt down carefully. Whoever broke it smashed the hinges and most of the glass inlay.

I flipped it over, and my gut plummeted when I saw they’d torn out the plush interior, and ripped open the secret door in the back.

They’d gotten past my spells.

It was gone.

I set down the box, and crawled all over the floor, looking, but I already knew.

Someone had taken the last birthday present I’d ever gotten from either of my parents, the last thing my mother had really wanted me to have.

Tears threatened, but I wiped my face savagely.

This was my fault. Whatever Jolie believed, I’d done this. That said, if I ever found out who’d destroyed our room to steal my mother’s necklace, I’d do more than punch them in the jaw. What I’d done to Bones in the forest would be a love tap in comparison.

Right now, however, I was mostly angry at myself.

My mother warned me. She’d said the necklace was important, that no one else could know about it, that it was magic. From the beginning I’d somehow known my mother wasn’t just being whimsical when she told me that.

She’d meant her words. Literally.

Even as a child, I’d understood that. I’d been careful with the necklace then, hiding it in the garden, never telling anyone about it, not my aunt, not even Archie. Now, as an adult, I lost it not halfway into my first year at university.

Something must have shown on my face, because Jolie’s voice grew alarmed.

“What is it?” she asked. “Leda? What’s wrong?”

I sat back from my knees, surveying the floor. I kept my expression unmoving as I continued to scan the floorboards and rug, even knowing it was futile.

“It’s nothing,” I said.

It wasn’t nothing, though.

Whoever was doing this, whoever was after me, they’d finally managed to make me really gods-damned angry.

“Are you sure it’s alright?” I asked, hating how insecure I sounded. “It doesn’t look anything at all like you or Mir’s costumes.”

Jolie, saint that she was, rolled her light-brown eyes, without stopping what she was doing. At the moment, that happened to be using magic, an enchanted hair product, and her fingers to coerce my hair into small, incredibly precise, black braids.

She had a photo book open on the desk next to her, and kept looking at it as she tried to copy the exact hairstyle from Ancient Egypt.

When she tapped the photo with a hand, igniting her magic through her primal, it would come to life like a video, and show how a servant had managed the braids using magic.

“This is the oddest spell,” she muttered. “I’d never have guessed it would work on hair.”

A little alarmed, I glanced back at her.

“As opposed to what?” I asked.

“Weaving baskets. Or possibly blankets,” Jolie said. She smacked me lightly on the head when I turned around a second time. “Stop moving, or I’ll end up braiding your arm hairs together… or possibly your nose hairs,” she joked.

I snorted, but faced forward obediently.

“You don’t have to get it right yet, you know,” I reminded her. “The dance isn’t until tomorrow night.”

“Yeah, but if this doesn’t work, I’ll need to try something else.”

“Or we can just go with straightening my hair, and not worrying about the braids,” I said.

“That’s not historically accurate.” Jolie scoffed, as if the very idea was preposterous.

Abruptly, she changed the subject. “Has Graham’s face even healed from that ridiculous fight in the tournament yet?

” she asked. “They’re not allowed to heal any of their wounds, are they? Or use magical painkillers?”

I thought about that, and sighed.

“No, it hasn’t healed,” I said. “Not entirely. And yes, Graham told me that Quicksilver, their coach, instructed them not to use magic on a single wound, even if it scarred. I don’t know about the painkillers, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

” Thinking about that, I rolled my eyes.

“Of course they could just ignore those stupid instructions.” I glanced over my shoulder.

“But they won’t, of course, because men. ”

Jolie laughed, still fussing with my braids.

“That,” she added tartly. “And they might worry about a good chunk of the school beating them up a second time, if either experienced a miraculous healing. If I were them, I’d leave the bruises and cuts the way they are, too.

There’s witches on that team who might want a few licks in, too, incidentally. ”

I didn’t answer.

Honesty, the whole thing was just ridiculous.

The Skulls had lost the match in the end.

It took the team too long to get to The Eyrie and the arakkus, and while they managed to wound the dragon-like creature, they lost points when it didn’t end up being a “fatal” wound.

They hadn’t managed to knock out enough of the defensive team to make up the difference, so when the Bavarian team, the Werewolves, had their offensive run and managed to deliver a “fatal” blow to the arakkus, as well as knock out more players, the Skulls lost.

Thankfully, like with the players, they didn’t truly kill the creature, although Luc told me they used to do that, even for college matches, and only outlawed non-symbolic deaths something like twenty years earlier for professional tournaments.

Everyone was pretty bitter about the loss, which struck me as mildly ludicrous, although I wasn’t foolish enough to say so in front of Jolie, Miranda, Draken, or even Luc.

Most of the school also seemed to blame Graham as much as Caelum, maybe because no one knew who’d started the fight, or even what it had been about.

Draken, of course, was not one of those people.

Graham refused to talk about what started the fight.

And I still hadn’t talked to Bones.

I’d heard murmurs, here and there, about how “Strangemore should have kept his mouth shut,” which made me wonder all the more what exactly happened between them.

Clearly, someone knew, likely quite a few someones, although no one would tell me.

I even tried asking Alaric when I met with him for coffee in Bonescastle, which we’d started doing after that night in the pub. But Alaric didn’t want to talk about it, either. I could tell he knew, though, so maybe Caelum had threatened him to keep quiet.

It bothered me that I didn’t know what to think about any of it.

It bothered me even more that Caelum now seemed to be avoiding me as much as I’d been avoiding him.

It was obvious now, that I’d made a huge mistake.

I should’ve faced him right after the dream, let him laugh it up, thrown a few insults back, told him I was keeping his damned cat, and ultimately given him the ego win.

It would have been humiliating, and embarrassing, but I would’ve gotten over it.

We could have gone on with things like before.

Instead I’d made a huge deal out of avoiding him, and now, if there’d been any doubt in his mind before, he knew I cared far too much about all of it.

Not to mention, I really did need his help. All of those files were still sitting in his private compartment in the Experimental Magic Shed, and Caelum had the only key.

Pushing him from my mind as best I could, I opened my mum’s diary on my lap, and stared down at one of her poem-like collections of symbols.

The journal contained eight such sections in total, and I’d attempted to read all of them, using different kinds of magic, but I was still no closer to understanding what any of it meant.

Caelum, while we were still speaking, took a few stabs at translating them, too, but he hadn’t had any luck, either.