Page 61 of Malcroix Bones Academy (Bones and Shadow #1)

Doors

Bones’s body just… collapsed.

It wasn’t a gradual thing, where he stumbled and I gripped him tighter, and he lost his balance, eventually taking us both down in a messy tumble in the grass.

Every muscle in his body stopped working.

Without warning.

His arms dropped, his fingers opened, his knees buckled, his spine no longer held up his six-foot-plus frame. He collapsed straight down, with me coming down more or less right under him, and landing on the grass at roughly the same time he did.

The wind got knocked out of me. Maybe from a sharp part of him landing on a softer part of me. Maybe from the sheer weight of him. Or maybe I just forgot how to breathe.

I struggled to get out from under him. I tried to push him off so I could look at his face.

“Caelum,” I managed to slur out. “Bones…”

Before I could turn over, someone shoved him roughly off me with a booted foot to his shoulder. I’d only been free of his weight a second when a hand grabbed my arm, and wrenched me roughly to my feet.

A cloaked figure held me tightly by the bicep, tighter than he had, even when he’d been angry.

The eyes that glared at me through that haze of magic were strangely familiar, but I couldn’t make sense of whose they were.

Now that I was away from Bones, everything around me went a blinding gold.

Gold and white and green. I held up my free hand, and couldn’t see my own fingers past all that light.

The magic there still felt like mine, but it was all wrong.

It was out of control. Chaotic.

I’d been better while he held me. Not fixed, not myself again, but definitely better, more grounded, more stable than I’d felt on the balcony where he first found me. My mind had been clearer. My eyes had been working. I could talk to him.

Now, all of that was gone.

I stood there, unable to move, while hands ripped the headdress off my head, then yanked the Egyptian neck-plate from around my neck. They tossed both things onto the grass. The loss of the headdress made me feel naked and cold, but my neck felt the most naked of all.

It’s gone, a voice whispered in my head. Mum trusted you, and you’ve lost it, and you’ll never get it back. You’ve lost the family’s heart.

Was it my own voice I heard?

My magic swum around me like an ocean of green-tinted gold.

I couldn’t control my limbs. I couldn’t see.

I didn’t know who was now dragging me across the grass.

I wanted to scream, to call for help, but I couldn’t get my mouth or throat to make a sound.

I struggled to clench my hands, to work my arms and legs, but I couldn’t do that, either.

I struggled again to speak, but my tongue filled my mouth.

Panic tried to reach me through the dense emptiness.

This was wrong. All of it was really, really wrong.

Caelum? My mind reached out. His name drifted away like smoke in my head. It swirled into my magic, billowed around me. Caelum? Can you hear me?

No one answered.

The wind cut into my bare skin now that I’d been torn away from that gold-painted body.

My braids slowly unraveled until my hair whipped at my face.

I’d lost at least one earring. I had no coat, nothing but a filmy skirt cut up to my hips and the gold bodice.

The air felt wet, but I couldn’t be sure if it was fog, or just my own magic turned into a blinding cloud.

The robed figure dragged me into the trees.

Everything got dark.

My legs forcibly moved in a marching, trudging walk, like a puppet being controlled by someone else.

I tried to fight back once I saw that much, but between whatever was wrong with me and the unyielding strength of that alien magic, I was entirely unable to disobey the pull on my muscles, bones, and blood.

We walked through the forest in silence.

I slipped on wet leaves, but remained upright from the iron grip still clamped around my bicep. When we stopped suddenly, I stood there, gasping.

A stone structure with rounded, dark walls, broken by three blue doors, loomed over me.

I recognized the detailed carvings from photos in the Malcroix Bones Campus Orientation Manual I’d finally acquired a few days after starting school, but I’d never seen it in person.

White, marble wings, delicately detailed, reflected moonlight.

Stern stone faces stared down, their expressions so lifelike, they looked like real people.

The fingers holding me half-threw me into the wall by one of the blue doors.

“Put your hand there,” the hooded figure hissed.

I looked down.

A glowing blue spot throbbed on the stone, near a lock made of black onyx. A wrought-iron, curved handle stuck out above the lock, matching the wrought-iron hinges.

“Put your hand there, or I’ll cut it off, and put it there myself.”

I struggled instinctively, not wanting to obey.

I fought to push myself back from the stone, to get away from the building, away from that glowing blue spot. A second hand joined the first on my arm, and magic rippled into me, forcing my heart to a standstill in my chest.

I fought to breathe, couldn’t. Pain blanked my mind.

Soon, my chest hurt so badly I couldn’t move.

The hooded figure dragged me the rest of the way to the door. They gripped my wrist and slammed my palm over the glowing blue spot. The blue glow spread, until the entire door began to pulse with light. Light poured out through the cracks between the wooden planks.

The door flung itself open.

The opening grew brighter and brighter, flashed white, with a glint of glass?

Hands shoved me viciously through.

I lost track of myself. Darkness fell over my eyes, over the stone building and the moonlight and the wings and the surrounding forest.

I… disappeared.

Then, with no warning or preamble, I was someplace else.

My breath rushed back into me, hurting my lungs.

I stood in a dingy, off-white space, colored sickly green by blinking, florescent lights.

Briefly, I could see again.

Before I could get my bearings, a toilet flushed near me, and a metal stall door opened inward, revealing startled, widening eyes, dyed red hair, smeared lipstick. The forty-something woman gawked at me, looking over the remains of my Bastet costume.

“Hey, dearie, where’s the party?”

The hooded figure walked through the mirror behind me. I turned to look, but immediately, my vision swam with gold and green light, cutting off my view of their face, even the shape of their hands. All I could see was the dark outline of the black robe.

“Be silent, creature!” a harsh voice hissed at the woman. “Go!”

The red-haired woman jumped like she’d been hit with a cattle prod, and toddled off to the door out of the toilets. She clutched her purse in front of her and didn’t look back.

I saw a faint shimmer behind the dark robe as the glass reformed in the floor-length mirror. Mirror. My blurred mind finally put that much together.

We’d mirrored somewhere.

Could I go back, if I made a break for the wall?

Even as I thought it, the hooded figure aimed a hand towards the tarnished glass. A pulse of blue light left their fingers, and the mirror shattered with a loud crack. I winced as slivers nicked my arms from the exploding glass, but most of it got pulverized as it fell to the dingy floor.

My throat closed in panic, and the hand closed back punishingly on my arm.

Pain snaked through my blood, and that smoke-like magic began manipulating my limbs.

It hurt more now, but once again, I couldn’t move my throat, or speak.

I was marching towards the door of the dingy loo in seconds, and then past it, into a darker, much more crowded space.

My eyes darted around as I fought to breathe, to break free of the magic.

I desperately wanted to call for help.

I fought to force out a cry, a scream, anything, but couldn’t.

Everyone in the dark, musky-smelling pub seemed to be looking at me, but none noticed or cared about the hooded figure gripping my arm. I heard a few laughs aimed in my direction, a few whistles at my bare thighs, but no concern as my captor marched me past the bar.

We reached another door and walked through.

I stumbled away from the pub door, and found myself on what had to be a city street, my sandals jarring on the cobblestones.

I felt free… briefly.

Then hard fingers gripped my bare bicep just below one of the gold armbands I still wore.

The robed figured yanked harder when I tried to resist, and began marching me down the street when I continued to struggle.

I blinked and half-stumbled into what looked like…

gods, that looked and felt like a parked car.

I saw what had to be headlights on the road, and it hit me they must be human cars.

Renewed panic nearly made me trip over my own feet. The hooded figure forced me upright with pain and magic, then shoved me closer to the road a second time.

Before I could make sense of what was happening, or see enough through the green and gold light to know where I was being taken, I was being crammed and folded through an opening and onto a stiff, plastic-feeling seat.

The busted springs squeaked loudly when I landed on them, then I was by a door, and a light-filled window.

This was familiar.

All of this was too familiar.

It was also entirely wrong.

I couldn’t be here.

I’d end up in Magical prison for being here. Or dead.

They might actually kill me for this. Isn’t that what everyone said?

Isn’t that what Caelum told me when I asked if there was any way to get to Overworld without the Praecuri or the other Magical authorities finding out?

They likely already knew I was here, since it had been my hand that opened that mirror door.

They wouldn’t muck around with a mongrel like me. I wouldn’t get the consideration even my mother had gotten from the public or the government, as a praecurus and a full-blooded Magical. They’d just put me down.