Page 65 of Malcroix Bones Academy (Bones and Shadow #1)

Goes Both Ways

Everything went dark.

Strangely, there was no pain.

There was loss, a feeling of losing, of being defeated.

I tumbled through what felt like a hole in the floor that had no bottom.

My mind twisted. I felt Ankha there, all around me, and panicked, trying to escape, but the magical fire my aunt sent wrapped into every part of me.

I felt the connection sink all the way in, felt my aunt’s triumph as her magic locked into place.

A sick satisfaction washed over her, the surety that it was all over.

I heard her calling to my great-great grandmother’s spirit, telling her that she could take me now. She was excited to meet her idol, the dark witch she’d worshipped and tried to emulate most of her life, starting when she was much younger than me.

After Morticia La Fey absorbed her essence into my body, Ankha would bind us together using the La Fey Stone, along with ancient blood magics she’d also been studying since she was fifteen years old. The whole process shouldn’t take more than an hour.

Two at most.

After that, she would bring my great-great grandmother to meet with the rest of their kind, and induct her formally back into Dark Cathedral.

I watched as if from a distance, as my aunt thought happily about what came next, the culmination of years and years and years?

Ankha’s ravings slowly faded.

Like rising bubbles in a still lake, my own memory rose from the depths.

“Every connection goes both ways, darling.” My mother’s achingly familiar voice, a near whisper, explaining love, explaining magic, too.

“If you’re vulnerable, love, it’s because they are, too, even if they don’t know it.

Even if they pretend they aren’t. In getting inside you, they’ve opened a doorway to themselves. ”

I strained for my mother, screamed for her.

The longing there was so intense, it was heart-stopping, excruciating.

I chased it through that dark nothingness, tumbling faster and faster into oblivion. I fell and fell, drawn and pulled by that burning need to be with her again.

…When suddenly it all righted.

I stood on a field.

A fan of black-clad mages and witches stood in front of me, all of them wearing long, grey-silver wings. A distinct air of authority hung over them. They practically glowed with magic. A light shone in their eyes as they faced me, expressions unmoving.

No, not me, I realized; they weren’t facing me.

Ankha stood in front of them, having summoned them there.

This was another memory, but no longer mine.

I stared into the face of a stern, forty-something mage who stood in front of the rest. I found myself fascinated by his near-black eyes, his long black hair, a hard but not unattractive face.

I could feel how much my aunt loathed him.

Cousin Racyth. I could feel how much Ankha hated being there, needing something from him.

She had nothing but contempt for her cousin, for his position, his mission, his priorities, everything about him.

But she needed him.

“I can bring her to you,” Ankha said, her words whipping in the Scottish wind. “I can bring her back. She trusts me.”

Racyth’s dark eyebrow rose. He glanced at a red-eyed witch to his right, and she raised her eyebrows in return, clearly agreeing with him. They highly doubted Clotide shared that trust with her sister, but perhaps they’d been wrong about the relationship there.

And anyway, they were obligated to follow an offer of help.

Rycyth faced Ankha.

“Why would you do that? Turn in your own sister?” he asked, blunt.

“She has something I want.”

The image of the stone rose sharply in my mind.

“…Which is, incidentally, why you can’t find her,” Ankha added coldly. “My price is the stone. Give me the La Fey Stone when it’s over, and I’ll give her to you.”

The mage looked skeptical.

More than that, I thought, he looked reluctant.

I could feel through Ankha’s mind and memories that Cousin Rycyth led the Praecuri.

He took his duties seriously, but finding his cousin, Clotide La Fey, wasn’t what he considered a burning priority.

He didn’t, personally, begrudge her finding happiness, even if it was with a human.

He looked for her because he was tasked with the job, but he didn’t expend a lot of resources in that pursuit when his searching came up short.

I could feel all of that through Ankha, through his magic, through his eyes.

“Do we have a deal?” she asked.

Again, the mage looked at his friend, who stared at Ankha with open distrust in her ruby-red eyes. When she looked at the Praecuri leader, however, she lifted her shoulder in a shrug.

Ankha knew she had them.

They would do it, because she would give them no choice.

I was still staring at my mother’s cousin when the image broke apart.

I was somewhere else.

Ankha stood in a dark, lush, fragrance-filled garden, near a high hedge and a massive fountain with a dragon made of bones as the watery centerpiece.

Wings outstretched, the dragon breathed out water and blue fire, some magical effect made more dramatic by the colossal size of the stone ornament.

It towered over them. Ankha thought the sound must be deadened by magic, or else she wouldn’t be able to hear the patriarch’s words at all.

Pain reached me, unspecific but intense, until it dawned on me why.

It was Caelum’s house. I was seeing Caelum’s backyard, if such an immense garden could be called such a thing.

I stared at the tall, black-haired mage who stood in front of my aunt.

Unlike the man with the silvery wings, this man was shockingly handsome, but everything in his eyes looked cold, dead inside.

He looked ageless; he could have been thirty or seventy, and neither guess diminished his otherworldly beauty.

His silvery-white eyes reflected pale blue in the light expelled by the stone dragon’s breath.

He looked at Ankha with calculation, with an utter lack of warmth. She might not be a person at all, but a piece still standing on a chess board while he contemplated his next move.

Caelum’s father.

Gods. He was terrifying.

He was so much worse than I’d realized in my bare glimpses at the Skyhunt match.

The tall mage with the silver eyes sniffed, then looked away.

“All right,” he said. “We will be there.”

Alarm reached Ankha’s mind. Unlike her cousin, the leader of the Praecuri, Malefic Bones was a man Ankha worshipped. She would grovel at his feet if he asked, and he knew it.

“You, yourself?” she asked, that alarm reaching her voice. “Surely you shouldn’t risk?”

A faint smile formed at the mage’s lips.

He shook his head, slowly clucking his tongue.

“Worry not, Ankha, dearest.” No affection lived in the endearment; it was pure ornament. “I wouldn’t be arrogant or foolish enough to go in person. No one can see my fingerprints on any part of this. The stakes are too great now.”

I felt Ankha’s expelled breath of relief.

The elder Bones gazed thoughtfully towards the dark hedge maze.

“I will send agents in my place,” he went on thoughtfully.

His lip curled. “Even if your blood-infidel sister manages to use the Stone against them, we have contingencies for that, now that we know what we’re up against.” He looked at Ankha.

“If you bring her where you say, when you say, we will do as you ask. Her ape of a husband will be taken care of. I will instruct them to leave Clotide’s body intact, and alive, so you can complete the ritual.

” He aimed another flat, reptilian smile in her direction.

“And you will have earned a most valuable favor from me, Ankha dearest?”

Something in that smile sent a shiver of horror down my spine.

I was still staring at it, when his face and mouth dissipated into black smoke.

After a moment of swirling darkness, where I could see nothing…

I was shocked to see myself.

Small, dirty-faced, blood and bruises near my hairline.

It was that day. It had to be that day.

I wore the same pink jumper. I wore the same backpack on my back, covered in dragons and unicorns. I stared down at little me, and little me stared up. I could feel Ankha’s rage, her slow-building fury as she stared at those wide, green eyes.

She turned to glare at Racyth, head of the Praecuri.

They weren’t speaking in person, exactly, but through a mirror between worlds.

“Where is it?” Ankha hissed. “She had to be wearing it! She had to! She never went anywhere without it! Where did it go?”

The dark-eyed mage looked weary, angry, and more than a little sad.

“It wasn’t there.”

“We had a deal!” Ankha snapped.

“We can’t hand over something that isn’t here, Ankha.” His voice contained an unsubtle warning. “We agreed to give you the stone if she had it on her. She doesn’t have it on her. How is that our fault?”

“Did you go through their bags?” Ankha demanded.

The mage’s expression closed. “File a request with the department. There’s nothing we can do for you that we haven’t already done.”

That scene was already breaking apart.

A fog crawled around the edges of my vision, eating up the tube sign, then the score of mages and witches combing over the crime scene, their expressions grim. The man with the stunning black irises was the last to vanish.

I heard the rustling of robes, voices clearing, whispers, low coughs.

I sat on a padded bench, with a mage and a witch wearing expensive suits.

Ankha stared up stonily at a higher group, a panel of robed Magicals looking down at her from an elevated platform.

They sat stoically, hands resting on an intricately carved wooden table.

Matching chairs had high backs, green velvet padding, and long arms with lion’s paws carved at the ends. Ankha seethed with fury at all of them.

Hostility and resentment swirled around her in a cloud.

I registered something close to astonishment when I realized where most of my aunt’s hostility was aimed.

Forsooth sat there, at the very center of the elevated Magicals.