Page 123 of Malcroix Bones Academy

Conversely, if theyweren’tinvolved 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 withBones,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. Healso 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 reallywantsto 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?

Wecan’tignore 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 eitherof our two worlds. And even if we somehow could,Ican’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 hewaschaos, 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 hedidsay, 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.