Page 136 of Malcroix Bones Academy

“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 justignorethose 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 asecondtime, 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, hadtheiroffensive 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 theyusedto do that, even for college matches, and only outlawed non-symbolicdeaths 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,someoneknew, 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 reallydidneed 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.

The words and letters didn’t match any cypher or language I’d found in Bones Library. I’d been through nearly a dozen books on magi-cryptography and ancient ritual keys by then, but hadn’t found anything that looked remotely like them.

Sometimes it even looked like English to me, only warped in some way.

It didn’t help that the journal, along with two interviews conducted by the Praecuri after my parents’ death, were all I had of the documents in Caelum’s shed. I hadn’t made it even halfway through all the materials he collected before our falling out.

Gods, I really needed to break our impasse.

I had to figure out some way to get him to talk to me again.

He’d be a prick about it, most likely, given it obviously angered him when I’d refused to speak to him. Maybe I could tell him it had been my birthday, and the anniversary of my parents’ deaths, and I couldn’t really deal with working on the project then. But that was a half-truth at best, farlessthan half at worst, and I doubted he’d buy it.

No, I probably needed to give him some measure of the truth.

I should just admit I’d been embarrassed, and maybe apologize for the dream itself. If his crack about me “summoning” him had any validity to it, I probably owed him one. Although maybe that wouldn’t go over well, either. Maybe it would just make things awkward, and push him away even more.