Page 137 of Malcroix Bones Academy

Maybe I should ask Alaric for advice on how best to approach Bones.

Exhaling as I shook off the thought, I turned to the next set of misshapen symbols in the journal. Wraith, who’d just leapt onto my lap, took that moment to attack my moving hand with both claws, digging in so quickly that I yelped, and jumped up in my chair.

“Bloody hell, Leda!” Jolie complained. “I’ve just completely fused two braids together! Now I have to start all over again on this part…”

I barely heard her.

I was still trying to extract the cat’s claws from my skin.

“Ow, ow, ow… you little beastie,” I scolded, pulling the cat’s talons out of my skin. I carefully removed Wraith’s sharp little teeth from my wrist, as well. “Look at what you did!” I showed the kitten my ravaged arm. “I’m bleeding! Is that what you wanted, you little menace? For me to bleed all over my clothes?”

The cat meowed at me, and stuck its tail in the air.

It batted a paw at the diary, making it clear it wanted it removed.

“No, you don’t get my lap now,” I informed her. “You’ll just have to go sleep on that cushion I got you, and think about what you’ve done.”

Wraith meowed a final time, then leapt off my lap and stalked away, looking more than a little offended. She went toher bed in the corner, curled up in a ball, and looked at me balefully with emerald green eyes.

“Vicious little Wraith.” I winced as I looked down at my arm. One of the cuts was deep enough to be welling blood. Tooth marks and scratches also decorated my wrist. “I might need one of your patented healing concoctions later,” I told Jolie ruefully.

“I’ll make more of the cream,” Jolie promised. “As soon as I’m finished here.”

I nodded. A drop of blood fell then, and landed on the open diary before I could pull my arm away.

“Drat.” I tried to dab up the spot with my finger, but it only spread. The open page absorbed my blood like a sponge, pulling it across the paper as if it was thirsty.

The odd symbols in my mother’s diary began to glow.

I stared as they swiftly changed position, then altered shape, and finally sharpened into clear, readable English on the page.

They turned green and continued to glow as I read the new text.

The signs are irrefutable now. We are being watched. Clearly someone found a way around the stone, something I never would have believed possible before now. If the stone no longer protects us, we have no choice. We must go back. Even Robert agrees with me now, although he’s understandably reluctant, given the risks. I’ll talk to cousin Racyth. Of course he might feel obligated to arrest me, but he and I always got on well. He might listen before he did anything drastic. He warned me before, when the Praecuri were coming for me, and promised me Robert wouldn’t be hurt if I ever turned myself in.

I blinked, shocked, but read on, greedily wanting more.

All this time, I believed it was about what Robert and I figured out, about the infiltration that’s already underway. But now I think it’s more personal than that. Dad always said there were those who never accepted our great-grandfather’s edict against Dark Cathedral and their “Project of Worlds.” Now I fear someone in Dark Cathedral has broken Argus La Fey’s curse altogether, or found a way around it. They seek to bring the La Fey line back under the blood vows made by Morticia herself.

It’s the only explanation that makes sense. It’s the only reason I can think of why the necklace would be entrusted to me… to get it out of Magique entirely.

My throat closed. I flipped back a few pages, looking for the encrypted section before that one, but the symbols inside the rest of the diary remained warped and unreadable.

I understood the key now, though.

Blood. It was my blood, and presumably Arcturus’s, that unlocked the cypher.

Each section must need to be fed separately.

I glanced at Jolie in the mirror, but my friend remained single-mindedly focused on my hair. Even so, I would wait until I was alone to translate the rest. I had no reason to think Jolie would read even a word of it over my shoulder, but everything in me told me to keep this a secret, to tell no one, not even my closest friends.

As much as it frustrated me, and depressed me, even, there was really only one person I wanted to show the unencrypted text to. It was maddening that I trusted him with it over Draken or Miranda, and even over Jolie or Luc, but somehow, I did.

That fact alone pretty much proved what an utter idiot I was.

I bit my lip,staring at him from across our Seeing Arts class, even though he’d told me at least a dozen times not to do that. Gods, I really need someone to look at this who wasn’t me. I’d translated and read all the passages in my mother’s journal now, and I had even more questions than I’d had before.

I had this strange feeling that he felt my stare, and it annoyed him.