Page 148 of Malcroix Bones Academy

We were both so bad at this.

I was terrible, maybe from being so terrible at social anything in Overworld, and so overly protective of myself, and so distrustful of most people, and always feeling like I had to keep everything together for my brother.

Bones was even worse, just absolutely awful at expressing anything.

Imagine leaving a present like that, and expecting me to know he wasn’t trying to fuck with me, when all he’d ever done was try to fuck with me?

I felt his arms tense.

“Shadow?” he began, his voice subdued.

Unfortunately, that was as far as he got.

33

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.