Page 48 of Malcroix Bones Academy

“There’s Luc. You want to get him, Drake? Or should I?”

The lanky, black-haired mage got to his feet without complaint. He exited out the door of the coffee shop, causing another tinkle of the overhead bell.

I watched as he loped towards the square. He paused to let an older witch walk by with a magically-powered shopping cart with a pink poodle primal perched on the handle, then waited again for a mage in a tall hat, which had a purple penguin perched on top of it, to pedal by on a bicycle.

Draken then walked up to someone roughly our age with long, shaggy, auburn hair and shocking blue eyes. He smiled at Draken, shook his hand, then both were headed back.

“You’ll like Luc,” Miranda told me confidently. “He’s a giant nerd. We had to physically drag him out of the library half the time in secondary school, or he might have turned into some kind of subterranean creature.”

I smiled at that, and sipped my cappuccino as I studied the primal perched on the red-haired mage’s shoulder. It peered around with round eyes, clinging to him with long fingers. A striped tail made a question mark in the air by its head.

“What is that?” I asked. “His primal?”

Miranda looked at her two mage friends and laughed. “It’s a ring-tailed lemur. It’s really cute. My primal never knows what to do with it, though. My corgi is feisty, and the lemur only wants to pet it and follow it around.”

I quirked my eyebrow at that, but didn’t comment.

The door opened, ringing the bell again, and the two mages joined us.

“I’ll get you a coffee,” Draken offered Luc. “Meet our new friend. This is Leda Shadow, our one and only hybrid…”

I winced at his bluntness, but the lanky mage in the rumpled suit only looked over with an expression of curiosity. He held out a hand, and I noticed he wore a number of rings, some of which looked old, like real antiques.

“Lucifer Ryan Mocking,” he said.

“Lucifer?” I smiled as I took the offered hand. “Really?”

He shrugged as we shook. “Everyone calls me Luc. But yeah. It’s a family name.”

We dropped hands right as Draken came back with the magically-prepared cappuccino. He plunked it down by a chair he’d dragged over to our table.

My eyes fell to where Luc’s lemur appeared to be stalking Miranda’s corgi. Like Miranda said, her corgi crouched down playfully and barked, clearly wanting to wrestle, but the lemur only reached out to gently stroke one of its ears.

The lion tackled both of them then, and the three primals tumbled over the floor.

“You don’t have a primal?” Luc asked politely.

I looked back at him, and realized Miranda and Draken were listening avidly too, although pretending they weren’t.

“I don’t,” I said, exhaling.

“Can you still do magic?” Miranda asked.

“I can,” I acknowledged. “Maybe not as well as Iwouldbe able to, but I managed to pass the bridging course.”

“And got the best score on the Magical potential test in something like a hundred years,” Draken muttered under his breath.

I glanced at him. I’d read that, of course, but hadn’t paid much attention. For one thing, I figured the papers were only being dramatic because of who I was. Also, Ankha had seemedmore irritated by that fact than impressed, and implied it was probably an error.

“Do you knowwhyyou don’t have one?” Luc asked me.

I looked back at him.

I didn’t sense any ulterior motive in the question, or hear it in his voice. When our eyes met, I saw only sincerity in his steady gaze, and a kind of burning interest that struck me as academic rather than judgmental.

“No idea,” I said, exhaling. “Entwhistle, my Theurgy professor over the summer, even brought a relatively well-known Seer into class, and tried to turn it into a lesson. He’d hoped she might be able to give us an idea of what a primal for me might look like.”

“And did she?” Luc asked seriously.