Page 54 of Malcroix Bones Academy

Him being an actual person, and a classmate, not purely a product of my distorted memories and nightmares, threw me. Over the years, I’d often wondered if I’d made him up, maybe as a coping mechanism for the trauma of my childhood. I’d wondered if he was the thing I remembered most clearly because I’d created him myself.

But he existed.

He was a real, bones and blood person.

Which meant he’d been there, the day my parents died. He’d been on the street, in the mouth of that Underground station, in Overworld.

I wondered what that could possibly mean.

I also wondered what that venom-tongued, spoiled and emotionally-stunted bigot would say if I told him he’d featured prominently in my dreams and nightmares for almost a decade. That, in some ways, I felt like Iknewhim, because I was so intimately familiar with his face, his metallic eyes, and that deep-black flame and crystal that hovered over his head.

Had he really seen my parents die?

What had he been doing in Overworld at that age?

Did he recognizeme?

He couldn’t have been there alone, not truly alone, could he?

He’d been young, maybe only a year or two older than me, which tracked with how he looked now. Had his mother or father been one of the praecuri who killed my mum and dad? Had the beings who killed my parents been praecuri at all, or was that just the story they’d used to cover up the real reason they’d been killed?

Even just thinking about it made my head hurt.

Trauma,I told myself.It’s trauma. Maybe even P.T.S.D. You’re having a minor panic attack from seeing him again… especially like that, so up close and personal, and, well… so utterly nasty in reality, compared to your dreams.

In my dreams, he’d never felt hostile.

In my dreams, he felt like an ally, even something like a friend. I’d never once thought he might have anything to do with my parents’ death.

Now that assumption felt painfully naive.

The authorities in Magique didn’t let Magicals just randomly visit Overworld, and likely wouldn’t allow children there at all.I’d looked it up. You had to have a special permit, a visitation schedule filed, not to mention an official appointment, there and back, with a mirror that traveled to that world. Apart from praecuri or an emergency situation that required a specific Magical’s presence, that meant advance notice, usually a few weeks.

It also meant a praecurus as escort.

I’d promised myself that in coming here, to Magique, I would find out what really happened to my parents. I mean, I was realistic about it. I hadn’t thought I’d get anywhere with it until well after I graduated school. The reality that someone was here, now, in the same academy as me, who might actuallyknowwhat happened that day, stunned me.

How in thegodswould I ever convince him to talk to me, though?

I couldn’t imagine him telling me anything willingly.

I’d have to find a way to bargain with him, or trade maybe. I couldn’t be stupid about it. I’d need to know infinitely more about him before I even thought about an approach.

Miranda said he was a good student, so he clearly wasn’t dumb (and more’s the pity, it would’ve been exponentially easier if he was). He was rich. He was terrifyingly good at magical combat. He was also an intensely racist, entitled, expensively-dressed pig, and clearly hated my guts. Not to mention all of those bizarre sexual comments, which suggested he didn’t think much of women, or witches, in general.

He was disturbingly handsome.

I hated to admit that part, but it was true.

He’d scarcely looked real, he was so beautiful, which I wanted badly to say didn’t affect me, but I knew it absolutely had. Usually a terrible personality erased any attraction I might feel for a pretty face, or a body that was positively distracting.The fact that ithadn’tin his case made me uneasy. It also made me wonder if my brain was broken.

Of course, that might have something to do with his magic.

He definitely had a lot of… well,somethingto him.

I might’ve known who he was for that reason alone, even if I hadn’t seen the dark flame and crystal hovering over his head. I remembered that vibration, that oddly charged, high-intensity feeling, even from all those years ago.

It came back to me in dreams.