Page 21 of Serpent and Shadow

Forming them caused him actual pain… physical pain.

It was different than the pain I felt experiencing them, and different from what he already suffered on the other side. I couldn’t make sense of the source of it. I could feel it choking him, trying to choke him out, to knock him out cold.

Anger grew hotter and more suffocating around him. I felt his rage at the effort it took to stay there, to talk to me, but the anger wasn’t what scared me.

He almost didn’t feel like himself at all.

Go away, he gasped from the dark. Pain exploded through him, but his rage burned hotter and also colder, and he didn’t stop. Leave me alone, you halfbreed bitch whore, and don’t ever fucking come back or I’ll kill you.

He lied there, gasping in the dark.

Come looking for me again, and I swear to the gods I’ll fucking kill you.

I didn’t move.

I’ll kill you, Leda. I’ll kill you… worthless, conniving cunt… worst thing that ever happened to me… I’ll laugh over your corpse… I’ll enjoy it…

The darkness briefly turned to a greenish-gold light.

His magic slammed into me, knocking out my breath. His fire, which never hit me that hard even in any of our practice sessions, short-circuited something in my magic. It also triggered a fight or flight response I couldn’t control, mostly because it hurt.

I threw myself backwards instinctively.

The spell broke.

I felt the instant the connection snapped.

I gasped in shock, then cried out in despair.

I was still falling backwards as some part of me reached for him.

I opened my eyes to find myself lying on my back, gasping stuck breaths, groaning in pain. I’d broken the circle with my head when I fell back, smearing the line of gold, blood, powdered crystals and bone, all the way into the thinner line of salt.

For the second time that day, I was in so much pain I couldn’t see.

5

Connected Minds

“You were right. He’s in the Black Tower.” I glanced at Forsooth’s bear primal where it sprawled on Bones’s rug in front of the fireplace. I swallowed, but my voice remained flat, leeched of emotion. “…The dungeon, I’d guess.”

I’d offered to go to him, to meet him in the same tower and room where I’d just been, but Forsooth insisted on coming to me.

It felt slightly awkward to have him in my new “home,” and not only because I still hadn’t taken a shower.

I also hadn’t cleaned up the ritual circle, so now, in addition to my appearance, he was forced to walk around a large, broken, messy section of floor, half-smeared with my blood, with a large burn mark on the stone where I kicked over a candle.

As for me, I didn’t look in a mirror, but I could only imagine how I must have looked when I opened the door, with blood, amethyst powder, monocerus horn, sphinx hair, scales, salt, cobra venom, and gods knew what else in my hair and stuck in my jumper and socks. That, of course, was in addition to the blood, mud, leaves, and grass I still had all over my clothes and skin from the fight that morning.

If my degraded appearance surprised or bothered the famed theosophist, he didn’t let it show.

We both seemed to have the same thought around not sending messages with certain types of information across the school grounds. Forsooth had been adamant I shouldn’t communicate information to him magically, or with the use of drakai, and I agreed.

Still, it felt disorienting having Forsooth there.

Maybe it was sheer tiredness on my side, but it felt oddly surreal to see the bushy-haired professor in one of Bones’s red leather chairs, ankles crossed, sipping tea from Bones’s tea set, his bear primal snoozing in front of the flames.

The bear itself seemed to be totally at home.