Page 18 of Serpent and Shadow

By the time I got to the top of his tower, I had everything mapped out, from the exact runes I’d need to copy to which incantations I’d recite. I’d tested the dragon ring a few times before I gave it to him. I’d played with a few different tracking and shielding spells before I found a combination I liked.

I hadn’t entirely told Bones the truth about the ring itself.

I hadn’t actually bought it for him as a Yule present.

I’d found the ring in Bonescastle toward the end of summer term the previous year. I bought it, telling myself it was for me, knowing it wasn’t even though Bones hadn’t spoken to me in months at that point. The dragon design made me think of him, and after I’d spent a few minutes staring at the intricate gold carvings, I found myself motioning over the shop clerk before I’d really let myself think about why.

I hadn’t worn it.

I didn’t tinker with spelling it until those weeks after Bones got hurt by his father, before he came back and invited me to Yule with his mother.

I think it was partly to reassure myself he would be coming back.

Maybe it was a control thing, some small way of trying to keep him safe after his father tried to murder him right in front of me.

Whatever had been going on in my subconscious, I tinkered with it for days. I didn’t manage to do even half of what Bones accomplished with the snake bracelet he’d given me, not in terms of dramatic effects, but I made it so the dragon breathed fire in the exact shade of his eyes when they glowed with gold and green magic.

That, and I fashioned it into a pretty complicated homing device.

I wasn’t sure exactly what Bones had done to it in the time since, but I knew he’d modified the shape, and where he wore it. I hoped whatever he’d done, he hadn’t tampered with the homing spell, or weakened it in any other way.

He’d promised he wouldn’t take it off.

Of course, there was the possibility his father would have picked up on the spell and removed it himself.

I supposed I’d find out which of those things was true in the next few minutes.

Closing my eyes, I adjusted my body where I sat cross-legged in the middle of a circle I’d drawn on the floor of Bones’s stone tower floor. I drew it with chalk runes, amethyst powder, gold filings, wyrmloc scales, cobra venom, powdered monocerus horn, powdered bone from a dragon and the hair of a sphinx.

Oh, and my own blood.

The ritual shouldn’t be necessary of course, not if all I wanted was to find him. I was hoping to find him without being seen, and so we could talk privately.

Around that inner circle, I carefully poured an outer ring of salt.

As far as protections went, it was pretty meager given the types of sorcerers and witches Forsooth described to me as being in the Resurrected. Not to mention Malefic was magically bound to Bones, and now Bones was bound to me.

I didn’t know exactly what that meant, either.

I supposed this might be one way to find out.

I fought to breathe, to focus.

When I first arrived in the northwest tower, and after I’d assessed everything I could see about what the Praecuri had done to the tower’s chimaeras, I’d built a fire in Bones’s enormous fireplace. I also used magic to make his entire living space warmer, including the lavatory and the kitchen, both of which had a tendency to stay cold even with a roaring fire.

Even though my magic did a surprisingly effective job, I shivered inside my knit jumper, even wearing thick pants and fuzzy socks.

Apart from the moments before I passed out in the Palace of the Lions, I’d been freezing and shivering since the end of the battle that morning.

I didn’t honestly remember much of the very end of that battle.

I remembered throwing myself on the mirror Bones and Sirena disappeared through. I remember trying to get through, and eventually cracking the glass with my fist, right before the whole thing shattered and my face and hands and arms got cut with tiny slivers of glass. Then a bolt of magic hit me from one side, and I’d been thrown into a nearby tree.

Of course, I’d been certain that the bolt came from a Dark Cathedral.

But when I’d turned around on the snow, panting, half-blind with pain, magic crackling up both arms and smoking off the ends of my fingers, I’d found three members of the Praecuri standing over me. My back had been wrenched and bruised against the trunk of a tree, but it didn’t take long for my mind to click through to what was happening.

They’d surrounded me, making it clear they hadn’t hit me on accident.