Page 72 of Serpent and Shadow

She let out an amused grunt.

“You mean someone should try to kill you again?” she asked wryly. “Do you want us to jump out of bushes at random, shove you into walls?”

I returned her amused look unsmilingly.

“Something like that,” I admitted. “I was thinking more like finding some way to scare that part of me enough that it reacts the same way.”

“Scare it?” Luc scoffed. “How, exactly? Anything we do, you’re going to know it’s only us. Which means you’re going to know we’d never really hurt you, Leda. How could we ever be convincing enough to fool it?”

“We could get her drunk,” Nyx suggested, winking at me.

I was thinking though, turning over something I knew they wouldn’t like.

“I’ve got something different in mind, actually,” I said, lifting my mug.

16

Experiment

“You can’t be serious,” Luc burst out, speaking loudly over the wind.

I stood next to him, our sides brushing. My hand still gripped the iron latch that opened a lower section of one of the tall windows in Bones’s apartment.

I’d discovered the latch a few days earlier, when a drakai appeared outside the glass, making loops in the air and periodically knocking on the glass with its little fist, and occasionally making larger thunks with his bushy-haired head.

Luckily, the drakai must have known Bones.

The creature stubbornly persisted when I tried to motion it around the tower to the kitchen window. It shook its head and motioned back, waving his hands and pointing until I found the handle hidden behind one of the long drapes.

I eventually did manage to wrench it open that first time, whereupon the drakai darted inside, scolded me in a high-pitched voice, and demanded a cup of chocolate and a few minutes by the fire to “collect its wits.”

It had brought me a letter from my brother.

Before Bones got taken, drakai used to find me in Frumpy’s on nights I had letters or packages, or in the main dining areas at Valarian or Grathrock, or sometimes at the coffee cart in the main lobby of Malcroix Mansion, or in one of the other common spaces in either of the dormitories where I’d lived. Prior to this year, they’d never had any need to hammer at the windows of Bones’s tower until I let them inside.

These days, I’d given them little choice.

Apart from when I was forced to leave to attend classes, I generally didn’t spend my free time anywhere but here. I had my meals delivered here. I revised here, and read here, and Luc, Nyx, Alaric, and Jolie came to see me here or in the lab downstairs.

Even between classes, I generally avoided being seen in common spaces, since it usually only left me open for curses or abuse. Sometimes, if the gap between periods was long enough, I would go to Bones’s experimental magic shed, or the library, where I’d found a number of out-of-the-way corners. Mostly though, I’d use Alaric’s Yule present, the talisman that made me invisible for short periods of time, to avoid all of that.

The talisman only worked in five minute bursts, and needed a minute of recharge before it became useable again, but it worked well enough to keep me out of trouble most days. It was far easier and wasted far less of my time to stay out of sight until it was time to reappear inside my next class.

It did mean some extra planning.

The five minute limit meant I couldn’t always use it, but it gave me one more tool, especially if I was in a hurry, or if the corridor or college where I happened to be was packed with royals. With everything else going on in my life, I wasn’t much in the mood for magical duels. I also increasingly worried someone might go too far.

I worried that someone might be me.

Given what happened with Quicksilver and the snake, that no longer felt like an unfounded fear.

My not being findable in the usual places clearly frustrated the drakai, though.

Drakai were banned from delivering messages inside lecture halls during classes, except in dire emergencies, or on the orders of a high-ranking school official. Which meant they’d mostly been forced to battle the rough winds outside Bones’s tower, even in the rain.

Still gripping the iron handle, I leaned through the narrow opening in the glass.

I looked down the length of the dizzyingly steep wall to the roof of the northwest wing, which flowed away in a straight line from the angle of the window. I knew how high that ceiling was when I stood beneath it, but from up here, it looked very far away.