Page 109 of Serpent and Shadow

“My primal won’t reconfigure the monocerus,” I told him, fingers clenching in my lap. “Why would it refuse to do that? Do you have any idea?”

Forsooth looked started. He and Blackstone exchanged looks, and had another of their bizarre, silent conversations. Forsooth looked back at me, but his gaze traveled up, above my head. I saw his eyes slide out of focus as he concentrated.

“Can you see it?” I asked him. “The sun primal, I mean.”

There was a pause before he answered me.

“Not exactly, no,” he said slowly at the end of that pause. “It is more like the human concept of gravity, Ms. Shadow. I can see the effects of it. I can see the magical cloud around it, and how that cloud feeds your magical aura. The actual primal is not visible to me, but through those secondary effects, I can still get a flavor of it.”

“Is it a divinity, then?” I asked.

Forsooth’s eyes shifted down to mine, and clicked back into focus. He studied my face for a brief instant, then smiled.

“Having never encountered one until relatively recently, I can’t be certain,” he said, a faint humor in his voice. “But I believe so, yes. It has been my working theory since I first encountered you in that testing center of the Magical Examiner’s Office.” His lips twitched. “Imagine my surprise when two of you appeared in my Theosophy 1.0 class that same year. One, the school’s first known hybrid. The other, the son of Malefic Bones.”

I might have blinked, but I wasn’t truly surprised.

I’d always gotten the impression Forsooth saw something in our magic. He and some of the other professors definitely seemed to know when we were communicating in class.

“Aren’t you interested?” Blackstone asked in his laconic way.

I turned and looked at him. “Interested in what?”

His lips twitched. “In which divinity it is?”

I stared at him. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me, not until that very second, that they were telling me I was magically connected to some kind of god.

Which meant Bones was connected to some kind of god, too.

“No,” I told him.

Blackstone snorted, the closest he ever came to a laugh. “Liar,” he scoffed.

23

Occulus

When neither of us had spoken for a few seconds longer, Forsooth delicately cleared his throat.

“Ms. Shadow?” he asked politely. “Are you amenable to seeing this now?”

For some reason, I glanced at Blackstone. He had gone back to watching me, sphinx-like, the fingers of one hand lightly touching the side of his face. His nearly white eyes looked dead, as always, and utterly impossible to read.

“Of course,” I said, barely hiding my reluctance as I looked back at Forsooth. “If you think it’s important.”

“I do,” Forsooth said gravely.

I hadn’t been able to reach Bones. I hadn’t dreamt about him, hadn’t heard his thoughts, hadn’t felt him at all really since the attack on the Sanctum. I’d even gone to Blackstone for help, but after we’d made multiple attempts to reach him through Bones’s and my connection, I was getting worried. We’d made seven unsuccessful attempts in roughly two weeks, which was probably part of why Blackstone was getting more vicious about Bones.

He thought Bones had cut me off.

I worried about that, too. More than worried, if I was being honest, but I didn’t know what to do about that, either, other than try to keep it from turning into full-blown panic.

Bones had found some way to lock me out.

That, or Malefic had.

I fought to ignore the pain sharpening in my chest at the thought. The anxiety from being cut off from him was growing increasingly difficult to ignore. It was going on three weeks now, by far the longest I’d gone without talking to him since this started.