Page 90 of Serpent and Shadow

She rose to her feet and walked over to Bones’s study. I considered calling her back, telling her not to worry about it, then realized there was no point. She would insist on doing it anyway, and I should let her.

I looked around at all of them instead, including Nyx who watched me from one of the chairs.

“I really am sorry,” I said. “I know you were right. All of you, with everything you said. I really wasn’t okay in my mind. I should have done all of that differently…” I trailed when I glanced at Alaric, and found him staring at me, an odd look in his hazel eyes.

Before I could decide what the expression meant, he blurted out words.

“You saw him,” Alaric said. “Cal. You were with him.”

I hesitated, briefly thrown that he could know that.

I didn’t see the point in denying it, though, so I nodded.

“Yes,” I said. “I went to the Tower again.”

“You got into the dungeon?” Jolie looked up from where she hovered over Bones’s desk, her voice shocked. “Did you phase directly there? To where he was?”

“No.” I shook my head, looking at her. “He found me.”

There was a silence where they all looked at me.

All but Luc, who remained in the kitchen, bent over the small saucepan. His spoon lightly scraped the metal as he stirred, but he didn’t look over.

“Is he all right?” Alaric asked.

I thought about that, about how he’d looked, how he’d felt, in the short time we’d had together. I thought about the way his eyes darkened at the end, and how he’d sounded when he asked me to take his mother out of there.

“No,” I said frankly.

I looked up at Alaric, and squeezed his hand again.

“No, he’s definitely not all right,” I said flatly.

I told them everything.

I think it might’ve been the first time with anyone where I didn’t censor myself at all, at least as far as Caelum Bones was concerned. It was definitely the first time I made no attempt to hold anything back with my friends.

I didn’t stop with describing everything that happened that night. I started back at the beginning, with how things had always been different between me and Bones. I told them how our magic connected, right from that first night, even when neither of us wanted it.

I told them about my primal.

Not the monocerus, which still seemed to be hiding from me, but my real primal, the blue-white sun that no one but Bones could see. I’d never spoken to anyone about that other than Bones. It hadn’t even occurred to me to do so, not until I did.

I told them Bones had a primal like mine, and that I could see his.

Somewhere in that, I must have decided to go all the way.

I told them about Bones being a caelum ignis.

It struck me as odd now, that I hadn’t told them, given how relevant it was to everything we’d been doing. I explained exactly why Malefic wanted Bones, why he’d spent so much of Bones’s life finding ways to control his magic. I explained how Bones and I ended up married, why I knew I could phase, even beyond what Forsooth and Blackstone believed, and why Golden Sun was so singularly focused on Bones’s role in Dark Cathedral.

I described to them what happened to caleum ignises when they reached Bones’s age, and what would’ve happened to Bones if he hadn’t married, and what would happen to him still if anything happened to me.

I didn’t think through all the implications of telling them.

It felt like it was too late for that.

If Bones belonged to Malefic now, they had a right to know what that truly meant.