“Anyone feeling a strong urge to disagree with me?” he asked lazily.
His eyes fell meaningfully on the mage with the peacock, who promptly lowered his hands.
Draken turned to stare at Bones, his hands still held up towards Peacock.
“Piss off,” Draken spat. “No one asked your opinion, you royalist fuck.”
Bones snuffed out the magic in his fingers and aimed his stare at Draken.
“Now, now, Joran… don’t be rude,” he said, clucking his tongue. “For once, I’m defending your scrappy little pussycat. I thought you’d appreciate the support.”
I caught hold of Draken’s arm before he could say anything back, about to lead him away.
Before I could, Miranda bounded up to us, grinning and oblivious.
“I’ve got Alchemy next,” she announced, knocking her shoulder into mine. “But I’ve got over an hour, and I’m absolutelystarving.I’m ready to go to the bestiary and attack wild beasts with my bare hands if I don’t get some food. Do either of you have time to run back to the Valarian dining hall with me? I can’t just do coffee, or I’ll pass out in an hour.”
I nodded, fighting to keep the relief off my face. “I’ve nothing until two-thirty,” I told her. “I’ll go.”
Draken, who’d stood there a few seconds longer, his magic still geared up, even as the crowd began to disperse, finally lowered his hands. He looked almost annoyed, though, and I suspected it was because Bones had intervened.
I watched Draken scan faces in the crowd, likely looking for Bones even now. But the tall, platinum-haired mage had pulled another of his vanishing acts as soon as everyone else decided to ignore me for another day.
Unable to find him, Draken grunted, and finally turned to face me and Miranda.
Hearing our back and forth belatedly, he pulled out a pocket watch and glanced at it.
“I have Magical Ethics and Philosophy,” he said, his voice as annoyed as his expression. “I’ll have time to grab a coffee if the line’s not too long, but that’s it.”
“Magical Ethics?” I asked, surprised. “You didn’t take that last year?”
His bad mood finally seemed to break at my words.
He rolled his eyes, snorting a faint laugh.
“No, Miss ‘I Take 10 Classes Every Term Because I Have Some Kind of Masochistic Mental Disorder’… I didn’t take it last year,” he said teasingly, nudging me with an elbow. “I didn’t get around to it, not with all the other requirements they cram onto your schedule first year. This was the only time it was offered I could make work with everything else.”
He frowned when a few other mages and witches paused to glare at us, at me, specifically, then pushed their way past.
“Bunch ofidiots!”Draken said, raising his voice.
I nudged his arm. “Ignore them. Graham’s gone. That’s all I care about.”
That was even mostly true.
I still couldn’t quite believe hewasgone, honestly, and I’d seen him led off campus with my own eyes. And yes, people were right to blame me. I was one hundred percent the reason he’d been expelled.
I’d always intended to report Strangemore for what he’d done, well before Bones made it a non-negotiable part of our new arrangement, so I couldn’t even blame him.
Only a few hours after I’d woken up in Bones’s bed, and less than an hour after I’d taken a shower in his shower, and while still wearing some of Bones’s magically-transformed clothes, I’d filed a formal complaint with Forsooth, as our year’s faculty head.
Forsooth took my statement in full, then brought me to the main offices to file a second complaint with the school’s administration. As a part of the evidence-gathering process for that one, I allowed them to look at my memories, after Forsooth assured me they could only legally look at the exact timeframe I gave them.
Which was a good thing, really, since the timeframe I used had been supplied to me by Bones. Given my own mental statethat night, I hardly could’ve pinned that down on my own, not with any precision, and Bones gave me exact times for the events he witnessed, up until the moment he directly intervened.
He adamantly refused to be included in any part of the complaint, himself. Since he didn’t want me mentioning him, access to my memories ended a few seconds before he’d arrived.
I had to fictionalize how I’d gotten away.
