I’d stopped wearing the green crystal since that night in the Kink-Tailed Cat. I’d even built a hidden compartment inside the wooden box, and cast shield and illusion chimeras over it, to keep it safe. I walked over and knelt down carefully. Whoever broke it smashed the hinges and most of the glass inlay. I flipped it over, and my gut plummeted when I saw they’d torn out the plush interior, and ripped open the secret door in the back.
They’d gotten past my spells.
It was gone.
I set down the box, and crawled all over the floor, looking, but I already knew.
Someone had taken the last birthday present I’d ever gotten from either of my parents, the last thing my mother had really wanted me to have.
Tears threatened, but I wiped my face savagely.
This was my fault. Whatever Jolie believed, I’d done this. That said, if I ever found out who’d destroyed our room to steal my mother’s necklace, I’d do more than punch them in the jaw. What I’d done to Bones in the forest would be a love tap in comparison.
Right now, however, I was mostly angry at myself.
My mother warned me. She’d said the necklace was important, that no one else could know about it, that it was magic. From the beginning I’d somehow known my mother wasn’t just being whimsical when she told me that.
She’d meant her words. Literally.
Even as a child, I’d understood that. I’d been careful with the necklace then, hiding it in the garden, never telling anyone about it, not my aunt, not even Archie. Now, as an adult, I lost it not halfway into my first year at university.
Something must have shown on my face, because Jolie’s voice grew alarmed.
“What is it?” she asked. “Leda? What’s wrong?”
I sat back from my knees, surveying the floor. I kept my expression unmoving as I continued to scan the floorboards and rug, even knowing it was futile.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
It wasn’t nothing, though.
Whoever was doing this, whoever was after me, they’d finally managed to make me really gods-damned angry.
“Are you sure it’s alright?”I asked, hating how insecure I sounded. “It doesn’t look anything at all like you or Mir’s costumes.”
Jolie, saint that she was, rolled her light-brown eyes, without stopping what she was doing. At the moment, that happened to be using magic, an enchanted hair product, and her fingers to coerce my hair into small, incredibly precise, black braids.
She had a photo book open on the desk next to her, and kept looking at it as she tried to copy the exact hairstyle from Ancient Egypt. When she tapped the photo with a hand, igniting her magic through her primal, it would come to life like a video, and show how a servant had managed the braids using magic.
“This is the oddest spell,” she muttered. “I’d never have guessed it would work on hair.”
A little alarmed, I glanced back at her.
“As opposed to what?” I asked.
“Weaving baskets. Or possibly blankets,” Jolie said. She smacked me lightly on the head when I turned around a second time. “Stop moving, or I’ll end up braiding your arm hairs together… or possibly your nose hairs,” she joked.
I snorted, but faced forward obediently.
“You don’t have to get it rightyet,you know,” I reminded her. “The dance isn’t until tomorrow night.”
“Yeah, but if this doesn’t work, I’ll need to try something else.”
“Or we can just go with straightening my hair, and not worrying about the braids,” I said.
“That’snothistorically accurate.” Jolie scoffed, as if the very idea was preposterous. Abruptly, she changed the subject. “Has Graham’s face even healed from that ridiculous fight in the tournament yet?” she asked. “They’re not allowed to heal any of their wounds, are they? Or use magical painkillers?”
I thought about that, and sighed.
