Lightning flashed in the background, a rolling cloud of purple and green smoke. I tried not to look at it. I tried to pretend I didn’t see it, that it wasn’t coming. I heard the thunder soon after, but it was too soon. I wasn’t ready. It was too soon.
It was always too soon.
“Wait,” I told her. “Wait, please, Mom?”
I reached for her as the screams filled my ears. My mother’s face was already disintegrating, eaten away as I watched, her hand outstretched, her eyes terrified.
Darkness descended, and then…
The boy was there.
Always him. Always alone.
He stood under the London Underground sign, head tilted.
Gold eyes. Spiky, platinum-blond hair. Dressed like a little prince, with a cream cape and green pants and a tailoredblack vest with a diamond at the throat of his high collar. I studied the distinct shape of his mouth, his long-fingered hands, adorned with heavy rings, too heavy for his age. A storm of emotions flashed in his odd-colored irises.
A black, coiling, living flame writhed and glowed around a smoking black crystal over his head. It floated there, without strings, but no one else seemed to see it.
A flush came to his cheeks as he stared back at me.
Then, his eyes angled higher. He stared at the space above my head, too.
He could see me.
I could see him.
We were the only ones who could.
Before I could warn him away, tell him he wasn’t safe, that he had to run… the cloud of smoke enveloped him, and pulled him into darkness.
I jerked awake.
Panting, lying on my back in the dimly-lit, shuttered room, I fought to focus, to bring my mind back online. Urgency lived in my breaths, my fast-beating heart, my sweat-dampened hair, but I couldn’t pinpoint the cause.
I was late. I had to be somewhere, didn’t I? Wherever it was, it felt vitally important, but my mind couldn’t comprehend what it was.
The bridging course had finished. It wasn’t that.
Alaric wasn’t expecting me. He’d returned to some palatial mansion on the south coast of France a few days earlier,summoned by his father for the week before the autumn term began at Malcroix Bones?
Malcroix. School.
I sat up, and stared at the room around me.
My eyes fell to the iridescent green clock, and the strange, curved arrows that served as hands. I threw back the duvet and blanket, and hopped to my feet, wearing silk pajamas I’d purchased a few weeks earlier. I padded to the door of my bedroom, opened it, and walked into the sitting room.
Something had changed. I could feel it.
I’d been alone in the suite at the Dragon’s Keep since the day I got my scrolls telling me I would be staying in Magique, and attending Malcroix Bones.
Ankha had left that very night, only a few hours after she opened them.
Before she went, she informed me I had the suite at the Dragon’s Keep for the summer. She told me which Magical bank held my money, wrote down where to go for my citizenship papers so I could access it and establish credit, and showed me on the second, thicker scroll where to go for the bridging course the following week.
Since then, apart from Alaric, no one but me had been in my rooms, so the feeling that someone else had been inside while I’d been sleeping unnerved me.
I reached the center of the suite before I saw it.
