No …
The cruel joke of it is that Simon Snow smells like smoke.
Snow whimpers—he’s plagued by nightmares, we both are—and rolls onto his back, one arm reaching for a moment before he lets it fall over his head. His ridiculous curls tumble back onto the pillow. Snow wears his hair short on the back and on the sides, but the top is a thatch of loose curls. Golden brown. It’s dark now, but I can still see the colour.
I know his skin, too. Another shade of gold, the fairest. Snow never tans, but there are freckles on his shoulders, and moles scattered all over his back and chest, his arms and legs. Three moles on his right cheek, two below his left ear, one over his left eye.
It doesn’t do me any good to know all this.
But I’m not sure it makes it any worse either. I’m not sure it could get any worse.
The windows are open; Snow sleeps with them open all year long unless I throw a snit about it. It’s easier to sleep with extra blankets on my bed than to complain. I’ve got used to the weight of them against me.
I’m tired. And full. I can feel the blood sloshing around in my stomach—it’s probably going to wake me up to piss.
Snow moans again, and tosses back onto his side.
I’m home. Finally.
I fall asleep.
34
BAZ
Snow doesn’t give a shit about waking me up.
He likes to be the first person down to breakfast, Chomsky knows why. It’s 6 A.M., and he’s already banging around our room like a cow who accidentally wandered up here.
The windows are still open, and the sunlight is pouring in. I’m fine in sunlight—that’s another myth. But I don’t like it. It stings a bit, especially first thing in the morning. Snow suspects, I think, and is constantly opening the curtains.
I guess we used to fight more about stuff like this.
And then I almost killed him, and squabbling over the curtains suddenly felt ridiculous.
Snow will tell you I tried to kill him our third year. With the chimera. But I was only trying to scare him that day—I wanted to see him wet his pants and cry. Instead he went off like an H-bomb.
He also says I tried to throw him down a flight of stairs the next year. Really, we were fighting at the top of the staircase, and I got in a lucky punch that sent him flying. Then, when my aunt Fiona asked me if I’d pushed Simon Snow down a flight of stairs, I said, “Fuck yes I did.”
But the next year, fifth year, I actually did try to take Snow down.
I hated him so much that spring. I hated the sight of him—I hated what the sight of him did to me.
When Fiona told me she’d found a way to “take the Mage’s Heir out of our way,” I was more than willing to help. She gave me the pocket recorder, an ancient thing with an actual tape, and warned me not to speak when it was on; she made me swear on my mother’s grave.
I don’t know what I was expecting to happen.… I felt like I was in a spy movie, standing by the gates and pushing the button in my pocket the moment I could see Snow start to lose his temper.
Maybe I thought I was entrapping him.…
Maybe I did think it would hurt him—or kill him.
Maybe I didn’t think anything could kill him.
Then came Philippa bloody Stainton running across the lawn to embarrass herself. (She wouldn’t leave Snow alone that year, even though he clearly wasn’t interested.) The recorder swallowed up her voice in one horrible squeak, like a mouse being sucked up in a vacuum. I hit stop as soon as I heard her.… It was too late.
Snow knew I did it, but he couldn’t prove anything. And no one else could either—I hadn’t touched my wand. I hadn’t said a word.
Aunt Fiona was hardly bothered by the mistake. “Philippa Stainton—she’s not one of ours, is she?”
I remember handing the recorder back to my aunt, thinking of the magic she must have poured into it. Wondering where she got that much magic.
“Don’t look so glum, Basil,” Fiona said, taking it from me. “We’ll get him next time.”
A few days later, in Magic Words, Miss Possibelf assured us all that Philippa would be fine. But she never came back to Watford.
I’ll never forget Philippa’s face when her voice ran out.
I’ll never forget Snow’s.
That’s the last time I tried to hurt him. Permanently.
I throw curses at Snow. I harass him. I think about killing him all the time, and someday I’ll have to try—but until then, what’s the point?
I’m going to lose.
On that day. When Snow and I actually have to fight each other.
I might be immortal. (Maybe. I don’t know whom to ask.) But I’m the kind of immortal you can still cut down or light on fire.
Snow is … something else.
When he goes off, he’s more of an element than a magician. I don’t think our side will ever put him out or contain him, but I know—I know—that I have to do my part.
We’re at war.
The Humdrum may have killed my mother, but the Mage will drive my whole family out of magic. Just to make an example of us. He’s already taken our influence. Drained our coffers. Blackened our name. We’re all just waiting for the day he takes the nuclear option—
Snow is the nuclear option. With Snow tucked in his belt, the Mage is omnipotent. He can make us do anything.… He can make us go away.
I can’t let that happen.
This is my world, the World of Mages. I have to do my part to fight for it. Even if I know I’m going to lose.
Snow is standing in front of his wardrobe now, trying to find a clean shirt. He stretches one arm over his head, and I watch the muscles shifting in his shoulders.
All I do is lose.
I sit up and throw my covers off. Snow startles and grabs a shirt.
“Forget that I’m here?” I ask. I stride over to my wardrobe and lay my trousers and shirt over my arm. I don’t know why Snow lingers over his clothes like he has big decisions to make. He wears his uniform every day, even on the weekend.
When I close my wardrobe door, he’s staring at me. He looks unsettled. I’m not sure what I’ve done to unsettle him, but I sneer anyway, just to drive it home.
I get dressed in the bathroom. Snow and I have never dressed in front of each other; it’s an extension of our mutual paranoia. And thank snakes for that—my life is painful enough.
When I’m dressed and ready and back in our room, Snow is still standing near his bed, shirt on but not buttoned, tie hanging round his neck. His hair actually looks worse than it did when he woke up, like he’s been tearing his hands through the curls.
He freezes and looks up at me.
“What’s wrong, Snow? Cat got your tongue?”
He flinches. Cat got your tongue is a wicked spell, and I used it against him twice when we were third years.
“Baz,” he clears his throat. “I—”
“Am a disgrace to magic?”
He rolls his eyes. “I—”
“Spit it out, Snow. You’d think you were trying to cast a spell. Are you? Next time, use your wand, it helps.”
He ransacks his hair again with one hand. “Could you just—?”
There’s nothing remarkable about Snow’s eyes. They’re a standard size and shape. A little pouchy. And his eyelashes are stubby and dark brown. His eyes aren’t even a remarkable colour. Just blue. Not cornflower. Not navy. Not shot with hazel or violet.
He blinks them at me. Stammering. I feel myself blushing. (Crowley, that’s how much blood I drank last night—I’m capable of blushing.)
“No,” I say, and pick up my books. “I just couldn’t.”
I’m out the door. Down the steps.
I hear Snow snarling behind me.
When he comes down to breakfast, his tie is still hanging. Bunce frowns and yanks on one end. He drops his scone and wipes his hand on his trousers before tying it. He looks up at me then, but I’m already looking away.
35
SIMON
Penelope wants to eat lunch out on the Lawn. It’s a warm day, she says, and the ground is dry, and we might not have another chance to picnic like this until spring.
I think she just wants to keep me away from Baz and Agatha—they’ve been playing games with each other all week. Taking turns staring across the dining hall, then quickly looking away. Baz always looks at me, too, to make sure I’m watching.
Everyone’s still gossiping about where he’s been. The most popular rumours are “dark coming-of-age ceremony that left him too marked up to be in public” and “Ibiza.”
“My mother’s coming to take me into town tonight,” Penny says. We’re sitting against a giant, twisting yew tree, looking out at the Lawn in slightly different directions. “We’re going to dinner,” she says. “Want to come?”
“That’s okay, thanks.”
“We could go to that ramen place you like. My mum’s buying.”
I shake my head. “Feels like I need to keep tabs on Baz,” I say. “I still don’t have a clue where he’s been.”
Penny sighs but doesn’t argue. She stares out onto the brown lawn. “I miss the Visitings. They were so magickal.…”
I laugh.
“You know what I mean,” she says. “Aunt Beryl came back to my mum, and I missed it.”
“What’d she say?”
“The same thing she said last time! ‘Stop looking for my books. There’s nothing in there for the likes of you.’”
“Wait, she came back to tell you not to find her books?”
“She was a scholar like Mum and Dad. She doesn’t think anyone’s smart enough to touch her research.”
“I can’t believe your relative came back just to insult you.”
“Mum says she always knew Aunt Beryl would take her bad attitude to hell with her.”
“Do the ghosts ever show up at the wrong place?”
“I think of them more as souls—”
“Souls, then. Do they ever get lost?”
“I’m not sure.” Penny turns to face me, holding out a slice of Battenberg cake. I take it. “I know you can confuse them,” she says. “You can try to hide their target. Like, if you’re worried a soul might come back and tell your secret—you can try to hide the living person who might get Visited. There’ve even been murders. If I kill you, you can’t get a Visitor; ergo, you can’t hear or tell my secret.”
“So the Visitors can get mixed-up.…”
“Yeah, they just show up where they think someone is supposed to be. Like a real person would. Madam Bellamy said she’d seen her husband lurking at the back of her classroom a few times before he actually came through the Veil.”
Just like I saw Baz’s mum at the window.…
I should tell Penny what happened. I always tell Penny what happened.
“Come on,” she says, standing and brushing dead grass off the backs of her thighs. “We’ll be late to class.”
She holds her hand over the napkins and plastic wrap, and spins her wrist. “A place for everything, and everything in its place!” They disappear.
“Waste of magic,” I say out of habit, picking up our satchels.
Penny rolls her eyes. “I’m so tired of hearing that. We’re supposed to use magic. What are we saving it for?”
“So it’s there if we need it.”
“I know the official answer, Simon—thanks. In America, they think that you become more powerful the more magic you use.”
“Just like fossil fuels.”
Penny glances over at me, then snorts.
“Don’t look so surprised,” I say. “I know about fossil fuels.”
* * *
Baz is in half my lessons. There are only fifty kids in our year; there have been terms in the past when he and I’ve had every lesson together, all day long.
We usually sit as far apart as possible, but today in Elocution, Madam Bellamy has us push all the desks out of the way and work in pairs. Baz ends up right behind me.
Madam Bellamy hasn’t been the same since her Visiting; it’s like—well, like she’s just seen a ghost. She keeps making us do practical work while she wanders around the room, looking lost.
At this point, eighth year, we’re past all the basic Elocution stuff—speaking out, hitting consonants, projection. It’s all nuance now. How to give spells more power by saying them with fire and intent. How pausing just before a key word can focus a spell.
Gareth’s my partner today. And most days. He’s terrible at Elocution. He still drones his spells out like he’s reading from a cue card. They work, but they land like lead balloons. If Gareth levitates something, it jerks; if he transforms something, it looks like it’s happening in cheap stop-motion animation.
Penelope says Gareth’s painful to watch—and not just because of his ridiculous magic belt buckle.
Baz says Gareth wouldn’t have even got into Watford in the old days.
Baz’s elocution is flawless. In four languages. (Though I suppose I’m just taking his word on that when it comes to French and Greek and Latin.) I can hear him behind me, rattling off cooling spells and warming spells one after another. I feel the change in the air on the back of my neck.
“Slow down, Mr. Pitch,” Madam Bellamy says. “No need to waste magic.”
I hear the irritation in Baz’s voice as he starts shooting the spells out even faster.
Sometimes it’s disturbing how much Baz and Penelope have in common. I’ve mentioned it to her before—“And,” I said, “your families both hate the Mage.”
“My family is nothing like the Pitches!” she argued. “They’re speciesist and racist. Baz probably doesn’t even think I should be at Watford.”
“Is he racist?” I ask. “Isn’t he a race? His mum looks sort of Spanish or Arabic in her painting.”
“Arabic is a language, Simon. And everyone is a race. And Baz is the whitest person I’ve ever seen.”
“Only because he’s a vampire,” I said.
Damn it all, I have to tell Baz about his mum. Or I have to tell Penny about Baz’s mum.… Or maybe even the Mage. If it wasn’t the Humdrum who had Baz’s mother killed, who was it?
I can’t keep a secret this big. I don’t have room for it.
* * *
Penny sneaks up to my room before she leaves that night with her mum. She’s stupidly brave—it’s the only stupid thing about her—and I swear it gets worse when we go too long between emergencies. I’m tempted to slam the door when I see that it’s her.
“Baz will turn you in if he catches you in our tower,” I say. “And you will get suspended.”
She waves her hand, dismissively. “He’s out by the pitch, watching the team practise. Pitch on the pitch.”
She shoves at the door, and I stop her. “Someone else will turn you in, then.”
“Nah. All the boys in our year are scared of me. They think I’ll turn them into frogs.”
“Is there a spell for that?”
“Yes, but it’s enormously draining, and I’d have to kiss them to turn them back.”
I sigh and let go of the door, peeking down the stairs while Penelope slips past me into my room.
“I’m just here to talk you into coming with me,” she says.
“Not gonna work.”
“Come on, Simon. My mum won’t lecture me so much if you’re around.”
“She’ll lecture me instead.” I sit down on my bed. I’ve got a few books spread out there. And some old documents from the library.
“Right. It’s a shared burden—hey, are you reading The Magickal Record?”
The Record is the closest thing magicians have to a newspaper. It keeps track of births and deaths, magickal bonds and laws, plus minutes from every Coven meeting. I snuck a few bound volumes from the early 2000s out of the library. “Yep,” I say, “I’ve heard it’s fascinating.”
“You heard that from me,” she says, “and I know you weren’t listening. Why are you reading The Magicka
l Record?”
I look up from the books. “Have you ever heard of a magician called ‘Nico’ or ‘Nicodemus’?”
“Like, in history?”
“No. I don’t know—maybe. Just anybody. Maybe a politician or someone who was on the Coven? Or a professor?”
She’s leaning against my bed. “Is this for the Mage? Are you on a mission?”
“No.” I shake my head. “No, I haven’t even seen him. I was—it’s about Baz.” Penny rolls her eyes. “I was thinking about his mum,” I say, “something I heard, that maybe she had an enemy.”
“The Pitches have always had more enemies than friends.”
“Right. Anyway, it’s probably not important.”
Penny isn’t that interested, but I’ve asked a question, so she tries to answer it. “An enemy named Nico…” But then something in her coat pocket chimes. Her eyes get big, and she jabs her hand in her pocket.
I feel my eyes get big, too. “Do you have a phone?”
“Simon—”
“Penelope, you can’t have a mobile at Watford!”
She folds her arms. “I don’t see why not.”
“Because of the rules. They’re a security risk.”
She frowns and pulls out the phone—a white iPhone, a new one. “My parents feel better if I carry it.”
“How does that even work in here?” I ask. “There’re supposed to be spells.…”
Penelope’s checking her texts. “My mum magicked it. She’s here now, at the gates—” She looks up. “—Please come with us.”
“Your mum would make a terrifying supervillain.”
Penny grins. “Come to dinner, Simon.”
I shake my head again. “No, I want to look this stuff over before Baz comes back.”
Finally she gives in, and runs down the tower stairs like she doesn’t give a fig about getting caught. I go to the window to see if I can spot Baz out on the pitch.
36
PENELOPE
My mum insisted on me having a mobile after what happened with the Humdrum.
For a few weeks this summer, she was saying I couldn’t come back to Watford at all, and my dad didn’t even try to talk her down. I think maybe he felt responsible. Like he should have figured the Humdrum out by now.
Carry On Page 14
