Any Way the Wind Blows

by Rainbow Rowell

  “That sounds like exactly the reason people keep animals in a pen.”

  Niamh’s looking down at my wand. “That was some tidy spellwork. I’ve never seen anyone cast a nursery rhyme before.”

  I’ve never even considered casting one before. “You just have to commit to it,” I say, tucking my wand into my pocket.

  “Well, I never would have tried it,” she says. “The rhyme’s about lambs, not goats. Your dad’s always telling me I’m too literal…”

  I look up over the Lawn, at the drawbridge and the ramparts. And the peak of the White Chapel. “I’ll wait here for you,” I say. “I’m still feeling a bit off.”

  “Oh,” Niamh says. “Well, if you feel better in a while, I really could use your help finding the rest of the herd. Sometimes it takes hours.”

  “Hours?”

  “They’re crafty.”

  The goat we caught is already heading out to the fields behind the school, where Ebb used to take them to graze. “I suppose I could help,” I say. “Do we have to cross the moat?”

  “No. The goats stay in the hills, usually. They hate the merwolves.”

  “So do I.”

  “Yeah,” Niamh says, “they’re horrible. They killed all the fish in the moat, and the school has to feed them horse meat. I talked the headmistress into euthanizing them, but some students led a protest.”

  “Ebb used to bring them in every night,” I say.

  “The merwolves?”

  “No. The goats. They slept in the barn with her.”

  Niamh frowns at me. “Ebb Petty is dead.”

  25

  PENELOPE

  Well, one way of looking at this is—there’s a lot more written on my blackboard.

  WHAT WE KNOW:

  Omaha, Nebraska

  Two years ago (Normal, age 20)

  Midnight ritual

  Curse victim was alone

  Victim does not wish to be called “victim”

  Where did curse victim (hereafter called “C.V.”) acquire ritual?

  “Some guy I met” (!)

  Where is ritual now? In C.V.’s pocket (!!)

  C.V. was told ritual would help him “meet a demon” (!!!)

  C.V. thought that sounded like a corking idea

  C.V. possibly already cursed? “Conked on the head with the stupid stick,” as my grandmother used to say? Worth investigating …

  *MY NAME IS SHEPARD*

  Demon was successfully summoned

  WHAT WE DON’T KNOW:

  Name of demon

  Type of demon

  What the ritual says

  What the ritual does

  How to reverse it

  What Shepard was thinking

  What Shepard is EVER thinking

  “Right now I’m thinking that you’d make an excellent prosecuting attorney.” Shepard’s sprawled out on the sofa, all long legs and orange corduroy.

  “That sounds like a compliment,” I say, surveying my lists. “Thank you.” I turn back to him—and to the demonic ritual which he’s taken from his pocket and spread out on my coffee table.

  At least it isn’t the actual ritual. This is just a phonetic transcription, written in purple ink on a piece of notebook paper. I start to read it out loud, and Shepard jumps off the sofa to cover my mouth. “Don’t do that,” he says softly, hand still pressed over my lips.

  I nod. I suppose he’s right.

  He slowly takes his hand away, and we both exhale.

  “Is that it how it happened?” I ask. “You just read it out loud?”

  He sits back down. “No, there was more. I drew a doorway on the floor.”

  “Not a pentagram?”

  “No, it was a door—there was a diagram for how to draw it. I think the door worked like a metaphor. Like it was the idea of a door, and then it became a door.”

  I flop down on the sofa, wiping chalk on my skirt. “So it was only a metaphorical summoning.”

  “Why not?” He’s still smiling. (One nice thing about talking to Shepard is that I don’t even have to pretend not to be patronizing. It rolls right off of him.) “After all,” he says, “your magic is based on clichés…”

  I wince. “I think you mean that we use the power of language to harness the world’s magic in a way that you can only contemplate. But go on, you drew a door … Where?”

  “In my bedroom.” Shepard cracks open another boxed sandwich. Coronation chicken this time.

  After an hour of list-making, I let him take a break to get dinner. With all the sandwiches on the coffee table right now, it’s like Simon never left. (It’s very much like Simon left. I can hear him—and Baz—not saying anything, not here, not wanting to be here. It’s like giant gongs of silence. Shepard’s constant chatter does nothing to crowd it out.)

  I’m crushing the end of my chalk with my nail. “So, you created a door to hell, in the room where you sleep…”

  He finishes his bite. “Oh,” he says. “It’s curry. I wasn’t expecting that. The queen was coronated with curry chicken salad?”

  “Shepard. Focus.”

  He tilts his head. “I’m focusing, focusing … I like the raisins.”

  I groan, and wipe some chalk on his leg. He pulls his thigh away, laughing.

  “What’s your surname?” I ask.

  “Is it that hard calling me ‘Shepard’?”

  “It’s awfully familiar,” I grouse.

  He laughs some more. He’s very good at smiling and laughing while he eats. It isn’t even a little disgusting. “It’s Love.”

  I frown and pull away from him. “It’s not—”

  “My last name. It’s Love.”

  “You’re joking.”

  He takes another bite, still smiling. “I am not. Feel free to call me that if it feels less familiar.”

  “Ugh, you’re inherently impossible.”

  “Untrue, I’m Normal. I’m utterly possible.”

  “Tell me more about the door,” I say. “Why’d you do this in your bedroom?”

  Shepard’s smile falls a notch. He looks down at his lap. “Well, I didn’t want to do it in anyone else’s space—and I don’t think demons live in hell, by the way. I think they’re more like beings from other dimensions.”

  “What did you use to draw the door?”

  He sets down the sandwich, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “Blood, soil, water, ash, and milk.”

  “Your own blood?”

  He licks his bottom lip. “It had to be my own blood. The guy who sold me the ritual was very clear.”

  “How much did the ritual cost?”

  He raises an eyebrow. “Nothing?”

  “Is that an answer or a question?”

  He shrugs and looks back at his lap, brushing off some crumbs. “It’s one of those ‘we don’t get paid unless you get paid’ situations…”

  I have a bad feeling about this. I almost don’t want to push him for a real answer. “What did it cost?”

  “Nothing. Yet.” He closes his eyes, like he’s bracing himself. “My thirdborn child.”

  I slap his shoulder. “Shepard.”

  He peeks over at me.

  “How could you,” I say.

  “I talked him down from my firstborn—they always want the firstborn—he was cutting me a deal!”

  “So there’s some shady character out there waiting for you to start a family?”

  “Aw. Ken’s not shady. He’s a stand-up guy with a big heart.” He smiles. “That’s a joke—he’s a giant.”

  I smack him again. “Shepard!” I’m shaking my head, dumbfounded. “You know that giants eat babies…”

  “Penelope, it’s fine. I’m not having three kids. I may not have any kids. I’m a child of divorce.”

  I stand up, still shaking my head, and add GIANT! to my What We Know list. “So you met this giant … somehow…”

  “I met him the usual way.”

  “You chased him off the road?”

  “No. I not
iced him and said hello. We’ve been friends for a while.”

  I lean back against a blank spot on the blackboard. “I guess I’m impressed he hasn’t eaten you.”

  “I think he only eats babies…”

  “Merlin and Morgana and bloody Anne Boleyn,” I say. “So this baby-eating giant you’ve befriended collects demonic rituals?”

  “It was in a book he had.”

  “He collects old books?”

  Shepard holds a finger up as if he’s about to say something interesting and not something outrageous. “He collects miniatures.”

  “Of course he does.”

  “Magickal miniatures,” he adds.

  “Naturally,” I say.

  “I was helping him organize his collection. He tends to break things…”

  “I mean.” I’m just nodding my head now, like this all stands to reason.

  “He liked having someone else around who really appreciated his collection.”

  “Which includes a book of demon-summoning rituals.”

  “It was a book about demon culture! That’s what Ken told me, anyway. He could read some of it, but only with a magnifying glass, and kind of the way you or I could read Spanish out loud, phonetically, even if we didn’t understand it. Ken knew I’d always wanted to meet a demon.”

  “Why have you always wanted to meet a demon?”

  “Who wouldn’t? Can’t you think of a thousand questions you’d ask a demon?”

  “I’d ask him to let go of your soul. That’s all. Then I’d close the door.”

  Shepard’s back to eating his sandwich. “They’re not all ‘he’s, you know. I’m not sure any of them are ‘he’s. What’s gender to a demon?”

  “Did you get a chance to ask him that?”

  Shepard looks sheepish. “I did not.”

  “Okay…” I look back at my board. I write in Ken.

  “If Ken is such a good friend, why didn’t he just give you the ritual?”

  “A guy’s got to eat. Plus, it was a lot of work for him. He had to write the whole thing out phonetically.”

  “And he didn’t tell you what it actually said?”

  “He didn’t know! Like I said, he knew the letters, but only a few words here and there.”

  “What did Ken say afterwards, when you told him what happened with the demon?”

  Shepard’s face falls—like he pities Ken, of all people. “He felt terrible.”

  “He’s going to feel a lot worse when I talk to him about this thirdborn situation. Did he try to help you at all?”

  “He said he was afraid of making it worse.”

  “What’s worse than losing your soul to a demon?”

  “Dying, I guess. Getting cursed along with me.”

  “Let’s call him,” I say. “This Ken. Right now.”

  “We can’t call him. He’s asleep.”

  “Nonsense, it’s ten A.M. in Chicago.” This is math I’m used to doing.

  “No, I mean he’s hibernating. He’ll be asleep for years.”

  “Giants hibernate?”

  Shepard shakes his head at me. “If you ever gave me a chance, I could teach you so much about magic…”

  “Oh my goodness, Shepard, stop. I’m going to roll my eyes so hard, they’ll get stuck.” I sit back down on the arm of the couch, tapping my lip. “Let’s stick a pin in Ken and come back to him. All right, so it was midnight … You drew the door, you read the ritual…”

  “And it worked. The demon showed up. The marks appeared on my arms. It left.” Shepard is looking at his lap, scratching the back of his head. He isn’t smiling at all.

  “Tell me about it.”

  He sighs. “It was a demon.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “Does that matter?”

  “I guess not. What did it say?”

  “Not much. Small talk … ‘Who calls me?’ ‘Did you call me of your own free will?’ Yada, yada.”

  “Yada, yada?”

  “It really was just small talk, Penelope. I thought we were having a nice time.”

  “And then?”

  “And then tattoos.”

  “And it didn’t explain?”

  “It said … I don’t remember exactly what it said.”

  SHEPARD

  “Who calls me?” the demon said, pushing open the door in the floor.

  “Hi,” I said. “My name is Shepard Love. I’m from Omaha, Nebraska. I’m studying journalism.” I was still in school then.

  It climbed into the room with me, like it was walking up stairs—I wasn’t expecting it to do that. It sat on my bed. I offered it a can of Coke, and it took it. This is going so well, I remember thinking.

  The demon spoke English with no accent. Or maybe with my accent. (When I was a little kid, I thought my accent was the true neutral. Because everyone on TV sort of sounds like they’re from Omaha, Nebraska.)

  It seemed a bit hassled at first, like I’d interrupted it in the middle of something. But then it was polite. I told it a lot about myself. That’s something one of my journalism professors taught me. You can soften up a source by sharing things about yourself. It’s like saying, This is a safe place for intimacy. This has always come naturally to me. I like telling people about myself. I like listening when it’s their turn to talk. I like being such a good listener that they sort of forget about me. Most people really like to talk about themselves; it doesn’t take much encouragement.

  The demon was less forthcoming than most people. It didn’t forget itself.

  It sat on my bed—Penelope would be horrified—and drank my Coke and got right to the point.

  “Did you call me of your own free will?” it asked.

  “Yes,” I told it. “Of course. I was excited to meet you.”

  It nodded at me. My room was full of sulphurous smoke by then. “All right, Shepard Love from Omaha, Nebraska—you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  PENELOPE

  I’m running out of space on my blackboard wall. I cast the spell on a second wall and push the TV out of the way. Simon would complain about this if he were here, but Simon isn’t here.

  NEXT STEPS, I write in big block letters, as high as I can reach. “I still think we should wake the giant. I’m putting that on the list. And also, if the giant could read this demon language, maybe someone else can. Maybe it’s not totally dead or obscure—maybe there’s even another copy of that book. Was it handwritten?”

  Language! I write.

  The book. More copies? Check at Watford. Pitch Library?

  “You know, the Mage actually seized a bunch of old magickal books. Wonder where those ended up…” I tap my chin.

  Ask Premal about the Mage’s book stash.

  “Was the book handwritten?” I ask again.

  When Shepard doesn’t answer, I turn away from the wall.

  His head is down, and he’s running his fingertips up and down the raised stripes of his trousers.

  “The book,” I say, “was it handwritten? Could there be more copies?”

  Shepard looks up at me, with one eye closed, like he’s thinking. “Penelope. I have to go now, if I’m going to make my flight.”

  “What? No—you’ve still got time.”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

  I pick up my phone … Oh. He doesn’t have time. He’s already going to be cutting it close. I look back at the blackboard. “But…”

  Shepard stands up, pulling his backpack straps over his shoulders. “This helped.”

  “It didn’t help,” I say. “We were just getting started—”

  Then he reaches for my face, and for a completely absurd moment, I think he might be trying to kiss me good-bye—but he’s just rubbing chalk from my chin. “It helped,” he says. “You have a way of making things seem manageable. I like it.”

  “But we didn’t manage anything.”

  He hooks his thumbs on his backpack straps. “You have my number now. Remember, you’re going to send m
e derisive texts.”

  I’m examining my blackboard again, like it might give me something useful to send home with him. “About what?”

  “Ah, just assume I’m doing something you wouldn’t approve of.”

  I look back at him. “That is a safe bet.”

  He winks at me. “I know.”

  Shepard is walking to the door now, and I’m walking with him. He’s going back to America. Where he doesn’t have a truck anymore. I mean, he’ll be fine. He’ll bounce back. He’s very bouncy. Unsinkable. Cursed, but unsinkable. Still totally cursed. And foolish. Too trusting. Will he even make it to Heathrow with both kidneys?

  I would help him if I could.

  If it were my responsibility …

  No—if it were in my power. I would help him if I were a better mage.

  But a better mage wouldn’t help him …

  There’s a patch sewn to his backpack that says, BE SOFT.

  “Shepard!” I say.

  He stops in the doorway.

  “Stay.”

  He smiles, but it’s sad. “Penelope…”

  “Stay,” I say again. “We just got started.”

  “We’ve been through this already. Twice.”

  “I know, I’m sorry!” I hold my palms up to him. “I’m sorry I keep jerking you around. I’ve had a really rough couple of weeks, and I don’t know which way is up. I still don’t know if I can help you by myself—honestly, I wouldn’t bet my thirdborn on it—but just…” I take hold of his denim sleeve. “Stay. Let me try. What have you got to lose?”

  Shepard looks down at me. “You know you don’t have to do this by yourself.”

  “No, it’s okay. I want to do what I can. I’m not completely useless. In every situation. Usually. I think.”

  “No. I mean—Penelope, I’m here, too. We can work on this together.”

  Oh …

  Right.

  I suppose we can.

  26

  BAZ

  Simon didn’t take it well.

  “There’s a new Chosen One?”

  This was last night. After we went hunting. (I still can’t believe that he came hunting with me. That he watched me drink rat blood and still wanted to kiss me. Repeatedly.) We’d eaten my aunt’s Bourbons, and we were headed back to sleep. My head was resting on his chest. It was bliss.