“The whole house is haunted, I told you.”
“I’m leaving.”
“Come on, Snow, you can sleep on my couch. The wraiths don’t hang out in here.”
“Why not?”
“I creep them out.”
“You creepmeout,” I mutter, and he throws one of his pillows into my face. (It smells like him.)
I realize, as I’m settling in on his couch, that I don’t mean it. About him creeping me out.
I used to mean it. I usually do.
But he’s the most familiar thing in this house, and I fall asleep better, listening to Baz breathe, than I have since winter break started.
56
FIONA
All right, Natasha, I know I shouldn’t have told him anything.
You wouldn’t have done.
Swans right into my flat, looking for trouble.Beingtrouble, every bloody moment he’s alive.
“Tell me about Nicodemus,” he says, like he already knows everything he needs to.
He knows he’s my favourite; that’s the problem. He would be, even if you’d had a litter of pups. Cocky as Mick Jagger, that one. And smart as a horsewhip.
“Who’s been talking to you about Nicodemus?” I ask.
He sits at my grotty little table and starts drinking my tea, dunking the last of my lavender shortbread in it. “Nobody,” he says.Liar.“I’ve just heard that he’s like me.”
“A scheming brat?
“You know what I mean, Fiona.”
“Nice suit, Basil, where are you headed?”
“Dancing.”
He’s all kitted out in his finest. Spencer Hart, if I’m not wrong. Like he’s here to collect his BAFTA.
I sit across from him. “He’s nothing like you,” I say.
“You should have told me,” he says. “That I wasn’t the only one.”
“He chose it. He crossed over.”
“What does it matter whether I chose it, Fiona? The result is the same.”
“Not hardly,” I tell him. “He left our world.Left.Said he was going to evolve.”
He said he was going to be more than magic.
“You’re powerful enough now, Nicky.”
