I hold the cross out with both hands. I want him to acknowledge what it is, what it means. Then I lift it up over my head and let it settle gently around my neck. My eyes are locked on Baz’s, and he doesn’t look away, though his nostrils flare.
When the cross is around my neck again, his eyelids dip, and he squares his shoulders.
“Where have you been?” I ask.
His eyes flick back up to mine. “None. Of your.Business.”
I feel my magic surge and try to shove it down. “You look like shit, you know.”
He looks even worse now that I can see him up close. There’s a grey film over him—even over his eyes, which are always grey.
Baz’s eyes are usually the kind of grey that happens when you mix dark blue and dark green together. Deep-water grey. Today they’re the colour of wet pavement.
He huffs a laugh. “Thank you, Snow. You’re looking rough and weedy yourself.”
I am, and it’s his fault. How was I supposed to eat and sleep, knowing he was out there, plotting against me? And now he’s here, and if he’s not going to tell me anything useful, I might as well throttle him for putting me through it.
Or… I could do my homework.
I’ll just do my homework.
I try. I sit at my desk, and Baz sits on his bed. And eventually he leaves without saying anything, and I know that he’s going down to the Catacombs to hunt rats. Or to the Wood to hunt squirrels.
And I know that once he killed and drained a merwolf, but I don’t know why—its body washed up onto the edge of the moat. (I hate the merwolves almost as much as Baz does. They’re not intelligent, I don’t think, but they’re still evil.)
I go to bed after Baz leaves, but I don’t go to sleep. He’s only been back a day, and I already feel like I need to know where he is at every moment. It’s fifth year all over again.
When he finally does come back to our room, smelling like dust and decay, I close my eyes.
That’s when I remember about his mum.
32
BAZ
I almost went up to the Mage’s office tonight.
Just to get my aunt Fiona off my back as soon as possible.
She lectured me all the way to Watford. She thinks the Mage is going to make another move soon. She thinks he’s looking for something specific. Apparently, he’s been visiting—raiding—all the Old Families’ homes for the last two months. Just rolls up in his Range Rover (1981, Warwick green—lovely) and drinks their tea while his merry Men go through their libraries with finding spells.
“The Mage says one of us is working with the Humdrum,” Fiona said, “that there’s nothing to hide so long as we have nothing to hide.”
She didn’t have to tell me that there’s plenty to hide at our place. We’re not working with the Humdrum—why would any magician work with the Humdrum?—but our house is full of banned books and dark objects. Even some of our cookbooks are banned. (Though it’s been centuries, at least, since the Pitches ate fairies.) (You can’t evenfindfairies anymore.) (And it isn’t because we ate them all.)
Fiona doesn’t live with us. She has a flat in London and dates Normals. Journalists and drummers.“I’m not a race traitor,”she’ll say.“I’d nevermarryone.”I think she dates them because they don’t seem real. I think it’s all because of my mother.
Father says Fiona thought my mother hung the moon. (To hear my father talk about her, my mother may haveactuallyhung the moon. Or maybe it was hung for her pleasure.)
Fiona was apprenticing with an herbalist in Beijing when my mother died. She came home for the funeral and never went back. She stayed with my dad until he got remarried, then moved to London. Now my aunt lives on family money and magic, and lives to avenge her sister.
It’s a bad fit.
Fiona is smart—and powerful—but my mother was the chess player in the family. My mother was groomed for greatness. (That’s what everyone says.)
Fiona is vindictive. She’s impatient. And sometimes she just wants to rage against the machine—even if she’s not exactly sure where the machine is or how to properly rage at it.
Her grand plan for uncovering the Mage’s plot is to send me sneaking up to his office. She’s obsessed with the Mage’s office; it was my mother’s office, and I think Fiona thinks she can steal it back from him.
