“Penny.” I frown and lie back on my bed. I’m knackered.
I feel her climbing up next to me. “Try again,” she says, taking my hand.
“No.”
“Why did you try with Baz?”
“I didn’t,” I say. “I just wanted to help him, and I didn’t know how. So I put my hand on him andthoughtabout helping him.”
“It was pretty extraordinary.”
“Do you think everyone could tell?”
“No… Maybe. I don’t know.Icouldn’t tell, not for certain—and I was the closest. But I saw him stand straighter when you touched him. And then the spell started working. There’s no way that Baz is powerful enough to chant back a dragon…” She squeezes my hand. “Try again.”
I squeeze hers back. “No. I’ll hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt Baz.”
“Maybe Idid—he’d never admit it.”
“Maybe it didn’t hurt him,” she says, “because he’s already dead.”
“Baz isn’t dead.”
“Well he’s not alive.”
“I… I think he is,” I say. “He has magic. That’s life.”
“Morgan’s tooth—imagine if youcoulddo it again. If you could actually control your power, Simon.”
“Baz was the one controlling my power.”
“It was like you were focused for the first time—directed. You were using him like a wand.”
I close my eyes. “I wasn’t using him.”
48
BAZ
When I come back, Bunce is gone. I can tell she’s been sitting on my bed again—it smells like her. Like blood and chocolate and kitchen herbs. I’ll snap at her about it tomorrow.
Snow has showered, the room is humid from it, but our papers and dinner things are still scattered on the table and the floor. It’s like having two slovenly roommates.
The blackboard is in order, though, completely filled with Bunce’s tight-fisted handwriting and pushed against the wall.
I take my jacket off and spell it clean, hanging it in my wardrobe. My tie’s tucked in the pocket. I pull it out and loop it around the hanger.
I ate my sandwich down in the basement, washing it down with a few rats. I need to go hunting in the Wood again; the rats are getting few and far between in the Catacombs, even though I try not to take the females.
It’s a pain to hunt in the Wood. I have to do it during the day because the Mage brings the drawbridge up at dusk, and I can’t “Float like a butterfly” over the moat every night like I did today; I don’t have the magic.
I look over my shoulder at Snow—a long, blanketed lump on his bed.
Hehas the magic.
He could do anything.
