Baz is reaching out to him. “Let me cast a spell on you, so the Normals won’t see.”
“I’ll be fine,” Simon says. “I’ll keep a low profile.”
“Snow—” Baz looks genuinely concerned. “—please.”
“Let him,” I say. “Seriously.”
Simon rolls his eyes. “Fine, but don’t make me invisible.”
Baz flicks his wrist, and his wand appears in his hand.“There’s nothing to see here!”
Simon shudders and shifts mostly out of sight. “I hate that one.”
“You hate them all,” Baz says. “It’ll wear off. I didn’t put much oomph into it.”
Simon flaps his wings and kicks up into the air. Niamh and I squint up at the sky, trying to keep track of him.
“It’s easier if you don’t look directly at him,” Baz advises.
He’s right. I let my eyes drift and watch Simon flying in my peripheral vision.
“I see them!” he shouts down to us. “The goats!”
“Where are they?” Niamh shouts back.
“Kind of . . . everywhere?”
52
BAZ
We spend the rest of the afternoon out in the hills behind Watford. I eventually stop trying to help; the goats don’t respond to any of my spells. I thought there might be something wrong with my wand, but the Irish girl—Snow’s veterinarian—says it’s the goats, not me. “They only respond to magic if they feel like it,” she says. “My spells roll right off them, too.”
I recognize her from school. Niamh Brody. She used to have fierce blond hair, cut shorter than Simon’s. She played lacrosse and rugby, and she wore heavy work boots with her school uniform. Not Doc Martens or something fashionable. The sort of boots you wear to drive a tractor.
She hasn’t lost her scowl since those days—nor her flair for brute force. She’s bullying the goats around, blocking them like a brick wall. Simon is herding them along from the air; he’s got a death-from-above move that gets the goats going—and makes him laugh like a maniac. Wellbelove is the only one the goats seem to actually listen to. I can’t tell if she’s using magic on them, or if they just like her.
Anyway, the three of them seem to have made some progress—the goats are at least grazing in the same general area now.
I’m sitting in the grass, watching Snow try to keep an old billy goat from wandering away. He gets in front of it and spreads his wings. “Bah!” The goat goes running in the other direction.
Simon sees me watching him and smiles. He still hasn’t put his shirt back on—he doesn’t seem at all self-conscious about it. I suppose Brody has seen his wings before, and Agatha’s seen the rest of him . . .
I scratch the back of my neck, looking down at the grass between my legs.
Snow drops to the ground beside me and lies back in the grass, squinting. The late afternoon sun is picking up every thread of gold in his hair, and throwing every freckle and mole into sharp relief. His cheeks are flushed. He’s a bit out of breath.
“Enjoying yourself?” I ask.
He grins at me. “Yeah . . .”
I hold up his shirt. “Any use for this?”
Snow sits up, still smiling, and takes it from me, collapsing his wings, and pulling the shirt up his arms first, then over his head and down his chest and stomach. He’s watching Wellbelove try to bring one of the last goats in. “Use your wand!” he shouts.
“I am!”
“Not like that!”
