“No. Just my mum fixing things . . .” He glances over at me. “You must think I’m a right plonker. Letting Smith fool me like that. Hiding in his basement, just because he told me to.”
I shake my head. “I don’t think that—I believed him, too.”
“Part of mestillbelieves in him.” Jamie sighs. “I really am a plonker.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, “about your magic.”
“Ah, it’s all right.” He throws a napkin into the bag. “I didn’t have much to lose. Not like you. You must miss it like crazy.”
“I do. But . . . if I’m being honest, I was never any good at it either. It’s not just about power, you know—you have to have some skill.”
Jamie buckles his safety belt. “My sister was a brilliant magician. She was so good, they sent her to Watford a year early.”
“My friend Penelope started school early, too.” Penny had to wait almost a year to go the pub with the rest of us.
“Mitali’s daughter.”
“That’s right.” I start the van—Penny charmed it to work without a key—and glance over at Jamie. “Were you jealous of her? Your sister?”
“Of Lucy?” He sounds surprised. “No. I mean, I missed her. When she left for school. We thought I’d be joining her someday. She used to tell me how she was going to show me around Watford once I got there, teach me all the tricks . . .” A wave of exhaustion seems to roll over him. He drops the rubbish onto the floor. “Nah, I wasn’t jealous of Lucy. She was so good to me . . . I couldn’t begrudge her anything.”
I know what I want to ask him next, but I’m not sure that I should. I wait until we’re driving again, my eyes on the road. “What happened to your sister? I hope that’s not a rude question. Your mum showed us her picture . . . and the candle.”
“Lucy ran away,” Jamie says. “When she was about your age.”
I glance over at him. “Ran away from what?”
“Fromwho,” he says, pushing a hand roughly through his hair. “She got involved with a bad bloke. My parents reckoned she left the country to hide from him.”
“Christ,” I say. “He must have been terrible, if she had to run away from the whole World of Mages.”
Jamie’s squinting out the window. “My mum doesn’t like us to talk about it . . .”
“Sure,” I say, “I understand.”
“. . . because it was the Mage.”
I turn my whole head towards him, then whip my eyes back onto the road. “TheMage?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Your sister datedthe Mage?”
“They met at school.”
“I didn’t know the Magedated. . .”
“My parents hated him.” Jamie’s voice is flat. This is all old news for him. “They thought he was a nutter. My mum wanted to send Lucy to Switzerland to get away from him.”
“What’s in Switzerland?”
“I still don’t know. Anyway, Lucy didn’t listen. She and Davy ran off after Watford—maybe they got married. Whatever happened, it wasn’t good. She used to write my mum these letters . . .” He trails off. I give him a moment to go on, but he doesn’t.
“And then what?”
He shrugs. “Then she stopped writing. She disappeared.”
I can’t wrap my head around this. Not even a little. “What did the Mage say about that?”
