“Now he won’t. He won’t remember you or me or any of it. He’ll spend the rest of his life wondering how drunk he must have been to have forgotten getting such elaborate tattoos. Get him on the next plane home.”
“You want me to abandon him?”
“Yes!”
“He’s my friend.”
“No. Penelope. He’s a Normal. Whom you’ve known for how long—a few days? A week?”
I don’t reply.
We both hear the front door open. My dad’s home, he’s calling up to Premal.
Mum’s face falls even farther, like someone has heaped another trouble on her back. “Wait here,” she says. “I’ve got to deal with this, then I’ll help you send Shepard on his way.”
She walks out of the kitchen.
I lay my right hand on Shepard’s forehead and whisper: “Rise and shine!”
He opens his eyes, then blinks at me. “Penelope?” Amazing. He really is resistant to memory spells. “Come on,” I say, quietly. “Can you walk?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
I pull him up and towards the kitchen door. We run through the back garden and out into the street. I wave down the first taxi we see and shove Shepard in.
He isn’t smiling when he looks at me. “You were right. Your mom really didn’t like me.”
6
BAZ
Simon Snow is terrible at texting. To no one’s surprise.
I message him from the train station —“I called in every favour to bail out my aunt. She didn’t thank me, and I still don’t know what she was after. How’s Wellbelove Manor?”
“fine,” he texts back. “agatha’s mum made chicken, you in trouble?”
“With my aunt?”
“ for america”
“Goodness, no. I don’t think anyone noticed we were gone. Fiona’s an excellent distraction.”
I wait for him to text back, but Simon never feels obligated to keep a conversation going.
“I’m heading to Oxford,” I send. “I want to talk to my father about Fiona.”
“kk”
“I’ll tell him you said hello.”
“really?”
“No, I was joking. He’s still pretending you don’t exist.”
“right”
“It wasn’t a good joke,” I send.
“not your worst,” Simon sends back.
I laugh, desperate for anything that passes for banter, then quickly type out, “You wouldn’t want to come along with me, would you?”
Simon doesn’t text back immediately. Then—“is that another joke?”
I sigh. “Yeah.”
The last and only time Simon came to my house, the Christmas before last, he inadvertently drained the entire countryside of magic. He’s the reason my parents had to relocate to Oxford. They live in a hunting lodge now. My younger sister had to change schools.
My father disliked Simon Snow long before he ruined our ancestral home. Simon was the Mage’s protégé, and the Mage spent the last fifteen years undermining families like mine. Old families. Powerful families. Wealthy families.
(You might think that all magickal families would be wealthy, but that’s not true. Look at the Bunces. And the Pettys. My father says magic is a tool just like any other, and some people don’t like to work. Bunce would argue with that assessment. But Bunce isn’t here right now, so I don’t have to suffer through her dissent.)
So Simon was already persona non grata in our house. And then he came over for Christmas and made our land unliveable. And then my father figured out—I’m not sure who told him, Fiona wouldn’t have—that Simon and I were being extremely homosexual together.
If I even mention Simon’s name in front of my father, the temperature in the room drops ten degrees.
I usually don’t mention him. My father and I are still firmly pretending that I’m going to make an honest woman out of someone someday. When I went home for my stepmother’s birthday, they’d invited some poor magickal girl from the next town over to sit next to me at dinner. She’d been a couple years ahead of me at Watford, and apparently hadn’t heard the news that Simon Snow showed up at my Leavers’ Ball and snogged me stupid.
I wish he’d show up and snog me stupid right now . . .
Un-bloody-likely. It’s only been twenty-four hours since Snow tried to talk me into dumping him so I could take up with a 300-year-old vampire. (Imagine bringing Lamb the Vampire King home for dinner . . .) I’m hoping we don’t have to talk about that again—that coming back to London has brought Simon back to his senses. Or at least back to himself.
“I’ll be home tomorrow,” I text him.
He doesn’t reply.
As soon as I open the front door, I can hear the television, and my first thought is that I’m in the wrong house. Then I hear my father shouting, and I’m certain I’m in the wrong house—I’ve never heard him raise his voice.
“I won’t ask you again, Sophronia! Put that down this minute! Sophronia!”
One of the twins runs past me, holding a doll over her head. I snatch it.
“Basil!” she shouts, grabbing my waist. Sophie and Petra are 5. This is Sophie, I think, but I’ll be honest, it’s hard for me to tell the twins apart unless they’re smiling.
I pick her up. “Goodness, you’re all grown up. It’s like holding a baby rhinoceros.”
“Basil,” she grins, “hide me.” Definitely Sophie.
“You are well over the line, Sophronia!” Father yells. (Actually yells.)
I carry Sophie into the family room, where Petra’s sobbing on the sofa. I hand her the doll. I always thought that twins were supposed to be best friends, but these two fight like rats. The baby’s crying, too. My father—or possibly his un-hinged doppelgänger?—is pacing with him. He stops when he sees me. “Basilton?”
“Father?”
Malcolm Grimm has two looks: gentleman farmer and gentleman’s gentleman. This is decidedly neither. His white hair is sticking up, his shirt is untucked. He looks like he’s just been roughed up in an alley—no, I’ve seen my father get roughed up in an alley, and he stayed much more pulled together than this.
“Is everything all right?” I ask.
“Tip-top,” he says, automatically. “Basil, would you be so kind?” He hands me the baby and takes Sophie. He scoops up Petra, too. “You pair are going to bed. And if you don’t stay there, I’ll—well, I’ll be very disappointed.”
The baby—Swithin’s nearly 2, I should stop calling him “the baby”—is screaming in my ear.
I pat his back, swaying. “What’s wrong, little puff? Bad night?” I check his nappy, then his forehead. “You’re allowed a bad night. Should we sing a song? Your sisters always liked my singing . . . Even Mordelia.”
I bounce him around the family room, singing songs from the White Album. The whole room is a mess, strewn with toys and clothes. It looks like my father let the girls eat dinner out here—frozen pizza?—and there are two dirty nappies shoved under the coffee table. Is this what happens when my stepmother goes out for the night? Poor Daphne.