I think I am, though … a madman.
I mean, I must be.
I’m seeing somebody, to talk about it—a magickal psychologist in Chicago. She’s, like, one of three in the world. We do our sessions over Skype. I want Baz to talk to her, too, but so far, he changes the subject every time I mention it.
His whole family has moved to one of their other houses, up north.
The magic hasn’t come back to Hampshire. Or any of the other dead spots—but there haven’t been any new holes since Christmas. (Dozens of new ones opened that day. I feel bad about that—those are the ones I could have helped.) Penny’s dad keeps calling to reassure me that nothing’s getting worse. I’ve even gone along on a few of his surveys. It’s not a big deal for me to visit the holes, the way it is for other magicians; I don’t have any magic to lose. I mean … it is a big deal for me. But for other reasons.
Penny’s dad thinks the magic will come back to the dead spots eventually. He’s shown me studies about plants growing in Chernobyl and about the California condor. When I told him I was going to university, he said I should study restoration ecology. “It could be very healing, Simon.”
I don’t know. I’m going to start with basic courses and see what sticks.
Baz is starting at the London School of Economics in a few weeks. His parents both went to Oxford, but Baz said he’d be staked before he left London.
“Would that actually work on you?” I asked him.
“What?”
“A stake?”
“I’d think a stake through the heart would kill anyone, Snow.”
He will call me Simon now, occasionally, but only when we’re being soft with each other. (All that’s still happening, too. I suppose I am gay; my therapist says it’s not even in the top five things I have to sort out right now.)
Anyway, Baz and I thought about getting a flat. But we both decided that after seven years together, it might be good to have different roommates. And Penny and I have always talked about having a place together.
I never really thought that would happen.
I never thought there was a path that would lead here, a fourth-floor flat with two bedrooms and a kettle and a grey-eyed vampire sitting on the couch, messing with his new phone.
I never thought there was a path that would lead to both of us alive.
When you look at it that way, it wasn’t that much to give up—my magic. For Baz’s life. For mine.
Sometimes I dream that I still have it. I dream about going off, and I wake up, panting, not sure if it’s true.
But there’s never smoke. My breath doesn’t burn, my skin doesn’t shimmer. I don’t feel like there’s a star going nova in my chest.
There’s just sweat and panic and my heart racing ahead of me—and my doctor in Chicago says that’s all normal for someone like me.
“A fallen supervillain?” I’ll say.
And she’ll smile, from a professional distance. “A trauma victim.”
I don’t feel like a trauma victim. I feel like a house after a fire. And sometimes like someone who died but stayed in his body. And sometimes I feel like someone else died, like someone else sacrificed everything, so that I can have a normal life.
With wings.
And a tail.
And vampires.
And magicians.
And a boy in my arms, instead of a girl.
And a happy ending—even if it isn’t the ending I ever would have dreamt for myself, or hoped for.
A chance.
“What time is it?” Penny asks. “Is it too early for tea? There’re biscuits in one of these boxes. I could magic them up for us.”
Baz looks up from his phone. “The Chosen One’s making us tea the Normal way,” he says. “It’s occupational therapy.”
“I already know how to make tea,” I say. “And I wish you’d stop calling me that.”
“You really were the Chosen One,” Penny says. “You were chosen to end the World of Mages. Just because you failed doesn’t mean you weren’t chosen.”
“The whole prophecy is bollocks,” I say. “‘And one will come to end us. And one will bring his fall.’ Did I also bring my own fall?”
“No,” Baz says. “That was me. Obviously.”
“How did you bring my fall? I stopped the Humdrum myself.”
Baz looks back at his phone, bored. “Fell in love, didn’t you?”
Penny groans, and Baz starts laughing, trying not to crack a smile.
“Enough flirting!” Penny says, flopping down into a stuffed chair her parents gave us. (Which I carried up by myself.) “I’ve endured enough flirting for this lifetime. I’m hungry, Simon. Find the biscuit box.”
Baz grins, then leans over and kisses my neck. (I have a mole there; he treats it like a target.)
“Go on, then,” he says. “Carry on, Simon.”