“Yeah, but, sir…” I was sitting in that giant leather chair up in his office, the one with three horns attached to the top. “The Crucible must have made a mistake. My roommate’s a complete wanker. He might even be evil. Last week, someone spelled my laptop closed, and I know it was him. He was practically cackling.”
The Mage just sat on his desk, stroking his beard. “The Crucible cast you together, Simon. You’re meant to watch out for him.”
He kept giving me the same answer until I gave up asking. He even said no the time there was proof that Baz had tried to feed me to a chimera.
Baz admitted it, then argued that the fact that he’d failed was punishment enough. And the Mage agreed with him!
Sometimes the Mage doesn’t make any sense to me.…
It was only in the last few years that I realized the Mage makes me stay with Baz to keep Baz under his thumb. Which means, I hope—I think—that the Mage trusts me. He thinks I’m up for the job.
I decide to take a shower and shave while Baz is still gone. I only nick myself twice, which is better than usual. When I get out, wearing flannel pyjama bottoms and a towel around my neck, Baz is by his bed, unpacking his schoolbag.
His head whips up, and his face is all twisted. He looks like I’ve already laid into him.
“What are you doing?” he snarls through his teeth.
“Taking a shower. What’s your problem?”
“You,” he says, throwing his bag down. “Always you.”
“Hello, Baz. Welcome back.”
He looks away from me. “Where’s your necklace?” His voice is low.
“My what?”
I can’t see his whole face, but it looks like his jaw is working.
“Your cross.”
My hand flies to my throat and then to the cuts on my chin. My cross. I took it off weeks ago.
I hurry over to my bed and dig it out, but I don’t put it on. Instead I walk around Baz and stand in his space until he has to look at me. He does. His teeth are clenched, and his head is tipped back and to the side, like he’s just waiting for me to make the first move.
I hold the cross out with both hands. I want him to acknowledge what it is, what it means. Then I lift it up over my head and let it settle gently around my neck. My eyes are locked on Baz’s, and he doesn’t look away, though his nostrils flare.
When the cross is around my neck again, his eyelids dip, and he squares his shoulders.
“Where have you been?” I ask.
His eyes flick back up to mine. “None. Of your. Business.”
I feel my magic surge and try to shove it down. “You look like shit, you know.”
He looks even worse now that I can see him up close. There’s a grey film over him—even over his eyes, which are always grey.
Baz’s eyes are usually the kind of grey that happens when you mix dark blue and dark green together. Deep-water grey. Today they’re the colour of wet pavement.
He huffs a laugh. “Thank you, Snow. You’re looking rough and weedy yourself.”
I am, and it’s his fault. How was I supposed to eat and sleep, knowing he was out there, plotting against me? And now he’s here, and if he’s not going to tell me anything useful, I might as well throttle him for putting me through it.
Or … I could do my homework.
I’ll just do my homework.
I try. I sit at my desk, and Baz sits on his bed. And eventually he leaves without saying anything, and I know that he’s going down to the Catacombs to hunt rats. Or to the Wood to hunt squirrels.
And I know that once he killed and drained a merwolf, but I don’t know why—its body washed up onto the edge of the moat. (I hate the merwolves almost as much as Baz does. They’re not intelligent, I don’t think, but they’re still evil.)
I go to bed after Baz leaves, but I don’t go to sleep. He’s only been back a day, and I already feel like I need to know where he is at every moment. It’s fifth year all over again.
When he finally does come back to our room, smelling like dust and decay, I close my eyes.
That’s when I remember about his mum.
32
BAZ
I almost went up to the Mage’s office tonight.
Just to get my aunt Fiona off my back as soon as possible.
She lectured me all the way to Watford. She thinks the Mage is going to make another move soon. She thinks he’s looking for something specific. Apparently, he’s been visiting—raiding—all the Old Families’ homes for the last two months. Just rolls up in his Range Rover (1981, Warwick green—lovely) and drinks their tea while his merry Men go through their libraries with finding spells.
“The Mage says one of us is working with the Humdrum,” Fiona said, “that there’s nothing to hide so long as we have nothing to hide.”
She didn’t have to tell me that there’s plenty to hide at our place. We’re not working with the Humdrum—why would any magician work with the Humdrum?—but our house is full of banned books and dark objects. Even some of our cookbooks are banned. (Though it’s been centuries, at least, since the Pitches ate fairies.) (You can’t even find fairies anymore.) (And it isn’t because we ate them all.)
Fiona doesn’t live with us. She has a flat in London and dates Normals. Journalists and drummers. “I’m not a race traitor,” she’ll say. “I’d never marry one.” I think she dates them because they don’t seem real. I think it’s all because of my mother.