“Baz will turn you in if he catches you in our tower,” I say. “And you will get suspended.”
She waves her hand, dismissively. “He’s out by the pitch, watching the team practise. Pitch on the pitch.”
She shoves at the door, and I stop her. “Someone else will turn you in, then.”
“Nah. All the boys in our year are scared of me. They think I’ll turn them into frogs.”
“Is there a spell for that?”
“Yes, but it’s enormously draining, and I’d have to kiss them to turn them back.”
I sigh and let go of the door, peeking down the stairs while Penelope slips past me into my room.
“I’m just here to talk you into coming with me,” she says.
“Not gonna work.”
“Come on, Simon. My mum won’t lecture me so much if you’re around.”
“She’ll lecture me instead.” I sit down on my bed. I’ve got a few books spread out there. And some old documents from the library.
“Right. It’s a shared burden—hey, are you reading The Magickal Record?”
The Record is the closest thing magicians have to a newspaper. It keeps track of births and deaths, magickal bonds and laws, plus minutes from every Coven meeting. I snuck a few bound volumes from the early 2000s out of the library. “Yep,” I say, “I’ve heard it’s fascinating.”
“You heard that from me,” she says, “and I know you weren’t listening. Why are you reading The Magickal Record?”
I look up from the books. “Have you ever heard of a magician called ‘Nico’ or ‘Nicodemus’?”
“Like, in history?”
“No. I don’t know—maybe. Just anybody. Maybe a politician or someone who was on the Coven? Or a professor?”
She’s leaning against my bed. “Is this for the Mage? Are you on a mission?”
“No.” I shake my head. “No, I haven’t even seen him. I was—it’s about Baz.” Penny rolls her eyes. “I was thinking about his mum,” I say, “something I heard, that maybe she had an enemy.”
“The Pitches have always had more enemies than friends.”
“Right. Anyway, it’s probably not important.”
Penny isn’t that interested, but I’ve asked a question, so she tries to answer it. “An enemy named Nico…” But then something in her coat pocket chimes. Her eyes get big, and she jabs her hand in her pocket.
I feel my eyes get big, too. “Do you have a phone?”
“Simon—”
“Penelope, you can’t have a mobile at Watford!”
She folds her arms. “I don’t see why not.”
“Because of the rules. They’re a security risk.”
She frowns and pulls out the phone—a white iPhone, a new one. “My parents feel better if I carry it.”
“How does that even work in here?” I ask. “There’re supposed to be spells.…”
Penelope’s checking her texts. “My mum magicked it. She’s here now, at the gates—” She looks up. “—Please come with us.”
“Your mum would make a terrifying supervillain.”
Penny grins. “Come to dinner, Simon.”
I shake my head again. “No, I want to look this stuff over before Baz comes back.”
Finally she gives in, and runs down the tower stairs like she doesn’t give a fig about getting caught. I go to the window to see if I can spot Baz out on the pitch.
36
PENELOPE
My mum insisted on me having a mobile after what happened with the Humdrum.
For a few weeks this summer, she was saying I couldn’t come back to Watford at all, and my dad didn’t even try to talk her down. I think maybe he felt responsible. Like he should have figured the Humdrum out by now.
Dad spent the whole month of June in his lab, not even coming out to eat. Mum made his favourite biryani and left steaming plates of it outside his door.
“That madman!” Mum kept ranting. “Sending children to fight the Humdrum!”
“The Mage didn’t send us,” I tried telling her. “The Humdrum took us.” But that just made her angrier. I thought she’d want to work out how the Humdrum had done it. (It’s impossible to steal someone like that, to port them that far. The magic required … Even Simon doesn’t have enough.) But Mum refused to approach it intellectually.
It made me really glad that she doesn’t know the details of every other scrape Simon and I have got ourselves into—and got ourselves out of, I should add. We deserve some credit for that.
Mum probably would have cooled down sooner, if it weren’t for the nightmares.…
I didn’t scream when it actually happened:
One minute, Simon and I were in the Wavering Wood, gaping at Baz and Agatha—me holding Simon’s arm. And the next minute, we were in a clearing in Lancashire. Simon recognized it—he lived in a home there when he was a kid, near Pendle Hill. There’s this big sound sculpture that looks like a tornado, and I thought at first that the noise was the Humdrum.
I could already feel that we were in one of his dead spots.
Dad studies dead spots, so I’ve been to loads of them. They’re the holes in the magickal atmosphere that started appearing when the Humdrum did. Stepping into a dead spot is like losing a sense. Like opening your mouth and realizing you can’t make any noise. Most magicians can’t handle it. They start to lose their shit immediately. But Dad told me he’s never had as much magic as most magicians, so it isn’t as terrifying for him to think of losing it.