“So you didn’t like her? Natasha Grimm-Pitch?”
“I didn’t like her politics,” he says. “She thought low-powered magicians should give up their wands.”
Low-powered magicians. Like my dad.
“Why did the vampires attack Watford?” I ask. “They’d never done it before.”
“The Humdrum sent them,” Dad says.
“But it doesn’t say that”—I lean towards him, across the table—“in the initial news stories, right after the attack. It just says it was vampires.”
He looks up at me again, interested. “That’s right.” He nods. “We didn’t know at first. We just thought the dark creatures were taking advantage of how disorganized we were. It was a different time. Everything was looser. The World of Mages was more like a … club. Or a society. There was no line of defence. There were even werewolf attacks back then—in London proper, can you imagine?”
“So no one knew the Humdrum was behind the attack on Watford?”
“Not for a while,” he says. “We didn’t know the Humdrum was an entity at first.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when the holes started appearing—”
“In 1998.”
“Yes,” he says, “that’s when we first recorded them. Seventeen years ago. We thought they might be a natural phenomenon, or maybe even the result of pollution. Like the holes in the ozone layer. It was Dr. Manning who first coined the term, I remember. He visited the hole in Lancashire and described it as ‘an insidious humdrum, a mundanity that creeps into your very soul.’” Dad smiles. He likes a well-turned phrase. “I started my research not long after that.”
“When did you guys realize that the Humdrum was a ‘he’?”
“We still don’t know it’s a ‘he.’”
“You know what I mean—when did you realize it was a thing with intention? That it was attacking us?”
“There wasn’t one day,” he says. “I mean, everything sort of shifted in 2008. I personally think that the Humdrum got more powerful around that time. We’d been tracking these small holes, like bubbles in the magickal atmosphere—and they suddenly mushroomed, like a cancer metastasizing. Around the same time, the dark world went mad. I suppose it was when the dark creatures started coming for Simon directly that we knew there was malice there—and intelligence—not just natural disaster. And then there was the feeling. The holes, the attacks … there’s a distinct feeling.” His eyes focus on me, and his mouth tightens.
After the Humdrum kidnapped Simon and me last year, Dad wanted to know every detail. I told him most of it—everything about the Humdrum, even what he looks like. Dad thinks the Humdrum took Simon’s form to mock him.
I rest my elbows on the counter. “Why do you think the Humdrum hates Simon so much?”
“Well.” He wrinkles his nose. “The Humdrum seems to hate magic. And Simon does have more of it than anyone—maybe anything—else.”
“It’s weird that the Humdrum isn’t its real name,” I say. “I mean, that it didn’t come with that name or name itself.…”
“Do you think a dark creature would choose the name ‘the Insidious Humdrum’?”
“I’ve never thought about it,” I say. “It’s just always been there.”
Dad sighs and pushes up his glasses. “That breaks my heart, to think that you can’t remember a world without the Humdrum. I worry that your generation will just acclimate to it. That you won’t see the necessity of fighting back.”
“I think I’ll see, Dad. The foul thing kidnapped me—and it keeps trying to kill my best friend.”
He frowns and keeps looking at me. “You know, Penelope … There’s a team of Americans coming in a few weeks. I think I finally got their attention when we visited this summer.”
Dad met with as many other magickal scientists as he could while we visited Micah. There was a magickal geologist who took a real interest in Dad’s work.
The American mages are much less organized than we are. They live all over the country and mostly do their own thing. But there’s more money there. Dad’s been trying to convince other international scientists that the Humdrum is a threat to the entire magickal world, not just the British one.
“I’d love it if you could come along on a few of our surveys,” he says. “You could meet Dr. Schelling; he has his own lab in Cleveland.”
I see what he’s doing—this is how my dad is going to keep me safe from the Humdrum. By hiding me in Ohio.
“Maybe,” I say. “If I can get out of lessons.”
“I’ll write you a note.”
“Can Simon come, too?”
He presses his lips together and pushes up his glasses again. “I’m not sure I can write a note for Simon,” he says, picking up his pen. “What did you say your school project is about?”
“The Watford Tragedy.”
“Tell me if you turn anything up that sheds light on the Humdrum. I’ve always wondered whether anyone felt his presence there.”
His head’s back in his work now. So I hop off the chair and start to leave. I stop at the door. “Hey, Dad, one more thing—did you ever know a magician named Nicodemus?”
He looks up, and his face doesn’t move at all—so I can tell he’s purposely not reacting. “I can’t say that I have,” he says. “Why?”