Carry On (23 page)

We're both staring at our joined hands. I can still feel his magic.

“We can talk about this after our lessons,” Baz says. “Back here.”

His grip loosens, and I yank my hand back. “Fine.”

*   *   *

I get to breakfast late, and Penelope hasn't set any kippers or toast aside for me.

She says she doesn't feel like talking, and I don't feel like talking either, even though I have so much I need to tell her.

Agatha still isn't sitting with us. I don't even see her this morning—I wonder if she's off somewhere with Baz. I should have added that to the truce:
And also you have to leave my girlfriend alone.

Ex-girlfriend, I guess. Anyway. “Have you heard any more from your mum?” I ask Penny.

“No,” she says. “Is Baz going to turn me in?”

“No. Is the Mage back?”

“I haven't seen him.”

She eats half as much of her breakfast as usual, and I eat twice as much, just to keep my mouth busy. I leave early for my Greek lesson because I feel like I've let Penny down—I can't take her side against the Mage. For what it's worth, I could never take his side against her, either.

When I get to the classroom, Baz is already there. Ignoring me. He ignores me all morning. I see him in the hallway a few times, whispering with Dev and Niall.

When it's time to meet back in our room, I tell Penny that I'm skipping tea to study, and run across the courtyard to get back to Mummers House.

I get as far as the stairs before I start wondering whether the meeting is a trap—which is just paranoid. Baz doesn't have to
lure
me to our room; I'm there every night.

It's not like the time he tried to feed me to the chimera. That time, he asked me to meet him in the Wavering Wood. He said he had information for me, about my parents, and that it was too dangerous to risk saying it on school grounds.

I knew he was lying.

I told myself I was going to the Wood just to see what he was up to and beat him into the ground. But part of me still thought that maybe he really
did
know something about my parents—I mean,
someone
must know who they are. And even if Baz was just going to use what he knew against me, it would still be something.

It was fucking beautiful when the chimera noticed Baz first, hiding in the trees, and went after him instead of me. I should have let the monster have a go at him. It would have served Baz right.…

Then there was the time when we were sixth years, and he left me a note in Agatha's handwriting, telling me to wait for her under the yew tree after dark. It was freezing, and of course she didn't show up, and I was stuck outside all night until the drawbridge was lowered the next morning. My heat spell wouldn't work, and the snow devils kept throwing chestnuts at my head. I thought about smashing them, but they're a protected magickal species. (Global warming.) I kept expecting something worse to show up. Why would Baz torture me with snow devils? They're just half-sentient snowballs with eyebrows and hands. They're not even
dark.
But nothing else came, which meant Baz's evil plan fell apart—or that his evil plan was to freeze me only half to death on the night before a big exam.

Then last year, he told me Miss Possibelf wanted to see me, and when I got to her office, he'd trapped a polecat in there. Miss Possibelf was sure I must be responsible—even though she really likes me.

I retaliated by putting the polecat in his wardrobe, which wasn't much of a retaliation because we share a room.

I'm at our door now. Still trying to decide whether this is a trap. I decide it doesn't matter—because even if I knew for sure that it
was
a trap, I'd still go in.

When I open the door, Baz is wheeling an old-fashioned chalkboard in front of our beds.

“Where did that come from?” I ask.

“A classroom.”

“Yeah, but how did it get up here?”

“It flew.”

“No,” I say, “seriously.”

He rolls his eyes. “I
Up, up and away
-ed it. It wasn't much work.”

“Why?”

“Because we're solving a mystery, Snow. I like to organize my thoughts.”

“Is this how you normally plot my downfall?”

“Yes. With multicoloured pieces of chalk. Stop complaining.” He opens up his book bag and takes out a few apples and things wrapped in wax paper. “Eat,” he says, throwing one at me.

It's a bacon roll. He's also got a pot of tea.

“What's all this?” I say.

“Tea, obviously. I know you can't function unless you're stuffing yourself.”

I unwrap the roll and decide to take a bite. “Thanks.”

“Don't thank me,” he says. “It sounds wrong.”

“Not as wrong as you bringing me bacon butties.”

“Fine, you're welcome—when's Bunce getting here?”

“Why would she?”

“Because you do everything together, don't you? When you said you'd help, I was counting on you bringing your smarter half.”

“Penelope doesn't know anything about this,” I say.

“She doesn't know about the Visiting?”

“No.”

“Why not? I thought you told her everything.”

“It just … seemed like your business.”

“It
is
my business,” Baz says.

“Right. So I didn't tell her. Now, where do we start?”

His face falls into a pout. “I was counting on Bunce to tell us where to start.”

“Let's start with what we know,” I say. That's where Penelope always starts.

“Right.” Baz actually seems nervous. He's tapping the chalk against his trouser leg, leaving white smudges.
Nicodemus,
he writes on the chalkboard in neat slanted script.

“That's what we don't know,” I say. “Unless you've come up with something.”

He shakes his head. “No. I've never heard of him. I did a cursory check in the library during lunch—but I'm not likely to find anything in
A Child's Garden of Verses.
”

Most of the magickal books have been removed from the Watford library. The Mage wants us to focus on Normal books so that we stay close to the language.

Before the Mage's reforms, Watford was so protective of traditional spells that they'd teach those instead of newer spells that worked better. There were even initiatives to make Victorian books and culture more popular with the Normals, just to breathe some new life into old spells.

“Language evolves,”
the Mage says.
“So must we.”

Baz looks back at the chalkboard again. His hair is dry now and falling in loose locks over his cheeks; he tucks a piece behind his ear, then writes a date on the chalkboard:

12 August 2002.

I start to ask what happened that day, then I realize.

“You were only 5,” I say. “Do you remember anything?”

He looks at me, then back at the board. “Some.”

 

43

BAZ

Some. I don't remember how the day started or any of the normal parts.

I remember only a few things about that whole year: A trip to the zoo. The day my father shaved his moustache and I didn't recognize him.

I remember going to the nursery, in general.

That we got digestives and milk every day. The rabbit mural on the ceiling. A little girl who bit me. I remember that there were trains, and I liked the green one. That there were babies, and sometimes, if one was crying, the miss would let me stand over the cradle and say, “It's okay, little puff, you'll be all right.” Because that's what my mum would say to me when I cried.

I don't think there were that many of us there. Just the children of faculty. Two rooms. I was still in with the babies.

I don't specifically remember going there on the twelfth of August. But I do remember when the vampires broke down the door.

Vampires—we—are unusually strong when we're on the hunt. A heavy oak door carved with bunnies and badgers … that wouldn't be a barrier for a team of us.

I can't tell you how many vampires came to the nursery that day. It seemed like dozens, but that can't be right, because I was the only child who was bitten. I remember that one of them, a man, picked me up like I was a puppy—by the back of my dungarees. The bib came up and choked me for a second.

The way I remember it, my mother was right behind them, there almost immediately. I could hear her shouting spells before I saw her. I saw her blue fire before I saw her face.

My mother could summon fire under her breath. She could burn for hours without tiring.

She shot streams of fire over the children's heads; the air was alive with it.

I remember people scrambling. I remember watching one of the vampires light up like a Roman candle. I remember the look on my mother's face when she saw me, a flash of agony before the man holding me sank his teeth into my neck.

And then
pain.

And then nothing …

I must have passed out.

When I woke up, I was in my mother's quarters, and Father and Fiona were casting healing spells over me.

When I woke up, my mother was gone.

 

44

SIMON

Baz lifts his hand to the board and writes
Vampires,
and then,
On a mission from the Humdrum,
and then,
one fatality.

I don't know how he can do this—talk about vampires without acknowledging that he is one. Pretending that I don't already know. That he doesn't know I already know.

“Well, not just one fatality,” I say. “There were also the vampires, weren't there? Did your mother kill them all? How many?”

“It's impossible to say.” He folds his arms. “There were no remains.” He turns back to the chalkboard. “There
are
no remains, in that sort of death—just ashes.”

“So the Humdrum sends vampires to Watford—”

“The first breach in school history,” he says.

“And the last,” I add.

“Well, it's got a lot harder, hasn't it?” Baz says. “That's one thing we can give your Mage—this school's as tight as a drum. He'd hide Watford behind the Veil if he could.”

“Have there been
any
vampire attacks since then?”

Baz shrugs. “I don't think vampires normally attack magicians. My father says they're like bears.”

They.

“How?” I ask.

“Well, they hunt where it's easiest for them, among the Normals, and they don't attack magicians unless they're starving or rabid. It's too much fuss.”

“What else does your father tell you about vampires?”

Baz's voice is ice: “The subject rarely comes up.”

“Well, I'm just saying”—I square my shoulders and speak deliberately—“it would help in this specific situation if we
knew
how vampires worked.”

His lip curls. “Pretty sure they drink blood and turn into bats, Snow.”

“I meant culturally, all right?”

“Right, you're a fiend for culture.”

“Do you want my help or not?”

He sighs and writes
Vampires: Food for thought
on the board.

I shove the last bite of roll into my mouth. “Can vampires really turn into bats?”

“Why don't you ask one. Moving on: What else do we know?”

I get off the bed and wipe my hands on my trousers, then take a bound copy of
The Record
off my desk. “I looked up the coverage of the attack—” I open the book to the right place and hold it out to him. His mother's official portrait takes up half the page. There's also a photo of the nursery, burned and blackened, and the headline:

VAMPIRES IN THE NURSERY

Natasha Grimm-Pitch dies defending Watford from dark creatures.

Are any of our children safe?

“I've never seen this,” Baz says, taking the book. He sits in my chair and starts reading the story out loud:

“
The attack took place only days before the autumn term began. Imagine the carnage that would have occurred on a typical Watford day.…

“
Mistress Mary, the nursery manager, said that one of the beasts attacked Grimm-Pitch from behind, clamping its fangs onto her neck after she neatly decapitated another who was threatening her very own son. ‘She was like Fury herself,' Mary said. ‘Like something out of a film. The monster bit her, and she choked out a
Tyger, tyger, burning bright—
then they both went up in flames.…'”

Baz stops reading. He looks rattled. “I didn't know that,” he says, more to the book than to me. “I didn't know she'd been bitten.”

“What's
Tiger, tiger
—?” I stop. I don't trust myself to say new spells out loud.

“It's an immolating spell,” he says. “It was popular with assassins … and spurned lovers.”

“So she killed herself? Intentionally?”

He closes his eyes, and his head hangs forward over the book. I feel like I should do something to comfort him, but there's no way to be comforted by your worst enemy.

Except … Hell, I'm
not
his worst enemy, am I? Hell and horrors.

I'm still standing next to him, and I bump my hand against his shoulder—sort of a comforting bump—and reach for the book. I pick up reading out loud where he left off:

“Her son, 5-year-old Tyrannus Basilton, was shaken, but unharmed. His father, Malcolm Grimm, has taken the boy to the family home in Hampshire to recover.

“The Coven is convened in an emergency meeting as of this writing to discuss the attack on Watford; the escalation of the dark creature problem; and the appointment of an interim headmaster.