Carry On (31 page)

“You have to be alive to be hungry,” Snow says. “You have to be alive to change.”

“Maybe
you
should write a book about vampires,” I say.

“Maybe I should. Apparently, I'm the world's leading expert.”

When I look up, Snow's staring right at me.

I can feel the cross around his neck, like static in my salivary glands, but it's never been less discouraging. I could knock him over right now. (Kiss him? Kill him? Improvise?)

“You should ask your parents,” Snow says.

“Whether I'm
alive
?” Fuck. I didn't mean to say it like that. To concede, even a little.

Snow closes his mouth. Swallows. That's where I'd bite him, right in the throat.

“I
meant,
” he says, “you should ask them if they remember Nicodemus. Maybe they know where he is.”

“I'm not asking my parents about the only magician to run off to join the vampires. Are you a
complete
moron?”

“Oh,” he says. “I guess I didn't think about it that way.”

“You didn't think—” I say. And then—
“
Oh. Oh, oh,
oh.
”

SIMON

Baz is running up the steps again, so I'm running behind him. We haven't seen anyone else since dinner. This house is so big, it could absorb a mob and still seem empty.

We're in a different wing now. Another long hallway. Baz stops in front of a door and starts casting disarming spells. “So predictably paranoid,” he mutters.

“What're we doing?” I ask.

“Looking for Nicodemus.”

“You think he might live here?”

“No,” he says. “But—”

The door opens, and we're in another creepy goth bedroom. This one is like Goth Through the Ages, because on top of the gargoyles, there are posters of '80s and '90s rock stars wearing lots of black eyeliner. And somebody's even written
Never Mind the Bollocks
in yellow spray paint on one wall, ruining the antique black-and-white wallpaper.

“Whose room is this?” I ask.

Baz is crouching next to a bookshelf. “My aunt Fiona's.”

I step back into the doorway. “What are we doing here?”

“Looking for something…” A second later, he pulls out a big purple scrapbook with
Remember the Magic
embossed on the front in gold. “Aha!” he says. “I'm pretty sure Fiona went to school with Ebb. I've heard her talk about her. Disparagingly, I promise you. She never mentioned Ebb's brother, though.…”

Baz is flipping through the pages. I crouch down next to him. “What is that?”

“It's a memory book,” he says. “They used to give them out at Watford before the Mage took over. At your leavers ball. It's got class pictures from every year and little stories.…” He holds the book open to a page full of photos. It makes me wish I had something like it—I don't have any pictures of myself or my friends. Agatha has a few, I think.

Baz has turned to the back of the book, and he's poring over a big class picture, squinting.

Underneath the picture, someone has taped in a few snapshots. “Look,” I say, pointing at a photo of a girl sitting against a tree—the yew tree. She's got mad dark hair with a blond streak, and she's grinning with her nose crunched up and her tongue between her teeth. There's a rawboned boy sitting next to her with his arm slung around her shoulders. “Ebb,” I say. Because the straight blond hair is the same. And the cliff's-edge cheekbones. But I've never seen Ebb looking so cocksure of herself—and I can't imagine her smirking like that. Under the picture, someone's written
Me and Nickels,
and dotted the
i
with a heart.

“Fiona!”
Baz says, snapping the book closed.

I take it from him and open it again, settling down on the floor and leaning against the bed. There are a few pages for each year Fiona was in school—with big class photos and blank pages where you can put other pictures and certificates. It's not hard to spot Fiona in each posed class photo—that white streak must be natural—and then to find Ebb and Nicodemus, always standing next to each other, looking almost exactly alike, but completely different. Ebb looks like Ebb, gentle and unsure, in every picture. Nicodemus looks like he's about to hatch a plan. Even as a first year.

I find another snapshot of Nicodemus and Baz's aunt, this time posing in old-fashioned costumes. “Did you know Watford used to have a drama society?” I ask.

“Watford had a lot of things before the Mage.” Baz takes the book from me and puts it back on the shelf. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“Now? To bed. Tomorrow? London.”

I must be tired, because neither of those statements makes sense to me.

“Come on,” Baz says. “I'll show you to your room.”

*   *   *

My room turns out to be the creepiest one yet:

There's a dragon painted on the archway around the door, and its face is charmed to glow and follow you in the dark.

Plus there's something under the bed.

I don't know exactly
what,
but it moans and clicks and makes the bedposts shake. I end up at Baz's door, telling him I'm going back to Watford.

“What?” He's half asleep when he comes to the door. And flushed—he must have gone hunting after I went to bed. Or maybe they keep kennels for him on the grounds.

“I'm leaving,” I say. “That room is haunted.”

“The whole house is haunted, I told you.”

“I'm leaving.”

“Come on, Snow, you can sleep on my couch. The wraiths don't hang out in here.”

“Why not?”

“I creep them out.”

“You creep
me
out,” I mutter, and he throws one of his pillows into my face. (It smells like him.)

I realize, as I'm settling in on his couch, that I don't mean it. About him creeping me out.

I used to mean it. I usually do.

But he's the most familiar thing in this house, and I fall asleep better, listening to Baz breathe, than I have since winter break started.

 

56

FIONA

All right, Natasha, I know I shouldn't have told him anything.

You wouldn't have done.

Swans right into my flat, looking for trouble.
Being
trouble, every bloody moment he's alive.

“Tell me about Nicodemus,” he says, like he already knows everything he needs to.

He knows he's my favourite; that's the problem. He would be, even if you'd had a litter of pups. Cocky as Mick Jagger, that one. And smart as a horsewhip.

“Who's been talking to you about Nicodemus?” I ask.

He sits at my grotty little table and starts drinking my tea, dunking the last of my lavender shortbread in it. “Nobody,” he says.
Liar.
“I've just heard that he's like me.”

“A scheming brat?

“You know what I mean, Fiona.”

“Nice suit, Basil, where are you headed?”

“Dancing.”

He's all kitted out in his finest. Spencer Hart, if I'm not wrong. Like he's here to collect his BAFTA.

I sit across from him. “He's nothing like you,” I say.

“You should have told me,” he says. “That I wasn't the only one.”

“He chose it. He crossed over.”

“What does it matter whether I chose it, Fiona? The result is the same.”

“Not hardly,” I tell him. “He left our world.
Left.
Said he was going to evolve.”

He said he was going to be more than magic.

“You're powerful enough now, Nicky.”

“What do we say about ‘enough,' Miss Pitch?”

His school tie tucked into his jacket pocket. That cruel, cool smile.

“He betrayed us, Basil.” I feel the old anger—the old everything—rising up in my throat.

“And he was stricken,” my nephew says.

“Because he was a betrayer,” I say.

“Because he was a vampire,” Baz says, and I can't help it—that word still makes me recoil.

It wasn't supposed to be
me,
Natasha. Telling this boy how to make his way in the world. I'm no good at this. Look at me. Thirty-seven years old, rolling my own joints in my dressing gown, eating bikkies for breakfast whenever I manage to get up—I'm a disgrace.

What would
you
say to him if you were here?

No … Never mind. I know what you'd say—and you're
wrong.

That's one way I've bettered you. I was weak enough to give your son a chance. And look at him now—he may be dead, but he isn't lost. He's dark as pitch and sharp as a blade, and he's full of your magic. He's a bonfire. He'd make you proud, Tasha.

“You're not going to be stricken, Basil,” I tell him. “Is that what this is about? No one knows about you, and even if they find out—which they won't—they'll know we can't spare you. The Families are finally ready to strike back at the Mage. It's all happening.”

He licks his bottom lip and looks out my little window. The sun's still out, and I know it bothers him, even if he won't complain. I unhook the curtain, and my kitchen falls into shadow.

“Is he still alive?” Baz asks. “Nicodemus?”

“I think so. In a matter of speaking. I haven't heard any different.”

“
Would
you have heard?”

There's a pack of fags on the table. I light one with my wand and take a few good drags, tapping the ash out on my saucer. “You know that the Families use my London connections.…”

“What does that mean, Fiona?”

“I talk to people here who no one else wants to. Undesirables. I'm not worried about getting my hands dirty now and then.”

Then, sister, he cocks one of your eyebrows at me.

I spit out some smoke. “Pfft. Not like that, you perv.”

“So Nicodemus is an undesirable,” he says.

“We're not permitted to talk about him. It's mage law.”

“Would you cut
me
off so easily?”

“Oh, fuck, Baz, you know I wouldn't. What are you on about?”

“I can't help but be curious.” He leans towards me over the table. “Is he alive? Does he hunt? Has he aged? Has he Turned anyone?”

“Nicodemus Petty doesn't have any answers for you, boyo.” I'm jabbing my cigarette at him, so I put it out before I accidentally torch him. “He's a two-bit gangster—a third-tier thug in a Guy Ritchie movie. He thought he was going to be the über-mage, but he ended up shooting dice in the back room of some vampire bar in Covent Garden. He threw his whole life away, and hurt everyone who loved him—
and there's nothing you can learn from him, Basil.
Other than how to be a shitty vampire.”

Baz's eyebrow is still raised. He drinks the rest of my tea. “Fine,” he says. “You've made your point.”

“Good. Go home and study.”

“I'm on break.”

“Go home and figure out how to take down the Mage.”

“I told you. I'm going dancing.”

I look at his suit again and his shiny black shoes. “Basil. Have you met a bloke?”

He smiles, and he's made of trouble. We should have dropped him in the Thames in a bag of stones. We should have left him out for the fairies.

“Something like that.”

 

57

AGATHA

I'm sitting at Penelope's counter, spreading pink icing on another gingerbread lady.

“Why do the gingerbread girls have to wear pink?” Penny asks.

“Why should the gingerbread girls feel like they shouldn't wear pink?” I say. “I like pink.”

“Only because you've been conditioned to like it by Barbies and gendered Lego.”

“Lay off, Penny. I've never played with Lego.”

Hanging out with Penny is actually going better than I thought. When she cornered me in the courtyard before we left for break, I thought she was going to chew me out for abandoning Simon.

“Hey,” she said, “I heard that Simon isn't coming over for Christmas.”

“Because we're not dating anymore, Penelope. Happy?”

“Generally,” she said, “but not because you broke up.”

It's impossible to end a conversation with Penny. You can be rude, you can ignore her—she's unshakable.

“Agatha,” she said, “do you honestly think I want to
be
with Simon?”

I think Penny wants to be the most important person in Simon's life, so is that a yes or a no? “I don't know, Penelope. But I know you didn't want
me
to be with him.”

“Because you both seemed miserable!”

“That wasn't any of your business!”

“Of course it was!” she said. “You're my
friends.
”

I rolled my eyes at her, very obviously, but she kept going.

“This isn't what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said briskly. “I heard Simon isn't coming to your house for Christmas. And he can't come to my house because my mum's pissed off at the Mage, but I thought maybe you and I could still get together and make biscuits and exchange gifts.”

We always do this, every year, the three of us. “Without Simon?”

“Right, like I said, my mum's got a bee in her bonnet about Simon.”

“But we never hang out without Simon,” I said.

“Only because he's always around,” Penny said. “Just because you guys broke up doesn't mean we're not still friends, you and me.”

“We're friends?”

“Nicks and Slick, I hope so,” Penny said. “I only have three friends. If
we're
not friends, I'm down to two.”

*   *   *