Carry On (33 page)

“Like the children's song,” I said. “
And one will come to end us, / and one will bring his fall, / let the greatest power of powers reign, / may it save us all.
”

“Yes.”

“My grandmother used to talk about the Greatest Mage.”

“There are dozens of prophecies,” Davy said. “All about one mage, the Chosen One.”

“How do you know they're all about the same person?” I ask. “And how do you know he—or she—hasn't come and gone already.”

“Do you really think we'd miss someone who saved our whole people? Someone who fixed our world?”

“Does it say what they'll fix?”

“It says there will be a threat, that we'll be dark and divided—that magic itself will be in danger, and that there will be a mage who has power no one else has ever dreamt of, a magician who draws his power from the centre of the earth.
‘He walks like an ordinary man, but his power is like no other.'
One of the oracles describes him as ‘a vessel'—large and strong enough to hold all of magic itself.”

Davy was getting more and more excited as he talked. His eyes were shining, and his words were tripping over each other. He gestured towards the stack of books as if their very presence made the prophecies irrefutable.

I felt my chin pull back. “You don't…”

“What?” Davy asked.

“Well, you don't think…”

“What, Lucy? What don't I think?”

“Well … that
you're
the Greatest Mage?…”

He scoffed. “Me? No. Don't be a fool. I'm more powerful than any of these cretins”—he glanced around the library—“but I have the sort of power you can imagine.”

I tried to laugh. “Right. So…”

“So?”

“So why is this so important to you?”

“Because the Greatest Mage of all is
coming,
Lucy. And he's coming at the hour of our greatest need. When the mages are
‘scrabbling with clawed hands at each others' throats'
—when
‘the head of our great beast has lost its way.'
That's soon. That's now. We should all care about this! We should be getting ready!”

 

59

PENELOPE

I like my dad's lab. In the attic. No one's allowed to clean up here, not even his assistants. It's a complete mess, but Dad knows where everything is, so if you move a book from one pile to the next, he goes a little mental.

One whole wall is a map of Great Britain—the holes in the magickal atmosphere haven't spread across the water yet, but they've grown over the years. Dad uses pins and string to map the perimeter of each hole, then uses different colours of string to show how the holes have grown. Little flags record the date of measurement. A few of the big holes have merged over the years—there's almost no magic left in Cheshire anymore.

Dad's assistants are out on a surveying mission now. He's just hired someone new, a magickal anthropologist, to study the effects of the voids on magickal creatures. He'd like to study how the holes affect Normals, but he can't get the funding.

I walk over to the map. There are two holes in London—a big one in Kensington and a smaller one in Trafalgar Square. I hate to think about what would happen if the Humdrum attacked near our house in Hounslow. Plenty of magickal families have had to move, and sometimes it weakens them. Your magic settles in a place. It supports you.

I sit at one of the tall tables. Dad likes to stand while he works, so all the tables are tall. He's already got a book open, and he's copying numbers into a ledger. He uses a computer, too, but he still keeps all his records by hand.

“I'm working on a project for school,” I say. “And I was looking through some old copies of
The Record
.…”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

“And I was reading about the Watford Tragedy.”

Dad looks up. “Yes?”

“Do you remember when it happened?”

“Of course.” He goes back to his ledger. “Your mother and I were still at uni. You were just a little girl.…”

Mum and Dad got married just after Watford and started having kids right away, even though they were still in school and Mum wanted a career. Dad says Mum wanted
everything, immediately.

“It must have been terrible,” I say.

“It was. No one had ever attacked Watford before—and poor Natasha Grimm-Pitch.”

“Did you know her?”

“Not personally. She was older than us. Her sister was a few years below me at school—Fiona—but I didn't know her either. The Pitches always kept to their own sort.”

“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?”

It's not like my dad to lie to me.

It's not like me to lie to him. “It's just a name I saw in
The Record,
and I didn't recognize it.”

“Hmm,” he says. “I don't—I don't think he's anyone important.”

 

60

SIMON

We wait until after midnight to go looking for the vampires. Baz's aunt wouldn't tell him exactly where they hang out, but he thinks he can find them, and he says they should be done hunting by midnight.…

Which freaks me right out. To think of all those murders happening. While we wait.

If the vampires are hunting Normals every night, why don't we do something about it? The Coven must know it's happening. I mean, if Baz's aunt knows, the Coven
must
know.

I decide Baz isn't the right person to talk to about this right now.

We have time to kill after we leave his aunt's, so we go to a library—the big one—and then to the reading room at the British Museum, where Baz steals at least a half dozen books.

“You can't do that,” I argue.

“It's research.”

“It's
treason.
”

“Are you going to tell the Queen?”

When the museums all close, we walk around a park, then find a place where I can eat a curry while he looks through his stolen books.

“You should eat something,” I say.

He raises an eyebrow at me.

“Oh, piss off.” I wonder if this is why he's never had a girlfriend. Because he'd take her on dates to the library, then insist on sitting there creepily while she ate dinner alone.

I've finished my curry and two orders of samosas, and I'm watching him read—I swear he sucks on his fangs when he's thinking—when he snaps the book shut with one hand and stands up.

“Come on, Snow. Let's go find a vampire.”

“Thanks”—I wipe my mouth on my sleeve—“but I'm already over the limit.”

Baz is already walking out the door.

“Hey,” I say, trying to catch up. When he ignores me, I grab his arm.

He frowns. “You can't just grab people when you want their attention.”

“I said ‘Hey.'”

“Still.”

“I've been thinking,” I say, “if we're going to do this, you have to start calling me by my name.”

I don't know why this seems important. Just—if we're going to walk into a vampire den together, it seems like we need to get past some of this stuff and actually
be
allies.

“Snow
is
your name,” Baz says. “Possibly. Who named you, anyway?”

I look away. It was written on my arm—
Simon Snow.
Whoever left me at the home must have written it. Maybe it was my mother.

“You have to call me
Simon,
” I say. “You've called me that before.”

He opens his car door and gets in, as if he didn't hear me—but I know that he did.

“Fine,” Baz says. “Get in the car, Simon.”

I do.

*   *   *

It took us almost two hours to find this place—Baz sniffed it out; it was like walking around Covent Garden with a bloodhound.

“Is this it?” I ask. “Are they here?”

He straightens his collar and cuffs. We're standing outside an old building full of flats, with a row of names next to the doorway and a brass slot for letters. “Stay close,” he whispers, and raps at the door with the back of his fist.

A large man opens the door. He sees Baz, then opens it a bit wider. Another man, standing behind a long bar in the centre of the room, looks over and nods. The doorman motions with his head for us to come in.

I follow Baz into a deep, low-ceilinged room with no overhead lights. The bar runs down the middle, and ornate, private booths line the walls on either side, each booth lit by a hanging yellow lamp.