Carry On (5 page)

Penny's always looked younger than she is—everything about her is round and girlish, she has chubby cheeks and thick legs and dimples in her knees—and the uniform makes her seem even younger.

But still … she's changed this summer. She's starting to look like a woman in little girl's clothes.

“Micah's good,” she says finally, pushing her dark hair behind her ears. “It's the most time we've spent together since he was here.”

“So the thrill isn't gone?”

She laughs. “No. If anything, it felt … real. For the first time.”

I don't know what to say, so I try to smile at her.

“Ugh,” she says, “close your mouth.”

I do.

“But what about you?” Penny asks. I can tell she's been waiting to interrogate me and can't wait any longer. She glances around us and leans forward. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“What happened when?”

“This summer.”

I shrug. “Nothing happened.”

She sits back, sighing. “Simon, it's not my fault that I went to America. I tried to stay.”

“No,” I say. “I mean there's
nothing to tell.
You left. Everyone left. I went back in care. Liverpool, this time.”

“You mean, the Mage just … sent you away? After everything?” Penelope looks confused. I don't blame her.

I'd just escaped a kidnapping, and the first thing the Mage did was send me packing.

I thought, when Penny and I told the Mage what had happened, that he'd want to go after the Humdrum immediately. We knew where the monster was; we finally knew what he looked like!

The Humdrum has been attacking Watford as long as I've been here. He sends dark creatures. He hides from us. He leaves a trail of dead spots in the magickal atmosphere. And finally, we had a
lead.

I wanted to find him. I wanted to punish him. I wanted to end this, once and for all, fighting at the Mage's side.

Penelope clears her throat. I must look as lost as I feel. “Have you talked to Agatha?” she asks.

“Agatha?” I butter another scone. They've cooled off, and the butter doesn't melt. Penny holds up her right hand, and the large purple stone on her finger glints in the sunlight—
“Some like it hot!”

It's a waste of magic. She's constantly wasting magic on me. The butter melts into the now-steaming scone, and I bounce it from hand to hand. “You know Agatha's not allowed to talk to me over the summer.”

“I thought maybe she'd find a way this time,” Penelope says. “Special measures, to try to explain herself.”

I give up on the too-hot scone and drop it on my plate. “She wouldn't disobey the Mage. Or her parents.”

Penny just watches me. Agatha is her friend, too, but Penelope's much more judgemental of her than I am. It's not my job to judge Agatha; it's my job to be her boyfriend.

Penny sighs and looks away, kicking at the chair. “So that's it? Nothing? No progress? Just another summer? What are we supposed to do now?”

Normally I'm the one kicking things, but I've been kicking walls—and anyone who looked at me wrong—all summer. I shrug. “Go back to school, I guess.”

*   *   *

Penelope's avoiding her room.

She says Trixie's girlfriend came back early, too, and they don't have any personal boundaries. “Did I tell you Trixie got her ears pierced this summer? She wears big noisy bells right in the pointy parts.”

Sometimes I think Penny's Trixie diatribes are borderline speciesist. I tell her so.

“Easy for you to say,” she says, all stretched out on Baz's bed again. “You don't live with a pixie.”

“I live with a vampire!” I argue.

“Unconfirmed.”

“Are you saying you don't think Baz is a vampire?”

“I know he's a vampire,” she says. “But it's still unconfirmed. We've never actually seen him drink blood.”

I'm sitting on the window ledge and leaning out a bit over the moat, holding on to the latch of the swung-open pane. I scoff: “We've seen him covered in blood. We've found piles of shrivelled-up rats with fang marks down in the Catacombs.… I've told you that his cheeks get really full when he has a nightmare? Like his mouth is filling up with extra teeth?”

“Circumstantial evidence,” Penny says. “And I still don't know why you'd creep up on a vampire who has night terrors.”

“I live with him! I have to keep my wits about me.”

She rolls her eyes. “Baz'll never hurt you in your room.”

She's right. He can't. Our rooms are spelled against betrayal—the Roommate's Anathema. If Baz does anything to physically hurt me inside our room, he'll be cast out of the school. Agatha's dad, Dr. Wellbelove, says it happened once when he was in school. Some kid punched his roommate, then got sucked out through a window and landed outside the school gate. It wouldn't open for him again ever.

You get warnings when you're young: For the first two years, if you try to hit or hurt your roommate, your hands go stiff and cold. I threw a book at Baz once in our first year, and it took three days for my hand to thaw out.

Baz has never violated the Anathema. Not even when we were kids.

“Who knows what he's capable of in his sleep,” I say.

“You do,” Penny says, “as much as you watch him.”

“I live with a dark creature—I'm right to be paranoid!”

“I'd trade my pixie for your vampire any day of the week. There's no anathema to keep someone from being lethally irritating.”

Penny and I go back to the dining hall to get dinner—baked sweet potatoes and sausages and hard white rolls—then bring it all back to my room. We never get to hang out like this when Baz is around. He'd turn Penny in.

It feels like a party. Just the two of us, nothing to do. No one to hide from or fight. Penelope says it'll be like this someday when we get a flat together.… But that's not going to happen. She's going to go to America as soon as the war is over. Maybe even before that.

And I'll get a place with Agatha.

Agatha and I will work through whatever this is; we always do. We make sense together. We'll probably get married after school—that's when Agatha's parents got married. I know she wants a place in the country.… I can't afford anything like that, but she has money, and she'll find a job that makes her happy. And her dad'll help me find work if I ask him.

It's nice to think about that: living long enough to have to figure out what to do with myself.

As soon as Penelope's done with her dinner, she brushes off her hands. “Right,” she says.

I groan. “Not yet.”

“What do you mean, ‘not yet'?”

“I mean, not yet with the strategizing. We just got here. I'm still settling in.”

She looks around the room. “What's to settle, Simon? You already unpacked your two pairs of trackie bottoms.”

“I'm enjoying the peace and quiet.” I reach for her plate and start to finish off her sausages.

“There's no peace,” she says. “Just quiet. It makes me nervous. We need a plan.”

“There
is
peace. Baz isn't here yet, and look”—I wave her fork around—“there's nothing attacking us.”

“Says the man who just thrashed a goblin.
Simon,
” she says, “just because we've been checked out for two months doesn't mean the war took a break.”

I groan again. “You sound like the Mage,” I say with my mouth full.

“I still can't believe he ignored you all summer.”

“He's probably too busy with ‘the war.'”

Penny sighs and folds her hands. She's waiting for me to be reasonable.

I'm going to make her wait.

The war.

There's no point talking about
the war.
It'll get here soon enough. It isn't even one war: It's two or three of them—the civil war that's brewing, the hostilities with the dark creatures that have always been there, the whatever it is with the Humdrum—and it will all find its way to my door eventually.…

“Right,” Penny repeats. And I must look miserable, because next she says, “I guess the war will still be there tomorrow.”

I clean her plate, and Penny makes herself comfortable on Baz's bed, and I don't even nag her about it. I lie back on my own bed, listening to her talk about aeroplanes and American supermarkets and Micah's big family.

She falls asleep in the middle of telling me about a song she's heard, a song she thinks will be a spell someday, though I can't think of any use for “Call me maybe.”

“Penelope?” She doesn't answer. I lean off my bed and swing my pillow at her legs—that's how close the beds are; Baz wouldn't even have to get out of his to kill me. Or vice versa, I guess.
“Penny.”

“What?” she says into Baz's pillow.

“You have to go back to your room.”

“Don't want to.”

“You have to. The Mage'll suspend you if you get caught in here.”

“Let him. I could use the free time.”

I get out of bed and stand over her. Her dark hair is spread out over the pillowcase, and her glasses are smashed into her cheek. Her skirt has hiked up, and her bare thigh looks plump and smooth.

I pinch her. She jumps up.

“Come on,” I say, “I'll walk you.”

Penny straightens her glasses and untwists her shirt. “No. I don't want you to see how I get past the wards.”

“Because that's not something you'd want to share with your best friend?”

“Because it's fun watching you try to figure it out.”

I open my door and peek down the staircase. I don't see or hear anyone. “Fine,” I say, holding the door open. “Good-night.”

Penny walks past me. “Good-night, Simon. See you tomorrow.”

I grin. I can't help it—it's so good to be back. “See you tomorrow.”

As soon as I'm alone, I change into my school pyjamas—Baz brings his from home, but I like the school ones. I don't sleep in pyjamas when I'm at the juvenile centres, I never have. It makes me feel, I don't know—vulnerable. I change and crawl into bed, sighing.

These nights at Watford, before Baz gets here, are the only nights in my life when I actually sleep.

*   *   *

I don't know what time it is when I wake up. The room is dark, and there's a shaft of moonlight slicing across my bed.

I think I see a woman standing by the window, and at first I think it's Penny. Then the figure shifts, and I think it's Baz.

Then I decide I'm dreaming and fall back into sleep.

 

6

LUCY

I have so much I want to tell you.

But time is short.

And my voice doesn't carry.

 

7

SIMON

The sun is just rising when I hear my door creak open. I pull the blankets up over my head. “Go away,” I say, expecting Penny to start talking at me anyway. She's good at immediately making me forget how much I missed her over the summer.

Someone clears his throat.

I open my eyes and see the Mage standing just inside the door, looking amused—at least on the surface. There's something darker underneath.

“Sir.” I sit up. “Sorry.”

“Don't apologize, Simon. You must not have heard me knock.”

“No … Let me just, I'll just, um … get dressed.”

“Don't trouble yourself,” he says, walking to the window, giving Baz's bed a wide berth—even the Mage is afraid of vampires. Though he wouldn't use the word “afraid.” He'd say something like “cautious” or “prudent.”

“I'm sorry I wasn't here to welcome you back yesterday,” he says. “How was your journey?”

I push the covers off and sit at the edge of my bed. I'm still in my pyjamas, but at least I'm sitting up. “Fine,” I say. “I mean, I suppose … not exactly fine. My taxi driver was a goblin.”

“Another goblin?” He turns from the window to me, hands clasped behind his back. “Persistent, aren't they. Was it alone?”

“Yes, sir. Tried to scarper off with me.”

He shakes his head. “They never think to come in pairs. What spell did you use?”

“Used my blade, sir.” I bite at my lip.

“Fine,” he says.

“And
Into thin air
to clean it up.”

The Mage raises his eyebrow. “Excellent, Simon.” He looks down at my pyjamas and bare feet, then seems to study my face. “What about this summer? Anything to report? Anything unusual?”

“I would have contacted you, sir.” (I
can
contact him, if I need to. I have his mobile number. Also, I could send a bird.)

The Mage nods. “Good.” He looks at me for a few more seconds, then turns back to the window, like he's observed everything about me that he needs to. The sunlight catches in his thick brown hair, and for a minute, he looks even more like a swashbuckler than usual.

He's in uniform: dark green canvas leggings, tall leather boots, a green tunic with straps and small pockets—with a sword hanging in a woven scabbard from his tooled belt. Unlike mine, his blade is fully visible.

Penny's mum, Professor Bunce, says that previous mages wore a ceremonial cowl and cape. And that other headmasters wore robes and mortarboards. The Mage, she says, has created his own uniform. She calls it a costume.

I think Professor Bunce must hate the Mage more than anyone who isn't actually his enemy. The only time I ever hear Penny's dad talk out loud is when her mum gets going on the Mage; he'll put his hand on her arm and say,
“Now, Mitali…”
And then she'll say,
“I apologize, Simon, I know the Mage is your foster father.…”

But he isn't, not really. The Mage has never presented himself to me that way. As family. He's always treated me as an ally—even when I was a little kid. The very first time he brought me to Watford, he sat me down in his office and told me everything. About the Insidious Humdrum. About the missing magic. About the holes in the atmosphere like dead spots.