I could hitchhike—would anyone pick me up? Would anyone be driving down this road, in middle-of-nowhere Hampshire in the middle of the night? On Christmas Eve? (Father Christmas isn’t real—the Tooth Fairy is.)
I’m kneeling in the snow at the side of the road. I can do this, I think. I’ve done this before. I just have to want it. I have to need it.
I think about getting away, about getting to Penny, I think about my magic filling me up and shooting out my shoulders. And then I feel them tearing through Baz’s pyjamas—
Wide, bony wings.
There are no feathers this time; I must have been thinking about the dragon. These wings are red and leathery with grey spikes at the hinges. They spread out as soon as I think about them, and pull me up out of the snow.
I tear off the remains of my flannel shirt, and I don’t think about how to fly; I just think about where I want to go—Up. Away.—and it happens. It’s colder up here, so I think about being warm, and my skin starts to flicker with heat.
Baz’s house is below me now, in the distance. The fire I started is still burning; I watch the smoke pouring out of the forest, and try to move closer—but I can’t. I’m made of magic, and there’s no magic there anymore.
I hover in the sky.
I think about putting out the fire. The clouds are full of freezing rain—so I think about pushing them towards the forest, and they go.
And then I think of Baz telling me to go, so I do.
And then I stop thinking.
73
PENELOPE
My little sister, Priya, was the one to get the door. She was waiting up for Father Christmas—and doing a hell of a job, too; she made it until four in the morning. I think she outlasted Mum and Dad.
Priya heard the knocking and thought that it was Father Christmas himself. We don’t have a fireplace; she must have thought he had to come through the front door.
When she opened the door, Simon fell in, and she shrieked.
I don’t blame her. He looked like Satan incarnate. Massive red-and-black wings. A red tail with a black spade at the end. He’d cast some sort of spell on himself that made him glow yellow and orange, and he was covered in snow and debris, and wearing the filthiest, fanciest pyjama bottoms.
Mum and Dad heard Priya scream and came thumping down the stairs. Mum screamed, too. And then Dad shouted, and then apparently he had to keep Mum from throwing curses—she thought Simon was possessed or enchanted or that he’d gone full Lucifer.
The rest of us came running down the stairs then (except for Premal, who didn’t come home, even for Christmas)—and I saw Simon and ran to him. It didn’t occur to me to be scared of him.
That snapped Mum and Dad back to normal.
Mum started casting warming spells, and Dad got a bowl of hot water and a cloth to clean Simon up. We ended up putting him in the shower. He was so exhausted, he could hardly stand. He couldn’t even tell us where he’d been. I assumed he’d made it back to Baz’s house, but I didn’t want my parents to know that we’d left Simon on the road in the middle of the countryside on Christmas Eve.
I helped my mum and dad give him a shower, and nobody cared that I was seeing him naked. Then we put him in some of Mum’s trackies, and she tried to tuck his tail down one leg.
I kept casting, “Nonsense!” until Mum told me to shut up.
“It’s not working, Penny.”
“But it worked last time.”
“Maybe it’s not a spell,” Dad said. “Maybe he transformed.”
“Maybe he evolved,” Priya said from the bathroom doorway, “like a Pokémon.”
“Go to bed, Priya,” Dad said.
“I’m waiting for Father Christmas!”
“Go to bed!” Mum shouted.
Mum was casting spells, too. “As you were!” and “Back to start!”
“Careful, Mitali,” Dad said. “You’ll turn him into a baby.”
But none of Mum’s spells touched Simon. She tried casting spells in Hindi, too. (She doesn’t speak Hindi, but my great-grandmother did.) Nothing worked.