The speeches are in the White Chapel. The stained glass has been repaired.
My aunt Fiona’s sitting in the front row. She whoops when I’m introduced, and I can see my father wince.
Fiona’s as cheerful lately as I’ve ever seen her. She didn’t know what to do with herself after the Mage died. I think she wanted to kill him again. (And again.) Then the Coven made her a vampire hunter, and everything turned around. She’s on some secret task force now and working undercover in Prague half the time. I’m moving into her flat when I leave school. My parents wanted me to go to Oxford with them—they’re living there, in our hunting lodge—but I couldn’t be that far from Simon. My father still isn’t ready to admit I have a boyfriend, and it would be too exhausting, living in a place where I have to pretend I’m not a vampire or hopelessly queer.
By the end of my speech, Fiona’s weeping and honking her nose into a handkerchief. My father isn’t crying, but he’s too choked up to properly speak to me after the ceremony. Just keeps clapping me on the back and saying, “Good man.”
“Come on, Basil,” Fiona says. “I’ll take you back to Chelsea and get you sozzled. Top shelf only.”
“I can’t,” I say. “Leavers ball tonight. I told the headmistress I’d be there.”
“Can’t pass up a chance to see yourself in a suit, can you.”
“I suppose not.”
“Ah, well. I’ll get you sozzled tomorrow, then. I’ll come back for you at teatime. Watch out for numpties.”
That’s Fiona’s standard farewell for me now. I hate it.
*
There are a few hours before the ball, so I take a quick walk in the hills behind the walls and gather a bouquet of yellow-eyed grass and irises, then head back across the drawbridge and into the now empty Chapel.
I make my way down into the Catacombs without bothering to light a torch. It’s been years since I’ve got lost down here.
I’m not in a hurry, so I stop to drain every rat I find on the way. This school is going to be infested when I leave.
My mother’s tomb is inside Le Tombeau des Enfants. It’s a stone doorway in a tunnel lined with skulls, marked by a bronze placard.
I would have been buried here with her, if I’d died that day. I mean, died properly.
I sit by the door—there’s no handle or lock, it’s a piece of stone wedged into the wall—and set down the flowers.
“Some of this will be familiar to you,” I say, getting out my speech. “But I’ve added a few flourishes of my own.”
A rat watches me from the corner. I decide to ignore it.
When I get to the end of the speech, my head falls back against the stone. “I know you can’t hear me,” I say after a minute or two. “I know you’re not here.…
“You came back, and I missed you. And then I did the thing you wanted me to do, so you probably won’t ever come back again.”
I close my eyes.
“But—I just wanted to tell you that I’m going to carry on. As I am.
“No matter how much I think about it, I don’t think there’s any scenario where you’d want me—where you’d allow me—to go on like this.
“But I think it’s what you would do in my circumstances. It seems like you never gave up. Ever.”
I exhale roughly and stand up.
Then I turn towards the door and bow my head. I speak softly, so that none of the other bones can hear: “I know I usually come down here to tell you I’m sorry. But I think today I want to tell you that I’m going to be all right.
“Don’t let me be one of the things that keeps you from peace, Mother. I’m all right.”
I wait for a few moments, just … just in case. Then climb out of the Catacombs, brushing the dust from my trousers.
*
It’s an especially grim leavers ball. The few friends I have left at Watford are here with dates—or avoiding me. Dev and Niall haven’t quite forgiven me for befriending Simon. Dev said I wasted their entire childhood plotting against him.
“Oh, what else were you going to do with your childhood?” I asked.