I try. I sit at my desk, and Baz sits on his bed. And eventually he leaves without saying anything, and I know that he’s going down to the Catacombs to hunt rats. Or to the Wood to hunt squirrels.
And I know that once he killed and drained a merwolf, but I don’t know why—its body washed up onto the edge of the moat. (I hate the merwolves almost as much as Baz does. They’re not intelligent, I don’t think, but they’re still evil.) I go to bed after Baz leaves, but I don’t go to sleep. He’s only been back a day, and I already feel like I need to know where he is at every moment. It’s fifth year all over again.
When he finally does come back to our room, smelling like dust and decay, I close my eyes.
That’s when I remember about his mum.
32
BAZ
I almost went up to the Mage’s office tonight.
Just to get my aunt Fiona off my back as soon as possible.
She lectured me all the way to Watford. She thinks the Mage is going to make another move soon. She thinks he’s looking for something specific. Apparently, he’s been visiting—raiding—all the Old Families’ homes for the last two months. Just rolls up in his Range Rover (1981, Warwick green—lovely) and drinks their tea while his merry Men go through their libraries with finding spells.
“The Mage says one of us is working with the Humdrum,” Fiona said, “that there’s nothing to hide so long as we have nothing to hide.”
She didn’t have to tell me that there’s plenty to hide at our place. We’re not working with the Humdrum—why would any magician work with the Humdrum?—but our house is full of banned books and dark objects. Even some of our cookbooks are banned. (Though it’s been centuries, at least, since the Pitches ate fairies.) (You can’t even find fairies anymore.) (And it isn’t because we ate them all.)
Fiona doesn’t live with us. She has a flat in London and dates Normals. Journalists and drummers. “I’m not a race traitor,” she’ll say. “I’d never marry one.” I think she dates them because they don’t seem real. I think it’s all because of my mother.
Father says Fiona thought my mother hung the moon. (To hear my father talk about her, my mother may have actually hung the moon. Or maybe it was hung for her pleasure.)
Fiona was apprenticing with an herbalist in Beijing when my mother died. She came home for the funeral and never went back. She stayed with my dad until he got remarried, then moved to London. Now my aunt lives on family money and magic, and lives to avenge her sister.
It’s a bad fit.
Fiona is smart—and powerful—but my mother was the chess player in the family. My mother was groomed for greatness. (That’s what everyone says.)
Fiona is vindictive. She’s impatient. And sometimes she just wants to rage against the machine—even if she’s not exactly sure where the machine is or how to properly rage at it.
Her grand plan for uncovering the Mage’s plot is to send me sneaking up to his office. She’s obsessed with the Mage’s office; it was my mother’s office, and I think Fiona thinks she can steal it back from him.
“Sneak into his office and do what?” I asked her.
“Look around.”
“What do you expect me to find?”
“Well, I don’t know, do I? He must be leaving a trail somewhere. Check his computer.”
“He’s never even there to use his computer,” I said. “He probably keeps everything on his phone.”
“Then steal his phone.”
“You steal his phone,” I said. “I’ve got homework.”
She said she’d be meeting soon with the Old Families—a consortium made up of everyone who got left behind in the Mage’s revolution.
(My father goes to these meetings, too, but his heart’s not in it. He’d rather talk about magickal livestock and archival seed stock. The Grimms are farmers. My mother must have been sick in love to marry him.)