He freezes and looks up at me.
“What’s wrong, Snow? Cat got your tongue?”
He flinches. Cat got your tongue is a wicked spell, and I used it against him twice when we were third years.
“Baz,” he clears his throat. “I—”
“Am a disgrace to magic?”
He rolls his eyes. “I—”
“Spit it out, Snow. You’d think you were trying to cast a spell. Are you? Next time, use your wand, it helps.”
He ransacks his hair again with one hand. “Could you just—?”
There’s nothing remarkable about Snow’s eyes. They’re a standard size and shape. A little pouchy. And his eyelashes are stubby and dark brown. His eyes aren’t even a remarkable colour. Just blue. Not cornflower. Not navy. Not shot with hazel or violet.
He blinks them at me. Stammering. I feel myself blushing. (Crowley, that’s how much blood I drank last night—I’m capable of blushing.)
“No,” I say, and pick up my books. “I just couldn’t.”
I’m out the door. Down the steps.
I hear Snow snarling behind me.
When he comes down to breakfast, his tie is still hanging. Bunce frowns and yanks on one end. He drops his scone and wipes his hand on his trousers before tying it. He looks up at me then, but I’m already looking away.
35
SIMON
Penelope wants to eat lunch out on the Lawn. It’s a warm day, she says, and the ground is dry, and we might not have another chance to picnic like this until spring.
I think she just wants to keep me away from Baz and Agatha—they’ve been playing games with each other all week. Taking turns staring across the dining hall, then quickly looking away. Baz always looks at me, too, to make sure I’m watching.
Everyone’s still gossiping about where he’s been. The most popular rumours are “dark coming-of-age ceremony that left him too marked up to be in public” and “Ibiza.”
“My mother’s coming to take me into town tonight,” Penny says. We’re sitting against a giant, twisting yew tree, looking out at the Lawn in slightly different directions. “We’re going to dinner,” she says. “Want to come?”
“That’s okay, thanks.”
“We could go to that ramen place you like. My mum’s buying.”
I shake my head. “Feels like I need to keep tabs on Baz,” I say. “I still don’t have a clue where he’s been.”
Penny sighs but doesn’t argue. She stares out onto the brown lawn. “I miss the Visitings. They were so magickal.…”
I laugh.
“You know what I mean,” she says. “Aunt Beryl came back to my mum, and I missed it.”
“What’d she say?”
“The same thing she said last time! ‘Stop looking for my books. There’s nothing in there for the likes of you.’”
“Wait, she came back to tell you not to find her books?”
“She was a scholar like Mum and Dad. She doesn’t think anyone’s smart enough to touch her research.”
“I can’t believe your relative came back just to insult you.”
“Mum says she always knew Aunt Beryl would take her bad attitude to hell with her.”
“Do the ghosts ever show up at the wrong place?”
“I think of them more as souls—”
“Souls, then. Do they ever get lost?”
“I’m not sure.” Penny turns to face me, holding out a slice of Battenberg cake. I take it. “I know you can confuse them,” she says. “You can try to hide their target. Like, if you’re worried a soul might come back and tell your secret—you can try to hide the living person who might get Visited. There’ve even been murders. If I kill you, you can’t get a Visitor; ergo, you can’t hear or tell my secret.”
“So the Visitors can get mixed-up.…”
“Yeah, they just show up where they think someone is supposed to be. Like a real person would. Madam Bellamy said she’d seen her husband lurking at the back of her classroom a few times before he actually came through the Veil.”
Just like I saw Baz’s mum at the window.…