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.)

After my mother died, anyone who had the courage to stand up to the Mage’s military coup was quickly forced off the Coven. No one from the Old Families has had a seat for the last decade—even though most of the Mage’s reforms are aimed at us:

Banned books, banned phrases. Rules about when we can meet and where. Taxes to cover all the Mage’s initiatives; most notably to pay for every faun bastard and centaur cousin, and every pathetic excuse for a magician in the Realm to attend Watford. The World of Mages never had taxes before. Taxes were for Normals; we had standards instead.

You can’t blame the Old Families for striking back at the Mage however we can.

Anyway, I told Fiona that I’d do it. That I’d go up to the Mage’s office and look around, even if it was pointless.

“Take something,” she said, gripping her steering wheel.

I was in the back seat, so I could see only a slice of her face in the rearview mirror. “Take what?”

She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Take something.”

“I’m not a thief,” I said.

“It’s not thieving—that office is hers, it’s yours. Take something for me.”

“All right,” I said.

I almost always go along with Fiona in the end. The way she misses my mother keeps her alive for me.

*   *   *

But tonight I’m too tired to do Fiona’s bidding.

And too jumpy. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being followed—that whoever it was who paid the numpties to take me will try again.

By the time I’m done in the Catacombs, it feels like I’m dragging my own corpse up the tower steps to our room.

Snow’s asleep when I come in.

Normally I shower in the mornings, and he showers at night.

We’ve got the dance all worked out, after so many years. Moving around the room without touching or talking or looking at each other. (Or at least not looking at each other while the other is paying attention.)

But there are cobwebs in my hair tonight, and I was so thirsty that I got blood under my nails when I fed.

That hasn’t happened since I was 14, not since I was just getting the hang of this. I can usually drain a polo pony without staining my lips.

I move around the room quietly. As much as I enjoy disturbing Snow, tonight I just need to clean off and get some sleep.

I never should’ve tried to make it through a full day of classes. My leg’s gone numb, and my head is killing me. Maybe it’s good that Coach Mac won’t take me back on the team, if I can’t even manage seven hours in a desk. (He looked sad when I showed up at practice. And suspicious. He said I was on probation.)