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.)
I take a quick, quiet shower, and when I climb into bed, I feel every bone in my body groan happily.
Crowley, I missed this bed. Even though it’s dusty and lumpy, with goose quills that sneak through the ticking and poke you.
My bedroom at home is enormous. All the furniture at home is hundreds of years old, and I’m not allowed to hang anything up or move anything around because it’s all registered with the National Trust. Every few years or so, the local paper comes in and does an article.
My bed there is heavy and draped, and if you look close, you’ll find forty-two gargoyles carved into the trim. There used to be a step stool at the head because the bed was too tall for me to climb into by myself.
This bed, at Watford, is more mine than that one ever was.
I roll over onto my side, facing Snow. He’s sleeping, so it doesn’t matter if I stare at him. Which I do. Even though I know it doesn’t do me any good.
Snow sleeps in a knot: his legs pulled up and his fists drawn in, shoulders hunched high, head tucked low, and his hair a crush of curls on the pillowcase. What little moonlight there is catches on his tawny skin.