I retaliated by putting the polecat in his wardrobe, which wasn’t much of a retaliation because we share a room.
I’m at our door now. Still trying to decide whether this is a trap. I decide it doesn’t matter—because even if I knew for sure that it was a trap, I’d still go in.
When I open the door, Baz is wheeling an old-fashioned chalkboard in front of our beds.
“Where did that come from?” I ask.
“A classroom.”
“Yeah, but how did it get up here?”
“It flew.”
“No,” I say, “seriously.”
He rolls his eyes. “I Up, up and away-ed it. It wasn’t much work.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re solving a mystery, Snow. I like to organize my thoughts.”
“Is this how you normally plot my downfall?”
“Yes. With multicoloured pieces of chalk. Stop complaining.” He opens up his book bag and takes out a few apples and things wrapped in wax paper. “Eat,” he says, throwing one at me.
It’s a bacon roll. He’s also got a pot of tea.
“What’s all this?” I say.
“Tea, obviously. I know you can’t function unless you’re stuffing yourself.”
I unwrap the roll and decide to take a bite. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me,” he says. “It sounds wrong.”
“Not as wrong as you bringing me bacon butties.”
“Fine, you’re welcome—when’s Bunce getting here?”
“Why would she?”
“Because you do everything together, don’t you? When you said you’d help, I was counting on you bringing your smarter half.”
“Penelope doesn’t know anything about this,” I say.
“She doesn’t know about the Visiting?”
“No.”
“Why not? I thought you told her everything.”
“It just … seemed like your business.”
“It is my business,” Baz says.
“Right. So I didn’t tell her. Now, where do we start?”
His face falls into a pout. “I was counting on Bunce to tell us where to start.”
“Let’s start with what we know,” I say. That’s where Penelope always starts.
“Right.” Baz actually seems nervous. He’s tapping the chalk against his trouser leg, leaving white smudges. Nicodemus, he writes on the chalkboard in neat slanted script.
“That’s what we don’t know,” I say. “Unless you’ve come up with something.”
He shakes his head. “No. I’ve never heard of him. I did a cursory check in the library during lunch—but I’m not likely to find anything in A Child’s Garden of Verses.”
Most of the magickal books have been removed from the Watford library. The Mage wants us to focus on Normal books so that we stay close to the language.
Before the Mage’s reforms, Watford was so protective of traditional spells that they’d teach those instead of newer spells that worked better. There were even initiatives to make Victorian books and culture more popular with the Normals, just to breathe some new life into old spells.
“Language evolves,” the Mage says. “So must we.”
Baz looks back at the chalkboard again. His hair is dry now and falling in loose locks over his cheeks; he tucks a piece behind his ear, then writes a date on the chalkboard:
12 August 2002.
I start to ask what happened that day, then I realize.
“You were only 5,” I say. “Do you remember anything?”
He looks at me, then back at the board. “Some.”
43
BAZ
Some. I don’t remember how the day started or any of the normal parts.
I remember only a few things about that whole year: A trip to the zoo. The day my father shaved his moustache and I didn’t recognize him.
I remember going to the nursery, in general.
That we got digestives and milk every day. The rabbit mural on the ceiling. A little girl who bit me. I remember that there were trains, and I liked the green one. That there were babies, and sometimes, if one was crying, the miss would let me stand over the cradle and say, “It’s okay, little puff, you’ll be all right.” Because that’s what my mum would say to me when I cried.
I don’t think there were that many of us there. Just the children of faculty. Two rooms. I was still in with the babies.
I don’t specifically remember going there on the twelfth of August. But I do remember when the vampires broke down the door.
Vampires—we—are unusually strong when we’re on the hunt. A heavy oak door carved with bunnies and badgers … that wouldn’t be a barrier for a team of us.
I can’t tell you how many vampires came to the nursery that day. It seemed like dozens, but that can’t be right, because I was the only child who was bitten. I remember that one of them, a man, picked me up like I was a puppy—by the back of my dungarees. The bib came up and choked me for a second.
The way I remember it, my mother was right behind them, there almost immediately. I could hear her shouting spells before I saw her. I saw her blue fire before I saw her face.
My mother could summon fire under her breath. She could burn for hours without tiring.
She shot streams of fire over the children’s heads; the air was alive with it.
I remember people scrambling. I remember watching one of the vampires light up like a Roman candle. I remember the look on my mother’s face when she saw me, a flash of agony before the man holding me sank his teeth into my neck.