“We’re sorry,” Shepard says. “Is that not your area?”
“No,” she says, “it is. I just thought you wanted an actual commission.
I’ve been doing more watercolours. Portraits, mostly. Sometimes I do pets.”
“Really?” he asks, sincerely interested. “They didn’t tell us that. I’d love to see some of your paintings.”
Kipper already has her phone out, opening her photo folder. “I have a shop online, but sometimes people see my prints down at the Ogre and ask about me.”
Shepard is looking delighted by something on her phone. I lean over to see. It’s a watercolour of a cat wearing a bow tie.
“Oh my God,” he says. “Adorable. And really reasonable pricing.”
“People like to get their pets done after they die,” she says. “After the pets die, I mean. To remember them.”
“That’s a cool idea,” he says.
She smiles. “I kind of happened into it.”
“So you don’t know languages?” I ask.
Kipper looks like she forgot I was sitting here. “No, I do. A little. It’s sort of a family specialty. My mother can speak in thirty-nine tongues.”
“That’s impressive,” Shepard says.
“Yeah, especially for someone who only has four.”
（Four what? Four tongues?）
“Wow,” he says.
I elbow him. “Get out the thing,” I say. “The … writing.”
“Right, right.” He pulls the folded-up ritual from his inside pocket and hands it to Kipper.
When she spreads it out onto the table, two extra fingers unfurl from each of her hands. “Oh shit,” she says, sitting back, away from it.
“What,” I say, “what’s shit?”
“That’s, like, really obscure.”
“Yeah?” Shepard asks.
“That’s not even, like, from this dimension, you know? Like, this is not from Earth-616. You shouldn’t translate this. I can’t translate it, but you shouldn’t anyway—you could end up slicing a trapdoor into another dimension.”
Shepard gives her a sad smile. “Kipper, I think I already did.”
31
AGATHA
I am flattened by the time we get back to Niamh’s Fiesta. My legs feel like jelly, and I’m hungry besides. Niamh pops the back of her hatchback open and gets out two bottles of water. Her face is flushed and sweaty, and her dark hair is coming out of her bun and sticking to her cheeks.
She tosses me a water—it’s warm—and tips her own bottle up, emptying it one swallow.
I gulp some water down, then wipe my mouth on my wrist. “Hell’s spells, I won’t be able to walk tomorrow.”
“What happened to that championship lacrosse athlete?”
“Oh, ha ha.”
She’s undoing her bun. Her hair falls down past her shoulders in shiny, dark brown waves. It’s incongruous. Niamh’s face is too hard to be framed by something so soft. She’s already pulling it back up with her fingers and twisting it back into place.
“All that work,” I say, “for nothing.”
“It wasn’t for nothing,” she says, getting into the car.
I get in, too. “We spent hours herding those goats—and then we just left them in the hills.”
“What were we supposed to do with them?”
“I don’t know, you tell me. Shouldn’t we have taken them down to the barn?”
“I already told you, you can’t pen up the goats of Watford. The best you can do is invite them in.”
“Invite them? Are they vampire goats?”
Niamh was about to start the car, but now she’s turned in her seat to frown at me. “You’re just like everyone else, aren’t you.”
“Oh, lay off.” I roll down the window. “I tried to help.”
“I suppose that’s true,” she mutters, starting the car. “You were extremely helpful for someone who doesn’t care at all about anything outside of herself.”
My head whips back to her. “Hey. You don’t even know me.”
Niamh scoffs, backing the car out onto the road. “Everyone knows you, Agatha. You’re Simon Snow’s girlfriend. You’re the Chosen One’s chosen one. You so much as break a nail, and he burns down the Wavering Wood.”
“I feel like you’re once again referring to a time when I was kidnapped…”
She looks over at me, actually angry now. “Maybe it doesn’t matter to you whether Watford falls—but it’s the heart of who we are, as magicians. It’s our only institution, the only thing we’ve ever managed to get done and make work.”