“You want me to abandon him?”
“Yes!”
“He’s my friend.”
“No. Penelope. He’s a Normal. Whom you’ve known for how long—a few days? A week?”
I don’t reply.
We both hear the front door open. My dad’s home, he’s calling up to Premal.
Mum’s face falls even farther, like someone has heaped another trouble on her back. “Wait here,” she says. “I’ve got to deal with this, then I’ll help you send Shepard on his way.”
She walks out of the kitchen.
I lay my right hand on Shepard’s forehead and whisper: “Rise and
shine!”
He opens his eyes, then blinks at me. “Penelope?”
Amazing. He really is resistant to memory spells.
“Come on,” I say, quietly. “Can you walk?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
I pull him up and towards the kitchen door. We run through the back garden and out into the street. I wave down the first taxi we see and shove Shepard in.
He isn’t smiling when he looks at me. “You were right. Your mom really didn’t like me.”
6
BAZ
Simon Snow is terrible at texting. To no one’s surprise.
I message him from the train station —“I called in every favour to bail out my aunt. She didn’t thank me, and I still don’t know what she was after.
How’s Wellbelove Manor?”
“fine,” he texts back. “agatha’s mum made chicken, you in trouble?”
“With my aunt?”
“for america”
“Goodness, no. I don’t think anyone noticed we were gone. Fiona’s an excellent distraction.”
I wait for him to text back, but Simon never feels obligated to keep a conversation going.
“I’m heading to Oxford,” I send. “I want to talk to my father about Fiona.”
“kk”
“I’ll tell him you said hello.”
“really?”
“No, I was joking. He’s still pretending you don’t exist.”
“right”
“It wasn’t a good joke,” I send.
“not your worst,” Simon sends back.
I laugh, desperate for anything that passes for banter, then quickly type out, “You wouldn’t want to come along with me, would you?”
Simon doesn’t text back immediately. Then—“is that another joke?”
I sigh. “Yeah.”
The last and only time Simon came to my house, the Christmas before last, he inadvertently drained the entire countryside of magic. He’s the reason my parents had to relocate to Oxford. They live in a hunting lodge now. My younger sister had to change schools.
My father disliked Simon Snow long before he ruined our ancestral home.
Simon was the Mage’s protégé, and the Mage spent the last fifteen years undermining families like mine. Old families. Powerful families. Wealthy families.
（You might think that all magickal families would be wealthy, but that’s not true. Look at the Bunces. And the Pettys. My father says magic is a tool just like any other, and some people don’t like to work. Bunce would argue with that assessment. But Bunce isn’t here right now, so I don’t have to suffer through her dissent.）
So Simon was already persona non grata in our house. And then he came over for Christmas and made our land unliveable. And then my father figured out—I’m not sure who told him, Fiona wouldn’t have—that Simon and I were being extremely homosexual together.
If I even mention Simon’s name in front of my father, the temperature in the room drops ten degrees.
I usually don’t mention him. My father and I are still firmly pretending that I’m going to make an honest woman out of someone someday. When I went home for my stepmother’s birthday, they’d invited some poor magickal girl from the next town over to sit next to me at dinner. She’d been a couple years ahead of me at Watford, and apparently hadn’t heard the news that Simon Snow showed up at my Leavers’ Ball and snogged me stupid.
I wish he’d show up and snog me stupid right now …
Un-bloody-likely. It’s only been twenty-four hours since Snow tried to talk me into dumping him so I could take up with a 300-year-old vampire.
（Imagine bringing Lamb the Vampire King home for dinner…） I’m hoping we don’t have to talk about that again—that coming back to London has brought Simon back to his senses. Or at least back to himself.