Aadhya went to fetch her car from the parking space—another convenient bit of magic; she’d found one with no trouble, less than a block away—and as soon as she had us in it, she began driving without any discussion. By some sort of instinctive and unspoken agreement, none of us said anything until we’d got through the tunnel and back into New Jersey, as if we needed to get running water between us and the monster on the other side, but then we came out from under the river and Liesel immediately said, “She is a maleficer?” at exactly the same time as Aadhya said, “Okay, El, what the fuck.”
“Yes,” I said, which was the answer to both of them.
“Do you think they…know,” Aadhya said, but it stopped being a question by the time she finished asking it. Of course they knew, where they was everyone who mattered: the rest of the New York council, the senior wizards of the enclave. It was a feature for them, surely, not a bug. A fantastically controlled dark sorceress, capable of anything and willing to do worse yet—of course any enclave would grab at her with both hands. That had been my own strategy for getting an enclave place, after all, and an excellent strategy it was; it had only broken down on my being willing to execute it. No wonder Ophelia was a shoo-in for the next Domina. In fact, it was probably her own choice not to have taken the position yet.
I had Ophelia’s small box cupped in my hands—not protectively, more like making sure it didn’t go off in some way—and I spent the rest of the way just staring at it, until Aadhya was pulling up in front of what I assumed at first was some sort of club or restaurant, a vast hulking mansion of pink brick that was only a tiny bit shy of London’s monstrosity, only it hadn’t been allowed to collapse in on itself. The plantings were absolutely stupendous, what seemed like the entire garden in bloom. But she left her car in the drive and led us to the door, so I said cautiously, “This isn’t your house?” half expecting her to laugh at me, only she said, “Yeah, sorry, I’m throwing you to the wolves,” before she opened the door.
The wolves were her entire family, who indeed descended on us in a pack; her mum sailed straight to me, grabbed my face in her hands and kissed me on both cheeks and then held me back a bit so she could smile at me fiercely, her eyes wet. “Aadhya told us all about you,” she said, her voice thick. I swallowed hard.
It wasn’t anything like the vague fragments I remembered from that one catastrophic visit to my father’s family. The gigantic American house was full of slightly wrong architectural details and every imaginable mod con, aggressively mundane. That was how Aadhya’s family had protected their last remaining child: they’d hidden all the magic away into small rooms upstairs, a workshop down in the basement, behind locked doors, and threw the rest of the house open to the mundane friends she made at the local middle school and turned it into a warm welcoming feast of a place for them, so mals wouldn’t come anywhere near.
And they hadn’t shut the doors after she’d gone away. While we were all sitting round the pool in back with tall cold glasses of iced tea full of fruit and a bowl of freshly made snack mix that I couldn’t stop eating by the handful, a mundane neighbor dropped by unannounced with a whole basket of glowing ripe tomatoes; she said they were overflowing her vegetable patch, exclaimed with surprise and delight to see Aadhya all grown up and home from boarding school, was beamingly friendly to Liesel and only wobbled a little when she came to me, with a vague expression of unease crossing her face that she hurriedly papered over with an even more determined smile before making a slightly awkward excuse to leave rather than sit down and have a drink.
Her own family probably felt that sensation too, since everyone does. But they didn’t let on if they did. They weren’t mundanes, and I wasn’t just a friend from school: I was Aadhya’s ally. I had got their daughter out of the Scholomance, and she’d got me out. For most of us, the loser kids who don’t have an enclave ready to take us in when we graduate, that’s the most important relationship in our lives short of marriage, and sometimes beyond it. I’d needed most of last year to wrap my head round the idea that anyone had been willing to be my ally at all, my ally and my friend, and not just someone using me at arm’s length, warily. I’d never thought about what it would be like having that relationship after getting out. And this was what it was like: I was welcome.
So it was, after all, like that visit to the compound outside Mumbai, only it was just the first shining moments of that visit, which had stuck with me all these years, warm and golden, family, and this time the beauty didn’t stop. And I didn’t say I need to get going, even though if I was going, I did need to go. It was like having cool balm applied to the searing pain of meeting Ophelia, of looking at Orion’s life.