Any Way the Wind Blows Page 3

  “Penelope … no.” She’s standing up, looking down at Shepard with her hands on her hips. “There’s no way to help him without compromising ourselves.”

  “He won’t tell anyone about us.”

  “Now he won’t. He won’t remember you or me or any of it. He’ll spend the rest of his life wondering how drunk he must have been to have forgotten getting such elaborate tattoos. Get him on the next plane home.”

  “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.

  “I’ll be home tomorrow,” I text him.

  He doesn’t reply.

  * * *

  As soon as I open the front door, I can hear the television, and my first thought is that I’m in the wrong house. Then I hear my father shouting, and I’m certain I’m in the wrong house—I’ve never heard him raise his voice.

  “I won’t ask you again, Sophronia! Put that down this minute! Sophronia!”

  One of the twins runs past me, holding a doll over her head. I snatch it.

  “Basil!” she shouts, grabbing my waist. Sophie and Petra are 5. This is Sophie, I think, but I’ll be honest, it’s hard for me to tell the twins apart unless they’re smiling.

  I pick her up. “Goodness, you’re all grown up. It’s like holding a baby rhinoceros.”

  “Basil,” she grins, “hide me.” Definitely Sophie.

  “You are well over the line, Sophronia!” Father yells. (Actually yells.)

  I carry Sophie into the family room, where Petra’s sobbing on the sofa. I hand her the doll. I always thought that twins were supposed to be best friends, but these two fight like rats. The baby’s crying, too. My father—or possibly his unhinged doppelgänger?—is pacing with him. He stops when he sees me. “Basilton?”

  “Father?”

  Malcolm Grimm has two looks: gentleman farmer and gentleman’s gentleman. This is decidedly neither. His white hair is sticking up, his shirt is untucked. He looks like he’s just been roughed up in an alley—no, I’ve seen my father get roughed up in an alley, and he stayed much more pulled together than this.

  “Is everything all right?” I ask.

  “Tip-top,” he says, automatically. “Basil, would you be so kind?” He hands me the baby and takes Sophie. He scoops up Petra, too. “You pair are going to bed. And if you don’t stay there, I’ll—well, I’ll be very disappointed.”

  The baby—Swithin’s nearly 2, I should stop calling him “the baby”—is screaming in my ear.

  I pat his back, swaying. “What’s wrong, little puff? Bad night?” I check his nappy, then his forehead. “You’re allowed a bad night. Should we sing a song? Your sisters always liked my singing … Even Mordelia.”

  I bounce him around the family room, singing songs from the White Album. The whole room is a mess, strewn with toys and clothes. It looks like my father let the girls eat dinner out here—frozen pizza?—and there are two dirty nappies shoved under the coffee table. Is this what happens when my stepmother goes out for the night? Poor Daphne.

  Swithin stops crying during “Martha My Dear” and finally falls asleep the second time through “I Will.” I ease myself down onto the sofa, trying not to disturb him.

  “Oh, Basilton. Thank magic.” My father’s standing in the doorway, looking a hundred years old. He drops into a leather club chair and groans.

  If he had asked me at the time, I would have told him that 46 was too bloody old to start a second family. The man was already past his prime when he had me! But Daphne was young and had baby fever, and he was in love.

  That was eight years and four children ago. Magic knows whether Daphne wants to have more; she’s still in her 30s and d
oesn’t seem to have any other interests.

  “Is Daphne at book club?”

  Swithin makes a fussy noise, but settles back on my chest when I pat him. I look up at my father to see if he heard me.

  He’s starting to cry.

  7

  SHEPARD

  “Hey. Penelope. It’s all right.”

  She’s been pacing for an hour. “I know it’s all right,” she snaps.

  “Okay, good,” I say. “That’s good. Maybe you could sit down?”

  “I don’t feel like sitting down. I feel like pacing. It helps me think. I need a blackboard, why doesn’t this flat have a blackboard!”

  Her phone pings. It’s been going off every ten minutes or so since we left her parents’ house.

  “Is that your mom again?”

  “Yes.” Penelope has paused her pacing to furiously thumb out a reply.

  “What are you telling her?”

  “Lies.”

  “You don’t have to lie to your mother for my sake.”

  “I think I do, Shepard, unless you’d like me to magically concuss you and leave you in Piccadilly Circus.”

  “I told you—I can just go home.”

  “You don’t even have a real passport!”

  “Cast a few spells my way, and I’ll get on a plane. It’ll be fine.”

  She stops raging at her phone to rage at me directly. “You. Will. Not. Be. Fine. There’s nothing fine about being cursed by a demon!”

  “We all die someday, right?”

  “Yes, but most of us aren’t obligated to go to hell afterwards.”

  “I don’t think it’s hell exactly. I’ve done some reading…”

  “For snake’s sake, Shepard—”

  “My point is—” I say.

  She takes a deep breath, like she’s about to shout at me.

  I keep talking, holding up both hands. “My point, Penelope, is that it’s not your problem to fix.”

  “Of course it is!”

  “Why?”

  “Be-because—” she sputters. “Because it’s a problem that—that exists.”

  “You’re responsible for all existing problems?”

  She buries her hands in her hair. “No! But yes. What sort of person would be if I didn’t help you?”

  I try to look reassuring. “A normal one.”

  “I’m not Nor—”

  “You know what I mean. If I had cancer, would you feel like it was your job to cure me?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Penelope, listen—”

  “No, Shepard, you listen! I understand I can’t fix everything. But it’s like, you can’t pick up every piece of litter, right? You can’t stop and pick up every napkin or piece of paper you see on the street. But my mum used to say that once we touched something, we were responsible for it. So if we picked up a can or a sweet wrapper, we had to deal with it—throw it away or recycle it or whatever—because we’d made it our business.”

  “Okay.” I nod. “I think I get what you’re saying … I’m like a piece of trash that you picked up.”

  “Exactly! I can’t just drop you now. Then I’d be the one littering.”

  “What if I give you permission to throw me back?”

  “It doesn’t work like that. You’ve penetrated my sphere of accountability.”

  “Penelope…” I smile. “Does that mean we’re friends?”

  She rolls her eyes—like she thinks I’m worth helping, but not talking to—and starts with the pacing again. “I can’t believe Mum was so dismissive. She’s the one who taught me the sphere of accountability.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t apply to Normals.”

  “Normals are still people, Shepard!”

  “I’m surprised to hear you say so.”

  She doesn’t look up. “On top of everything else, I owe you a life debt. We might all owe you a life debt. I can’t just—”

  The front door bangs open, and Simon walks in, shuffling off his raincoat. His wings spring out.

  “Simon, thank Morgana!” Penelope says. “You won’t believe what Mum did tonight—”

  Simon walks past her. “We can talk about it tomorrow, yeah?”

  “Simon, it’s urgent, I—”

  He walks into one of the bedrooms and shuts the door behind him.

  8

  SIMON

  Dr. Wellbelove told me to sleep on it. So I did.

  And I woke up thinking he was right. I’m taking the money.

  I don’t deserve it. Nobody owes me. But I could use it—I could really use it right now.

  I’ve been trying to hang on to the World of Mages because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Because I couldn’t find a way forward. I thought I’d find my way at the bottom of a cider can. I thought I’d find it, or something, driving across America. And for a few hours—a few hours in the back of a truck, somewhere in Utah—I fooled myself into thinking that I had.

  But the only way forward is out.

  This money is my way out.

  There’s enough to get a flat. I won’t have to worry about rent for a year, at least. And I’ll have a job by then. I made an appointment with Dr. Wellbelove to finally deal with the wings. It’s going to have to be surgical, he says; magic won’t touch them. That’s fine. I’m ready.

  I’m ready to let go—to be me again. The me I thought I was before the Mage ever showed up.

  9

  BAZ

  “I just tried to call you. I’m going to stay down here for another day. Things are a bit of a mess. I think my father and Daphne had a fight. Text me when you wake up.”

  * * *

  “Are you around?”

  * * *

  “Are you sleeping? You shouldn’t sleep in the middle of the day when you’re jet-lagged.”

  * * *

  “I don’t have a room here. I slept on the sofa. Mordelia woke me up this morning, playing video games.”

  * * *

  “Daphne still isn’t home. She hasn’t returned my texts.

  There’s a lot of that going around…”

  * * *

  “I’m staying another day, maybe two, I’m not sure. I still haven’t cornered my father.

  I don’t know how to corner my father.

  Anyway …

  I can’t leave yet.”

  * * *

  “I’ll just pretend you’ve replied with a thumbs-up emoji.”

  * * *

  “Good night, Snow.”

  * * *

  “Good morning.”

  * * *

  “Daphne has left my father.

  As far as I can tell.

  He hasn’t *told* me so—magic forbid my father tell me anything other than ‘Tea’s ready’ or ‘The night mares are nearly ready for brooding.’

  (He’s into heritage livestock now—the barns are full of rare magickal creatures. Battering rams and Judas goats. ‘The only lllama herd outside of South America.’)

  But my stepmother isn’t here—and hasn’t been here in days, maybe weeks. A Normal woman from the village comes up on weekday mornings to take care of the children—who all have mobile phones and iPads glued to their faces. Even Swithin! He watches the same YouTube videos over and over, and cries if you take the thing away. These Grimm children are being raised by algorithms.”

  * * *

  “Bunce says you’re awake and running a lot of errands. I leave the city for three days, and suddenly you have errands.”

  * * *

  “Sorry.”

  * * *

  “That was rude.”

  * * *

  “I’m still camping out in the family room. I think you’d like this house better than the one in Hampshire. It isn’t haunted, for one. And the lighting is better.

  You could come sleep on the sofa with me, if you like. My father is in such a state, I don’t think he’d notice.

  There’s not actually *room* for you on the sofa, but there’s no room for me either. I wouldn’t be a
ny less comfortable with you here. And I think you’d like the twins. All they do is eat jam and butter sandwiches and throw things at each other. It takes me back to our first year at Watford.

  I wish I’d brought a change of clothes with me, but I never expected to stay this long. I’m still not certain how long I should stay. I’d thought ‘until Daphne comes home.’ But what if Daphne isn’t coming home?

  I’m not raising my father’s ill-advised second family.

  (If I *were* raising them, we’d have a stern talk about screen time.)

  I’m half asleep, can you tell?

  You could come down, if you like. You don’t even have to text. Just show up on my door, caked with mud. Coat open. Snow in your hair.

  It’s June, isn’t it?

  Good night, Snow.”

  * * *

  “Mordelia walks from room to room, video-chatting with Normals. She says her mother is in London, taking classes, which seems unlikely. I’ve never known Daphne to be studious. Or to have any interest in a career.

  Maybe she’s having a midlife crisis? (I’d be in constant crisis if I were married to someone like my father. He refuses to have a conversation about anything that’s actually happening!)

  Anyway, I can hardly interrogate Mordelia. She’s 8.”

  * * *

  “Is this about America, Snow?”

  * * *

  “It’s going to be all right.”

  * * *

  “I change nappies now. And by that, I don’t mean that I know how to change nappies; I already knew how. What I mean is, it’s all I do. Daphne could have at least housetrained this child before she abandoned him.”