Any Way the Wind Blows Read online

  He isn’t my boyfriend, I think. “He isn’t the Chosen One,” I say—though I still half believe that he was.

  She waves a hand in the air. “Well, we all know that now, don’t we? But thousands of years of prophecy don’t just go away. This is an excellent time to get into the Chosen One business. Everybody’s got a pet theory or a pet candidate.”

  “So Daphne … what? Ran off with some new golden boy?”

  Fiona shrugs. “I’ve heard whispers. There’s a lot of this going around. The Coven sent me to talk to Lady Salisbury last week—her son’s missing. It looked like vampires, but old Ruth is sure he’s joined one of these cults. They do prey on the daft and the gormless…”

  “Daphne’s hardly gormless.”

  Fiona raises her eyebrows like she’s refusing to comment.

  “And you really don’t care?” I ask. “That she’s abandoned her marriage to chase some charlatan?”

  “Who says he—or perhaps she—is a charlatan? Someone has to be the Chosen One. Maybe your stepmum’s got it right.” Fiona pushes the rest of her sandwich into her mouth. “All I’m saying is, when someone runs off like this, they’re usually running from something as much as they’re running to. I’m not telling Daphne Grimm how to live her life, even if she is as thickheaded as she is thin-blooded.” Fiona washes her last bite down with tea, then stands, brushing her hands on her jeans. “Right then, I’m off.”

  “But you just got here.”

  “I came by to check on you, and now I have. You look a mess.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She’s walking away. “Work.”

  “Vampire hunting? On a Monday afternoon?”

  “Something like that. Drink your tea, and mind your business.” She turns back to me. “And—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “Eat something.” She winks.

  16

  BAZ

  The good thing about my aunt’s terrible flat is that I can do some light hunting without even leaving the building. I just have to dispose of the empty rodents when I’m done.

  Fiona let me move in here after I left Watford. Simon and I didn’t want to live together; that seemed premature—even though we’d shared a single room for eight years. Maybe that’s why it seemed like a bad idea. Some distance seemed prudent.

  Still … I didn’t expect to be sleeping in my aunt’s flat every night. I didn’t expect to become so accustomed to the night bus back to Chelsea.

  Simon needed time. He needed care. He still startled at bright lights and sudden noises. And prolonged eye contact. He’d get jumpy when we were alone together. He’d actually shudder if I touched him too softly—and not a good shudder. (My kingdom for a good shudder.)

  On the worst days, on the even worse nights, I used to think about all the bad things that have happened to Simon—just the ones I know about. And then I’d wonder about all the terrible things that have happened to him that I don’t know about. Twenty years of bad things. How long would it take for those painful memories to die back? Or, at least, to wither?

  I’d wait.

  I was going to wait.

  The neighbours are tired of my music again. They’ve come to the door this time. Well, they can push right off—James Blake is a Mercury Prize winner, and this song was written by Joni Mitchell, surely Canada’s finest. They think they’re tired of this song? Once I figure out the magic, I’m going to loop the same two lines again and again:

  “You’re in my blood, you’re my holy wine. You taste so bitter and so sweet.”

  That’s the part that hurts the most, and I’ve decided that it helps to hurt the most. It sort of maxes out my nerve endings.

  They’re knocking on the door. Fuck off.

  More knocking. Seriously, fuck off.

  I turn up the music. I have to use a spell to do it, because the speakers are already at their limit. “These go to eleven!”

  The neighbours are really banging on the door now. I should spell off their hands. I’m not even going to answer the door—I’ll just spell their hands off from here.

  Wait … They’ve stopped.

  Have they stopped?

  There’s no knocking …

  No knocking …

  I think they’ve given up. Good. Go back to your flat, and get used to this. This is our soundtrack now. Oh—my favourite part is coming around again. Sing it, James.

  “You’re in my blood, you’re my holy—”

  Knocking! Fucking pounding on the door!

  I jump off the couch. My head spins. I give myself a moment. More bloody knocking. I plow over to the door and yank it open. My fangs might be out, I can’t be held responsible.

  Simon Snow is standing there.

  About to knock again.

  His hand drops.

  “Baz,” he says. He looks down at me. “You haven’t changed.”

  SIMON

  Baz is still wearing the clothes he had on yesterday. He’s wrinkled looking, and his hair is stringy. “What?” he says. I think that’s what he says. It’s so loud inside his flat, I can’t hear him.

  “What?” I shout.

  I can’t make out his next sentence.

  “What?” I say again. “Why is it so loud in there?”

  Baz walks away from me, into the living room. He turns down the music. His arms are folded when he comes back, and he’s sneering. “Oh. Snow. You’re still here. I expected you to run and hide as soon as my back was turned.”

  I lift my chin. “I deserve that.”

  “You deserve worse. Why are you here?”

  I try to sound more steady than I feel. “I came to tell you something.”

  He huffs. “You’ve already told me enough.”

  “Baz—”

  “Unless you’ve thought of another way to say that you don’t want to be with me.”

  “Baz, I—”

  Baz keeps talking. His top lip is curled so sharply, it looks like someone snagged it with a fishhook. “Because that would be unnecessary, Snow. Message received!”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “Also unnecessary!”

  “Baz!”

  He shouts at me: “I don’t care that you’re sorry! Do you understand that, Simon? It makes no difference to me whether you feel regret or not! You’re sorry? What do I care? What can I do with that? You came here to tell me you’re sorry?”

  “No!” I really didn’t. “Listen—”

  “Listen? I have been listening. I’ve spent the last year listening, and you didn’t have anything to say to me. You couldn’t assemble a complete sentence until you’d already left me. And now you’re back to say you’re sorry? Guess what? You already put that in your note. It didn’t matter then either!”

  “No,” I growl. I know it’s a growl because that’s what Baz calls it when I sound like this. I grab him by the front of his shirt. “I didn’t come here to say I’m sorry—I came to tell you that you were right!”

  He didn’t even flinch when I grabbed him. He’s sneering down at me like I’m miles beneath him.

  “Of course I was,” he says.

  He shoves me back and slams the door in my face.

  BAZ

  I let my forehead fall against the door. I’m panting. Maybe I’m hyperventilating. I haven’t had enough food, water, or blood for this. I can’t get enough air.

  Simon came to see me.

  After saying he hated the sight of me.

  Simon came to say he was sorry.

  (Which really is worthless. And more about making him feel better than making me feel anything. And fuck him if he thinks—)

  He came to tell me I was right …

  I open the door again. He’s still standing there.

  “What was I right about?” I demand. “And you better make this clear and to the point, for once in your magic-forsaken life.”

  Simon looks tired. He’s wearing baggy jeans and a Watford hoodie and someone has spelled his wings invisible—or
maybe they’re already gone.

  He pushes his shoulders back and points that square chin at me. “You were right, Baz. I never tried.”

  SIMON

  Baz doesn’t say anything.

  I meet his grey eyes. As hard as it is. As hard as they are. As much as I feel like I don’t have the right.

  “I’ve just been waiting for you to get tired of me,” I say. “Since the day I lost my magic. Before that, even. I never thought—” I shake my head. “I never really thought this would work.”

  Baz is shaking his head, too, just slightly, like he’s quietly rejecting every word. “I thought you’d go down fighting if you believed in something…”

  He’s right, he’s always right. I look him in the eye. “I never believed in us.”

  BAZ

  I didn’t think there was anything left that Simon could say to hurt me …

  I was wrong.

  I laugh and wipe my eyes. “Seven snakes,” I say. “What a thing to hear. Fuck, Snow…” I bring my arm up and laugh into my elbow, sobbing.

  Simon’s mouth is hanging open. “No,” he says. “I mean…” He reaches out a hand but doesn’t touch me. “What I mean is, as soon as I turned against the Mage, I left the map. It was like I walked right out of the story everyone had been telling about me. I started losing, and I didn’t stop. You felt like something I grabbed on my way down—but I never believed I’d get to keep you. I didn’t get to keep anything … What did I get to keep, Baz?”

  Simon is crying, too, but he doesn’t wipe his tears. Just licks away the ones that hit his lips.

  “I didn’t try,” he says, “because I thought it would be worse if I tried. I told myself to enjoy it—you—while I could. But that didn’t work. It felt like eighth year again, waiting for the Humdrum to attack. The waiting … I’m not good at waiting.”

  I rub my nose against my sleeve. I nod. I know.

  “I just wanted to, like, make it happen,” he says. “To like, charge into it and get it over with. Whenever we were together, I just wanted to get it all over with.”

  I laugh again. The hits keep coming.

  Simon shoves his hand up into the front of his hair and pulls. “Stop,” he says. “I know how that sounds. That’s not how I mean it!”

  “No.” I shake my head. “I know. I know how you mean it. It still hurts.”

  He looks in my eyes. He’s hardly looked away. “Baz”—his voice is small—“do you think it would have been different if I’d tried?”

  SIMON

  He doesn’t answer me. I shouldn’t have come here. Nothing I’ve said changes anything, I was a berk to think it would—

  But I haven’t been able to get it out of my head, what he said. That he was the first thing I ever gave up on. He’s right. I didn’t give up on Agatha—I waited until she gave up on me. I fought whatever the Humdrum threw at me. I did whatever the Mage asked of me. I gave myself wings because I couldn’t stop fighting.

  Why haven’t I ever fought for Baz?

  What would happen if I did?

  Baz takes a step back, into the living room. His hand is on the door. And he’s looking at me the way he did in my flat last night, like I’ve got a knife in his heart, and I’m holding it there.

  Then his head falls forward a bit, and he tilts it away from me. “Come on,” he says softly. “Come in.”

  BAZ

  Snow doesn’t move.

  I back out of his way. “Come on. We don’t have to do this in the hall.”

  He steps over the threshold and seems to wait for me to change my mind. I close the door behind him, so he has to come all the way in. (I still might change my mind, I don’t know.) Then I sit at one end of the sofa and wave my hand at the other end.

  He hesitates some more, still standing with his feet apart and his shoulders back. Battle mode.

  When I clear my throat, he finally moves—taking the spot on the far end of the sofa and leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. (He’s moving stiffly. I wonder if he’s sore. I wonder if Dr. Wellbelove took his tail as well.) He scrubs at the caramel-coloured curls at the top of his head. They already look thoroughly scrubbed.

  “I could make tea,” I say.

  “No,” he says. “Just”—he makes a fist in his hair—“say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “That it wouldn’t have mattered. That it doesn’t matter.”

  I turn more fully towards him. My voice is getting haughty again, I can’t help it. “The question on the table is whether it would have mattered, to our relationship, if you had tried?”

  He looks over at me, infernal chin raised. “Yeah.”

  “Of fucking course it would have mattered!” I say. “What kind of question is that?”

  He’s nodding, too quickly, looking at my aunt’s rug. “Right. Right. Of course.” He scrapes his fingers up the back of his hair to the top of his head. “Right.”

  I want to grab his wrists. I want to shake him. (I want to cast spells over his shoulders and make every pain in his body go away.)

  “I was trying,” I say. “Every minute.”

  Simon nods. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t.”

  “All right. Sorry. I mean. Just—”

  Use your words, Snow.

  He turns on the sofa, pulling one leg up, to face me. His fists have dropped to his thighs. “How?”

  “How what?”

  He looks in my eyes. He looks like a dog trapped in a snare. Like he’s begging me to set him free from something. “How would it have been different if I’d tried?”

  I huff out a breath. “I can’t answer that. How would I know that?”

  “Baz…”

  “What do you want from me, Snow?”

  He’s breathing through his teeth. “I just—”

  “You just.”

  “I mean—”

  “You mean.” I wonder if I sound cruel. I wonder if I mean to be.

  “I want to try!”

  SIMON

  That came out wrong. Like a threat. Like an armed robbery.

  Baz is looking down at his lap. He pushes a lock of black hair behind his ear.

  “It’s okay,” I spit out, trying to reel things back. “I don’t expect—You don’t owe me—”

  “Shut up, Snow.”

  I shut up.

  I think Baz is still crying.

  I’m so bad at this. At people. At him. I shouldn’t have come here. I stand up—

  His hand latches on to my wrist. “Don’t you dare.”

  I sit down again. “Okay. Sorry.”

  Baz doesn’t let go. His hand is cold. He’s still looking at his lap. “What does that mean?” He sounds careful. “That you want to try?”

  “Just what I said. That I want—That I wish I could—That I would like to—” I clench my jaw for a second. “Try. With you. To see … if it could be different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to give up.”

  Baz scowls up at me. “Am I a video game you’re trying to beat?”

  “No!”

  He pulls on my arm, but doesn’t pull me close. “Then why?”

  “Because you were right! I didn’t try. I gave up on us. And I can’t—I can’t live with myself—”

  “I don’t care!”

  I take Baz’s other hand. By the wrist. He’s holding me back, and I’m holding on to him. “I can’t go on, Baz, knowing that it could have been different!”

  “That sounds like another apology.”

  I look in his cold, grey eyes. I beg him to understand. I’m growling again, I know it. “I want to … try. Because—Because I love you, Baz. I love you, and I didn’t think that I could keep you. But if there’s a chance … If there’s any chance at all … I can’t—I want—I need—”

  Baz’s hand goes slack on my arm.

  I let go of him.

  I push my palms into my eyes. They’re wet—how long have I been crying? Baz isn’
t saying anything, and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do now. I drop my hands and look up at him, desperate for a clue.

  Baz’s mouth is slightly open, and his eyebrows have pulled up in the middle. “You … love me?”

  BAZ

  Snow nods. “Yeah,” he says, “of course.”

  Like it’s obvious.

  It isn’t obvious. It has not been obvious.

  “You never said,” I say.

  “Haven’t I?”

  “No.”

  He frowns. “I thought—I mean … I’ve killed so many things for you.”

  I laugh. It might be another sob, but maybe it’s just a laugh. “What are you, a house cat? Am I supposed to know how you feel because you brought me a mouse?”

  The corner of Snow’s mouth twitches. “I brought you a cow once, remember? And I killed that chimera for you in fifth year.”

  “You killed it near me. There’s a difference.”

  He reaches a hand up towards my face, then hesitates.

  I hesitate, too—I feel torn in every direction—then I slowly close the distance.

  Snow’s thumb connects with my chin. He tucks his knuckles under my jaw. He swallows, and it’s a whole show. “I do,” he says. “Love you.”

  I close my eyes for a moment. Like I’m trying to trap his words in my head. Then I open them again. “What about … everything else?”

  “What else?”

  “Everything you said last night. About magic.”

  “Oh. Well, I meant all of that. I still mean it.”

  I shake my head. “Fucking hell, Snow.”

  He holds on to my chin. “I don’t want to live in the World of Mages, Baz—I want a Normal life. But maybe we could, like, meet in between?”

  “In between.”

  “Like, you do your thing. Magic. And I’ll do mine. And we don’t have to talk about it all the time.”

  “You said it makes you miserable, that I remind you of everything you’ve lost.”