Carry On

“Tea, obviously. I know you can’t function unless you’re stuffing yourself.”

I unwrap the roll and decide to take a bite. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me,” he says. “It sounds wrong.”

“Not as wrong as you bringing me bacon butties.”

“Fine, you’re welcome—when’s Bunce getting here?”

“Why would she?”

“Because you do everything together, don’t you? When you said you’d help, I was counting on you bringing your smarter half.”

“Penelope doesn’t know anything about this,” I say.

“She doesn’t know about the Visiting?”

“No.”

“Why not? I thought you told her everything.”

“It just … seemed like your business.”

“It is my business,” Baz says.

“Right. So I didn’t tell her. Now, where do we start?”

His face falls into a pout. “I was counting on Bunce to tell us where to start.”

“Let’s start with what we know,” I say. That’s where Penelope always starts.

“Right.” Baz actually seems nervous. He’s tapping the chalk against his trouser leg, leaving white smudges. Nicodemus, he writes on the chalkboard in neat slanted script.

“That’s what we don’t know,” I say. “Unless you’ve come up with something.”

He shakes his head. “No. I’ve never heard of him. I did a cursory check in the library during lunch—but I’m not likely to find anything in A Child’s Garden of Verses.”

Most of the magickal books have been removed from the Watford library. The Mage wants us to focus on Normal books so that we stay close to the language.

Before the Mage’s reforms, Watford was so protective of traditional spells that they’d teach those instead of newer spells that worked better. There were even initiatives to make Victorian books and culture more popular with the Normals, just to breathe some new life into old spells.

“Language evolves,” the Mage says. “So must we.”

Baz looks back at the chalkboard again. His hair is dry now and falling in loose locks over his cheeks; he tucks a piece behind his ear, then writes a date on the chalkboard:

12 August 2002.

I start to ask what happened that day, then I realize.

“You were only 5,” I say. “Do you remember anything?”

He looks at me, then back at the board. “Some.”

43

BAZ

Some. I don’t remember how the day started or any of the normal parts.

I remember only a few things about that whole year: A trip to the zoo. The day my father shaved his moustache and I didn’t recognize him.

I remember going to the nursery, in general.

That we got digestives and milk every day. The rabbit mural on the ceiling. A little girl who bit me. I remember that there were trains, and I liked the green one. That there were babies, and sometimes, if one was crying, the miss would let me stand over the cradle and say, “It’s okay, little puff, you’ll be all right.” Because that’s what my mum would say to me when I cried.

I don’t think there were that many of us there. Just the children of faculty. Two rooms. I was still in with the babies.

I don’t specifically remember going there on the twelfth of August. But I do remember when the vampires broke down the door.

Vampires—we—are unusually strong when we’re on the hunt. A heavy oak door carved with bu

I can’t tell you how many vampires came to the nursery that day. It seemed like dozens, but that can’t be right, because I was the only child who was bitten. I remember that one of them, a man, picked me up like I was a puppy—by the back of my dungarees. The bib came up and choked me for a second.

The way I remember it, my mother was right behind them, there almost immediately. I could hear her shouting spells before I saw her. I saw her blue fire before I saw her face.

My mother could summon fire under her breath. She could burn for hours without tiring.

She shot streams of fire over the children’s heads; the air was alive with it.

I remember people scrambling. I remember watching one of the vampires light up like a Roman candle. I remember the look on my mother’s face when she saw me, a flash of agony before the man holding me sank his teeth into my neck.

And then pain.

And then nothing …

I must have passed out.

When I woke up, I was in my mother’s quarters, and Father and Fiona were casting healing spells over me.

When I woke up, my mother was gone.

44

SIMON

Baz lifts his hand to the board and writes Vampires, and then, On a mission from the Humdrum, and then, one fatality.

I don’t know how he can do this—talk about vampires without acknowledging that he is one. Pretending that I don’t already know. That he doesn’t know I already know.

“Well, not just one fatality,” I say. “There were also the vampires, weren’t there? Did your mother kill them all? How many?”

“It’s impossible to say.” He folds his arms. “There were no remains.” He turns back to the chalkboard. “There are no remains, in that sort of death—just ashes.”

“So the Humdrum sends vampires to Watford—”

“The first breach in school history,” he says.

“And the last,” I add.

“Well, it’s got a lot harder, hasn’t it?” Baz says. “That’s one thing we can give your Mage—this school’s as tight as a drum. He’d hide Watford behind the Veil if he could.”

“Have there been any vampire attacks since then?”

Baz shrugs. “I don’t think vampires normally attack magicians. My father says they’re like bears.”

They.

“How?” I ask.

“Well, they hunt where it’s easiest for them, among the Normals, and they don’t attack magicians unless they’re starving or rabid. It’s too much fuss.”

“What else does your father tell you about vampires?”

Baz’s voice is ice: “The subject rarely comes up.”

“Well, I’m just saying”—I square my shoulders and speak deliberately—“it would help in this specific situation if we knew how vampires worked.”

His lip curls. “Pretty sure they drink blood and turn into bats, Snow.”

“I meant culturally, all right?”

“Right, you’re a fiend for culture.”

“Do you want my help or not?”

He sighs and writes Vampires: Food for thought on the board.

I shove the last bite of roll into my mouth. “Can vampires really turn into bats?”

“Why don’t you ask one. Moving on: What else do we know?”

I get off the bed and wipe my hands on my trousers, then take a bound copy of The Record off my desk. “I looked up the coverage of the attack—” I open the book to the right place and hold it out to him. His mother’s official portrait takes up half the page. There’s also a photo of the nursery, burned and blackened, and the headline:

VAMPIRES IN THE NURSERY

Natasha Grimm-Pitch dies defending Watford from dark creatures.

Are any of our children safe?

“I’ve never seen this,” Baz says, taking the book. He sits in my chair and starts reading the story out loud:

“The attack took place only days before the autumn term began. Imagine the carnage that would have occurred on a typical Watford day.…

“Mistress Mary, the nursery manager, said that one of the beasts attacked Grimm-Pitch from behind, clamping its fangs onto her neck after she neatly decapitated another who was threatening her very own son. ‘She was like Fury herself,’ Mary said. ‘Like something out of a film. The monster bit her, and she choked out a Tyger, tyger, burning bright—then they both went up in flames.…’”

Baz stops reading. He looks rattled. “I didn’t know that,” he says, more to the book than to me. “I didn’t know she’d been bitten.”