Carry On

“Like the children’s song,” I said. “And one will come to end us, / and one will bring his fall, / let the greatest power of powers reign, / may it save us all.”

“Yes.”

“My grandmother used to talk about the Greatest Mage.”

“There are dozens of prophecies,” Davy said. “All about one mage, the Chosen One.”

“How do you know they’re all about the same person?” I ask. “And how do you know he—or she—hasn’t come and gone already.”

“Do you really think we’d miss someone who saved our whole people? Someone who fixed our world?”

“Does it say what they’ll fix?”

“It says there will be a threat, that we’ll be dark and divided—that magic itself will be in danger, and that there will be a mage who has power no one else has ever dreamt of, a magician who draws his power from the centre of the earth. ‘He walks like an ordinary man, but his power is like no other.’ One of the oracles describes him as ‘a vessel’—large and strong enough to hold all of magic itself.”

Davy was getting more and more excited as he talked. His eyes were shining, and his words were tripping over each other. He gestured towards the stack of books as if their very presence made the prophecies irrefutable.

I felt my chin pull back. “You don’t…”

“What?” Davy asked.

“Well, you don’t think…”

“What, Lucy? What don’t I think?”

“Well … that you’re the Greatest Mage?…”

He scoffed. “Me? No. Don’t be a fool. I’m more powerful than any of these cretins”—he glanced around the library—“but I have the sort of power you can imagine.”

I tried to laugh. “Right. So…”

“So?”

“So why is this so important to you?”

“Because the Greatest Mage of all is coming, Lucy. And he’s coming at the hour of our greatest need. When the mages are ‘scrabbling with clawed hands at each others’ throats’—when ‘the head of our great beast has lost its way.’ That’s soon. That’s now. We should all care about this! We should be getting ready!”

59

PENELOPE

I like my dad’s lab. In the attic. No one’s allowed to clean up here, not even his assistants. It’s a complete mess, but Dad knows where everything is, so if you move a book from one pile to the next, he goes a little mental.

One whole wall is a map of Great Britain—the holes in the magickal atmosphere haven’t spread across the water yet, but they’ve grown over the years. Dad uses pins and string to map the perimeter of each hole, then uses different colours of string to show how the holes have grown. Little flags record the date of measurement. A few of the big holes have merged over the years—there’s almost no magic left in Cheshire anymore.

Dad’s assistants are out on a surveying mission now. He’s just hired someone new, a magickal anthropologist, to study the effects of the voids on magickal creatures. He’d like to study how the holes affect Normals, but he can’t get the funding.

I walk over to the map. There are two holes in London—a big one in Kensington and a smaller one in Trafalgar Square. I hate to think about what would happen if the Humdrum attacked near our house in Hounslow. Plenty of magickal families have had to move, and sometimes it weakens them. Your magic settles in a place. It supports you.

I sit at one of the tall tables. Dad likes to stand while he works, so all the tables are tall. He’s already got a book open, and he’s copying numbers into a ledger. He uses a computer, too, but he still keeps all his records by hand.

“I’m working on a project for school,” I say. “And I was looking through some old copies of The Record.…”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

“And I was reading about the Watford Tragedy.”

Dad looks up. “Yes?”

“Do you remember when it happened?”

“Of course.” He goes back to his ledger. “Your mother and I were still at uni. You were just a little girl.…”

Mum and Dad got married just after Watford and started having kids right away, even though they were still in school and Mum wanted a career. Dad says Mum wanted everything, immediately.

“It must have been terrible,” I say.

“It was. No one had ever attacked Watford before—and poor Natasha Grimm-Pitch.”

“Did you know her?”

“Not personally. She was older than us. Her sister was a few years below me at school—Fiona—but I didn’t know her either. The Pitches always kept to their own sort.”

“So you didn’t like her? Natasha Grimm-Pitch?”

“I didn’t like her politics,” he says. “She thought low-powered magicians should give up their wands.”

Low-powered magicians. Like my dad.

“Why did the vampires attack Watford?” I ask. “They’d never done it before.”

“The Humdrum sent them,” Dad says.

“But it doesn’t say that”—I lean towards him, across the table—“in the initial news stories, right after the attack. It just says it was vampires.”

He looks up at me again, interested. “That’s right.” He nods. “We didn’t know at first. We just thought the dark creatures were taking advantage of how disorganized we were. It was a different time. Everything was looser. The World of Mages was more like a … club. Or a society. There was no line of defence. There were even werewolf attacks back then—in London proper, can you imagine?”

“So no one knew the Humdrum was behind the attack on Watford?”

“Not for a while,” he says. “We didn’t know the Humdrum was an entity at first.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when the holes started appearing—”

“In 1998.”

“Yes,” he says, “that’s when we first recorded them. Seventeen years ago. We thought they might be a natural phenomenon, or maybe even the result of pollution. Like the holes in the ozone layer. It was Dr. Ma

“When did you guys realize that the Humdrum was a ‘he’?”

“We still don’t know it’s a ‘he.’”

“You know what I mean—when did you realize it was a thing with intention? That it was attacking us?”

“There wasn’t one day,” he says. “I mean, everything sort of shifted in 2008. I personally think that the Humdrum got more powerful around that time. We’d been tracking these small holes, like bubbles in the magickal atmosphere—and they suddenly mushroomed, like a cancer metastasizing. Around the same time, the dark world went mad. I suppose it was when the dark creatures started coming for Simon directly that we knew there was malice there—and intelligence—not just natural disaster. And then there was the feeling. The holes, the attacks … there’s a distinct feeling.” His eyes focus on me, and his mouth tightens.

After the Humdrum kidnapped Simon and me last year, Dad wanted to know every detail. I told him most of it—everything about the Humdrum, even what he looks like. Dad thinks the Humdrum took Simon’s form to mock him.

I rest my elbows on the counter. “Why do you think the Humdrum hates Simon so much?”

“Well.” He wrinkles his nose. “The Humdrum seems to hate magic. And Simon does have more of it than anyone—maybe anything—else.”

“It’s weird that the Humdrum isn’t its real name,” I say. “I mean, that it didn’t come with that name or name itself.…”

“Do you think a dark creature would choose the name ‘the Insidious Humdrum’?”

“I’ve never thought about it,” I say. “It’s just always been there.”

Dad sighs and pushes up his glasses. “That breaks my heart, to think that you can’t remember a world without the Humdrum. I worry that your generation will just acclimate to it. That you won’t see the necessity of fighting back.”

“I think I’ll see, Dad. The foul thing kidnapped me—and it keeps trying to kill my best friend.”