come to the door.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Mordelia, Father Christmas never comes to the door. And if he did, I’d tell him he had the wrong house.” I’m carefully manoeuvring the whiteboard through the kitchen door.
“I’m telling Mum!” she shouts after me.
I prop the board up in the library, and I’m making columns—Everything we know and Everything we still don’t—when Snow walks into the room. I ignore him.
“It’s not that I think you’ll betray us,” he says.
I make a noise that I’m afraid sounds a lot like “harrumph.”
Simon hassles his curls with one hand. “It’s just … Well, it’s still weird between us, isn’t it?”
I continue ignoring him.
“I mean … you haven’t said … that things are different now for you. I’ve said that I’m not going to kill you.”
“No, you haven’t,” I say.
“It must have been implied.”
“No.”
“Um, all right.” He clears his throat. “Baz. I’m not going to kill you. I’m not going to fight you at all, am I?”
“Good,” I say, stepping back from the whiteboard and admiring my columns. “That will make things much easier.”
“What things?”
“Crowley, I don’t know. Whatever the Families cook up for me. Probably I’ll be the one they ask to poison your Ribena, now that you trust me. What I can promise, Snow, is to weep over your corpse.”
“Or not,” he says.
“Fine, I’ll weep in privacy when the day arrives.”
“No,” he insists, “I’m serious. Or not.”
I look over my shoulder at him. “What are you trying to say?”
“That we don’t have to fight.”
“You realize that your mentor has raided my house twice this month.”
“Yeah—I mean, no, I didn’t realize that—but the point is, I didn’t raid your house. What if,” he says, stepping closer, “I help you find out who killed your mum, then you help me fight the Humdrum, and we just forget about the rest?”
“‘The rest,’” I say, turning around. “Way to oversimplify a decade of corruption and abuse of power.”
“Are you talking about the Mage?”
“Yes.”
He looks pained. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
“How can I not talk about the Mage when I’m talking to the Mage’s Heir?”
“Is that how you think of me?”
“Isn’t that how you think of yourself? Oh, right. I forgot—you don’t think at all.”
Simon groans and rakes at his hair. “Jesus Christ. Do you ever not go for the lowest blow? Like, do you ever think, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t say the most cruel thing just now?’”
“I’m trying to be efficient.”
He leans against the shelf where I’ve set the whiteboard. “It’s vicious.”
“You should talk, Snow. You always go for the kill shot.”
“When I’m fighting. We’re not fighting.”
“We’re always fighting,” I say, going back to the board.
I’m facing the board; he’s standing next to me, facing the room. He leans towards me a bit, without looking at me, and bumps his arm against mine, ruining the word I’m writing. “Or not,” he says.
I erase the word and start over. I’m working on the Everything we still don’t list. I’m tempted to write: everything important and also: whether Simon Snow is actually gay. And: whether I’ll live forever.
“I’ll help you find out who killed your mother,” he says again, like he’s laying out a plan. “And you’ll help me stop the Humdrum—that’s a shared goal, yeah?—and then we’ll worry about the rest later.”
“Is this how you get what you want? By just repeating it until it comes true?”
“Isn’t that how you cast a spell?”
My chalk hand drops, and I turn to him, exasperated. “Simon—”
“A-ha!” he shouts, springing up and pointing. It scares the hell out of me. I’ve seen him kill a dog with less effort. (He said the dog was were; I think it was just excited.) “You did it again!”
“Did what?” I say, slapping his hand away from my face.
He sticks his other hand in my face, pointing. “Called me Simon.”
“What would you prefer—Chosen One?”
His hand dips. “I prefer Simon, actually. I … I like it.”
I swallow, and it must be obvious how nervous I am, because he looks down at my neck. “Simon,” I say, and swallow again, “you’re being idiotic.”
“Because I like this better than fighting?”
“There is no ‘this’!” I protest.
“You slept in my arms,” he says.
“Fitfully.”
He lets his hand fall, and I catch it. Because I’m weak. Because I’m a constant disappointment to myself. Because he’s standing right there with his tawny skin and his moles and his morning breath.
“Simon,” I say.
He squeezes my hand.
“It’s not that I don’t prefer this. It’s that…” I sigh. “I can’t even imagine it. My family objects to everything the Mage