Wayward Son - Rainbow Rowell Page 0,7

Humdrum gone and the Mage dead. (I didn’t even go back to Watford our final term. Miss Possibelf came to London to give me my exams.) Simon was shattered. I couldn’t bugger off to Chicago and leave him alone—he was already more alone than ever.

Anyway, Micah was cool about it all. He agreed that my staying in London was the best thing for the time being. The plan was, I’d come visit him, just as soon as things got better. We both agreed.

We didn’t have a plan for if they got worse.

8

AGATHA

I thought the retreat would be at a hotel. But Josh drives us to a gated house inside a gated community. He’s got a sports car that doesn’t make any noise and doesn’t use any fuel and doesn’t have much of a back seat.

“This neighbourhood is almost all NowNext members,” he says. “Most of the founders live here.”

Ginger looks impressed. I try to look polite.

We’re greeted by a competent young woman, covered in tattoos and thoroughly pierced. She’s the most decorative thing in the house. All of the NowNext meetings are in places like this: cavernous homes, minimally adorned. This one is the most cavernous, most minimal yet—like someone’s making a real show of how much space they have to fill with nothing. My mum would go blind from the lack of upholstery and wall decor.

Personally, I’d rather be at a hotel than this big, empty house; when Ginger and I get to our room, the door doesn’t have a lock.

“I don’t know why you’re unpacking,” I say to her. “I know you’ll be staying with Josh.”

“Nope,” she says. “It’s members-only in that wing of the house. You’re stuck with me every night.”

Ginger doesn’t want to miss a minute of the retreat’s programming. She drags me to the welcome party out on the deck. We drink champagne cocktails, and no one asks me if I’m 21. (I’m four months shy.) It’s mostly men here. A few women. All the vested members wear gold pins—little figure eights. (The pins remind me of a relic my parents keep in our bathroom, a silver snake eating its tail, that’s supposed to keep basilisks from coming up the pipes.)

After the welcome party, there’s meditation in one room and an investing seminar in another. Ginger and Josh and I choose to meditate. I like meditation. It’s quiet, at least.

Then we’re all supposed to gather for a big keynote talk—“The Myth of Mortality”—in one of the ballroom-sized sitting rooms. Whoever lives here must own fifty sofas, all of them black or white or creamy nothing-coloured. And all so sleek that they keep their shape even when you’re sitting on them.

I spend twenty minutes fidgeting. It’s practically like being at church. The guy talking says that Normals—well, human beings—were put on this earth to live forever, and it’s only sin and shame and environmental factors that got in the way. He has Ginger at “environmental factors.”

It sounds like crap to me. Even magicians can’t live forever, and we’ve got thousands of spells on our side. “Living is dying,” my father says. He’s the best magickal doctor in England. He can cure anything that can be cured. But he can’t cure death. Or as he says, “I can’t cure life.”

I try to be bored by the talk, but I’m irritated. I’m irritated by everyone nodding along to this nonsense. Do they really think they can cheat death with tropical juices and positive thinking? It reminds me of the Mage.

Which reminds me of that night on the Tower.

And Ebb.

I stand up. I tell Ginger that I’m going to find a bathroom, but I just want to get away. I end up in an empty room on the other side of the main floor, a library with a big window overlooking a golf course.

I was supposed to be at a festival this week. I bought body paint and sewed feathers onto my bikini. It was going to be ridiculous and brilliant. Not like this—ridiculous and sad.

I dig around for the emergency fag I keep in my purse. I never really smoked back in England. Simon and Penny hated it, and, like I said, my dad’s a doctor. But then I moved to California, where literally no one smokes, and having a cigarette now and then feels like toasting the Queen.

I’ll bet whoever owns this house would flip their shit if I lit up.

I hold the cig between my fingers and cast, “Fire burn and cauldron bubble!”—one of three spells