Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

⚡⚡⚡

I’m halfway out of my suit when there’s a knock on my office door.

“Fuck,” I mutter, desperately tugging my jeans on and hopping out of the direct line of sight of the door. I never change in my office, specifically because I’ve been terrified of this happening. Children are monsters with no sense of decorum, and more than once a student has just come waltzing in without an invitation.

(They’re nasty creatures, but they all seem to love me, and as a result my office is a rotating door of questions.) (I wouldn’t put it past them to come bug me even though summer holidays have officially started.)

“One moment!” I shout, tripping over my loafers as I dive toward my desk. There’s no way I can get myself cleaned up in time, but at least I can hide the fact that I’m not wearing shoes.

The door swings open just as I make it to safety.

“It’s just me,” comes a voice from the doorway, muffled and strained. “I don’t care if you’re naked, just come get this box.”

Relief washes through me. Thank Merlin. Not a student. Just Hollow.

“I’m not wearing shoes,” I snap back, zipping my flies and trying to shove my feet into my boots. Reaching up, I pull my hair out of the tidy bun I keep it in when I teach, and scrub my hand across my scalp.

(My hair is far too long. It’s bordering on indecorous. I need it cut before someone says something.) (Fiona. It’s Fiona who will say something.)

“I really, really don’t care,” Hollow grunts, kicking the door closed behind him. “I’m pretty sure we’ve hit a point where I can see you in your pants.”

He has a towering pile of books in his arms, and a huge stack of papers rests precariously on top of them.

“We will never hit that point,” I say, at last satisfied enough with my appearance to stand from my desk and go to help him. I take the stack of papers and suddenly his face is visible, and he blinks at me like he’s surprised to see me, even though he’s the one breaking into my office.

“You puked pig’s blood and eggnog in my lap last Christmas. I think we’re there.”

“What do you want?” I snap. We were never supposed to speak of the Father Christmas incident ever again, and yet between he and Snow I get reminded of it at least twice a month. (I can’t even listen to the Kinks anymore because of it.)

Glancing down at the piles of papers in my hands, I momentarily forget that I’m pissed at him and frown. “Hollow, term is over. Are you seriously just now doing your marking?”

He ignores me, dropping the books onto the sofa shoved in the corner of my cramped office. I frown at the way the books just spill everywhere, all over the sofa and onto the floor. I’ve given up trying to control the absolute chaos that permeates every corner of Hollow’s office, but I refuse to let him spread his mess to mine. It’s a constant, ongoing battle, made all the more unfair by the fact that his office is at least three times the size of mine.

He says it’s fair because he’s taught at Watford longer, but I say it’s unfair because I’m better than him, and therefore deserve it.

“No, this is just the materials for next year,” he says, straightening up and stretching his back in a grotesque way, which just makes my frown deepen. I’m well past my schoolboy crush on him — Simon aside, becoming coworkers really solidified it — but sometimes I can’t help but notice that Charlie Hollow is still as annoyingly good looking as the day I first met him. He’s aged obnoxiously well, and he has streaks of silver in his sandy hair that make him look distinguished, even in his stupid cardigans and wrinkled shirts. 

Also I swear to Circe his glasses just keep getting bigger.

Simon calls him my “dad crush” which is absolutely untrue, because Hollow isn’t a father (thank Merlin) and also because my dad crush is so obviously Henry Walsh’s father, George.

(Henry Walsh is a fifth year in my Music and Casting seminar.) (He’s the most stupid student I’ve ever taught, but his father is perfection.)

(The man has perfect salt and pepper hair and a jawline that could cut me to pieces.) (Even Simon agrees.)

“You cannot store your things in my office,” I tell Hollow, turning away from the sofa and pulling my suit jacket and buttoned shirt off. “Unless you want to finally trade, that is. Then by all means, move your things in now, I’ll happily keep your office warm while you’re gone.”

“No, these are the things for my classes,” Hollow says, collapsing onto the sofa next to his mess with a sigh and a breathless grin. “So you can look over my syllabuses over the summer and get ahead on the reading.”

My stomach drops out. I can hear the warning bells in my ears.

“What?”

“I really appreciate you taking them over, by the way,” he continues, ignoring the fact that I’ve paused halfway through unbuttoning my shirt and am staring at him. “It takes a huge weight off, knowing you’ll be handling the kids. Especially the eighth years, I don’t really trust them to anyone else for their last year.” He smiles at me, crooked and beautiful, and I’m still extremely lost. “This way Fi and I can just enjoy our travels without me being a fretting old bird.”

“What?”

For the first time, Hollow realises that I’m not following.

“My classes,” he says slowly, tilting his head. “You agreed to take over my sections next year?”

I don’t recall this. I don’t recall this at all. Why would I agree to something like that? I already teach three sections of Entry Elocution, plus a Special Spells class, a Music and Casting seminar, and the rotating eighth year Independent Capstone class. In what world would I agree to take on Hollow’s sections?

Hollow’s face grows tight.

“You do remember agreeing to this, right?” he asks, panic starting to rise in his voice. His eyes look impossibly huge behind his stupid large glasses. “Because we were in the staff meeting and Mitali asked you, and you said yes. You didn’t even say yes, you said yes, absolutely, it would be a joy and the delight of your life.” Hollow looks like he’s about to have a panic attack. “You do remember this, right? Because otherwise I’m about to leave for my sabbatical without anyone covering my classes, and I don’t have time to find a replacement, and Mitali is going to kill—”

“Hollow, stop,” I burst in, waving my hand. “Stop. Yes. Of course I remember, of course.”

I don’t. I vaguely recall the staff meeting in question, though, last month. I was texting Simon through the entire thing, because he’d just gotten off his flight from Greece and was on the train heading straight to Watford instead of stopping at home in London first, and I was a bit preoccupied with the idea of seeing my partner for the first time in over a month, and I may, possibly, have been speaking and responding to things without being aware of what I was saying.

Merlin’s fucking beard.

I clear my throat, finish unbuttoning my shirt, and then turn to Hollow as I pull on my t-shirt.

“Don’t worry, I remember. All your classes will be taken care of, and you have nothing to do but enjoy your honeymoon.”

“It’s not a honeymoon,” Hollow says automatically.

“Yes, yes, whatever it is, you’re free to enjoy it.” We’re calling Fiona and Hollow’s year-long honeymoon a “sabbatical” because that was the only way to get Mitali Bunce to approve the vacation time. 

Simon and I have already been plotting a way for me to take a “sabbatical” that will allow us to go fuck off somewhere warm, like Italy. He thinks we could probably convince the Coven that he needs me as a consultant, so at this point we’re really just waiting for him to get assigned to investigate a grisly werewolf murder in Majorca or infiltrate a vampire den in Croatia or something.

Hollow leans back into my sofa and smiles. 

“Thanks, Baz,” he says, deflating into his normal rumpled, soft state. “Now if I can just get through the wedding, everything will be fine.”

“Well, I can’t help you there. I told you not to get married.” I bend to shuffle the papers back together and drop them into my already bursting briefcase, and then glare at the books. I’ll have to take another box. My car is already about to burst, what with my suitcases and the girls’ school things. Whatever. Mordelia can ride with the box on her lap.

“I’m going to remember this, you know,” Hollow says, smiling and shaking his head at me like we’re back in class and I’ve just given a wrong answer. “In a few years when you’re trying to plan a wedding and having meltdowns on my sofa, I’ll be standing there and laughing at you and handing out unhelpful, shitty little quips.”

“I doubt it. Snow and I aren’t going to get married.”

Hollow snorts.

“Give it time.”

A flash of annoyance goes through me, and I turn away from him to do a last check of my desk. That’s what everyone says when Snow and I say we’re uninterested in marriage. “Just give it time. You say that now. We’ll see in a few years.”

Fiona and Hollow had been the last hold-outs. The last adults in our lives who weren’t pressuring us at every turn, who didn’t give a shit if we were planning an expensive wedding and two point five magical babies. They weren’t married, and they were perfectly happy.

And then the traitorous bastards got engaged and ruined everything.

“Is there a reason you’re still here, or are you just trying to become one with my sofa so you don’t have to go home and deal with Fiona yelling at you about seating charts?” I snap, folding up my suit and shirt carefully and tucking them into my bag. “Because unlike you, I have a partner at home who I am very eager to see, and I want to get the fuck out of here for the summer.”

“Take me with you,” Hollow says, his voice a cracked, desperate thing. “I’ll sleep in the solarium. I’ll do all the cooking. Just let me hide under your stairs until August, and I’ll give you anything you want. My record collection. My car. My Talking Heads tour shirt.”

“I have a bigger collection than you, and Snow is going to be securing us a new car this summer that is far, far better than your egg-shaped piece of shit,” I tell him. “So you have absolutely nothing of value to offer me.”

“Baz,” he says, staring at me. “We’re friends. We’re almost family. I’d go so far as to say we’re almost like brothers—”

“Get the fuck out of my office, Charlie.”

He sighs, puts his hands on his knees and stands. 

“It was worth a try,” he says glumly. He drags his feet toward the door and turns back one last time to grin at me. “See you at the suit fitting?”

“Yes, yes,” I say, waving my hand at him. “Like I’d let you pick out your own. Now go before I tell Fiona you unironically like Squeeze.”

“Tempted is a great song,” he argues, but he’s still out the door in a flash, his laugh trailing behind him, and I turn to the mess he’s left in my office.

I guess my summer of absolutely no work won’t be happening.

⚡⚡⚡

“Text Mordelia and tell her that if she’s not here in five minutes, we’re leaving without her.”

“Mordelia isn’t here?” Acantha says, her words tilting up on the ends. Everything she says sounds like a question these days, because she’s adopted the most annoying accent, where her words come out overly high and breathy and like she never knows what the hell she’s talking about.

“What?” I spin around in the front seat to stare at my little sisters.

“She left already?” Acantha glances at Ophelia, who hasn’t once looked up from her phone. They’re in the backseat of my car, and we’ve been idling next to the gates for ten minutes, the engine running, waiting for Mordelia.

“If she left already, then why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, incredulous. Ophelia and Acantha shrug in unison, like the creepy fucking Shining twins they are.

“Thought you knew,” Ophelia says, her voice monotone and dull and utterly uninterested.

“Who did she go home with?”

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Ophelia says, at the same time that Acantha goes, “Uh, Priya?”

I hate thirteen year-olds. They’ll all be the death of me.

“It was Priya,” Ophelia drawls. “The Bunces are going to drop her at home.”

“She went home with Bunce? Mitali didn’t tell me she was taking her.”

“I don’t know?” Acantha says, shrugging. “She said Daddy knows, so it’s fine? I guess?”

I sigh and turn back to the front of the car. I should text Mordelia. Or I should call Mitali. I should confirm that my delinquent little sister actually did things above board for once and has actually left with her roommate, but honestly? I don’t care.

It’s three hours later than I intended to leave, I have four new boxes full of summer work from Charlie fucking Hollow, my stomach is absolutely growling because I haven’t fed yet, and I just want to get home and see Simon.

He’s been in Brighton for the last three weeks investigating the disappearance of a young mage that everyone thinks is linked to a mermaid herd, and judging from his photos it’s been more vacation than work. Not that his work is ever work for him. He loves being the Coven’s catch-all boy: investigating mysteries, sometimes getting to hack at things with his sword. Never going into an office or wearing a tie. It’s his dream come true.

Not that I don’t love my job. I do. I just wish it came with less children and more Simon, sometimes.

“Fine,” I say, slipping my sunglasses back on and shifting the car into drive. “Let’s fucking go, then.”

I flip on the stereo and am turning out of the gate when Ophelia groans. It’s so loud that it drowns out Pete Shelley and the rest of the Buzzcocks. 

“Baz, please,” she says, her voice carrying the most emotion I’ve heard all year. “Please no more of your weird music. Can I have the aux cord?”

“No.”

“Just give me the aux cord.”

“No.”

“Merlin and Morgana, why do you have to be such a fucking troll dick all the time?”

“I’m sorry,” I say, veering to the side of the dirt road and spinning around in my seat, “what did you just call me?”

“I called you a troll dick,” Ophelia says, crossing her arms and glaring at me. “Because you’re being a troll dick. And your music sucks. It’s so weird .”

“Ophelia—”

“No one calls me Ophelia!” she groans. “Circe, Baz, we’ve been over this, call me Phee!”

“If you’re going to call me a troll dick, I’m going to call you Ophelia,” I snarl. “Acantha?”

Acantha looks up from the notebook she’s been furiously scrawling in and blinks, her eyes wide like a doe’s. Her hair is so blonde that her eyelashes are almost white, and it makes her eyes look huge and unnatural. Simon says she reminds him of a ghost. Mordelia agrees. (But that’s because Mordelia is far too invested in ghosts.)

“Yes?”

“What are the rules of the car?”

“If you’re not driving, you don’t get to complain about the music?”

“Exactly,” I nod. “Ophelia, are you driving?”

“Simon gets to bitch about your shitty music all the time,” Ophelia mumbles.

“Snow has earned that right!” I shout, even though he hasn’t. “What have you done?”

“I hate you,” Ophelia snaps. “You’re a fake goth troll dick, and I hate you.”

“Well if I’m a troll dick, what does that make you?”

I turn back to the road, feeling thoroughly humiliated for having gotten in a childish spat with a thirteen year old, and pull the car back onto the road.

“Hey Baz, what time were you born?” Acantha asks, as if that entire fight didn’t just happen.

“Nine a.m., why?”

“I’m doing star charts? For the family? For gifts?” she says. I glance at her in the rear-view mirror and see her chewing on the end of her purple gel pen. “What time was Simon born?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“Oh. What day?”

“June 21.”

“Okay, uh, where?”

“Wales.”

“Wait, Simon is Welsh?” Ophelia says, perking up again. “I didn’t know that.”

“How? ” I ask, meeting her eyes in the rear view mirror. “I know for a fact that you studied The Greatest Mage prophecy in History of Magick this year.” I keep my eyes off the road for a dangerously long time in order to maintain eye contact. “And I also know you failed that section.”

“If you know I failed, why are you surprised I don’t know shit about the stupid made up prophecy?”

I sigh, flex my hands on the wheel, and try to control my breathing.

I wish Mordelia were here. She’s so much better at dealing with the twins than I am. Ophelia seems to have been put on this earth specifically to annoy me, and Acantha doesn’t seem to actually be from earth. Simon is fairly sure she’s an experimental alien embryo who was implanted in Daphne while pregnant. 

Sometimes, after I’ve watched too many of his sci-fi shows with him and spent too much time around Acantha, I’m inclined to agree.

I love my siblings. I do, even if I don’t get the twins and think that Magnus and I may be different species. But Merlin, I’m so fucking happy I won’t have to spend the summer with them.

Simon and I have been planning for literally months to clear this whole summer. He’s turned down all summer assignments from the Coven and declared that he refuses to be sent out of the country on another of his goblin hunts or creature investigations. I begged out of the big Grimm family trip to Cornwall, told Father we would not be doing his birthday event at the Oxford lodge, and told Fiona I didn’t want to see her face for at least three weeks.

Our only obligations for the entire summer are the Salisbury family reunion in July and Fiona’s wedding in August.

Until then, it’s just Simon and me.

We haven’t had a summer off since — well, since I left Watford, honestly. We did nothing that summer except travel and eat and drink and kiss. Since then it’s been nonstop; we had uni and responsibilities and a lease and then jobs and life and suddenly, ten years have gone by and we’ve barely taken a breather since we were eighteen.

We’re too young for this shit. So we’re taking the summer off.

I need it. I’m tired, worn down. I need wine and sun and a good two weeks in bed with Simon, and three months of getting to see him at breakfast and try his weird culinary inventions and listen to his old man music and watch his horrifying conspiracy shows, and I don’t want anyone else to intrude.

I’d even skip the Salisbury family reunion, if I could.

But Oliver Salisbury keeps making hints about giving Simon his car — a 1960 Frogeye Sprite, black — and I want that car. I really want that car. Salisbury has put all kinds of updates and detailing into it. Heated seats. Vacuum brake booster. 948 engine and new upholstery detailing. A custom sound system. And he has made no secret that he wants Simon to have it.

Oliver Salisbury does things like this all the time. Same with Lady Salisbury. Just hands over family heirlooms and possessions with a casual, unruffled air that only makes Simon feel seven times more awkward about receiving them.

“He treats me like I’m his son, but I’m not,” Simon always says, turning red and stammering awkwardly whenever he’s just been the benefactor of some other item from the Salisbury’s immense estate collection. “I mean, yeah, we’re family. But he doesn’t have to give me things.”

I’ve tried to explain to him that this is how the Salisburys treat family. That they’re all still so excited to know him and have him — even ten years later — that they can’t help themselves. He’s the last in the generation. He means everything to them.

Simon didn’t grow up in a family that prioritises legacy and permanence. He didn’t even grow up in a family. So he doesn’t get it. He feels awkward and beholden and horrifically unsure of what to do. Normally I’m understanding of this. I’ve learnt to step in and politely refuse things on his behalf. I navigate the sticky waters of family relations so he doesn’t have to.

But Simon owes me. Typically we don’t keep track of things like that, because we have an equitable relationship, but he owes me.

And I’m calling in his debt to get me that car.

So aside from the reunion and the wedding, this summer is just us. And as soon as I drop my little sisters off in Hampshire, there’s nothing between me and that summer (and that car — it’s truly something, absolutely gorgeous) but road.

⚡⚡⚡

And also dinner with my family.

I should have seen this coming. Daphne always pressures me into staying for dinner, and for some reason I can face down demons and vampires and murdering psychopaths, but I fall weak against my stepmother.

I was literally backing out the door, trying to slip away as quickly and quietly as possible, when she’d situated herself between me and the exit and smiled.

“Oh, Basilton, darling! Just in time for dinner! We’re celebrating the end of your term!”

I’m a weak, pathetic man.

Dinner is a weird affair. Daphne has put on an absolute feast. Multiple courses, serving wear heaped with everyone’s favourites. I never eat, because I still don’t feel comfortable eating around my family and the younger children don’t know I’m a vampire. No one really notices though, because the twins are so used to it, and Magnus eats enough for six of me.

He’s recently started playing rugby, though Merlin knows why, and he’s apparently determined to turn himself into a human tank as a result. He can already pick Simon up. He could probably pick me up as well, but I’ve never let him close enough to try.

He’s settling in to finishing off the roast beef right now, his head down, elbows tucked in as he steadily eats and eats and eats and Acantha breathlessly tells Daphne all about star charts, and Ophelia and Malcolm have a conversation about how many rain jackets to pack for Cornwall. I don’t think it’s awkward small talk — I think they actually enjoy it. They’re the family packers, and they take it extremely seriously.

They talk about the logistics and planning required for a two week holiday throughout the entirety of four courses, while I sit there, my stomach growling, my head pounding, vibrating with eagerness to go home. Please, for Merlin’s sake, just let me go home.

Malcolm is just about to start detailing how much food they should pack when his mobile phone goes off, earning him a nasty look from Daphne.

He searches for his mobile, digging it out of the inside of his suit and answers it with a frown.

“Malcolm here.”

There’s silence while Daphne glares daggers at him for using his phone at the table, broken only by the sound of Magnus’s chewing, and Malcolm’s frown lines get even deeper.

“I see,” he says, then sighs. “Yes. Of course. Thank you Mitali.”

And that will be the answer to the mystery of the missing Mordelia.

She wasn’t at the Manor when I got home, despite assurances from Ophelia that Mitali was going to drop her home and that Malcolm knew everything.

As I quickly discovered, Ophelia had texted Malcolm from school to tell him Mordelia was going to the Bunce residence, and that I had signed off on it.

I had to give Mordelia credit; she doesn’t usually involve the twins in her schemes. No one would trust her word, but it didn’t occur to us to consider she’d conned Ophelia into playing us as well. I wonder what she offered her.

Malcolm had sent off an obligatory text to Mitali, but no one is all that concerned about Mordelia’s absence or the fact that she’s clearly up to something. Maybe it’s because Daphne and Malcolm have their hands full with the other children, or maybe it’s because everyone’s so used to it. Hardly a month goes by where Mordelia hasn’t suddenly disappeared, or told us she’s going to Priya Bunce’s and then called from Scotland needing a ride home.

She said she’d been ghost hunting.

Once, my father told me Mordelia was off at a Spell Camp for extra instruction in her elocution and classics. She showed up at my house two weeks later with six Normal kids in varying levels of torn denim and eyeliner and asked Simon to make them breakfast.

Fiona and I still don’t know how we have managed to retain the title of Family Bad Seeds, while it hasn’t occurred to anyone that Mordelia is a public menace of terrifying levels. 

Maybe it’s because even when she’s being a delinquent, Mordelia is still so charming about it. She really is the nicest punk I’ve ever met.

Or maybe Fiona and I have just established this as the new normal.

I guess I did steal a car a few times.

“So?” Daphne asks as Malcolm rings off and returns to his dinner. “Is she with Mitali?”

“No,” Malcolm says, taking another bite of beef. “Mitali says she drove her back to London with Priya, and then Mordelia left and said she was going to Baz’s.”

“I should really get home and intercept her, then,” I say, putting down my fork. “I should leave as soon as possible.”

“Oh, no need to rush off, love,” Daphne says, smiling at me. “Simon’s home, isn’t he? He can ring us if she turns up.”

“I don’t think Simon is home, actually,” I lie. “Last I heard he’ll be in Brighton through the week.”

“No, he won’t,” Ophelia argues, looking up at me. “I literally heard you talking to Professor Hollow yesterday after class when you said you were going to go home and get shit faced with him tonight.”

“How many times have we spoken about eavesdropping on me in my office?” I thunder, thoroughly annoyed. 

“Why don’t you just call him, dear? See if Mordelia got there safe?” Daphne blinks at me, so sincere, and I can’t find it in me to tell her to fuck off. And also to point out that Mordelia very clearly is not at my house. She’s probably neck deep in a mosh pit in some cellar club in London by now, and I’ll hear from her in two weeks when she needs coffee.

“That’s a good idea,” Malcolm says, nodding. “Basilton, would you call him?”

I groan inwardly, push back from the table, and pull out my mobile.

“I won’t be but a moment,” I tell them, striding out of the dining room as I auto dial Simon’s number.

It rings three times and then goes to voicemail, which means the asshole has declined my call.

“Hi, you’ve reached Simon Snow, er, Salisbury. I’m not available right now, but you can leave a message. If you’re calling for work, please email me at [email protected]. Thanks and have a great day!”

“Do you seriously have your coven email address in your voicemail?” I snarl into the phone, just like I do every time. “That’s got to be breaking at least sixteen rules. You work for the Coven, for magic’s sake, you should know this.”

I pause in my tirade and remember why I called.

“Anyway, I’m trapped at my parents’ house in a never ending dinner. I’m not eating though, so please don’t eat dinner because I want to get biryani when I’m home. Also, Mordelia is missing. She’s allegedly heading to our house, but we both know that’s a lie. Just ring if you happen across her, or if you see someone setting tourists on fire in Trafalgar or something. Also, please come save me.”

The voicemail beeps three times to let me know my time is almost up, and I roll my eyes.

“I’ll be home soon. I hope. Remember me fondly.”

I get in just before the click that cuts me off, and I shove the phone back in my pocket. I wish he’d answered. I know he’s probably just watching TV or playing video games or something, there’s absolutely no chance he’s doing something actually important enough to warrant declining my phone call, the asshole.

If he’d answered, he could have kept me from the table for at least a bit longer.

Taking a deep breath and rolling my neck, I square my shoulders and return to the dining room.

“Oh, excellent timing, dear,” Daphne says, smiling widely. “I’ve just brought out the first dessert course!”

⚡⚡⚡

It’s four hours before I’m able to get home, and then it takes me another fifteen minutes to find parking, because even though Simon and I own a house, it’s still in the middle of fucking London and parking is impossible.

He says the solution is to just move somewhere with built-in parking, but neither of us are willing to do that. We got the house as a uni graduation gift from Lady Salisbury when we were twenty-two. Simon felt too awkward and overwhelmed about it at the time to know how to politely decline far too large a gift, but we both actually love it. It’s an old house — a family house, it’s been in the Salisbury property cache for at least four generations — and it’s perfectly sized for us.

It’s a three-story Edwardian with cramped, narrow hallways and bizarre iron fixtures on the roof and a walled-in back garden. In other hands it would probably be an extremely elegant home, but between my posters and the weird things Simon drags home from his travels, we’ve rather ruined the stiff-upper-lip vibe of the place.

It’s home, honestly. I don’t think either of us would willingly part with it, especially not for something like parking. Though I’d never tell Simon that.

Having finally found a spot, I drag my bags and boxes up the steps and touch my hand to the iron plaque that sits just outside the door. It was a house warming present from Bunce — a little plaque that reads “THE HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN” that mimics the wards we had on our room at Mummer’s. It’s coded to our magic.

It was terribly thoughtful of her, even if the inscription choice was her way of referencing something hideously stupid I said several years ago while drunk. Simon doesn’t get the joke — Bunce was kind enough to never elaborate on my drunken ramblings — so he just thinks our house is named after The Animals song, which is fine by me.

The entryway and den are dark when I get inside, the shadows from the setting sun creeping along the dark wood floor of the hallway. The house is silent. It’s as different from Watford as it can get and I love it.

“Simon?” I call, dropping my bags in the middle of the entryway and pulling off my jacket. A sigh escapes me. Being back home feels perfect. Just the smell of this house relaxes me. 

“I’m home,” I shout. “Finally. I need Lou Reed and a glass of red or I’m going to die. Going to actually wither up and die on this spot. I’ll leave a beautiful corpse, of course, so open casket funeral, please. Also I expect you to remain a widower. So if you don’t want to be single for the rest of your sad existence, I suggest you bring some wine to the study.”

“Solarium!” comes a muffled shout from down the hallway. At least he’s in the house. If he’d been gone I would have thrown a fit. I’d never admit it to him, but I’m desperate for him to play with my hair while I bitch about my family.

“Solarium? No, I’m going to the study, bring me wine.” I’m going to drain a bottle and then thoroughly debauch my boyfriend, because the universe owes me after this fucking day.

Also I’m going to fit a take away masala somewhere in that order of events.

“Come to the fucking solarium,” Simon shouts again. He sounds annoyed, which is absolutely unacceptable. Only one of us gets to be pissy at a time, and I have thoroughly earned the dibs to it.

“Unless you’ve got a bucket of wine in there or are naked, I’m very uninterested,” I call back, kicking off my shoes and lining them up next to a pair of Simon’s shitty trainers before I head down the hallway toward the solarium. “Actually, let’s go with that second option, I could drink a case of you right—”

“Nicks and fucking Slick could you not?” comes a voice that is decidedly not Simon. “I don’t want to hear about your gross sex life.”

I freeze in the doorway of the solarium as I take in the sight before me. Simon, warm and grumpy looking, sitting on the floor with a beer in one hand while he goes over a stack of papers. And sitting on the sofa, a shitty and haughty expression on her face, is the runaway herself. She’s wearing one of my black t-shirts and a pair of Simon’s boxers, and has clearly settled in for the night. Also, she still has her combat boots on for some reason.

(I have a theory that Mordelia lives every second of her life like Sheena Is A Punk Rocker could be playing in the background.)

“Mordelia,” I say, schooling my voice even. “Absolutely not. Get out.”

“No.” She folds her arms.

“You’re not staying here. Go call Malcolm to pick you up.”

“No.”

“We have plans,” I bite out.

“Actually, I’m kind of drunk and I had a huge lunch with Welby so my stomach sort of hurts, so no we don’t,” Simon says, not looking up from what I’m now extremely sure are the seating arrangements for Fiona’s wedding. “Also Mordy is in crisis. Tell him.”

I try to tamp down the curls of annoyance and disappointment that are trying to crawl up my throat and choke me as I turn to my sister.

“Well? What’s the crisis.”

Mordelia leans forward, her dark eyes gleaming, and holds my gaze.

“I have to kidnap Priya Bunce.”

“Alright,” I say. “I’m going to bed.”

“I’m serious!” Mordelia shouts, and a moment later something large and fluffy hits me in the middle of my back. I spin before she can launch another sofa cushion at me.

“I don’t care,” I snap back. “I don’t want to know. I got stuck in a two hour dinner at home because of you. Call Malcolm, now.”

“Actually, you should hear her out,” Simon mumbles from the floor. “It’s kind of cute, in like, a crazy way.”

“I’m not crazy!” Mordelia snarls. Simon just stares up at me, his blue eyes wide, doing that annoyingly cute thing we do where we know exactly what the other is saying without having to speak aloud, and I know that I’m going to have to suffer through whatever breakdown Mordelia is having, purely because Simon wants me to.

I sigh and collapse in the chair behind Simon, defeated.

“Fine,” I say, waving my hand magnanimously. Simon leans back against my knees, and suddenly I feel a lot more charitable. “Why are we kidnapping Priya Bunce?”

Mordelia rockets to her feet, excited and unable to sit still, and starts pacing.

“She doesn’t want to go back to Watford for eighth year,” she says, her dark eyes getting wide and taking on a slightly manic tinge. “It’s mental. It’s crazy. Eighth year is important , but she claims it’s not.” She spins suddenly and points at Simon. “That’s your fault, by the way. You and Penny, you know that right?”

“Er,” Simon says.

“Loads of kids have started skipping eighth year because of you two. Because you proved it’s not needed. It’s a thing people do now. Pacey did it too, because Headmistress Bunce apparently just doesn’t care about the educational needs of her children. And now Priya wants to!”

“She does have a point,” I concede. It’s criminal he and Bunce never went back to school.

“Er,” Simon says again. I rest my hand on his head and carefully pull my fingers through his curls. They’re overgrown. He needs a haircut. I’m glad he waited until I came home to get one, though. I love playing with his hair when it’s long like this.

“She says she’s going to take a gap year. Can you believe it?” Mordelia continues. “She’s going to go to America and do an independent study with Micah and ‘travel.’ She actually said that. Like she’s some free-wheeling white woman who can just run off to America and go drive through the desert and find herself.”

Mordelia snorts, and I decide to not point out that she is literally a free-wheeling white woman, even if Priya Bunce isn’t.

“I’m not sure I follow,” I say carefully. “What does this have to do with kidnapping her?”

“Because we have to make her listen!” Mordelia shouts, grabbing at her long dark brown hair. It’s too long and always seems tangled, but she has this natural volume to it that I’m horrifically jealous of. “She won’t listen to me anymore, she told me to stop bothering her about it and let it go. And she leaves for America in August, so that leaves me with just two months to convince her that she has to go back to school! She’ll ruin her life if she doesn’t!”

“Okay, so, no offence,” Simon starts, “but, er. You hate school. You blow it off all the time.”

“Well, yes,” Mordelia says, like Simon has just raised a very stupid and unimportant point. “But I still go sometimes. My grades are still good . ”

She’s right. Her grades are shockingly good. Hollow and I assume that she has to be cheating somehow, but we’ve never managed to catch her.

“While I applaud your sudden dedication to the importance of education,” I begin carefully, “why is it so important that Little Bunce stay? You two will still go to uni together even if she takes a gap year.”

“Because we started Watford together, and we’re supposed to end it together!” Mordelia collapses back on the sofa and sighs as she stares down at the ground. “We’re… we’re supposed to do this stuff together. And now she’s just decided she can just… leave me. And she won’t listen.” There’s a moment of silence, and then she adds, almost too quiet to hear, “She just doesn’t understand we’re supposed to be together.”

Simon tilts his head back enough to catch my eye, and we both sigh at the same time.

There’s been absolutely no confirmation of it, but it’s getting harder for us to ignore the overwhelming signs that my little sister is in love with her Watford roommate.

I feel for her. It’s almost poetic how much I can relate, and I ache for her. Truly. Because the Little Bunce is straight.

“I mean, you thought I was straight for years,” Simon says any time we talk about it. 

“Do you really think Little Bunce is queer and going to wake up one day and love Mordelia back?” I ask him every time. And then he gets quiet and usually gives me a hug or plays with my hair, or, one lovely time, pressed me back into the sofa in the den and thoroughly kissed me.

Simon’s hand wraps around my ankle now and he strokes the top of my socked foot, and I sigh.

“Okay, so you want Baby Spice to stay in England. May I suggest a plan that doesn’t involve kidnapping?”

“No,” Mordelia says.

“Er,” Simon tries again. “I don’t think chaining her up in the guest room is a good way to drive your point home.”

“Fuck a nine toed troll, I wasn’t going to literally kidnap her,” Mordelia snaps, throwing her hands in the air. “I was just going to like, steal Baz’s car and pressure her into a whirlwind road trip and take her all over and then one night, probably at sunset, we’d get out and sit on the bonnet and watch the sun over the hills and we’d have like, a heart to heart, and I’d explain to her why she needs to stay, and she’d suddenly see sense, and then she’d decide to come back to Watford with me next year, and then we’d like, stay away the whole summer and have awesome adventures and maybe I’d get another tattoo.”

“Another?” I ask, sitting up.

“You’ve really thought this out, huh?” Simon says, cutting me off.

“What do you mean another ?” Then a new thought catches up with me. “Wait, you were going to steal my car?”

“You’re not going anywhere this summer,” Mordelia shrugs. “You don’t need it.”

“You can’t just steal a car .”

“I mean, in her defence, we did,” Simon says. “Like, twice.”

“That was different, that was Fiona’s car,” I snap back. Simon shrugs.

“You’re kind of Mordy’s Fiona.”

“I’m not, this is just, I cannot believe you would—” I stop, close my eyes, and breathe deep. “Mordelia, you’re not stealing my car.”

“Yeah, and I vote against the kidnapping thing,” Simon adds. “Why don’t you start slow and take her to a museum or something and have a nice day and remind her why you are friends and then nicely ask her to reconsider?”

“A museum?”

Simon shrugs.

“Yeah. That’s like, a thing, isn’t it? Food and a museum?” He glances at Mordelia and frowns. “Just don’t like, get bored and steal books or something and make it weird.”

“Or,” I interject, “perhaps consider that Little Bunce may have made her choice, and you need to accept it.”

“If Simon made a stupid decision, would you accept it?” Mordelia glowers.

“Yes. I would. And I have. Many, many times.”

“Oi—”

“If Little Bunce wants to go to America, and you want to protect your friendship, you might just need to let her go.”

Mordelia sighs, pulls a cushion over her face, and groans loudly into it.

“Can I stay here tonight? Or like, a few nights? Just to be closer to her?” she asks, her voice muffled through the cushion. Simon tilts his head back and gives me That Look again. He knows I’m going to tell her to get lost, because I’m heartless and cruel and greedy for time with him. 

But Simon is a romantic. And an idiot. And he thinks Mordelia and Little Bunce might actually work out.

“Fine.” It kills me to say it. I don’t want Mordelia haunting the house all summer, especially because I had plans for this summer, and I’m extremely uncomfortable enacting half those plans with my little sister in the house. “Fine. One week. That’s it. No more.”

Mordelia tosses the cushion aside and smiles at me, her face an expression of radiant happiness.

“Thanks, Baz. I’ll be proved right, you’ll see.”

Simon leans his cheek against my knee and I can feel his smile from here. I run my hands back through his hair again and try to stay positive. It’s not the worst thing in the world. Mordelia isn’t that bad. She’s even fun, sometimes. And she and Simon get on famously.

I can still have my summer. I can still salvage this.

⚡⚡⚡

“Your sister needs to leave,” Simon growls against my lips as he presses me further into the wall. “Like, yesterday, she needs to be gone.”

“How long do we have?” I ask, panting as I slide my hands up the back of his shirt and grip his sides. A sigh gets punched out of me and my arms tighten, pulling him closer as his hands come up to grab my face and his fingers bunch in my hair. I needed this. We needed this. It’s been absolute torture trying to find time for this, because everywhere we look and go, Mordelia is there.

Her antics toward the Little Bunce have gotten elaborately convoluted, and she’s always popping out at random times to ask us whether we think it’s a good idea to send her a bouquet of talking birds, primed with arguments to stay, or if she thinks there’s a case for calling the Coven on Mitali Bunce for being negligent with her childrens’ education.

I lost my phone for six hours yesterday, only to discover that she’d stolen it to call Niall and grill him about the possibility of whether Priya was possessed by an anti-education Tory demon.

Somehow I’ve never really noticed just how weird she is until now.

“She left just a few minutes before you got home,” he responds, kissing down my jaw and abandoning his hold on my face to work open my trousers. “Can’t take her too long to get milk and eggs though, so, you know, less talking, please.”

I let him steer me forcefully back toward the bed, never parting from each other, kissing desperately, furtively. Grabbing hands and panting breaths as Simon leads the charge, more energetic than I’ve seen him in months. Normally these things are slow and lazy, not this. Not this desperate grapple.

“This feels illicit.” I hit the bed with a heavy thunk and Simon is immediately on top of me, his legs bracketing me, a look of fierce determination on his face. His fighting face. “Like we’re teenagers again.”

“We had more freedom to do this when we were teenagers.” Simon starts furiously unbuttoning my shirt. “Stop talking.”

I slide my hands down his arms to try to lace through his fingers, but he slaps them away.

“Crowley, Snow, what kind of boy do you think I am?” I murmur, grinning. “No dinner, no romance—”

Simon sits up, his eyes flashing, his mouth pulled into a scowl.

“Baz. We have like, maybe ten minutes, and if you don’t shut the fuck up, I’ll—”

We both freeze as the sound of the front door slamming echoes through the house. Simon looks paralysed, his eyes wide in what can only be called fear. Slowly, terrified of making any sound, I reach up and carefully cup his cheek.

He glances back down at me and bites his lip, and I know we’re thinking the same thing, that maybe it was the wind, maybe it wasn’t the door, maybe Mordelia isn’t home—

Our dreams come crashing down around us as No Doubt begins blaring through the downstairs. Hella Good.

“Aleister fucking Crowley, enough with the No Doubt,” I groan as Simon collapses back on top of me. All the joy and eagerness is gone, and now he’s just a sad, frustrated, lifeless lump of a man. I slide my arms around him and sigh so deeply the bed shakes. “Why does she love No Doubt so much?”

“It’s classic,” Simon mutters dully into my shoulder.

“No Doubt isn’t a classic. Led Zeppelin is classic. Talking Heads is classic. No Doubt is not classic. For Crowley’s sake, we were both alive for the Harajuku phase.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“And she plays it all the time. Do you know how many CDs and albums I’ve given her? She has access to all of Spotify and yet—”

“Baz,” Simon groans, “shut the fuck up.”

I tighten my grip around him and sigh and try not to focus on how good it feels to have him on top of me, of how much I’ve missed the weight of his body. Cuddling isn’t the same — and anyway, we hardly ever cuddle because he runs hot and I move around too much in my sleep. And he falls asleep before me anyway, so most of our nighttime cuddling is him playing with my hair while we watch TV or me shoving my cold feet under his knees while he sleeps. It’s not like this. It’s normal. Not intentional.

“I can cast a silencing spell,” I whisper, running my hands up and down his back. “And we can be really quick.”

Simon sighs and groans into my shoulder.

“That feels weird,” he says. Whines, actually, and I nod. It does feel weird. Casting a silencing spell at three in the afternoon for a quick shag while my sister treats us to No Doubt’s greatest hits isn’t exactly high on my list of things to do. Having to sneak around in my own bloody house doesn’t exactly put me in the mood, either.

“Maybe tonight?” I try not to sound hopeful, because I hate indicating that I feel positively toward anything. Simon turns his face into my neck and huffs.

“Maybe,” he says, wiggling to reposition his weight. He elbows me in the stomach and puts his knee between my legs and it’s honestly not helping anything. 

“I’ll even use a locking spell so she doesn’t break into our room again to yell about Little Bunce at two a.m.”

I can feel his breath as he laughs.

“I wish she would just, like, tell Priya how she feels, you know? Or at least admit that she has feelings at all.” He tucks his head so that the top of his curls scratch at my chin. “It’d be a lot easier than this stalking thing.”

“You’re one to talk.”

“At least once I figured out I liked you I did something about it.”

“Well that’s because you were a brave little idiot,” I hum, moving my hands up to scratch at the hair at the base of his neck. “Not all of us are so brave. Some of us have to deal with these things differently.”

“Like trying to kill or kidnap your crush.”

“Yes, like reasonable cowards do. Keep up, Snow.”

The music downstairs cuts off suddenly, and then all at once Piece of My Heart begins. The Joplin version. It’s louder than before and accented by Mordelia’s shrieking accompaniment, and Simon and I sigh in unison.

“We should go down there before the neighbours complain.” 

“I need to start dinner,” Simon agrees, even as he wriggles closer to me and grabs the blanket to drag it over us. “If we stay up here, do you think she’ll think we’re gone?”

“Maybe if we’re lucky she’ll think we’re dead.”

I shift us a bit, so Simon isn’t laying so entirely on my stomach, and dare to close my eyes. Just for a moment. Then we’ll get up and deal with Mordelia’s gay crisis.

In a moment.

⚡⚡⚡

Simon and I don’t get another moment alone for almost a week. And instead of working to make time with each other, he’s turned into an absolute gobshite.

“He’s just feeling restless,” Niall says, his voice tinny and sharp through my earbuds. “I think we all are.”

I’m walking back from the shops with my arms full of supplies for dinner and several cartons of pig’s blood, and I’m in a hideous mood. Mordelia and Simon were fighting when I left, and Simon has been building up to a strop for awhile. It’s like since I’ve been home for the summer we’ve barely spent any time together, and when we do he’s not paying attention to me or he’s being a sulky bastard.

“Maybe, but we’re all not taking it out on our partners,” I snap back, adjusting my grip on my shopping bags. “If he’s not bitching about Mordelia, he’s bitching about not working, or he’s doing his thousand-yard stare thing while he listens to moody music. He was the one who said Mordelia could stay. I wanted to kick her out.”

There’s silence on the other end, broken only by the rustling of books, which means Niall is only barely paying attention to this phone call.

“Well, you do have that family reunion coming up, yeah? With the Salisburys?” he says finally.

“What about it?”

“He always gets weird about those things, doesn’t he? Like with the family stuff? Last summer when I was preparing for my PhD defence, I was a nutter. I was so nervous I was nearly shitting myself daily and I made Dev miserable, remember?”

I pause. Niall is right. Snow does always turn into a basket case whenever he has to spend extended time with his mother’s family. I’ve been assuming he’s just being an asshole, but maybe there is more to it.

“Also, don’t they always put weird pressure on you guys about getting married?”

They do. Constantly. It wouldn’t entirely be a lie to say that’s part of why we aren’t married. Because of the expectations. Because everyone wants us to. Years later, I still chafe at the idea of doing what my family wants, and the constant pressure from the Salisburys to settle down and move to the country makes him turn splotchy and red. 

If Simon showed any interest in marriage, I’d do it in a heartbeat, but he doesn’t see the point in it. 

“What we have is fine. It’s just for us. I dunno why anyone else wants to stick their noses in.”

“Just saying,” Niall continues, “I bet things will be better after the reunion. And he doesn’t actually have issues with you, right? He’s just getting twitchy in general. Just try to, I dunno, calm him down. You’re good at that.”

“When did you get so wise?” I mutter, shaking my head. Niall laughs.

“It comes with age.”

“We’re the same fucking age.”

“Yeah,” Niall says, then pauses. “Mate, we’re getting old. My back hurts.”

“Everyone’s back hurts, join the club,” I drawl, rounding the corner to my street.

“I just thought I had until at least thirty before my body started breaking down. Weren’t we supposed to have more time? You know, the other night Dev bent down to pick up the cat and his back spasmed so bad he had to lie down the rest of the night.”

“That’s just because your cat is morbidly obese.”

“Beelzebub is not obese, he’s just full of love.”

I snort as I put my shopping down and dig around for my keys.

“Call it what you want, that cat is a menace. Anyway, I’m home. Text me about that concert you mentioned when you know more.”

Niall makes a sound of affirmation. 

“Good luck. Don’t be a prick.”

I hang up on him instead of replying, and let myself into the house.

All the lights are on, and warm food smells are wafting down the hallway, carried with snippets of music. I follow them, padding lightly to the kitchen, and pause.

Simon is listening to Al Green.

The music is coming from the beat up bluetooth radio in the corner, filling every inch of the kitchen with soft melody as Simon stands at the stove, poking at something that looks like stir fry and bobbing his head in time to Tired of Being Alone.

He doesn’t even know I’m here. He just keeps singing, low and out of key, stirring at the veggies that are sizzling quietly along, bopping his head from side to side, completely in his own world. He’s wearing a very stretched out Watford t-shirt and joggers, and something in my chest feels hot and tight at the sight, like I’ve been simultaneously punched and stabbed with a searing knife. Like this tension and tightness won’t stop until I can touch him, and it makes it impossible to stop myself from stepping up behind him and sliding my hands along his waist.

He jumps slightly when my hands come around his waist, and then he leans back against me for a moment before returning to the stove. He’s still bobbing, even in my arms, still dancing a bit, so I bury my face into his neck and take a deep breath and dance with him, slowly, out of sync, until the song ends.

“I think I’m going to send Mordelia home,” I say quietly, my face still tucked into his neck. “She’s driving me crazy.”

“Me too,” Simon says, moving the pan off the burner and turning to face me. “I want to kill her.”

“I’ll drive her back tonight.”

“No, don’t,” he sighs. He runs a hand through his curls, and it looks like the effort of saying no is actually hurting him. “She’s clearly, you know, going through something.”

“She can go through something in Hampshire.”

Simon gives me a level stare.

“You don’t seriously think she’s going to get anywhere with Priya, do you?” I whisper. I don’t know where she is; she could be lurking behind me for all I know.

“I dunno,” he shrugs. “But she needs to find out if she can, yeah? Or at least, like, come to the realisation that she can’t herself. She clearly feels safe here.”

“I don’t want her to feel safe, though,” I whine, turning away to start unpacking the groceries. “I don’t want her to treat this like home. I want to have my house back.”

“Look, she’s your sister,” he says with a shrug, grabbing plates out of the cabinet. “Just saying. She’s losing it. I might kill her. But I think it’s better for her to lose it here.”

I pull the lid off the carton of pig’s blood and hold it to my mouth, never breaking eye contact with him. He swears he doesn’t care about the blood thing, but I don’t totally believe him, so sometimes I do this just to see if he’ll squirm.

He doesn’t.

“Fine,” I say, giving in and wiping blood from my mouth before putting the carton in the fridge. “Fine. But next time you’re throwing a fit, remember this was your choice.”

⚡⚡⚡

“Don’t ever get fucking married!”

Fiona throws her purse into the chair closest to the fireplace and fumbles in her jacket pocket for her vape.

“Hi, Fiona, nice to see you,” I drawl, putting down my book to watch her clumsily set up her vape. “I thought I told you not to bother us.”

“What, so Mordelia gets to ignore directions but I can’t?” she asks, raking a shaking hand through her hair. Her dark hair is short and jagged these days, and the white streak sticks almost straight up. “Fuck you. I needed to get out.”

She taps her vape several times, then shakes it, then throws her hands up in exasperation and manages to almost perfectly mimic the large black and white framed poster we have of Bowie’s Heroes album cover, which is hanging on the wall directly behind her.

There’s a noise from behind me and I turn to see Simon and Mordelia coming down the stairs. Mordelia has her bitch face on and Simon is scowling, so I can only imagine what they’ve been arguing about. But Mordelia takes one look at Fiona and her vape before she turns around and goes back upstairs. Simon’s eyes get wide and he starts trying to walk backwards to follow her, but it’s too late.

“Simon!” Fiona shouts, seeing him. He freezes on the spot. “Did you finish the seating chart?”

“Uh, yes,” he says. I raise an eyebrow. I still haven’t figured out why Snow of all people has gotten roped into wedding planning. He’s about as coordinated and organised as a pack of worsegers.

“Good. Tear it up.”

“Uh.”

“Charlie’s mother,” Fiona says, her voice dropping into a snakelike hiss, her eyes narrowing to slits, “has invited seventy more people.”

“Right. Uh, Baz, can I talk to you? About, uh, something?”

I glare at Fiona and follow Simon down the hallway and into the kitchen. He heads immediately to the fridge and pulls out a beer.

“Look, you know I love you,” he says, his voice low and gravelly and the tone he uses when he is Extremely Pissed Off At Me.

“Yes, I know, it’s very embarrassing for you,” I respond. He gives me His Look, and I try to stop the next shitty quip from coming out.

“Your family is driving me fucking crazy,” he growls. “Between Mordelia’s break from reality and Fiona calling me like six times a day about wedding plans? They never stop. I thought we were supposed to have the summer off! I took off work for this! I could be in Romania with goblins right now, you know. Welby has called me three times about it.”

“I’m so sorry to tear you from your green boyfriends,” I drawl. “What an absolute hero you are for deigning to spend time with me.”

“That’s not what I fucking mean and you know it.” He clenches his jaw and takes a deep breath. “I’m just… itchy.”

I want to go to him, grab his hand, tug him into a hug, but I don’t. Partly because I’m annoyed at him, and annoyed at Fiona, and annoyed at the world, but also because I know that when he’s like this he doesn’t want to be touched. It’s like the remnants of the days when he would get overwhelmed and go off, except now there’s nothing for him to explode or blow up except for our relationship.

“It’s just, we had plans, you know? And we were supposed to have a summer off and do things. And I don’t have anything to do and Mordelia is so fucking sad and I think she is actually going crazy. The things she’s doing are crazy. Like, I said we could help her, but I can only take one of them at a time, Baz. I can only handle one.”

I nod and stay silent. I try to remember what Niall said, about not taking things personally and just calming him down. 

“I’m just, I don’t know!” he says, sighing. “I don’t know.” His voice goes softer. “We told them to leave us be. We were supposed to have us time.”

“We can do a spell to block Fiona from the door once she’s gone,” I say, leaning back against the counter to watch him. He takes deep breaths in and out. “Mimic the Watford spells. Big, eye-searing magic if she gets near. Ed Sheeran starts blaring. She’ll run for her life. We’ll drop Mordelia in the Thames.”

“It’s not Mordelia,” he mutters.

“I can set my whole family on fire?”

“Yeah,” he says, nodding. “Yeah, alright.” He takes another deep breath and turns away to open his beer, then nods. “Okay. I’m calm.”

“And if all else fails, you can always stab her,” I say, trailing behind him as he heads back to the living room. “She had a good run, she won’t be missed.”

“Fuck you,” Fiona spits as we enter the room. Simon collapses on the sofa, an eerily calm look of concentration on his face, and I sit next to him. Not too close, in case he does decide to start stabbing things.

“I’ve been begging Simon to, but we keep having house guests,” I drawl. Simon chokes on his beer.

“I am so sick of you, you little shit.” Fiona takes another drag of her vape and glares at us. “I’m going through a fucking crisis here, Baz.” She laughs shakily. “And I don’t even give a shit about these things, you know? Like, sure, everyone can just show up and have a bash, I don’t fucking care. But his mother has been insistent on having everything like, organised and written down so now there are head counts I’m supposed to have. Which I already finalised!”

Her words are met with silence. I know I’m supposed to say something, have something to offer, but I’ve got nothing.

Simon stands up from the sofa in the middle of Fiona’s rant and leaves the room, and I’m filled with a blinding, unyielding hatred for him because I can’t do the same. I fucking hate him. He didn’t even last five minutes, the coward.

“And what the actual fuck is the point of a bridal shower? Isn’t that just like a hen party? But with shitty food and less booze?” Fiona asks, barely even pulling the vape away from her mouth. The smoke spills out while she speaks, and she looks like a dragon. “And Charlie’s mum keeps asking me what colour my dress is for the rehearsal. Why does that matter? And why a dress? I haven’t even thought past, like, tomorrow, and she’s over here obsessing about—”

She stops mid sentence as Simon re-enters the room, hands her a bottle of vodka, and then crosses to the record player to put on Stray Cats, Rock This Town.

She flicks the lid off the vodka bottle with her thumb, pulls the vape away and takes a long, long sip of the liquor. She chugs for so long I think she’s going to finish the bottle or drown, but when she swallows, sighs, and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, she looks like a different woman.

“Alright?” Simon asks, picking his beer up and settling back into the space next to me. He shifts a bit closer so he’s fully pressed against my side, spreads out his legs and rests his beer on his knee, casual as all fuck.

Fiona nods and raises the vodka bottle in salute.

“Stay trashy, Golden Boy.”

He raises his beer back to her and then they both take long sips as I stare on in utter confusion and amazement. And a bit of rage, because I’m suddenly realising that this is how Simon deals with me.

Fiona closes her eyes and sways in place for a moment, letting out a long breath, and then slowly begins vaping again.

“When you two get married,” she says, pointing a black polished finger at us, “don’t tell anyone. Just do it. Fuck off somewhere nice and get married and let everyone know after the fact, okay?”

Simon and I glance at each other and then immediately away.

“I’ll be sure to remind you that you said that,” I say, staring at the wall over Fiona’s shoulder and feeling the heat from Simon’s arm sink into me.

We haven’t talked seriously about getting married, but it’s not like we haven’t made a commitment to each other. Personally, I think the hellscape that was our Watford years was more harrowing than any pre-wedding trial or duel, but even still. I don’t need some elaborate wedding and splashy public announcement to know that we’re forever. 

We know. Our magic knows. We’re bound for forever. Literally.

Not many people know about that. Fiona doesn’t, which I feel a bit bad about sometimes. My father certainly doesn’t, because he’d shit himself. Just Bunce, Wellbelove, Dev and Niall. And they only know because they were there that night — The Long Night. The night Simon and I merged our magic.

It was Bunce’s idea. Sort of. We were all twenty-one, shitfaced and fresh off of graduating from uni, and everyone had gathered in Bunce and Simon’s poky little flat to celebrate her birthday. Wellbelove was back for the summer and it had been a proper piss up.

And, as Bunce does when drunk, she was lecturing about magic.

Old bonding rites, rather. She’d been researching them as part of her plan to propose to the scary American after graduation, and the flat was full of texts on bonding rites, wedding duels, dimensional handfasting and even a few on demonic union rituals, which I’m fairly sure Niall ended up stealing. 

Bunce was going on and on about an old rite she’d found — something tricky and risky and semi, possibly illegal — a rite that allows two mages to merge their powers together. To make their magic like one, so they can pull on it as needed. So they can channel their power through each other, use each other’s instruments. Become one.

“I can’t imagine what that would feel like,” Dev had said, shaking his head. “Your magic is yours, you know? Why would you want to share that?”

In the corner, Simon and I kept glancing at each other, then looking away as soon as the other noticed.

We never talked much about what had happened with the Humdrum. With the power sharing. We never figured out why I was able to use his magic, why it worked so cleanly and powerfully, but we assumed it had to do with all the fucked up experiments the Mage had run on him.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it. Not the excess of power — I hated that, honestly, I was relieved when Simon gave it all away — but the sharing. The being close. The being together like that.

Two hours and too many drinks later, Simon was slumped into my side, the book with the rite in it open at his feet.

“Do you think it’d be the same?” he’d slurred to me. I’d blinked at him, long and low and very, very drunk.

“No.” His smile dropped a bit, and I turned myself to face him, grabbing him by his ankles and dragging him into the circle of my legs. “I think it would be better.”

“It can’t be undone,” he’d said, putting his head to mine. My chest was tight, like I couldn’t breathe, and my skin felt on fire, like the only places I was real and living and not burning alive were the places where we touched.

I’ve always been in love with him. Hopelessly, stupidly, pathetically in love with him, and I always knew he’d be the ruining of me.

“I wouldn’t want it to be.”

The smile he gave me then was so wide, so bright, so earnestly happy that I forgot for a moment that we were young and drunk and terrified of our impending adulthood, and so I didn’t even hesitate.

“Bunce!” I shouted. “Come here and bind us.”

She’d argued. Dev had argued. Wellbelove told us we were crazy. Niall didn’t argue, but he’s a romantic son of a bitch who knows it’s useless to get in my way. Eventually they all gave in. Bunce was so anxious and jittery she must have put away an entire bottle of wine herself as she went about getting the ingredients, but finally we were ready: all out on Bunce and Snow’s tiny balcony, sitting, because there wasn’t enough room to stand.

“Are you sure about this?” Bunce asked. “You won’t ever have your magic to yourself ever again. He can use it, and you can use his. You’ll feel it, Basilton, every time. Are you sure about this? Him?”

I wasn’t looking at her. I was looking at Simon, hovering on the other end of the balcony, talking to Wellbelove, who was uselessly trying to fix his hair. His head was down and his cheeks flushed with alcohol. I felt so full in that moment — full of love, of confidence, of Simon, that I opened my mouth and made the biggest mistake of my life.

“He’s like the sun,” I said to her quietly. “My whole world revolves around him. I’ve never been as sure of anything as I am of Snow.”

(Saying yes wasn’t the mistake. Saying all that out loud to Bunce was. She has a terrifyingly sharp memory, even with inebriated.)

“Oh, Baz,” Bunce had said, her voice very small. And then she’d straightened up, taken another gulp of wine, and nodded. “Alright. Let’s do this bitch.”

Niall sat next to me, Wellbelove sat next to Snow, and Dev and Bunce faced us, leading the ceremony. It took less than ten minutes for Simon and me to bind our magic together, and then we all promptly blacked out.

When I woke up the next morning, freezing and stiff and wildly hungover, I had what felt like a supernova glowing inside my chest. It was too much, suddenly. I was one person, holding the magic of two, and I itched. I fucking burned from the inside out. 

Over the years it’s settled; calmed. Gone still. Learned to coexist with my own magic. It still burns, though. Simon’s fire always burns, like a steady campfire, like slowly glowing coals. It makes me feel warm.

Ever since we bonded, I’ve never felt cold.

We haven’t told anyone else, largely because we don’t want questions. We don’t want to justify it. We don’t want to explain.

It’s our secret. Our bond. Just ours.

I look at Simon again, still seated next to me on the sofa, still watching Fiona’s wedding rant with interested, if tired, eyes. What I said that night was true. He really is my sun.

He glances sideways and smiles at me, then scrunches up his nose and turns back to Fiona, the smile still on his face. 

Deep inside me, sitting quietly in the well of my magic, I can feel him.

That’s why I don’t get worried when he’s like this. When he gets angry and huffy and pulls away a bit. Because he’s a part of me. And I’m a part of him.

⚡⚡⚡

“There are still no tomatoes!” Simon’s face is locked in a snarl, his chin jutted out as he shakes a potted plant in my face. “Why won’t it give me a tomato?”

I blink, utterly unprepared for another of Simon’s gardening meltdowns this early in the morning, and instead take a seat at the kitchen table next to Mordelia. She has her legs propped up and her eyes are glued to her phone, but she looks up for a moment to nod at me as I pick up my paper.

They’re listening to Fleetwood Mac this morning. I Don’t Wanna Know is beating out a drum rhythm against the cookery, and I’m actually not sure whether this is Simon’s music or Mordelia’s.

“I’ve done everything the stupid Google told me to do,” Simon continues, slamming a mug of tea in front of me, followed a moment later by a plate of bacon that positively clatters to the table. “I even talked to the bloke I’m working with for Fiona’s wedding flowers. And it’s still all brown and tomatoless.”

“Wait, why are you doing Fiona’s wedding flowers?” I ask.

“Maybe it’s not a tomato plant,” Mordelia offers, and I glare at her. She knows better than to goad Snow when he’s like this.

He’s become a bit fixated on the house plants, lately. He’s always enjoyed having them — dithering about feeding and watering them and such — but since we’ve been home for the summer it’s gotten a bit obsessive.

It’s like fifth year all over again, except instead of following me around trying to prove I’m evil, he’s fixating on a plant and getting personally offended when it doesn’t shower him with tomatoes because he’s the Chosen One and the world falls at his feet.

Part of me thinks that he’s obsessively nurturing the plants because he can’t fix Mordelia’s issues for her.

“You just need to romance it, make it feel special,” Mordelia says now, ignoring the looks both Simon and I are giving her. “What do you do when you and Baz fight? Just make it a nice curry or something, offer to give it a—”

“I’m not taking plant or relationship advice from you,” Simon growls, turning back to putter with his plant. 

“Especially considering you excel at neither,” I add dryly. Simon snorts from the sink.

A look like anger flashes across Mordelia’s face, her eyes locked on the back of Simon’s head, and I take a quick sip of my tea. If she and Simon get in another fight, history has proven that things get set on fire or exploded, and I really would like to finish my breakfast first.

To my surprise, however, Mordelia doesn’t rise to the bait.

“Alright then,” Mordelia says, swinging her legs off the table and standing up. She’s wearing those hideous brown trousers of hers again — the ones that cinch tightly high around her waist and then cuff at the bottom, like she’s some kind of teddy boy or artsy lesbian from an 80s movie. She puts her hands into her huge trouser pockets and shrugs. “I’ll just leave you and your gay plant to it.”

“The plant isn’t gay!” Simon shouts, turning away from the sink to glare at her back as she leaves the kitchen. “Why do you have to make everything gay?”

She doesn’t respond, and he turns to me, his mouth set in a frown.

“Why does she make everything gay?”

“Because being gay is cool now,” I say, tucking my hair back behind my ear and focusing back on my paper. “If Mordy wants your plant to be gay, let the plant be gay.”

“Bit rich, coming from her,” Simon mutters darkly as he turns back to the sink. There’s a thunking and clattering as he starts doing the washing up. “I’m gay, the plant’s gay, the squirrel is gay, she’ll call everything gay but herself.”

I put down my paper and raise an eyebrow. He can’t see it; his back is to me. But I feel better for doing it.

“I thought you didn’t like labels and commitments, Snow.”

“I don’t!” he shouts, dropping his sponge into the sink and turning to point at me with his floppy yellow rubber glove. “I hate labels. But your sister is a lesbian.” He turns back to the sink. “And the longer she denies it, the more she’s making herself miserable. She just needs to get over this whole refusal to accept it shit and get on with things.”

“I need some fresh air,” I say, standing up from the table and grabbing my tea, “the hypocrisy in this room is so thick it’s making me ill.”

Mordy is sitting on the stairs just outside of the kitchen and she glares up at me as I pass. There’s a twinge in my gut as I realise she’s heard all of it, everything Simon said. And even though I agree with him, some things are meant to go poetically unspoken.

“Ignore Snow,” I tell her under my breath. “He’s in a lover’s spat with his plant.”

“The plant isn’t gay!” Simon shouts. There’s a scrambling noise and then he appears in the doorway, still wearing his rubber gloves and looking contrite.

“Sorry, Mordy,” he says, leaning against the doorframe. He sighs and lets the house take his weight. “You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be. Or, like, say anything if you aren’t ready. You know I don’t care. Like, super don’t care, and totally get it. And Baz is really fucking gay, so he doesn’t care, so that’s fine, and like, if you’re not that’s also fine! But just, yeah, we’re here, if you ever need to uh, talk, and—”

“Aleister fucking Crowley,” I say, cutting in over Simon’s babbling and turning to my sister. “I have to go meet Hollow to pick out a suit. Want to come?”

“Yes,” Mordelia says, rocketing off the stairs, the relief on her face palpable. “After, can we swing by Hounslow? I thought of a new argument for Priya but she blocked me on Instagram so I was thinking I’d just stop by, maybe corner her in person? That way she can’t get away, she has to listen.”

“I see absolutely no flaw with this plan,” I say, gesturing my arm wide for my sister to walk out of the cramped hallway.

Simon is still leaning on the doorway, looking like a kicked puppy.

“You’re very stupid, you know,” I say to him. He frowns deeper. “You’re atrocious at handling these things, you awful, awful man.”

I step closer to him and slide my hands around his waist and go to pull him into a hug, but he resists.

“No, you can’t hug me and call me stupid, those are the rules,” he says, leaning away. I tighten my grip and pull him back in.

“You’re stupidly beautiful,” I mumble, pressing my face to his neck. He hasn’t shaved in a few days, so there’s a decent amount of stubble. It makes him look like a mess, but I kind of like when it scratches my cheek. “You’re hideously lovely.”

“Fuck off,” he mutters, swatting me, but it’s a weak attempt, and I can hear the smile in his voice.

“Unreasonably and terrifyingly awful at navigating teenagers, but disturbingly good at making tea.”

His hands come up around my back and I know I’ve won, just one more and he’ll let me kiss him fully.

“Stop being gay and let’s go!”

Simon and I both sigh as Mordelia’s boots stomp down the stairs and her shout interrupts what could have been our first good snog this week.

“I don’t want kids,” Simon mutters into my chest, and I nod. 

“Never,” I agree. “Never ever.”

“Let’s fucking goooooooo,” Mordy yells again.

“Have fun,” Simon says, pulling back and giving me a hideously shitty grin. “Have a really great day with your sister. You deserve it. Truly.”

“Fuck off, Snow.”

“This is why I love you,” he says, placing his hands over his heart. “We have such a warm, supportive relationship.”

“I’ll show you warm and supportive,” I snap, fleeing the room before Snow has the chance to laugh at how hideously stupid a retort that was.

I hear him laughing as I step out the door.

⚡⚡⚡

“Step away from the white suit, or I swear on all that is magic I will set you on fire.”

Hollow looks up sheepishly from the white linen suit he’s been eyeing. It’s the only white suit in the entire store, and I’m absolutely revolted that he’s managed to find it.

“It could be nice. Classic?” Hollow asks, his voice tilting up. The tailor behind me makes a noise and covers it with a discreet cough.

“We came to Grieves & Hawkes, not ASOS,” I tell Hollow, motioning for the man behind me to come forward and attack Hollow with his tape measure. “You asked me to make sure you look nice. Allow me to do my job.”

Hollow grimaces but holds out his arms and lets himself be tended to by the best of Savile Row.

“How’s your summer going?” Hollow asks as the man kneels to measure his inseam.

“Are we really going to make awkward small talk right now?” I ask, flipping through the book of fabric samples on the coffee table in front of me. Privately, I think Hollow would look lovely in a brown three piece, but that’s so not the style of this wedding. Fiona will want something edgier.

“Uh, yes, we are,” Hollow says. He shifts and coughs a bit as the measuring tape climbs higher up his thigh. “Please.”

“Just splendid,” I respond, tapping my fingers against a lush dark navy. “My house is a revolving door of uninvited people just barging in. Simon is so bored and twitchy he’s climbing the walls, we haven’t had any alone time, and he and Mordelia are going to tear each other apart and eat each other’s eyeballs.”

“Is she being a handful?” he asks as the tailor begins measuring his neck.

I shrug lazily and stare down at the book.

“No. Simon is just twitchy. And she’s going through a lot. They’re feeding off each other,” I say, flipping between the navy and a muted black.

“Maybe Mordy needs someone to talk to about it. The uh, the thing. That she won’t talk about.”

I look up at Hollow, who has a measuring tape around his neck, and raise an eyebrow.

“She knows she can talk to me. We talk about everything. If she’s not talking to me about this , then clearly there’s something else going on.” 

The tailor releases Hollow from his clutches and I hand him the samples book, tapping quickly on the page I have open. He takes it with a silent nod and disappears to the back.

“I’m just saying,” Hollow says, rolling his neck and shaking out his arms, “maybe she’s nervous. I once knew this kid. He was one of my students, actually. And he was going through hell, and wouldn’t talk to anyone. Tried to carry everything himself.”

“Sounds like a real twat,” I drawl, leaning back into the sofa and glaring at him.

“Nah, he was a good kid. But my point is, he only ended up opening up when he was at the end of his rope, and even then, he only did it because I was removed from the situation. I was kind of a stranger. And he was able to weaponise his confusion and pain.”

“I’m not sure why we’re taking this lovely trip down memory lane.”

“Mordelia is more like you and Fiona than she is the rest of your family,” Hollow says, his smile dropping, his tone serious. “Were you tripping all over yourself to talk to Fiona about things?” He gestures his head toward the far wall, and I follow his gaze.

Mordelia is lurking on the other side of the shop, looking sullen and trailing her fingers over the lapels of a velvet green tux jacket.

“Fine,” I sigh, standing up. “Point taken.”

“What point?” Hollow asks innocently. “I don’t have a point.”

I’m saved from responding by the reappearance of the tailor, who has six different samples in his arms and is shepherding Hollow toward a changing room with a grip like a steel vice.

I meander across the store slowly, looking at samples and fabrics as I go, and pretend to be interested in a garish and boring grey cotton as I come to a stop next to Mordelia, who is still running her fingers over the tux.

“Do you want one?”

She looks up at me, startled, her eyes wide, her hand pausing like she’s been caught in an illicit act.

“What?”

I gesture at the suits surrounding us.

“A suit,” I say. “Do you want a suit?”

Mordelia drops her hand and her eyes dart around the room. She looks nervous as she pulls one of her large lips into her mouth to gnaw on it.

“Oh, uh.” She’s starting to go a bit pink. “I dunno if Mum and Dad would want that.”

Mordelia hates eye contact, so I busy myself with inspecting a sample book with various embroidered and floral patterns. They’re actually rather nice. There’s a blue floral pattern that would make an impeccable wedding suit. Crowley, and it would go lovely with a leather jacket.

“Maybe. Maybe not,” I say, snapping myself out of a violently vivid image of Snow in a wedding tux. “They surprise me all the time.” I pause for a beat, and then continue. “Since when do you care what Malcolm and Daphne think anyway? Why does it matter if they care if you wear a suit?”

Mordelia stares down at the ground.

“It sends a message, don’t you think?”

“Not sure how a suit sends a worse message than lighting the Christmas turkey on fire.”

“It’s just different,” she says, quietly. “It’s not just causing some ruckus for fun, you know? It’s a… choice. Something people assume I’ll grow out of.” She looks up at me, and I can see the nervousness on her face, hear the slight hitch in her tone as she continues. “But what if I don’t? It’s like… a choice. If I wear a suit, it’s you know, saying I’m a person who likes suits. And… maybe I’m not. Maybe I haven’t, like… found the right dress yet.”

My stomach feels tight and broiling, and it takes everything in me to pretend that I’m not deeply, deeply invested in this conversation.

“It’s not a choice,” I say, and then immediately abandon the pretense that I don’t care, because this is crucial, and we’re clearly not talking about suits. “Mordelia, it’s not a choice. You know that, right?”

She makes a small noise but otherwise doesn’t acknowledge me, and I can see her tensing up, like she’s about to run.

So I retreat.

“The only choice in the matter is whether you allow yourself to do what feels comfortable and natural for you,” I say quietly, “or whether you’re going to shove yourself into dresses for forever, because that’s what people want you to do.”

She gives a snorting laugh, but still won’t look at me, and I can tell that this conversation is done. 

“For what it’s worth, I think you’d look stunning in a suit.” Her shoulders lose some of their tension. “And I’ll set fire to anyone who disagrees.”

She turns her head away from the velvet tux slightly to smile at me, and my stomach unclenches.

“Come on, come help me pick out a suit for Simon. Let’s make him look garish.”

The small smile turns into a wide grin.

“I vote tweed.”

“Ungh,” I say, letting the noise get ripped from my throat. “Merlin, he’d look like a professor. He’d hate it.”

“And if he’s in tweed, he’ll be all sweaty in the August heat,” she adds. “He’ll boil alive before the ceremony is over.”

 “Excellent thinking,” I counter. “Come on, let’s find the ugliest fabric we can.”

⚡⚡⚡

The doorbell rings and Simon and I freeze.

No one uses the doorbell. Everyone we know just walks straight in. I didn’t even know what our doorbell sounded like, but there it is, resonating a gentle chime through the entire house. 

For a moment I think it’s part of the song Simon has playing, one of his weird white man groups with the guitars — Crosby and Nash? Or Stills and Young? Or maybe all four? Or perhaps just three? I can never keep their ridiculous line ups straight — but then the bell chimes again.

“I’ll get it!” Mordelia screams from upstairs, and a moment later she’s thundering down the staircase, her heavy boots causing the wall of the kitchen closest to the stairs to vibrate slightly.

“Who the fuck is using the doorbell?” Simon asks me, his eyes drawn tight with concern as he abandons the scone batter he was mixing to head towards the entryway. I push back from the kitchen table where I’ve scattered Hollow’s syllabus notes to follow him.

“...why did you use the doorbell?” Simon is saying as I turn the corner to find, to my immense surprise, Fiona and Hollow, standing on the stoop. It’s starting to rain, and Hollow’s hair is curling up at his neck. Fiona is wearing a hoodie under her leather jacket, pulled up tight over her hair.

“Because we’re civilised, polite people,” Fiona responds, scoffing. Beside her, Hollow grimaces.

“Did someone die?” I ask, alarmed. Mordelia is pulling on her jacket — the stupid brown suede one with the weird tassels that makes her look like a ranch hand from the ‘70s — and she has a rucksack slung over her shoulder.

“We’re stealing your sister,” Fiona informs me cooly. “Charlie and I are about to kill each other if we’re left alone with wedding planning, so we’re going to go up to Glasgow for the weekend and we’re taking the brat.”

“The Smiths are playing a revival show,” Mordelia says, pulling her hair out from under her collar. “It’s going to be so bad.” She’s smiling. Delighted.

“We’re going to heckle Morrissey,” Fiona agrees, grinning at me.

“Er, no we’re not,” Hollow says, shaking his head. He’s met by silence. “We’re not, guys, seriously. Guys, he might kill us.”

Simon is staring between me and Fiona, giving me The Look, asking if I orchestrated this. I wish I had, but I didn’t. I didn’t have any idea.

Fiona is grinning ferally at me now.

“Anyway,” she continues, “we’ll be back Monday afternoon. Ready kid?”

Mordelia nods, her hands around the strap of her bag, her eyes excited. 

“Ready. Oi, do you think we could stop off in—”

“No,” Fiona snaps, shaking her head. “Don’t even say it. Not a chance.”

Mordelia huffs and stomps out the door, followed by Hollow, who has his wand out and is surreptitiously spelling the rain away from he and Mordelia as they dash down the street.

“You kids don’t do anything rash or shitty, okay?” Fiona says, watching them go. She has a soppy, fond look on her face, but when she turns back to me it’s gone. “Enjoy your weekend.”

Simon is nearly vibrating next to me as I nod, my stomach churning with excitement and relief and excessive, annoying appreciation for my ridiculous aunt.

“Thank you, Fi.”

She waves her hand. “Nahh, don’t mention it, kid.” She pulls her collar up and shoves her hands deep in her jacket. “By the way, Baz, your hair looks like shit. You really need it cut. The grunge look doesn’t work for you.”

And then she’s gone, walking off into the rain at a slow, cool pace, completely unconcerned that she’s about to be drenched.

I close the door behind her, and then slowly turn to Simon.

I’ve barely turned around before we’re on each other. I don’t know who moved first, him or me, but a second later I have Simon pinned against our front door, my hands grappling at his waist, his fingers tugging at the neck of my t-shirt.

“I love your aunt,” he murmurs, slotting his knee between my legs as he moves down to kiss at my neck. “I fucking love her, she’s my favourite person.”

“I’m extremely offended,” I respond, trying to keep my voice even, but I think I’m failing. Simon makes a noise that sounds like a literal growl, and I give in and begin to target his moles, grabbing his hands in mine to keep him from pushing me back.

“We have all weekend to ourselves,” he says, nearly delirious. “Merlin, should we — should we slow down or like—”

“No,” I snap, kissing the mole at the edge of his eye. “Stop talking.”

We’re being ridiculous. He’s right. We have all weekend, and we’re acting like teenagers.

But for Merlin’s sake, we’re not even thirty. We’re still young. We’re still in the prime of our fucking life, and there’s no reason for us to rein ourselves in and settle down and act like we’re solid and sixty.

Fuck that.

I pull Simon’s shirt off quickly, and it gets stuck in his curls like it always fucking does, and I snort inelegantly as he wobbles to get it fixed, trying to push me backwards towards the stairs while blinded by soft cotton.

He stumbles over a pair of his trainers and lurches into me, and we go down hard on the bottom stairs.

Simon pauses, breathing heavy, one of his arms still stuck in his shirt, sticking up wildly above his head.

“We can just do it like this, this is fine,” he says, his voice resigned. “No problem.”

“You’re a nightmare,” I tell him, carefully extracting his elbow. “Merlin, you’re a gorgeous fucking nightmare.”

⚡⚡⚡

I can hear the storm beating itself out against the windows of the solarium, adding a calming backdrop to the buzz of the television. We’ve the game on — I barely know who’s playing, Tottenham and someone else — because I can barely keep my eyes open.

Simon is actually watching, though, making little oohs and ahhhs and hisses that I can feel reverberating through his body from where we’re pressed together. I’m sprawled out across him, my arms around his waist and my head pressed to his chest, slotted neatly between his legs while he combs his fingers through my too-long hair.

It’s lovely.

It’s warm and soft and safe and everything feels like it’s come to a pause, like the storm over the house is protecting us from everything, and I can let my body loose and relax and sink into him like I’ve been wanting to for weeks.

Forget the sex. Forget the kisses or the squabbles or the routine of morning breakfasts. This is what I miss during the school year when we’re not together. These pockets of time. The ability to just be together. This is what I want available to me, without pre-arranging or scheduling. This is what’s missing from me like an organ, like a lung, like my ability to breathe.

At some point the game ends, and the room gets submerged into silence, but I’ve lost all track of time until Simon shifts beneath me and reaches for his wand on the back of the sofa.

“Two turn tables and a microphone ,” he whispers, and I feel his magic — our magic, our shared power — surge up within me, pulled from my belly like a tiny warm flame, and across the room the record player starts playing. She’s Leaving Home. The Billy Bragg version. The speakers are still connected to Mordelia’s ridiculous pining playlist, and the magic is still thrumming in me in time to the piano.

I love this feeling.

Dev said we’d regret it. Merging our magics. Sharing our power. Said it’d drive us crazy to feel it every time one of us used a spell, said it would get us in danger if one of us depleted the store. Said it would make things confusing, would muddle the magic.

But I love it. I love knowing when he’s casting, even if he’s in a different country. I love feeling his power light up within me again. Not like it used to, not like holy lightning, but like a winter bonfire, crackling through my skin. 

He once told me that when I use his magic, it feels like he’s just let out a great breath of relief, like his lungs have cleared and his body has relaxed.

Light a match inside your heart, and blow on the flame, my mother used to say.

That’s how you make magic.

Chapter Text

My kitchen looks like a scene from a reject Tarantino movie.

Simon is sat at the table, my syllabus notes pushed into a mess in order to make room for his towering tomato plant, which he appears to be pruning like a bonsai while wearing boxers, mismatching socks, and his old denim jacket.

Mordelia is tucked up next to him, eating peanut butter out of a jar with her fingers and wearing my dressing gown. It’s my favourite dressing gown — some kind of black fake silk with embroidered red dragons that Simon brought me back from China as a joke. It’s extremely soft. She’s gotten peanut butter on it.

Also in her hair.

“I seem to have missed the dress code memo,” I note, crossing the kitchen to pour myself a cup of tea from the pot Simon has sitting out. “What’s the occasion?”

“We’re plotting ways to get Simon out of going to the Salisbury thing,” Mordelia says, wiggling her hand a bit to make it fit more easily into the jar. She looks like a demented Winnie The Pooh. “The leading plan is that he’s going to break his leg.”

“We’re not getting out of it,” I say, grabbing the paper from where someone has thrown it on the ground and flipping open to the crossword. “Why don’t you want to go?”

“Seriously?” Simon asks, pausing in his pruning, his mouth open.

“Seriously. They’re loud, but they’re nice enough. Why this excessive dread?”

“Oliver texted me to confirm and said something about ‘the house.’”

“Oh?” I raise an eyebrow, and Simon nods, standing up and pacing toward the sink and turning his back to me. I can see the tense lines of his shoulders from here. He’s filled out over the years, what with his running and jumping and general Coven shenaniganing, and his old denim jacket stretches somewhat indecently across his back.

“Yeah. Apparently he wants to chat with us about a house,” Simon says. “And our future. He’s got to be talking about the country house.”

I make a face behind Simon’s back. There have been noises for years about Oliver Salisbury moving, taking his mother down south for a quiet retirement. Noises about passing his current house onto us.

“So we say no,” I say dismissively, shrugging and turning back to my paper. “What’s so difficult about that?” Simon turns and makes a face almost identical to the one I just pulled.

“I don’t know, he and Lady Salisbury are just always saying stuff about marriage and kids and the whole, ‘you’ll give this to your son someday, Simon,’ thing.” He growls and tugs at his hair. “It’s just so much! And so much talk about kids!”

“Kids are terrifying,” I hum, tapping the pencil against my mouth as I frown at the crossword.

“Exactly!” Simon shouts. “I don’t want kids! We already have Mordelia.” He gestures wildly at my sister, who pauses in licking the peanut butter off her fingers to glare at him.

“Excuse me, Chosen One,” she snarls, hugging the jar of peanut butter to her chest defensively. “I’m not your kid. You never changed my shitty nappies.”

“You are a shitty nappy,” I chime in.

“Well at least that means someone has found value in me,” she snaps, sticking her hand back in the jar and settling into her pouting face.

“What?” I ask. “That’s not even— that’s not—”

“I just don’t want to go,” Simon whines, collapsing into the chair across from me and giving me his best pathetic expression. “Tell me we don’t have to go.”

“We have to go.”

“Fuck you,” he mumbles, leaning forward to rest his forehead against the table. “You never support me.”

“There, there,” Mordy says, patting the back of his head with a hand covered in peanut butter. “At least your uncle is fit. Also there are like, so many ghosts at his house. Did you know there’s a legend about a crown made of human bone buried on the property? It gives the wearer persuasive powers.”

“Did you just put peanut butter in my hair?” Simon whispers into the table.

Mordelia looks up at me with a vaguely guilty expression.

“Simon. I would never.” She sniffs and slowly gets up from the table. “I’m offended you would think that of me. Really.”

Then she grabs the peanut butter jar and runs.

Simon turns his head to the side, so his cheek is flat against the table and he can stare at me.

“I wish the Humdrum had killed me.”

“Well he did his best. Just like you will, at the family reunion.” I reach over to stroke his cheek and smile. “Because I want that car, Simon. I want that car very badly. And you’re going to provide for me and get us that car.”

He turns his face back to the table and moans, and I turn back to my tea.

⚡⚡⚡

“I could eat a fucking cow,” Simon mumbles, scrubbing his hand over his face a few times before shaking his head. His face is all ruddy and flushed, his freckles nearly hidden with the rosy tinge. I love him when he drinks. He lights up like a Christmas tree.

“Me too,” Dev nods from beside us. He has his head down and his hands in his pockets, and he’s swaying a bit into Niall, who is the only sober one here.

None of us meant to get so thoroughly pissed. It just sort of happened. Niall dragged us to some basement show for this indie act he was desperately excited about that none of us had ever heard of, and every song was so torturously slow and identical that there was literally nothing to do but drink. Dev tried to hold out and stay with Niall up at the front, watching as the waifish teen girl on stage stared dead-eyed into the crowd, but even he couldn’t take it for longer than thirty minutes before he joined Simon and me at the bar in the back.

“There’s a chippy just up the street,” I say, pleased with how sober and steady I sound. “We can stop off there before we get to the house.”

“Ungh, yes,” Simon says, an absolutely indecent noise pulled from his throat. “Cheese chips.”

“You don’t have to make it sound so pornographic, Snow,” I chide, but I lean into him anyway and steer the group down the pavement.

The chippy is cramped and dirty and smells like seven layers of grease, and Dev and Simon look ready to sob for joy. Dev shoves himself to the front and orders an obscene amount of food, while Simon hangs back and squints at the menu board.

“Know what you want?” I ask, moving to take Dev’s place at the till. Simon holds back.

“I forgot they don’t do chips with cheese here,” he mutters, frowning.

“Yes, they do.”

He shakes his head and points up.

“It’s not on the menu.”

“They’ll do it if you ask.”

“I don’t want to ask.”

I roll my eyes and glance at the girl working the till, who is watching this entire exchange with the dull eyes of one worn down by London food service.

“Then I’ll ask.”

“No!” Simon says, shuffling forward to address the girl. “Er, an order of chips, please.”

“Merlin’s fucking—” I start, sighing. “Simon, don’t you want the cheese?”

“No!” he insists, going even redder. “No, it’s fine, I’m good. Regular chips.”

“If you just ask—”

“Regular!” he says again, throwing a handful of coins at the till worker and shaking his head before dashing out of line and to the waiting area. I follow at a slow pace, staring at him.

“Snow, what the fuck was that?”

“Nothing,” he says, scowling. “Just drop it.”

His sad, regular chips get shoved onto the pickup counter and he takes them with a harried expression, then scowls down at them.

“Oh for Merlin’s sake,” I mutter, shoving past him to head to the counter to order him some fucking chips with cheese. 

“Baz, don’t, seriously—” he starts, then stops as his phone goes off, his annoying ringtone echoing through the cramped chippy. He fumbles with his pocket, trying to get his mobile out, and then stares down at the screen, his eyes wide in panic.

“Who—” I start, but he’s already answered. 

“Hello?”

He pauses to listen, his eyebrows knitting together, his mouth falling open even wider, and then suddenly he shoves his box of chips at me and bursts out of the restaurant.

“What’s wrong?” Niall asks, watching him go. “Is he okay?”

“I have no idea,” I say, pushing my way through the line and toward the door to follow him. He’s out on the pavement, his head down, his mobile tucked against one ear, his finger pressed to the other.

“Yeah, yeah, of course, we’ll be there.”

Pause. Simon kicks at the pavement with his trainer.

“Are you, er, are you okay?”

More silence. My stomach is churning. Is it Bunce? It has to be Bunce. Or maybe Agatha. Or one of the Wellbeloves. Anyone else would have called me. Honestly, Agatha would have called me. So it has to be Bunce.

“Yeah. Yeah, of course. We’ll, er, leave tomorrow.”

My heart is pounding.

“No, it’s fine, we were already packed and stuff for the reunion. Just let us know if you need anything, yeah?”

More silence, and then Simon turns to me. His eyes look bloodshot, and I suddenly feel extremely sober. I can feel Dev and Niall hovering behind me anxiously, and I cringe as Dev takes a long sip of his soda. The straw makes a hideous slurping noise.

“Okay,” Simon says, nodding. “Yeah. See you, Oliver.”

My stomach churns again as Simon rings off and stares directly at me. He’s not crying, but his face looks crumpled.

“Lady Salisbury just died.”

⚡⚡⚡

“I wish I’d gotten the chips with cheese.”

Simon’s voice pulls me out of my unsteady sleep, and I blink groggily into our dark room.

“What?” I ask, my voice hoarse.

“The chips. I wish I’d gotten cheese on them. You were right. They were gross without it, but I was too anxious to ask.”

I sit up and rub my eyes and glance sideways at the clock on my side table. Three a.m.

“Simon, we have to be up in four hours. Why are you talking about cheese?”

“I was just so anxious about this stupid reunion thing, because there were going to be so many people, and I refused to order the cheese. And now it’s a funeral and there’s going to be so many more people.”

I sigh and reach over to turn on the light, wincing as it illuminates our bedroom. I’m not drunk still, but I’m not entirely sober, and my head is not fully prepared to deal with this right now.

“No one is going to expect anything of you at a funeral,” I say, my voice cracked with sleep. “Everyone will be sad.”

“No, Oliver said it’s going to be a party,” he says, his voice getting higher and louder. “And you don’t get it, it’s going to be so much worse now. You know how much Lady Salisbury wanted us to get married. Everyone’s going to be talking about it.”

Sometimes I find it weird that Simon calls his grandmother Lady Salisbury still. I get that there’s an awkwardness there. She’ll never be Nan or Gran, but to him she’s strictly Lady Salisbury, despite how many times she’d begged him to call her Ruth. Even I called her Ruth.

He had all kinds of weird boundaries with her that he refused to cross, and no matter how many times I’ve tried, I’ve never been able to unpack all of Simon’s family issues.

“Crowley, is this really just about the marriage thing?” I snap, flopping back down to the bed and grabbing at my covers. “Just tell them you don’t want to marry me and call it a day.”

“That’s not—” Simon shoots up in bed, his face fierce, his voice loud. “It’s not — Aleister fucking Crowley, that’s a shitty way to put it. And it’s not true.”

There’s a sound on the other side of the wall, and then the rhythmic pounding of Mordelia’s fist, signalling for us to shut up. I guess she got in safe, then. She’d gone out with her friends (after swearing that the night wouldn’t end with Little Bunce locked in the boot of my car) and was asleep when we stumbled in. I haven’t told her. Merlin, I’m going to have to call the family in the morning and tell them.

“Simon, I’m too tired to do this,” I mutter, sighing. “Put it however you want, just tell them you don’t want to be married and stop stressing about it.”

He’s still sitting up, his body tense. I sigh and reach for him, wrapping an arm around his waist and trying to drag him back to the bed. He goes, slightly unwillingly, lying down to rest against my chest.

“Of all things, don’t stress about this,” I murmur, forcibly locking him into my arms. “There’s all kinds of other things to go crazy about.”

He allows himself to go still, and an uneasy silence settles over the room.

“Oliver said she went in her sleep. Put on a murder mystery and had a cup of tea with brandy and passed in her sitting chair.”

“That sounds extremely fitting for her,” I respond, because I can’t think of anything else to say. Simon nods against my chest.

“Is it awful that I’m not sad?” he whispers. “That’s awful, right? I should be sad. She was family. She was a nice lady.”

“I think there are layers,” I respond, as delicately as I can. “You didn’t know her for most of your life, and when you did meet her, she was so desperate to love you that she kind of skipped the getting to know you part. It was overwhelming.”

“That’s the thing,” he says, his voice louder as he squirms out of my arms and sits up again. “She loved me. Like. So much. I should be a mess. Oliver was crying when he called.”

“She was his mum,” I remind him. “And everyone handles death differently.”

Simon handles death differently. But I don’t tell him that. It goes unsaid. He never even cried when the Mage died, even after he realised he was his dad. He never cried for his mum, either.

I don’t think Simon has actually ever properly grieved anyone. All the deaths in his life have been too complicated. No one has ever just… passed peacefully because their time had come. He doesn’t know the nature of a natural death.

But I also think the sadness will come, in time. I just think there’s so much wrapped into this right now that he’s deflecting it. Trying to find something to rail against. Always looking for an enemy to vanquish.

“Look,” I say, rolling onto my back so I can stare up at him. “Things take time. There’s no wrong way to grieve. Just, think about the good things and the good times you had with her, and stop stressing about the stupid marriage thing. I promise, it’s not going to come up.”

“Yeah,” he says, huffing. He flops back to the bed. “She was nice. She always made really great cake.”

“That she did,” I agree, even though as far as I know, Ruth never baked cakes. She was just excellent at picking them out and paying for someone else to make them. “Maybe you should make a cake for the reception. In honour of her.”

“Do you think that’s appropriate?”

“I think Oliver would like it. He’s a sappy type.”

“Hm.” Simon rolls over and puts his head on my shoulder, and I can feel his body lose some of the tension. “I am sad for him. Like, really sad for him.”

“You are closer to him than you were to Ruth.” I run a sleepy hand through his curls. “That’s not surprising.”

Simon reaches across me and grabs my wand from the side table and spells the lights off. I feel his magic flare deep in my belly as he collapses back on top of me.

“I will make the cake,” he mumbles. “Yeah. I can do that.”

⚡⚡⚡

It’s a sinfully lovely drive to the Lake District, and it seems cruel that we’re doing it for a funeral.

Mordelia is asleep in the back, legs kicked up onto the middle compartment, arms wrapped around her duffle bag. We have the windows down, a gorgeous breeze whipping through the car as we pass fields of sheep and rapeseed, and Simon has his music on. It’s one of the easy soul playlists that Bunce’s American made him, one of the ones he listens to all the time.

It’s this thing they do now. Making playlists for each other. Every time he goes to America to visit Bunce and Micah he comes back with some new weird music preference. Southern guitar rock. R&B. Motown hits. He and Micah even Facetime each other to listen to their odd new record finds together. Some of it is nice — I do like this playlist in particular — but I could really do with less CSNY in my life some days.

The playlist rolls over to Otis Redding’s Glory of Love, and Simon sighs a little and shifts in his seat as the opening trumpets start up.

“I love this song,” he says. It’s one of the first things he’s said since we left, and I make a small noise of agreement, not wanting to scare him off. I do actually like this song.

“I always kind of thought it would be a good wedding song,” he continues, his voice dull.

I turn to him and raise an eyebrow. That’s a new topic. Weddings. Wedding songs. Anything remotely positive in conjunction with a wedding.

“It would be,” I agree

“We should tell Fiona.” Then a moment later. “I think Penny played this at her wedding. They had really good music at that.”

I distinctly remember a drunk Micah headbanging to Jump! by the Pointer Sisters and feel the need to disagree, but I swallow the urge.

Because I also remember the aftermath of the wedding, when Simon had gone missing and I’d found him and Micah hidden away in Micah’s bedroom, ties undone, happy drunk smiles on their faces as they sat and listened to Funkadelic. I’d laid down on the floor and joined them, too drunk to care about my suit, and put my head in Simon’s lap.

Bunce had burst in eventually, looking for a place to hide and angry that we’d escaped without her. After we got lectured for leaving her with her mother, she’d settled in as well, disregarding her white dress and collapsing between Micah’s legs, leaning back against his chest as the vinyl scratched round and round and we all tried very hard not to think of the passing of time and the vastness of the ocean about to be between us.

That had been a lovely wedding, to tell the truth. (Better than Dev and Niall’s at any rate, which was an awkward hellscape of a weekend in Oxford that ended in Niall having an asthma attack and Dev and his father making an Unspeakable Vow to Never Speak Again.) And hiding in Micah’s childhood bedroom, listening to his favourite albums from his teen years was some of the most fun I’d had in ages. He and Bunce had been sickeningly in love, and it was abundantly clear.

“Maybe we shouldn’t tell Fiona,” I say lightly. “Maybe we should save it.”

Simon glances up at me and shrugs. He looks exhausted. There are purple bags under his eyes, and I know he didn’t get any sleep last night at all.

“Yeah, maybe,” he says quietly, and then fumbles around with his phone to change the song.

Something mean and sharp and cruel twists in my stomach, and I try to push back the feeling that I’ve just been rejected.

⚡⚡⚡

It’s a testament to what a dedicated and conscientious partner I am that I don’t abandon Simon the moment we get to the Salisbury seat in order to go check in on the Frogeye Sprite.

Given the new nature of the gathering, I have a suspicion that we won’t be leaving here with a car anyway. It’s probably better not to visit it, given everything. It will only make it harder for me.

Besides, I couldn’t abandon Simon. The place is chaos. The house is huge (Oliver’s house is probably larger than Pitch Manor, and his gardens and landscaping are impeccable, in an overgrown, cottagey kind of way), but it already seems like it’s a full house by the time we arrive.

The Devon Salisburys are there already — Oliver’s cousins, three sisters, triplets. All over 60, all unmarried. Daphne calls them The Fates, and they thoroughly creep me out. I have a vivid childhood memory of Eudora Salisbury trying to kiss my cheek with wine-stained lips, and she smells like the combination of sixteen retired perfumes. The Aberdeen Salisburys, who were related to Ruth by marriage and are extremely odd and may actually be werewolves, have already arrived, and the Staintons are here as well, to my deep, deep disappointment.

(That had been a slightly unpleasant surprise, when all of the family revelations had gone down: The Staintons — the same Philippa Stainton that had annoyed me through Watford and the same Craig that Niall had dated — are Simon’s cousins.)

(Well, second cousins. Their father Philip was Ruth’s nephew.)

(He’s also a giant prick.)

They’re all outside on the back lawn when we get in, seated around Oliver’s huge outdoor table, surrounded by papers. Or at least Oliver is. The Fates appear to be surrounded by wine glasses, and Philip Stainton is fucking around on his phone.

Mordelia takes one look at them and shakes her head.

“I think Henry Walsh is here,” she says, starting to walk backwards. “I bet I can make him dig holes for me.”

“Why are you digging holes—” I start, but she’s already gone, disappeared back into the house, and the occupants of the table have already noticed us.

“Simon, you’re here,” Oliver says. He stands from the table and moves toward us, looking extremely tired but genuinely happy to see us. Or, at least to see Simon.

I think Oliver likes me. We don’t really talk about it. That’s half of why I like him.

“How was the drive?” he asks, reaching out a hand to Simon. He takes it and allows himself to be pulled into a brief, manly hug, and not for the first time I’m struck by how similar these two look. In retrospect, it’s hard to ignore how much Simon and the Mage looked related, but seeing him next to Oliver Salisbury, it’s blinding. They look like father and son.

“It was good, yeah,” Simon says, pulling back from the embrace. “Got here as fast as we could. How are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m alright,” Oliver says in the false tones of a man who is clearly not alright. “Just trying to get things planned for mum. You know how fast these things get done, and we want to do it right. Throw her a big party, you know.”

“Yeah, of course,” Simon says, nodding. “Yeah, that’s what she would have wanted.”

Oliver claps Simon on the shoulder and then turns to me.

“Baz, great to see you,” he says, shaking my hand. It’s firm and soft. One of the things that marks him apart from Simon. He has the soft hands of a scholar. “Thanks for coming. I wanted to talk to you two about the magic component of the memorial if you’ve got a moment—”

“Ah, no need for that Ollie, I told you I’ve got that covered,” Philip Stainton cuts in, standing up from the table. I resist a cringe at the sound of his voice. Nasally and plummy, all rounded and syrupy and like the worst kind of stereotype. “Leave all the magic to me, I’ll see it done respectably, I’ll handle everything.”

Oliver’s face tightens a bit, but his smile doesn’t fade.

“I appreciate that, Phil. I just wanted to touch base with Simon, see if he’d like to be involved. You know how much he meant to Mum, she’d want him to do something.”

Beside me, Simon’s eyes go wide.

“We’ll chat over dinner, shall we?” I ask, cutting in. “If you don’t mind, though, Simon and I are going to drop our things in our room, get cleaned up from the drive.” I glance around. “Also my sister was with us a moment ago, I should probably track her down.”

“Of course, of course,” Oliver says, nodding. His voice sounds hoarse, and I pray he has a cold and it’s not from crying. “I’ve got you in Simon’s room like usual, come down whenever.”

“Here, I’ll walk up with you lads, I need to get my charger,” Stainton says, slapping Oliver on the back as he passes him and begins to stroll inside like he owns the place. “It’ll be great to catch up. I haven’t seen you two in ages, hasn’t it been? You weren’t at the Salisbury Christmas this year.”

“Er, yeah,” Simon says, flushing and frowning as we follow. “We, uh—”

“We were with my family,” I cut in smoothly. “We try to alternate family holidays.”

Stainton nods, though he’s barely listening, and makes his way through the gorgeous sweeping hallway that cuts through the heart of Oliver’s house and toward the staircase.

“Glad you two are here to help Ollie,” he says, not even looking back. “Between us, he’s totally overwhelmed by having to put on a magical event, poor chap.” He lowers his voice conspiratorially. “Totally out of his field house. I keep trying to help him, but I think he’s too embarrassed to accept. Touch of Ruth’s pride in him, I suppose. You know she always kept him involved and present in our world, poor chuck, she was a determined one, refused to face reality sometimes, between us.”

“Er,” Simon says as he and I exchange looks. Crowley, I always forget that Stainton loves nothing in life so much as the sound of his own voice.

“I just hope she hasn’t left him all her magickal artefacts,” he continues, ignoring us. “It would be a shame, terrible shame, to see them go that way. Though I suppose you’ll see a fair few of them, Simon. She did love to spoil you, I’m sure you two will probably have quite the windfall from this. Well, Simon will. No offence, Baz, but as you two haven’t exactly tied yourselves together legally, I’d be surprised if there were any accommodations for you, unfortunately. Ruth was a traditionalist like that.”

Simon makes a coughing noise and I slap him heartily on the back.

“Now, of course, I haven’t seen the will, she had Oliver do all that and he’s keeping it close. Don’t think it’s particularly appropriate, even if he is a solicitor, but it was her affair,” Stainton says, sniffing. His voice suddenly goes solemn. “I trust her judgement though, of course. I loved my aunt deeply. She was the best of women. I’ve always admired her.”

“Yes, I always could tell,” I drawl, grabbing Simon’s hand as we come even with the room we usually stay in. “Well, this is us. Great chatting as always, Stainton.”

I open the door and drag Simon inside before Stainton can get another word in.

“Merlin’s fucking balls,” Simon says as soon as the door closes. “I always forget he’s like that.”

“He’s a modern miracle,” I nod, looking around the room. Oliver’s housekeeper already brought our things up for us, and they’re stacked tidily in the corner near the leather armchair that I have coveted for ten years.

“He seems worse than usual, though,” Simon says, collapsing onto the bed. “Like, that’s not just me, right? That was worse.”

“It was,” I agree. “It definitely was.”

“And that weird dig about marriage?”

“And all his comments about Oliver not having magic?” I add, sitting down next to him. Simon drags his hands over his face and groans.

“Crowley, what a prick. He’s got to be driving Oliver crazy.”

“Oh, I guarantee it.” I lie down with a small sigh. I always forget that this bed is heavenly. I don’t want to get up. I don’t want to face Simon’s family again. “But we’re here now to help. Run interference.”

“Yeah,” Simon sighs. His legs swing restlessly against the side of the bed. “Yeah. Let’s just distract him as much as we can, do whatever we need to help Oliver. Let’s just…get through this. Somehow.”

“We killed the Humdrum,” I remind him. “We can survive this.”

“Yeah.”

“Yup.”

Then we lie on our backs and stare up at the ceiling and try not to think about how much I’d rather face the Humdrum than Philip Stainton.

Also I need to figure out why Mordelia is planning on digging holes.

I’ll do that later.

⚡⚡⚡

The worst thing about mage funerals is that they’re huge. Everyone attends all of them. The World of Mages is so small that everyone practically knows everyone, and since the end of the war with the Old Families, everyone has mixed in, so the events just keep getting bigger and bigger.

Especially so for someone like Ruth Salisbury, society matron, Coven patron, grandmother of the Chosen One and beloved by all.

Simon and I have been here for two days and Oliver’s house is already packed to bursting. Mordelia got shoved in with us so that an entire family could share her bedroom, all three guest houses on the property are full, and some people are even in the barn. I’m fairly sure every BnB around Windermere is booked in anticipation of the funeral tomorrow.

And there’s nowhere to hide. Stainton is always lurking around a corner, wanting to give his opinion on something, or one of the Fates is staggering around looking for wine and finding ways to touch the shoulders of every man they cross. Normally when surrounded by Simon’s family I hide in the library, but the Aberdeen Salisburys have set up camp in there with a crystal ball in an attempt to try to contact Ruth via seance to ask her opinions of table decor. It’s a testament to how weird they are that even Mordelia won’t hang out with them.

And the Walsh family is indeed here already — they’re second cousins of the Salisburys — so every morning as I wander out to brush my teeth, I keep having to look over my shoulder so I don’t run into one of my students and his illegally attractive father.

The World of Mages is staggeringly incestuous at times.

Simon is nearly tripping over himself with awkwardness, trying to greet guests and run interference with Stainton while helping Oliver with the planning, all while being bombarded at every turn with well-meaning people trying to offer their condolences.

“It feels so wrong to stand there and have people treat me like I’m in mourning,” he mutters once we’re finally back in our room. It’s well past midnight and he, Mordelia and I have just escaped from a rousing family dinner wherein every person seemed to have a unique story about something scandalous Ruth had done at some point.

“You’re her grandson, of course they’re giving you condolences,” I say, tugging the bed comforter out from underneath Mordelia, who has collected every blanket in the room and made herself a rats nest on the air mattress Oliver provided. She grunts and grabs at the blanket, winding it around her wrists and then throwing it over her head and clutching it beneath her like an old babushka or the Virgin Mary.

“But I’m not really,” Simon insists from the corner, where he’s putting his clothes back into his bag after doing the world’s most ill-advised attempt at changing into pyjamas without showing any skin, because he is also too awkward to try to use the lav.

He keeps saying things like this, reiterating it to me in private, like it’s crucial, like I have to understand. I’m trying to, but I can’t. Just because he didn’t grow up knowing Ruth doesn’t mean she wasn’t his family. I never knew my grandparents, but they’re still my grandparents.

And he and Ruth got on, I’d thought. They’d taken to each other almost from the start. That first summer — the summer after I graduated Watford — when we’d finally shown up at this house, Simon and Lady Salisbury had ended up spending four hours locked in the breakfast room together, just talking and eating scones. Oliver and I had left them to it, taking tea in the garden in absolute silence. It’d been extremely enjoyable.

“Look, people don’t know what to say to you,” Mordelia snaps at Simon from inside her blanket cocoon. “So just say thanks and don’t make it weird.”

“Yeah,” he mutters, curling up in a ball on our blanket-less bed. “Yeah, I guess.”

Mordelia blinks up at him from the floor and sighs. It’s so deep and world weary I can feel it in my bones. She stands, stumbles over to the bed with her blanket shawl, and then flops herself on top of Simon. He lets out a great oof.

“Stop being a sad sack,” she says, sprawled out half across him, her elbow sticking into his ribs. “You’re making me sad and I hate feeling feelings.”

“Please get off,” Simon squeaks, his voice very high. Mordelia wriggles like a worm further onto the bed, and Simon makes several hideous noises. She wriggles again and frees a bit of her blanket and throws it over his face.

“So, Henry has been digging the holes for me to find the bone crown,” she says. “If I find it, I’ll let you use it.”

“The bone crown doesn’t exist,” I say, sitting next to them on the bed and turning on the television. “I don’t know where you got this from.”

“It’s real,” Mordelia insists. “Simon can use its powers of persuasion to make people never speak to him again, if he wants.”

“Sounds brilliant,” Simon says, pulling one hand up beneath his head and closing his eyes. He looks exhausted. Everything about this has been weighing on him. There’s so many people here it’s claustrophobic, and everywhere we turn there’s Oliver, wandering around and looking gutted, but trying his best to smile. I think that’s making Simon just feel worse, seeing how hard Oliver is pretending he’s fine, when Simon can’t even pretend he’s not.

Mordelia wriggles herself like a snake all the way over Simon and up the bed until she’s squeezed between us, and leans her head on my shoulder.

“Switch the channel,” she says. “I hate Chef’s Brigade.”

“I like it,” Simon mumbles.

“See if Eastenders is on,” Mordelia urges, even though her eyes are closed.

“We’re not watching Eastenders,” I scold. “And we’re not watching Chef’s Brigade either.” I flip through the channels and stop when I see Countryfile.

“Merlin, you’re such an old man,” Mordelia says, yawning loudly into my face as she does so. Her breath reeks of wine. I really need to stop leaving her alone with the Fates. “Whatever. Priya and I have caught up on Eastenders anyway.”

Simon shuffles, rolling over onto his side to face us and grabbing at Mordelia’s blanket.

“How’s that going?” he asks, his blue eyes sleepy. “She’s going to be here for it, you know.”

“I know,” Mordelia says. She’s suddenly gone very rigid against me. “I’ve got a plan.”

“You cannot kidnap her at a funeral,” I warn.

“Lewis and Suess, I’m not kidnapping her.” She huffs and moves closer to me. “I’m just going to talk to her. I’m running out of chances, she leaves in two weeks.”

“Just tell her the truth,” Simon yawns, closing his eyes. He reaches out and pokes Mordelia somewhere in the general vicinity of her shoulder. “Just be direct.”

“I am being direct,” she mutters.

“You know what I meant,” Simon mumbles. He yawns again so widely that the movement causes his jaw to click. “Just be open. Tell her how you feel. Clearly the fact that she hasn’t called the Coven on you yet means something.”

“Simon, that’s horrible advice, don’t encourage this.”

“No. He’s right, she doesn’t seem to mind it.” Mordelia shrugs. “Sometimes I think she finds it funny.”

“That’s promising,” Simon says, nodding. “You should pull her aside after the funeral and talk to her. Tell her the whole truth, not this bullshit about her needing to complete her schooling. She may still go to America, but maybe you two could work something out?”

Mordelia glares at Simon, her eyes just two slits peering out from underneath her blanket.

“You’re talking nonsense, Snow. Honestly, you should hear yourself speak, the things you come up with,” she sniffs, shifting her body until she’s rolling over me, elbowing me in the ribs, nearly crashing her head into my chin until she’s on my other side, and I’m now squeezed in the middle between them.

“I hate both of you,” Simon says, accepting this new world order very quickly as he reaches out and wraps one arm around my waist and buries his head in my side.

It’s hideously uncomfortable, but they’re both warm and already breathing deeply on either side of me, and before I can bring myself to shove Mordelia off the bed, I’m asleep.

⚡⚡⚡

“Simon!”

For once in my life, I actually startle, jolting in place, my hand coming up to cover my heart. My cool vampire instincts have let me down. I don’t think I was even that scared by the Humdrum. Beside me, Snow looks just as rattled.

Oliver Salisbury blinks owlishly at us from behind the archway he was lurking in.

“Sorry to startle you,” he says, his voice suspiciously close to a whisper. “Would you come into my study?”

He literally looks over our shoulders and both ways before quickly ushering us into the room next door, a lush, dark-wood lined study full of books and chairs, and he closes the door behind us with an authoritative click and a look of immense relief.

I suppose we weren’t the only ones trying to hide from family members, then.

“I’ve been trying to catch you to talk about the service,” he says, taking off his glasses to rub at his eyes. “There’s details about the magic that I need help with.” He puts his glasses back on and smiles at us.

(The glasses really do suit his face. I would never have thought it, but they do.) (I wonder if Simon will need glasses when he’s older?)

(I’m horrified that a small part of me hopes so.)

“Oh, er, yeah, of course,” Simon says, sitting down in a chair near the window. I take the one next to him silently. “Anything.”

“Brilliant,” Oliver says, deflating as if a huge weight has been lifted. “Simon, I was hoping you would do the magic offering in my place.”

I freeze, a sudden vice-like clamp going around my chest. Of course. Of course he would ask Simon to do it. I should have expected this.

Beside me, Simon’s face is entirely blank.

“Sure,” he says, then glances sideways at me. “Uh, what is that?”

Oliver stares at him for a moment, surprised, like he’s at a loss for words, and then looks at me. 

Even after all these years in the magical world, there are still large gaps in Simon’s cultural knowledge. He didn’t grow up surrounded by it, dealing with the mundanities of magical existence. Just when I think there’s nothing left for him to learn, something pops up. I’m used to it; I’ve lived my whole life with it. But for someone like Oliver, who prizes knowledge above literally all else, these small pockets of ignorance hit him like an anvil.

“It’s a magickal funeral tradition,” I tell Simon, using the bored voice I always use when explaining things to him. It’s so that I sound like a bored dick, and not a patronising one. “A family member — someone who shares the magickal line — takes a small bit of their magic and makes it tangible, and then offers it up to the deceased.”

Simon’s eyes get huge.

“I have to pull out my magic?” he asks. He sounds a bit like he does whenever I try to get him to go to the doctor.

“Only a little bit,” Oliver reassures him quickly. “And I’m told it doesn’t hurt. It’s more symbolic. A bit like the Normals’ dust to dust bit, minus the religious overtones. Well, not really, actually, it’s sort of a superstition, meant to honour the family magic, give it back to the earth to keep it pure.” He smiles. “I would do it, if I could.”

Simon looks on the verge of a panic attack.

“If you’re not comfortable, I completely understand,” Oliver says, watching Simon, his voice growing hesitant. “It’s not a problem, I can ask Philip.”

“No, er, it’s just…” Simon shifts in his seat and drags his lower lip between his teeth. “My magic isn’t… uh. It’s not mine to give. Not all mine, I mean.”

Oliver’s brows furrow, and my stomach flips a bit. I never expected him to tell anyone, especially not Oliver.

“I’m not sure I understand,” Oliver says. “If you’re referring to something the Mage might have done—”

“No, no,” Simon cuts in, shaking his head. “No, it’s uh. Baz and I—” he glances at me, and I nod infinitesimally, giving my agreement. “We did a bonding rite a few years back, we merged our magics. So now it’s not just mine, it’s ours. So it’s not mine to agree to give away, and also I don’t know if having it merged would impact the funeral rite, or… uh… if that’s appropriate?”

Oliver blinks.

“You merged your magic? You mean you can call on each other’s magic at will?”

Simon and I glance at each other and nod.

Oliver takes off his glasses again and sighs. I suddenly feel viscerally like I’m back in school as Oliver crosses his arms and leans back against his desk.

“There’s only one rite that does that, by my knowledge, and it was made strictly illegal in 1784.”

“Oh,” Simon says, his voice small. “I did not know that.” He turns to me. “Did you know that?”

“Of course not,” I lie. Sort of lie. I didn’t know the date it was made illegal, at least.

“Interestingly,” Oliver continues, putting his glasses back on, “it’s largely due to Cordelia Pitch, who kept bonding with men and then killing them and keeping their power.”

He and Simon both turn to look pointedly at me, and I shift in my seat.

“That sounds about right,” I admit, shrugging nonchalantly. “There’s a general belief that much of the family power is thanks to Cordelia.”

“And thus why the Coven made it illegal,” Oliver says. “Interestingly, did you know one of the husbands was a Salisbury? The first Simon Salisbury, as chance would have it, the same one my father and you are named after. He was Cordelia’s second husband, and he died by—”

“I’m pretty sure if Baz was going to kill me, he’d have done it by now,” Simon interrupts, cutting off Oliver. I shoot him a thankful glance. Oliver is a good sort, but he’s like a walking magickal archive, and sometimes he can go off on obscure rants that leave you trapped in a library all afternoon. “So I get why it’s illegal but I’m not too worried about it.”

“Well, fair enough,” Oliver says with a shrug.

“Please, er, don’t tell the Coven.” Simon scratches at the back of his hair. “I like my job.”

“I’m not telling the Coven,” Oliver reassures us with a tiny snort. “You two are hardly the first to dig up an illegal rite in the name of romance. Far from it. My own parents did it, as it so happens.”

“What?” Simon asks, rocketing up in his chair. “Your parents bonded their magic?”

Oliver nods and smiles. 

“They did. No one outside the family knows, of course. It’s generally accepted as the reason why I’m a dud. The bond can sometimes muddle up the magic, you see. Confuse the lines. My mother always believed it’s why I got none of the family magic and why my sister got so much.” He nods his head at Simon. “Possibly why you got so much as well.”

Simon flushes a deep red, and I reach over and take his hand. Even without the surplus, he’s still a powerhouse of a mage. I know that sometimes he worries it’s a sign that he’s broken. That something might still be wrong with his magic.

“I don’t think the risks of magical inheritance are going to be an issue for us, all things considered,” I say, trying to divert any more conversation of Lucy and magic and Simon’s parentage. “Given that we’re not having biological children.”

Oliver chuckles — a real, throaty laugh — and shakes his head.

“I wish you had told me. I wish Mum had known, she’d have loved it. When did you do it?”

“A few years back. No one knows.” Simon glances at me. “You’re the first in the family we’ve told, actually.”

Oliver smiles, a soft, sad thing.

“Well, I’m honoured to know. I’ll keep your secret. It’s practically a family tradition by now.”

I clear my throat and adjust my seat again.

“If you’re comfortable with our magic being bound, I’m comfortable with Simon sacrificing it for the rite,” I say. “If he agrees to.”

“Yeah,” he says immediately, nodding. “Yeah, of course. Anything.” He looks at Oliver and squares his jaw, his voice fierce. “I mean it. Anything you need.”

Oliver looks down at the floor.

“Thank you, Simon.” He doesn’t look up. “I appreciate your help. Both of you. This has been… a lot. I know it’s what Mum would have wanted, she loved a party, but I can’t lie, I don’t want any of this.” He raises his head finally and gives a weak huffing laugh. “When I go, please keep it small. Just friends and immediate family.” 

He turns away from us and fiddles with the decanter of whisky on his desk, pouring out three glasses, and then turns back, handing one to each of us.

“My only request,” he says, raising his glass, “is that you do not invite Philip Stainton.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I say, raising my glass.

“Merlin’s tits,” Simon mutters, raising his as well.

We all sip in silence, a heavy weight settling over the room. Not comfortable but not stifling. Just still. At rest.

“This isn’t the way I wanted to spend time with you two this summer,” Oliver says finally, when his glass is empty. “I’d been looking forward to the reunion. Mum and I had planned…” he clears his throat and tries again. “Mum and I had planned to talk to you about her Will. She’s made accomodations for you — both of you — but mostly she wanted to talk to you about her house.”

“This house?” Simon says, eyes wide, the earlier panic returning. “Oliver, this is your home, we don’t—”

“No, no, not this house,” he says, shaking his head quickly. “No, I know you two aren’t interested in the country life, and I know you love your home in London.” He throws a wry grin in my direction. “Mum was concerned about her house. Her family home, the one she grew up in. It’s small, hardly anything to write home about. A cottage, really, near Watford. Her father was the headmaster there, did you know?”

“No,” Simon says, his voice strained. “I didn’t.”

I did. But it doesn’t seem the time to mention that.

“She wanted to ask if you’d be interested in it,” Oliver continues. “Considering that Baz works at Watford now. She was always so bothered about you two living in different places. And now knowing that you’re married—”

“We’re not married,” Simon and I say, almost in unison.

“Of course,” Oliver says, and it sounds placating. “Well, never mind all that. I didn’t drag you in here to talk about life plans. She left the cottage to my discretion, and it’s not going anywhere. We can always revisit it.” He sets down his glass and pushes up from his desk. “Christmas, maybe? Some time more festive?”

Simon nods, looking extremely overwhelmed. I feel a bit overwhelmed myself. A house. At Watford. The possibility of having Simon with me year round. There’s more pressing, important things to focus on, but my heart is stuttering over the idea of it. Waking up in the morning with Simon. Getting dressed for work with Simon. Coming home from work to see Simon. We love the London house and didn’t want to move. Buying a second property seemed excessive and it seemed reasonable enough to do weekend visits. We’re a solid couple. We barely gave it a second thought.

But it’s pathetic, really, how much more I’d enjoy my job if Simon were around.

“Christmas sounds lovely,” I say, tearing my mind away from the flashes of sinful domesticity that are rattling around my brain. Simon shoots me a relieved look.

“I look forward to it,” Oliver says. He pauses for a moment then grimaces. “I don’t want to keep you two, and I’ve some papers to get to.” He reaches back and taps a paperback novel that’s sitting on his desk, then smiles grimly at us. “If anyone comes looking for me, you don’t know where I am.”

⚡⚡⚡

We’ve just finished lining the drive with gold balloons and paper lanterns when we hear him. His voice echoes down the drive like a bad wind, cutting over the tinny tones of Dusty Springfield playing from the mobile in Simon’s hoodie pocket.

“Welby! Have you seen Simon about?”

Simon and I freeze, tucked behind the tree we were just spelling lanterns into, and stare at each other. Simon reaches into his pocket with fumbling hands and cuts off the music. We’ve been successfully ducking Philip Stainton for the better half of the morning, but it appears he’s now caught up to us.

“Now, Oliver is insisting we use a different order of service, won’t listen to me that it should be the traditional magical service. Something about Simon doing his bit?” Stainton says. Beside me, Simon closes his eyes, like if he can’t see Stainton, Stainton can’t see him. “Maybe you can talk sense into him, eh?”

“I’m going to kill him,” Simon growls quietly. “I had a dream about it last night, I put my foot on his chest and pulled on his head until—”

“Oh, uh, of course,” Dr. Wellbelove responds. “I thought I’d seen Simon and Baz—”

“Run,” I whisper, poking Simon in his side and darting out from the tree, crouched low. “Come on you oaf, run.”

“What are you—” he whispers back as we dart along the hedge.

“You need a breather,” I tell him. “Or else you’re going to do something stupid. And I refuse to attend Philip Stainton’s funeral.”

We reach the barn quickly, slipping around to the back tack room, and I glance both ways before pulling out my wand and spelling it open. The earthy smell of hay and dirt greets us like a warm hug.

“Go,” I say, shoving him in front of me and following him quickly, shutting the door behind me. “Now, we’re going to stay here until — oh, Merlin.”

Two sets of sheepish eyes blink up at us from the corner of the tack room.

“Sorry, we’re already hiding here,” Philippa Stainton says, her back hunched, her fingers curled around a tiny cigarette. “But you’re welcome to join us.”

“Er, no, that’s fine, we’re just—” Simon starts, but beside Philippa, her brother Craig snorts.

“We’re hiding from Dad too, it’s fine. Pull up a saddle.”

I’m not huge on the Stainton siblings, but I’d rather be in here than out there, so I seat myself delicately on a tack box near Philippa and hope Simon will do the same. 

Both of them have changed since Watford. Philippa got married young, to a Normal of all things, and has a young daughter. I haven’t met the kid — apparently she and the husband stayed home. Craig never married. I’m not sure what he’s doing these days, but he seems to be chronically at ease, so I imagine his income has something to do with the hand-rolled joint his sister is holding. Also family money.

“We’re not hiding from your dad,” Simon lies, still standing. His eyes are darting around the room, and I can see him nearly vibrating with anxiety.

“Simon, it’s okay,” Philippa says, smiling. Her voice is still annoyingly high pitched. “We are probably like, the only ones who get it. This funeral is crazy. It’s bringing out the worst in dad. In everyone, really.”

“Hear hear,” Craig says, reaching over to take what I am now absolutely positive is a joint from his sister. “It’s the exact kind of chaos Ruth would have loved. Shame about Oliver, though, I’m not sure he’s going to make it through this in one piece.”

“Not if Dad and the aunties have anything to say about it,” Philippa mutters. “You should make Oliver a care package when we leave, to apologise. Double what you left him at Christmas.”

“Already planned to,” Craig says, taking a deep inhale of the joint. He exhales a great cloud of smoke and then holds it up to Simon. “Want some?”

Simon’s eyes narrow, and I raise an eyebrow, truly curious as to how this is going to go. I don’t think Simon has had weed since we were in school, and it didn’t sit well with him the one time he tried. He got all introspective and maudlin.

Having him get maudlin at a funeral may be for the best, though. It would be better than whatever this weird imposter-syndrome anxiety is.

“Alright,” he says, to my immense surprise. “Sure.”

He takes the joint from Craig and throws himself to the ground near my feet, criss-crossing his legs neatly beneath him and taking one brief inhale, before choking and coughing smoke everywhere. He catches his breath, takes another pull, and then holds it in.

“Baz?” he croaks, his throat tight, his eyes watering, his face scrunched up.

Normally, I would say no. I don’t particularly like being high, and unlike Fiona, I left the habit in my teen years. But I know it took a lot for Simon to say yes, and I don’t want him alone in this, so I take the joint carefully from him, take a hit, and then pass it back to Craig. 

Apparently I give into peer pressure.

“So if it’s not Dad, why are you hiding?” Craig asks, accepting it from me. “If you need to cry or something, that’s fine. What happens in the tack room stays in the tack room.”

“Nah, I don’t need to cry,” Simon says, sighing. He pauses for a moment. “I don’t even know if I’m sad. Or like, I am sad. But am I even allowed to be? Oliver is like, crying everywhere.”

“That’s fair,” Philippa says, shrugging. “I didn’t really know her? Like, I’m sad for Dad. And I’m sad for Oliver. But I think she and I spoke maybe like, three times?”

“But she and I had a relationship, kind of,” Simon mutters, sounding miserable. “She really wanted us to be close. Like she tried so hard and I kind of think I pushed her away.”

I perk up. This is a new angle I haven’t heard Simon voice before. He’s right. He did push her away. But I never expected him to acknowledge it.

“Oh, that’s rough,” Craig says, nodding, like the Saviour of the World of Mages isn’t spilling his messy family drama everywhere, like this isn’t a huge Simon breakthrough.

“I just don’t think I could be what she wanted, you know?” he mutters. “So instead of disappointing her I just kind of held her at arm’s length. I didn’t want someone else planning out my life and wanting things from me and getting disappointed when I couldn’t deliver.”

“I think she just wanted a grandson,” Philippa says. “That’s what she always told Dad, at least. Just, like, someone to spoil and be proud of and do gran stuff with.”

Simon stares at her, stricken. He looks like he’s been punched. There’s a sickening horror building in me at the realisation that Simon didn’t know this. It’s never occurred to him.

All these years with Ruth and Oliver, and he’s just been waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Oi, don’t worry about that,” Craig says, handing the joint back to Snow. “Too many deep thoughts. Just try to relax.”

Simon is still frowning, but he reaches out for the joint anyway.

“Snow, maybe we should—” I start, because I’m starting to think that maudlin Simon might not actually be a good idea, but he takes another pull before I can stop him.

“What?” he asks, shrugging. He brings the joint to his lips and inhales again. “Fiona does this all the time. It’ll be fine.”

I focus on the warm feeling spreading up from my belly and try to believe him.

⚡⚡⚡

“Are you high?” Mordelia hisses at me as I sit down next to her at one of the cavernous tables in the back garden. There are several out here to accommodate everyone, fairy lights strung up across the veranda, and soft jazz floating on the wind, carried by what I’m very sure is a spell.

“Barely,” I whisper back, elbowing her. “Snow is, though. Baked as a fucking cake.”

I’m still feeling slightly warm and a little fuzzy, but I’m mostly fine by now. But on my other side Simon’s eyes are like slits, his face blotchy and red, a stupid smile fixed on.

“Nicks and Slick, he looks like such an amateur,” Mordelia whispers. An incandescent smile has broken out on her face. “He looks so stupid I won’t even yell at you for not sharing.”

“I never would have anyway,” I snap back, reaching for the wine she’s poured herself and moving it in front of my plate.

Simon does a serviceable job of keeping his head down through the start of dinner, laughing along politely to stories of Lady Salisbury taking guests on midnight fox hunting excursions, or hiding underneath Oliver’s bed to scare him as a boy, or shoving cake on everyone. He eats steadily, drinks lightly, and is doing an incredible job of acting normal.

And then come the toasts.

Dinner is almost over, escape in sight, when Oliver stands up, clears his throat, and taps his wine glass. The crowd of family members and friends falls silent as everyone turns to look at him.

“Thank you, everyone, for coming,” he begins, giving the crowd a weak smile. “I’d been looking forward to seeing everyone at the reunion, and I hate that we’re together under different circumstances. But Mum would have loved this, having everyone together.”

The crowd makes various murmurs of agreement, and several people hold up glasses of wine.

“Mum loved funerals,” Oliver continues, and a few laughs go up. “No, it’s true!” he says, smiling. “You all knew her, it’s true. When my dad passed, magic bless him, she threw him a funeral party that lasted a week. I think my sister and I spent that whole week drunk. Mum and Lucy had so much fun that they jumped in the lake.”

Suddenly the crowd goes immediately silent. Oliver never talks about Lucy. Not publicly.

Beside me, Simon’s hands clench around his wine.

“I wish Lucy were here,” Oliver says. His voice sounds very small. Too small, for a man with a smile as large as his. My insides feel like they’re ripping themselves apart, and I don’t know whether to look at Oliver or Simon.

They’re both staring at each other.

“But I’ve got her son,” Oliver says, clearing his throat suddenly, trying to crawl out of the hole inside himself he’d just fallen into. “Mum used to call it a gift, getting you back.” He coughs again and faces the rest of the crowd. “Family is a gift. I learnt that from her. Her family was absolutely everything to her. You all meant everything to her. So thank you for being here for her, to say goodbye.”

He stares down at the table for a moment, then raises his glass.

“To Ruth,” he says.

“To Ruth!” the crowd echoes. “To Ruth,” I mumble as I lift my glass to my lips. Simon doesn’t say anything, but takes a long sip of his wine and then stares down at his plate. In the flickering yellow of the fairy lights, his moles look like shadows.

“Love, you okay?” I murmur to him. The tables around us are starting to chat again, the noise washing over us in a tide.

“Fine,” he whispers. “Just… wish he hadn’t brought me into it.”

“Simon, lovie, are you okay?”

His eyes snap up to where one of the Fates — Ambrosia, I think — is staring at him, a look of genuine concern on her face.

“Er, yeah,” he says, clearing his throat and trying to sit up. It doesn’t help. With his weed-bloodshot eyes and splotchy face he looks like he’s been crying.

“It’s true, you know,” Ambrosia continues, “Ruth adored you. Oh, she talked about you all the time, she was so excited to go to your wedding.”

“Merlin, how she went on about it,” adds Eudora from beside her, laughing. “I think she’d already picked out the cake.”

“And the china set, don’t forget,” says Stainton, interjecting himself into the conversation. He leans across the table toward Simon and I, as if in a conspiratorial tone. “She’s got this bone china set, lovely. She’d put it aside for Lucy’s wedding, but, well. That didn’t happen. I thought it would have gone to Philippa, but when I asked Ruth about it before the wedding, she said she was going to give it to you. It’s lovely, really, gold trimmed with shooting stars and setting moons—”

“Why are we talking about this?” Simon snarls, his face pulled into an ugly mask. Everyone leans back, and I take a sip of wine. Sometimes I forget that not everyone grew up being intimately familiar with the blistering anger and moodiness of Simon Snow.

The World of Mages think he’s a ray of fucking sunshine. None of them have ever had to deal with him in a strop.

Maybe I am  high, because I should probably feel more concerned about this than I do.

“Love, I was just saying she wanted you settled and happy,” Eudora says, blinking.

“I am happy,” Simon says. “I meant why are we talking about who gets her things? She just died! It doesn’t matter who gets what.”

“Now, there’s nothing wrong with appreciating family heirlooms—”

“If you want the china, you can have the china, Philip,” Simon snaps. Stainton’s face goes tight. “Hell if I care.”

“Snow—” I start.

“It’s wedding china,” Stainton says through gritted teeth. “It’s passed down on the occasion of a wedding. It’s already put aside for yours.”

“Well, I’m not getting married, so take it.”

The table goes silent. People from other tables are starting to listen in now as well, and Mordelia’s eyes are getting large. Several people are flicking concerned looks to me.

I focus on my plate.

“But dove, I thought—” starts Ambrosia, but Simon interrupts her.

“I don’t get what all the obsession with this marriage thing is! When Baz and I get married it’ll be because we want to and we choose to, not because other people have decided we’re going to!” Simon says, his voice loud. So loud. “I’m not having people pick out my future for me any more!”

I’m a bit horrified by everything happening, but my brain has stuck on the phrase when Baz and I get married, and suddenly I don’t really care about anything else. It’s the first time it’s ever been addressed like that. As a when. Not an if. Not a never.

“What Simon means—” Mordelia starts, and I almost reach out to stop her. It’s too late, he’s gone off, there’s no pulling him in now. All that’s left to do is duck and cover and wait for the explosion. Simon turns to Mordelia.

“No, don’t. I’m saying what I mean.” His face is blotchy and now I’m wondering if he is actually crying. He does that, sometimes, when he’s angry. “Don’t even try to get on me about that, Mordy, when you’d be so much happier if you just—”

“Son, I think you should take it easy on the wine,” Philip Stainton says from across the table, his voice tight, a fake smile on his face. Several people nearby laugh awkwardly.

“I’m not drunk,” Simon snarls, turning on him. “Also, you’re a dick.”

Mordelia, who had looked on the verge of horrified tears, coughs so violently her water spits all over me.

“Yeah, I mean it,” he says, not stopping. “Stop being so rude to Oliver. He’s killing himself to get this done and nice for Lady Salisbury and you’ve done nothing except be an arse to him and talk nonstop about whether you’re getting any of my grandmother’s shit. Have some fucking decency.”

On the other end of the table, Oliver makes a coughing noise as well, and there’s the clear sound of ill-disguised laughter from the other onlookers. Craig and Philippa Stainton are at the far end of our table, looking torn between horror and delight.

“Holy fucking shit, I love him like this,” Mordelia whispers from beside me.

Simon is breathing heavy, his eyes narrowed with rage, and then suddenly, as quickly as it came on, it’s gone. He’s gone off and now he’s standing in the crater.

Sometimes I think I miss the literal explosions.

“I, er,” he says, his eyes widening as the realisation of what he’s just done fully catches up with him. He shoves back from the table clumsily. “Er, sorry, I just…”

And then he flees.

Every single relation at the table turns and looks at me.

“Forgive him,” I say, as delicately as I can, folding my napkin and standing up. My limbs feel a bit heavy. “He doesn’t handle death well.”

“It’s true,” I hear Mordelia say in a stage whisper as I walk away. “He feels things deeply. I often tell him he’s a sensitive soul. Has a terrible temper, though. Have you seen him with a sword? Phil, you’d love it. Saw him decapitate a werewolf once. Took the head clean off. Beautiful.”

⚡⚡⚡

Simon looks like he wants to die.

He’s standing at the edge of the memorial garden, talking with Oliver Salisbury, frowning at the ground like his deepest desire in life is for it to open up wide and swallow him whole. It would be a shame if it did. He’s wearing a lovely grey suit, and I’d hate to have it lost to the world.

“I have just heard the absolute best rumour,” says a hissing voice by my ear, and I turn to see Fiona and Hollow, flanked by the rest of my family, along with Dev and Niall.

They’re some of the only people wearing black here, and I must admit, we all clean up terribly well.

“And what would that be?” I ask, leaning past her to kiss Daphne on the cheek and shake hands with my father. I’m working as the official greeter for the service, and the affectionate movement comes without thinking. I’ve been shaking hands and giving hugs all day, to my immense horror. For some reason, funerals make people hug.

“Rumour is that Simon got high and made a twat of himself last night,” Fiona responds under her breath. “Please tell me it’s true. Mordelia re-enacted it all for us.”

I glare at Mordelia, who is standing on the fringes of the group, wearing a floor-length black velvet brocade monstrosity of a coat that looks a bit like the curtains Daphne used to have in the library. She doesn’t even notice; she’s too busy breaking her neck as she peers over the crowd, desperately looking for someone.

Little Bunce, probably.

“It’s true,” I confirm, glancing back at Simon, who has just caught sight of us and is walking over, pushing his way through the crowd, shaking hands and giving tight nods as he goes. Dr. Wellbelove breaks off from his conversation and walks with him, their heads tilted together in serious conversation.

“Bless him, it was terrible,” Mordelia says, squinting through the crowd.

“It wasn’t that bad,” I lie. “No one mention it, he’s extremely embarrassed.”

Simon and Dr. Wellbelove come even with us as soon as I finish speaking. Wellbelove shakes hands and Simon gives my family a tired smile as I slide one arm around his waist and kiss his cheek.

“Hey mate, how you holding up?” Niall asks, a kind, concerned expression on his face.

“Yeah, we heard you shit the bed,” Dev adds. Magnus, Ophelia, and Acantha all cover up laughter, Simon turns bright red, and Niall frowns aggressively at Dev. There are eyebrows involved and everything.

“Merlin,” Simon mutters, staring down at the ground.

“Don’t be too harsh on yourself,” Malcolm says, clearing his throat. “Funerals have a way of bringing out the worst. We’ve all been there. At my father’s funeral, I tripped over the family dog and made a scene.”

“No, that was Natasha’s memorial,” Fiona says, shaking her head. “And it wasn’t the dog, it was Dev’s toy truck, and you screamed fuck. I was shitfaced, but I remember it vividly. About the only thing I do remember from that day.”

“I remember the whole day really well,” Hollow adds, grimacing. “You shouted fuck back at him, and then the two of you got into a fight in the middle of the service, and Malcolm’s brother had to spell you silent.”

Everyone stares down at the ground awkwardly, and Hollow shrugs.

“Baz was on great behaviour, though,” he offers like an apology.

“I was possessed by a demon during my gran’s funeral,” Niall adds, as if that will make this situation better.

“You were what?” Dr. Wellbelove asks, startled.

“PRIYA!” Mordelia shouts, her booming voice echoing across the lawn. Everyone follows her gaze to where Priya and the rest of the Bunces are making their way up the aisle, trying to get seats in the crowd. “OI! HOLD UP, SAVE ME A SEAT.” She glances back at us sheepishly. “Sorry. I’m just, yeah. See you lot later.” 

She pushes through the crowd, her brocade jacket sweeping the grass behind her as she runs. She’s wearing high-heeled boots. I retract my comment about my family looking nice.

“Er, yeah, we should probably get to our seats,” Simon says, trying to shake off his humiliation. “We’re starting soon. I’ve got seats for you up here, with, uh, with the family.” He flushes red again as he says it and sets off walking quickly.

Oliver told him to mark off as many seats as Simon wanted for his own family members. So he saved spots for all the Grimms, Pitches, and Wellbeloves.

Following him silently to the front, my hand hanging just inches from his, it occurs to me that Simon Snow went from having absolutely no family to rather a lot of it.

⚡⚡⚡

It’s blue skies all day, absolutely perfect weather for a memorial. As pleasant as Lady Salisbury herself. The sun warms the crowd, the birds sing daintily, and the service is over almost as soon as it began.

People spoke. People sang. Oliver looked stoic, the crowd shed tears, and then it’s time for Simon to extract his magic.

Our magic, I suppose.

I thought I would feel some of it missing, somehow, like I expected to have a collated file of all my strands of magickal energy, and the absence of one of them would be egregious, but I was wrong. Nothing feels different. I feel Simon tug on the magic, and then it’s gone. Like it was never there.

It’s lovely to watch, though. I’ve seen the magic done before, just a handful of times, but always from afar. I know it was done at my mother’s funeral. I know, dimly, that I stood with Fiona and helped as she performed the rite. But I was too young to remember it.

The rite is always emotional. It’s the part of every service where people actual cry, where the family breaks down in tears, where the reality of the death begins to set in. We’re meant to be silent as we watch Simon weave his magic, and think about Ruth.

All I can think about is Simon.

I think it’s the most beautiful magic he’s ever done. He taps his wand to his heart, murmurs a spell, and pulls one soft, glowing string of pure magic out of him. It’s a lovely muted green, shifting and dark like the shadows in a winter forest. 

It looks like Simon’s magic smells, like it would taste of mossy leaves and burnt wood. And licking along the sides of it are tiny tendrils of black flame.

My magic.

Fiona glances at me out of the corner of her eye, clearly surprised by the manifestation of Snow’s magic. In the crowd to my left, Mordelia leans forward past Priya, trying to catch my eye. Niall’s head tilts to the side, and my father shifts forward slightly in his folded chair.

“Boyo has fire in him?” Fiona whispers. I shrug, still looking forwards to where Simon is carefully placing our magic inside the urn with Ruth’s remains.

“Snow is constantly full of surprises,” I whisper back, and then nudge her to make her pay attention.

Oliver makes his way back to the front, murmuring something to Simon, and then he turns to the crowd.

“Thank you for coming,” he says. His voice is croaky again. His glasses are slightly smudged. “My mother requested we play this song at the end of her service, and invite everyone back to the house for a brief reception.”

He gestures to Simon, who pulls out his wand again — the Salisbury wand, the wand that should have been Oliver’s — and flicks it quickly in a motion so achingly familiar to me that even though I can’t hear the spell, I know what he’s casting.

All around the memorial garden, stone angels come to life, spreading out their wings, lifting up their arms, and opening their mouths in song.

That’s Life. The James Brown version, if I’m not mistaken, judging from the guttural hip thrusts coming from an angel holding a harp.

Beside me, Fiona snorts, and throughout the crowd various people begin laughing. Some cheer, some whistle, some sing along. At the front, Simon and Oliver stand like twin statues, their heads tilted together, their arms around each other’s backs.

A blinding, pulsing, overwhelming feeling of pride and love shoots through me at the sight.

⚡⚡⚡

It’s raining when we leave.

The car is out front, our things loaded up and Mordelia already curled up in the back, looking like she’s on the edge of either crying or murdering someone. Something happened with Little Bunce after the funeral yesterday, but she hasn’t told us what happened and I’m not going to pry.

Oliver and Simon are on the front stoop of the house, ducked under the archway that covers the front of the house, heads bowed close together as they talk. I can barely make them out through the drizzle.

“Do you think he’s yelling at him for the high thing?” Mordelia asks as we watch them. The windows of the car are fogging slightly from the humidity, and in front of us Oliver pulls Simon into a tight, silent hug.

“No, I don’t expect so,” I respond, watching them pull away and clap each other on the back. Simon turns and dashes for the car, his hands over his head in the rain as Oliver looks on.

The whole car moves when he jumps in, slamming the door closed and shaking his head like a dog, water going everywhere.

“Ready?” I ask him. He nods and leans back in his seat.

“Yeah.” His voice sounds hoarse and cracked, and he clears his throat. “Yeah.”

We drive for at least thirty minutes in total silence, broken only by the sound of wipers on my windscreen and the steady clicking of the turn indicator and the ambient noises of rainy roads. Simon presses his head against the window and stares out of it the whole time.

“You know, I think I am going to miss her,” he says finally. Quietly.

Mordelia and I lock eyes in the rear mirror.

“Of course you will,” Mordelia scoffs, leaning forward to run a hand through Simon’s curls. He bats her away with a half-hearted shove. “She was an awesome old lady.”

“You know, she once told me that you looked like a vampire,” Simon says, glancing at me. “She told me to look out for my neck.” He shrugs. “Then she said she got the appeal, and that Dracula was a lovely movie.”

“She was the one that told me about the buried bone crown,” Mordelia admits from the back, sounding dejected. “I’m starting to think she made it up just to mess with me.”

I feel like I should have something to add, some witty or funny interaction I had with Lady Salisbury to share, but I don’t. She and I never spoke much. Whenever I saw her, I was with Simon, and she only had eyes for him.

The only meaningful interaction we ever had was Christmas several years ago, when she caught me by the window watching Simon and Oliver shovel the front stoop. She’d stood with me for a moment, watching, and then put a tiny, papery hand on my shoulder and thanked me for taking care of Simon.

She didn’t phrase it that way, though. “Our boy,” she’d said. “Thank you for taking care of our boy.”

“What were you and Oliver talking about?” I ask instead, my tone light. Simon shrugs.

“Nothing really. Thanked me for my help. Said he just wants me to be happy. Whatever that means for me.”

“Hm,” I say, taking my hand off the gear stick to press it lightly to his leg. “Well, happiness for me would have meant driving home in that Frogeye Sprite. A custom sound system, Simon. Heated seats.”

He glances at me out of the corner of his eye and there’s a tiny, tired smile lining the edge of his mouth, pulling up just a bit at his freckled cheek.

“Maybe Christmas,” he says, his hand tightening around mine. “Though, I’m pretty sure we’re going to somehow end up with another house, so.”

“I don’t need a house,” I groan, even though, staggeringly, the idea isn’t hideous to me. “I want a car, Simon. That car. Merlin, what kind of provider are you?”

The tiny smile grows a bit wider now and he shrugs.

“Pretty shit one, I suppose,” he says. “I’m kind of fine with being the trophy husband, though. One of us has to be.”

“Trophy husband?” I repeat, indignant. “You? You’re delusional, Snow. Are you still high? If anyone is the trophy husband, it’s me. Have you seen my cheekbones? My hair?”

“Oi, speaking of,” Simon says, burrowing down into his seat and crossing his arms, the classic signal that he’s about to take a nap, “it’s getting a bit long there. You need a haircut.”

⚡⚡⚡

Mordelia and Simon are sulking in the solarium when the doorbell chimes.

We’ve just gotten home after a miserable drive. The rain refused to let up, the traffic was a nightmare, and Mordelia’s mobile was frantically buzzing the entire time, sending her deeper and deeper into a foul mood. 

Without the ability to get out and set something on fire, she instead chose to spend the remainder of the trip reminding Simon of his weed-fuelled outburst, and regaling him with imitations of both himself and everyone who watched it.

When we finally reached London and parked, she and Simon were literally screaming at each other over what to do for dinner, and as far as I can tell, the consensus appears to be “nothing.”

They both look up at the doorbell, though, and Simon narrows his eyes.

“If one of you paid ten pounds to get shitty coffee delivered to the house again, I swear I’m going to—” he starts, but is cut off by the front door slamming open.

“When someone is polite enough to ring the bell, you’re meant to answer!” Fiona shouts down the hallway, followed by the muffled sounds of footsteps.

“I tried to stop her,” comes another voice, and suddenly there are several people standing in our kitchen, dropping cloth totes and unpacking brown bags of liquor.

“Er,” Simon says as Fiona, Hollow, Dev and Niall turn to stare at him.

“Jesus, what a welcome,” Fiona mutters, pulling off her wet jacket and throwing it across the table. I watch it splatter against my unfinished crossword. I was going to do that tomorrow.

“Not that I’m not thrilled to see you all again so soon, but what are you doing here?”

“We got a ride home with Fiona and Hollow and they kept us captive,” Dev says, shrugging. “We’re supposed to be on a train back to Oxford right now. I have work in the morning.”

“Who the fuck has a job?” Fiona says, waving her hand. She’s clutching a terrifyingly large bottle of tequila. “This was more important, anyway.”

“What was?”

Hollow smiles, picks up Fiona’s jacket and hangs it neatly on a hook, then puts his own on it as well.

“We’ve come to cheer up Simon,” he says. “Also you live closer to the train station and I need to pick up my brother’s kid tomorrow.”

“Exactly,” Fiona agrees. “We’re going to get the Chosen One shit faced. And the other thing. Wait, Toby is coming in tomorrow?”

“Er,” Simon says, eyes large.

“We talked about this at length,” Hollow says, frowning. “Toby is staying with us until the wedding, remember? To help with things?”

“Er,” Simon repeats.

“Whatever. Fine. Snow,” Fiona says, dropping a packet of salt and several limes onto the kitchen table. “You just went through a major rite of passage. This is a celebration.”

“Burying my grandmother is a rite of passage?”

“No,” Fiona says, tossing a lime to Hollow to cut, “getting high and making an idiot of yourself is.”

“Oh my God,” Simon mutters, scrubbing his hands over his face. “Er, no. It was nice of you to come, but—”

“Look, kid. I know you were like, little orphan Annie and shit so you’re still catching up, but about eighty per cent of having a family is having to deal with all the weirdness and awkwardness and tension, and shoving it down. And then sometimes you pop.”

“Usually at major celebrations,” Hollow adds.

“Christmas and weddings are usually big ones for the Grimms,” Dev agrees, collapsing next to Mordelia on the window seat. She scoots away from him.

“Exactly. Someone always pops and looks like a massive asshole. But that’s the great thing about family,” Fiona says, speaking while clutching her vape with her teeth. “They’ll all just pretend it never happened, because everyone has been there, and by the next big holiday someone else will have made a twat of themselves.”

Taking the lime back from Hollow, Fiona pours a messy shot and then slaps the glass, salt, and lime in front of Simon.

“So let’s drink to you and your awesome fucking gran, who would have laughed her ass off if she’d been there to see it, and who had surprisingly not shitty music taste.”

Simon stares down at the tequila like it’s poison, and I can see him eyeing up his choices and trying to make a decision.

Suddenly his hand darts out and he grabs the shot glass and downs it in one, and then makes a horrifying face.

“Nnyygghhaaaa,” he mutters, shaking his head and sticking out his tongue and shuddering. “Merlin’s fucking nuts that’s awful.”

“You’re meant to do it in steps,” I chide, pouring myself a shot as well, because apparently I will follow Simon into any questionable life decision. “Look. Lick, sip, suck.” 

I lick my hand, dump the salt onto it, then lick it off, knock back the shot, and bite down on the lime. It’s bitter and it burns going down, sliding down my throat and pooling in my stomach like fire, like magic. I let out a small ahh.

“And that’s how you fucking do it,” Fiona crows, reaching to grab more shot glasses out of her purse and lining them up so she can run the bottle over them. “Alright lads, all in.”

Hollow takes his shot glass obediently, setting his shot up like a professional, while Dev and Niall glance at each other, having some kind of silent communication, before turning to me.

“Can we sleep in your guest room?” Dev asks, even as he grabs Niall’s hand, licks it and dumps salt on. Niall makes a disgusted face down at his hand, but doesn’t say anything.

I nod and cut another lime for Simon. “Hollow, you and Fiona can stay as well.”

“Circe, could you two stop being responsible for like, two minutes?” Fiona asks, rolling her eyes. “That’s the absolute opposite of what we’re supposed to be doing.”

Hollow knocks back his shot with a deft movement and then does a full body shake.

“We need music,” he says, fiddling with his phone. A moment later Donovan floods the kitchen. Sunshine Superman. Beside me, Simon begins to smile.

“I love this song,” he says, setting up another shot for himself.

“Me too,” Mordelia says, reaching for a lime and a shot. Fiona freezes, as if suddenly realising she’s here. And seventeen.

Fiona and Charlie exchange looks, and then both turn to me. I’m too busy watching Simon lick salt off the joint of his hand.

“I’m not her keeper,” I say, shaking my head. “And I don’t think anyone here but Snow is fit to judge her for underrage drunkeness.”

Mordelia huffs.

“I’m legal in five months,” she says, meeting Fiona’s gaze, her chin lifted in a challenge. Fiona narrows her eyes and stares down my sister.

“If I give you this shot, are you going to tell your dad?”

Mordelia snorts, flips her hair back, and snatches the shot from Fiona’s hand.

“Please,” she says, pausing to lick the salt from her hand, “do I look like I speak to my father?”

Then she grabs the lime, throws back the shot, and doesn’t even make a face.

Next to her, Simon is still sticking out his tongue and scrunching up his face like a dog that has peanut butter stuck to the roof of its mouth.

Dev and Mordelia are the ones who start the dancing eventually, a kind of buzzed, spastic dancing that seems more head bobbing and foot wiggles than actual dancing, and Niall nearly wheezes from laughter. He and Hollow are the most sober ones here; Niall because he stopped at two shots, and Hollow because I think it’s actually impossible to get him drunk.

Snow is in that sweet spot of happy flushed and I’m pleasantly dizzy when I pull him up to join Dev and Mordelia. Got To Give It Up by Marvin Gaye is on, and Mordelia shoves her hands on Dev’s shoulders and starts following him around like a two man conga line. Niall jumps up to join them, the three of them thrashing and flailing around the kitchen, while Simon and I bob along next to them, our arms around each others necks, foreheads pressed together.

He has a sloppy, happy smile on his face, and I can see the matching smile on my own reflected back to me from the dark window over his shoulder. We sway back and forth, smiling, as our friends and family dance around us. The kitchen smells like rain and lime and tequila, the frantic beat of the music is too loud, and my head is pounding as Simon buries his face in my neck and lets out a long, laughing huff.

“Being an adult is so fucking weird,” he mumbles.

I tighten my arms around him and keep dancing.

“From what I’ve heard, it only gets weirder.” 

Chapter Text

“Stop with the bloody doorbell!” I snarl, yanking the door open to glare at my aunt. I appreciated the first gesture of civility, but at this point her decision to use my doorbell has begun to drive me up a wall. “Can you not— oh.”

It’s not Fiona on my doorstep. It’s Priya Bunce.

“Hi, Professor Pitch,” she says, tucking her curly brown hair behind her ear. It looks like she’s grown over the summer; she’s fast on track to be the tallest in her family. She glances around nervously, as if she’s anticipating something to pop out at her. “Is, uh, is Deli here?”

“Deli?” I stare at her. “Oh. Uh. Yes, of course, Mordelia’s upstairs.” I stand aside from the door to let Little Bunce pass by me into the front hallway. It’s littered in shit; we’ve become the dumping ground for all of Fiona and Hollow’s wedding preparations, much to my eternal horror.

“Please excuse the mess,” I say, kicking a rejected floral arrangement aside.

“Oh, it’s not a problem.” Priya smiles awkwardly and hunches in on herself, shoving her hands in her back pockets. She really doesn’t look anything like her older sister. She’s like a stretched out version of the real Bunce, with a stronger nose and a weaker spine.

“Oi, is that Fi?” Simon calls from the kitchen. “I need your help with this list, how do you spell Charlie’s mum’s name? Is it P-h-e-o-b—”

“It’s not Fiona,” I shout back. “It’s Priya Bunce.”

There’s a clattering thunk from upstairs, followed immediately by a slamming door and the sound of someone running down the hallway.

“Mordelia!” I call, indulging in the pretense that Mordelia isn’t already acutely aware that Little Bunce is in our house. “Priya is here!”

There’s another thunk and a slam and then Mordelia appears at the top of the stairs. She’s wearing a different shirt than she was ten minutes ago; she’s been swanning around in one of my old Watford shirts and gym shorts, and now she’s suddenly in a voluminous blue button down and trousers, her hair pulled out of her bun.

“Pree,” she says, smiling, looking calm. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Priya says, staring up at Mordelia. I can smell the nervousness floating off of her. “Can we, uh, talk?”

“I’m done with the garden,” Simon says from behind my shoulder. He’s left the kitchen to hover, looking as nervous as Priya does. “You two can go out there. Baz and I needed to, uh, go over seating charts.”

“Yes,” I say nodding. “Seating charts.”

“Thanks,” Mordelia says, flicking her eyes back and forth. She descends the stairs slowly, airily, and then nods to Priya. “C’mon, it’s this way.”

Little Bunce trails Mordelia through the kitchen and out into the garden, while Simon and I very studiously stare at our hands until we hear the garden door close.

“So Priya’s here,” Simon says, breaking the silence.

“She called Mordelia ‘Deli’.”

“Deli? Like deli meat?”

“Like deli meat.”

“Crowley.”

I nod and steal a glance down the hall. Simon watches me.

“What do you reckon they’re out there talking about?”

“Little Bunce leaves tomorrow, doesn’t she?” I ask, walking slowly down the hallway. I’m just craving a cup of tea.

“Do you think she’s gonna tell her?” Simon asks, his voice hushed, following me.

“Might do.”

We enter the kitchen at a comically sedate pace, both shooting glances out of the large window. Simon elbows past me and puts the kettle on, not looking away from the window.

Mordelia and Priya are seated in the back garden, facing each other, not talking. Priya is sitting fully upright, her back rigid, while Mordelia has her feet tucked up in front of her, her arms wrapped around her legs and her chin resting on her knees.

She doesn’t look happy.

“We really shouldn’t be in here,” Simon says, pulling down two mugs for tea. “This is a huge invasion of her privacy.”

“We’re not eavesdropping,” I argue, even though I know I absolutely would if I could. But Mordelia has a magick detector better than any I’ve ever met. She’d know immediately.

In the garden, Little Bunce is gesturing widely, and Mordelia is staring at the ground.

“It doesn’t look like it’s going well,” Simon whispers, shoving a mug of tea into my hand as he comes to lean against me and look out the window. “She wouldn’t want us watching this.”

Little Bunce is shaking her head now, her arms wrapped around her sides. Mordelia still isn’t looking at her.

“We shouldn’t be watching this,” Simon whispers, moving closer to the window. “She’d kill us.”

“Remember when she barged into the bathroom to try to pee while we were in the shower?” I remind him. “I have no concern for her privacy anymore.”

“Good point,” Simon murmurs. “That was horrifying.”

“If it helps, I don’t think she knows you were in there with me.”

“It was my birthday. Of course I was in there.” He makes a face. “And even if she doesn’t know what was happening, I do. I know, Baz, and that’s bad enough.”

In the garden, Mordelia is speaking, still staring down at her feet. Her lower lip is trembling, and she keeps tossing her hair out of her eyes.

Priya stands on the other side of the garden, still hugging her middle, looking like she’s going to cry. There’s silence for a moment, and then Priya crosses the garden and gives Mordelia a hug.

“That looks promising,” Simon breathes. “Hugs are good, right?”

The two girls let go of each other, and then Priya turns and begins marching toward the door.

“Oh, fuck, fuck, get back,” I say, grabbing Simon as we trip over ourselves to get to the sink and turn our backs to the garden door. Simon turns on the sink and begins throwing clean dishes into it while I try to lean casually against the counter next to him.

Priya walks into the kitchen and then blinks at us in surprise. She’s not crying, but she looks extremely unhappy.

“Oh, uh. I’m leaving now,” she says, glancing behind her toward the garden. It’s hard to see from this angle, but I can just make out the sight of Mordelia still sitting on the wall, staring at the ground. “See you, Simon. Professor Pitch.”

“Have a good time in America,” Simon says, turning from his fake washing up. “Say hi to Pen for me.”

“Uh, yeah. Sure. Bye.” She gives us a thin smile and then hurries out of the kitchen. A moment later the front door closes.

“So I’m going to guess that was not a good resolution,” I say carefully, as soon as she’s gone. Simon lets out a long huff of air and shakes his head.

“Uh, yeah, I don’t think so.” He glances toward the garden. “Think she’s okay? Think we should go out there?”

“No. Give her space.” I move closer to the window again, unafraid of being observed this time, and watch my little sister. She is crying now. Her pale face has gone splotchy, her nose bright red, and she wipes at her eyes angrily.

On second thought, maybe she doesn’t need space.

“Give me that tea,” I say, snatching the mug from Simon’s hands and turning toward the door, but Mordelia has already gotten up, power walking, her head down.

When she enters the kitchen, she doesn’t even look at us.

“Hey,” Simon says, soft and low and slow like he’s speaking to a spooked animal, “how’d it go?”

“Tea?” I ask, holding out Simon’s mug.

“No,” Mordelia says, looking up finally. Her eyes are bloodshot and puffy, but she has her jaw squared in a way that reminds me startlingly of Simon.

“Did she—” I start, but Mordelia shoulders by, checking me forcefully as she goes.

“No,” she repeats in a snarl. “Just, leave me alone.”

She pounds up the stairs and the slamming of her bedroom door reverberates throughout the house.

“So I guess they’re not getting together,” Simon says, taking his tea back from me. “I’m kind of gutted. I really thought it might work out.”

I tip my forehead into the side of his head and let out a low hum.

“Not everyone is as lucky as us.”

⚡⚡⚡

Jolene is playing when I get home. Again.

It’s been days of Dolly Parton. Here You Come Again. Jolene. Islands In The Stream.

Last night at 3 a.m. it was I Will Always Love You.

I’ve barely seen my sister since Little Bunce came, presumably thrashed Mordelia’s heart into pieces, and then left. Mordelia keeps going out to Crowley knows where, then coming home and holing herself up in her bedroom. She only leaves the room for tea and will barely speak to Simon and I.

She’s meant to go with Fiona to do a sizing for her wedding dress tomorrow, and at this point I genuinely think we may have to drag her there by force.

Enough is enough. I know she’s hurting, but I can’t handle it anymore. And I cannot stand Dolly Parton.

“Open up or I’ll open sesame it,” I call through Mordelia’s door. I have tea in one hand and an entire platter of melted brie in the other, and I’m going to force her out of this room if it’s the last thing I do.

Melted cheese typically works on her, so I’ve come prepared.

“I’m tired. Please go away,” she calls, her voice muffled through the door.

“I’m always tired, find a different excuse,” I respond. “Open up.”

“Baz, seriously, please just go.”

I didn’t actually anticipate this much push back.

“I thought we already dealt with you being stroppy earlier in the summer?” I ask, juggling the tea carefully so I can open her door. “I refuse to do this again. It’s for your own good, I’m coming in.”

The door isn’t locked (which is good, because I left my wand downstairs) and I step into her room, careful to not spill the tea. This used to be a guest room — that was the initial plan for it when Simon and I got the house, at least — but then Mordelia stayed over so often and the knickers drift started up so severely that at some point it stopped being the guest room and became Mordelia’s room.

It’s full of a mishmash of her things and our oddities — a pair of fake shrunken heads Simon bought off a street vendor hang next to her posters of Dolly Parton and Fleetwood Mac — and her clothes are strewn everywhere, piled so thick I can barely see the floor.

She’s sat on the window seat in front of the large, lead lined window that throws a huge amount of light into this room, her feet tucked up in front of her, her hair pulled into a sloppy bun.

“Wow, you really have no concept of respecting privacy, do you?” she snaps. She does sound tired. She sounds exhausted actually, like every word is wrung from her. I’ve never seen her like this before. She taps pause on the computer in front of her that’s blaring Dolly Parton, and then brings her left hand up to take a deep inhale of a tiny rolled cigarette.

“Are you smoking?” I ask, horrified. Every other thought has left my mind. “Since when do you smoke? You don’t smoke.”

“Calm down, it’s just moongrass,” she says, sighing. She tucks a long strand of tangled brown hair behind her ear.

“Moongrass? What the hell is moongrass? Are you doing drugs?”

Mordelia narrows her eyes. She looks shockingly like Daphne when she does that.

“It’s not a drug, calm down, Mum.” She drops the wrapped paper cigarette into an empty tea mug. “It’s aromatherapy. Helps open your lungs and relax you. Half of it is chamomile. I got it from Headmistress Bunce for exam anxiety.”

“Oh.” Distantly, in the far corners of my mind, I realise that I sound like a squawking helicopter parent. Also, even if it were drugs, I have absolutely no leg to stand on here. Especially not lately. Also, I had no idea Mordelia got exam anxiety.

I try to take a deep breath. 

“I’ve brought you cheese.”

“Thanks, but I’m not hungry.”

I put the tea and cheese down on her vanity anyway, and then pull out the chair and sit in it, crossing my legs neatly. This feels excruciatingly awkward. I’m not good at shows of emotion and being so openly concerned. The only person I ever try to be nice to is Snow, and I do it by just crowding him and being mean and then playing with his hair. I can’t do that with Mordelia.

“So, Fiona wants you to go to her fitting tomorrow,” I say, desperately trying to find a thread of conversation.

“Alright.” Her voice is dull. Monotone. Not shitty, just… flat. She’s completely flat and neutral. It’s scaring me, a bit.

“Simon and I were thinking we would all go out to dinner tonight. We should go back to the chippy, see if we can watch him have another nervous breakdown about cheese chips.”

“I’m good, but you two go ahead.” She’s staring at her computer screen, refusing to look at me. She hasn’t looked at me once since I came in.

“Alright,” I say, louder than I mean to. Sharper than I’d planned. “What is going on?”

“What?” She looks up at me finally, her eyes narrowed. Crowley, there are puffy bags under them, purple and bruised looking, like she hasn’t slept in days.

“This. This whole sad girl, lounging in depression bit you’ve got going. What is this?”

“I’m just tired. Can you go away?”

“No.” I shake my head and lean forward. “No. I know this has been a weird time for you, but you’ve been cheery and dealing with it with humour all summer. I know Little Bunce came in here and you had an awkward conversation, but this isn’t you.” I sniff. “This moping about isn’t how you handle things. It’s not how Grimms do things.”

Mordelia’s eyes narrow to slits. She looks like a snake, about to strike.

“So you think I need to just get up and laugh it off that my best friend has gone to America and left me behind without a second thought?”

“I think you should just find one of your new schemes or whatever or go set something on fire, yes. Not hole yourself up in here. This Little Bunce thing is a hard shake, but it’s not worth all this.” I gesture my hand vaguely in her direction.

“You have no fucking idea what this feels like or what’s going on, so don’t tell me to shake it off,” she snarls. I jerk back, surprised by how quickly her voice has gone from flat to full of venom. I didn’t mean to piss her off. I was trying to be supportive. She’s better than this. Stronger than this. She shouldn’t fall apart over a girl who clearly isn’t worth it.

“Mordelia,” I say, softening my tone. “I know this hurts. But you will get through it. You’re only seventeen. I know it feels like the end of the world right now. Crowley, when I was seventeen, I—”

“Yeah, I know,” she spits. “When you were seventeen you were a vampire and a rebel and killed the Humdrum and brought down the Mage and went through all these crazy intense horrors that I’ll never possibly understand.” She lets out a bitter, cruel laugh. “My apologies! Being a lesbian is dreadfully dull in comparison, I’ll just suck it up, shall I? My best friend finds me repulsive, but at least I’m not fighting the Humdrum!”

The force of her words make me almost physically flinch.

“Priya called you repulsive?” I ask, jumping to the most important thing in that mess of vitriol. The hair on the back of my neck starts to stand up in anger, my fangs start tingling at my jaw. “She said that?”

“She didn’t have to,” Mordelia says, her voice hard. She stares back down at her laptop. “Now please, will you go.”

“No,” I say, leaning forward. “Absolutely not, Mordelia, you need to talk about this. You need to talk to someone about this, clearly, instead of just keeping this all to yourself—”

“Really?” She laughs again as she shoots up from her seat and crosses to the other side of the room to put distance between us. “Oh, that’s rich. That’s bloody rich. You, of all people, making me feel like an twat for not talking about things. Yes, I’m absolutely the only one in this family to keep secrets.”

“I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean—”

“You haven’t told your siblings you’re a vampire!” she shrieks. Her voice is high pitched, almost manic in its combination of laughter and frustration, and she runs a hand through her hair, tangling it even further until she hits the bun. “Do you realise you never even told me? I found out from Priya who found out from her mum when we were kids. Do you remember that?”

“I—”

“I had to approach you ,” she says, rolling over my words. “I was thirteen and I had to be the one to reference it to you as a joke. You would never have told me otherwise, would you? You would have let me go on like Magnus and Phee and Cantha, never knowing. I had to find out from my friend, whose mum trusted her more than you trust me.”

“That’s completely different, that’s not—”

“And let’s not even start on the fact that you and Simon got fucking married and didn’t tell anyone.”

Bricks land in my stomach.

“We’re not married,” I say. She meets me with silence, and I know it doesn’t matter. “How did you know?”

“How could I not? When you cast, sometimes we can smell Simon’s magic, did you know?” Her voice is soft, dangerous like a warning whip. “And then that little show at the funeral? I’m not a fucking idiot.”

“No, you’re not.” There’s something sharp in my throat, and I feel completely wrong footed. “Mordelia, that wasn’t about you, I promise, it’s just—”

“It’s just that you keep your own secrets,” she says. She wraps her arms around her waist, hugging herself, and she looks like she might cry. “You don’t share anything with anyone, but you expect me to come to you and have a nice understanding chat?” 

“I’m sorry I’ve made you feel that way.” My voice is high. I feel like I’ve just been punched in the gut and thrown off a moving train. It’s occurring to me that I’ve never had Mordelia angry at me before. Not properly, not like this. “You’re right. But you shouldn’t have to go through this alone, the sexuality thing, Mordy, I’ve been there—”

“No, you haven’t.” She scoffs and shakes her head. “Do you think I don’t hear you and Simon talk about me behind my back? Calling me crazy? Wondering when I’ll just get over it, go home, leave you alone?” The bitter laugh returns. “I know you wish I’d just let my pride pin fly and find a girlfriend and be perfectly happy, which is rich, considering you’re married to a bloke who won’t even call himself gay.”

“Do not bring Simon’s sexuality into this—”

“Just fuck off, Baz.” Her voice is quiet. “Please. Just leave me alone.”

She turns around and faces the far wall, her back to me, her shoulders hunched. Discomfort and anger are radiating off of her and I have absolutely no idea what to do.

So I leave her alone.

⚡⚡⚡

“I’ve never seen her that angry, ever.” I take a sip of my wine and cross my legs, turning to the side so I can look out at the Thames. It’s muddy and smells, so all is in order. “She was like Medusa, she was just missing the snakes.”

“Don’t shit talk Medusa,” Fiona warns.

“Well, she’s going through a lot,” Hollow says, his tone calm. He’s sitting across the table from me, next to Fiona, and he’s poking at his salmon. (She told him not to order it, but he did anyway, and he’s barely eaten a bite.)

“Yes, but don’t you think she’d want to talk to someone about it?” I insist. “That was your advice!”

“Do you think we should have the cake before the first dance or after? I can’t remember what the traditional order is,” Fiona asks, frowning down at the huge binder she and Simon are huddled around. I cannot believe that we came all the way to Southbank for lunch and they brought that infernal wedding binder with them. I can’t bloody escape it.

“Before,” Simon says, making a note on a page already crammed with his handwriting. “No one wants to dance full of cake.”

“Maybe she needs time to process,” Hollow says, ignoring our partners. “She and Priya have been close for a long time. Being… left behind or whatever probably hurt.” He sighs, puts down his fork and rubs at his eyes under her glasses. “Look, I know we shouldn’t speculate but are we allowed to just say that Mordy had her heart broken? Is it bad if we just acknowledge she’s a lesbian even if she hasn’t said it?”

“Oh, she said it,” I say dryly, taking another sip of wine. “She shouted it at me.”

“Yeah, and you won’t stop telling people,” Simon says, not looking up from the wedding binder. “Kind of a shit move. Fi, you have Charlie’s mum seated all the way in the back, away from the family table.”

“I’m aware,” Fiona says, tapping something into her mobile. “Don’t change it.”

“You’re the one who led the charge with spying in the garden!” I sputter. “You were yelling at her and the plants about being a lesbian! She heard that!”

“Yeah, but I didn’t mean for her to,” Simon says, carefully picking up a place card that says Mrs. Hollow and placing it at the family table. “I was just bitching at you. You don’t count.”

“Why don’t I count?”

“Because we’re, like. Us. Doesn’t count.”

“It’s true,” Hollow says, reaching across me to take a chip off of Simon’s plate. “Spouses and significant others don’t count with the ‘saying shitty things’ rule. You can say any shitty thing you’re thinking to them and you’re exempt from being a bad person.”

“Where’s the paper with the DJ’s bloody fee schedule?” Fiona snarls, flipping through pages.

“Right here,” Simon says, handing a crumpled piece of paper to her. It was in his pocket. Not even in the binder. He just had it on him. Casually.

“Sorry, I thought we came out to lunch so I could bitch about my sister, not so you two could wedding plan?” I snap. “Snow, why are you even doing this? You’re not marrying her.”

“I think Mordelia needs a distraction,” Hollow says, cutting across me. “Don’t you think, Fiona?”

“Snow, this fee schedule has the wrong date on it.”

“Fiona,” Hollow says, reaching across and carefully taking the paper out of her hands. “Help me out. I handled the last Baz heart-to-heart. Wanna take this one? He’s actually your kid.”

“I’m not her kid,” I snap. “What do you mean, took the last one? Are you two trying to remote parent me?”

“When have I ever, for a moment, parented you?” Fiona asks, finally looking up from her binder. Simon doesn’t; he just keeps writing. “Look, Charlie’s right. She doesn’t need a circle hug kumbaya, she needs to just have a distraction. Get out of her head.”

“I suggested she go find a scheme or cause a traffic accident or whatever she does.”

“Wow, no wonder she yelled at you,” Fiona mutters.

“What? She likes schemes.”

“When she was fifteen, maybe. She’s not a kid anymore, though, is she?” Fiona asks, grabbing Hollow’s wine and taking a sip. “You’re treating this like some childhood spat, but she’s an adult now, going through something big. When was the last time she set something on fire? Or was actually destructive?”

“If I’ve been such a prick to her, why does she even still stay with us?” I ask, feeling churlish. “She won’t speak to me. Just comes and goes and listens to music. She’ll speak to Simon, but she freezes me out because apparently she hates me now.”

“She doesn’t hate you. She’s just embarrassed and uncomfortable and lashing out. You do the same fucking thing,” Simon says. He looks up and notices that half the chips from his plate are missing, and he frowns.

“Why is everyone here being reasonable? What is this?” I snap, turning away from them all to stare out at the shitty river. “This is just absurd.”

“Toby!” Hollow says suddenly, slapping the table. “Toby. She should hang out with Toby. They’ve never met, have they?”

“I don’t think so,” I say, still annoyed. I’m not really sure why Hollow thinks that sicking his brother’s gremlin of a child on Mordelia is a good idea. For Crowley’s sake, last time I saw the French side of the Hollow branch, Toby had green hair and an eyebrow piercing.

“We should make them hang out,” Hollow says, taking another chip. “Toby is coming off of something too, to be honest. Taking the year before starting up uni to stay in England and heal. They could be good for each other.”

“Tobes is very calming,” Fiona says, nodding. “Makes incredible bread, too. You should taste it, I’ve never met a kid that just bakes bread for fun, it’s amazing. Is that a French thing? That seems like it should be a stereotype.”

“No, I think it is just a French thing,” Hollow agrees. He puts his elbows on the table and leans in. “Seriously. I think Toby might make her feel better.”

“By all means, let’s try,” I say, sitting back. “I’ll deny it if ever repeated, but I’m worried about Mordelia. I’m actually rather fond of her.”

“Hey, Fi, are the chairs getting there before or after the duel dinner?” Simon interrupts, squinting back down at his mobile.

“Better fucking be before,” Fiona says, downing her wine. “That reminds me, what did you think about those vows I sent you?”

“Beautiful,” Simon says, looking up. Not a trace of shittiness in his tone. No sarcasm. “Really, they were lovely. Thanks for letting me read them.”

“What the fuck is happening right now?” I ask, desperate.

No one answers me.

⚡⚡⚡

I have been on hold for forty-five minutes.

Initially, this was Simon’s phone call. He’d been waiting for thirty minutes, had to pee, passed the phone to me and then never reclaimed it when he came back. He’s now on hold with the bakery, trying to fix a design mistake in Fiona’s wedding cake sample. I’m not sure who I’m on the phone with. I’m not sure I’ll ever find out.

We’re in the solarium. Simon on the floor, surrounded by his wedding binder, while I sit on the sofa and attempt to organise the very small amount of work I’ve done on my lesson plans into something that resembles an actual outline. At this point I think I may have to make my students watch films for the first few weeks of term.

The doorbell rings, and Simon looks up, frantic. 

“Can you get that?” he whispers.

“No,” I answer back, in a normal tone, because we’re both on hold and I’m not overly concerned if the jazzy music robots on the other end hear us. “You get it.”

“I don’t want to get up.”

The doorbell rings again.

Sighing, I grab my wand from its place on the table and shoot off a quick open sesame! It’s needlessly dramatic and overly powerful, and I desperately hope it’s not a Normal mail carrier on the other side of the door. (Though truthfully, I don’t mind that much if it is.) (Mordelia and I are both trying to give our house a reputation.)

“‘Ello?” Comes a voice from the hallway. Soft, lyrical, very French. Toby. “Anyone home?”

“In here!” Simon shouts back, glancing up at me and then at the ceiling, and then back at me. I don’t know what he expects me to do about it. Mordelia has long since stopped coming when I call. 

“I don’t know where ‘here’ is,” Toby responds, their voice muffled. “Marco?”

“Polo,” Simon and I say in unison. The holding music on the other end of my phone lets out little blasting sax solo of Careless Whisper just as Toby appears in the doorway to the solarium, their arms full of garment bags, a confused smile on their face.

It’s been a few years since I’ve seen Toby, and I have to admit that I’m glad they ditched the green hair. I feel like my father just thinking it, but their natural dark curls — which they have half shaved and cropped close to their head — are a much better look than the odd green mohawk they’d had at age fifteen.

“I didn’t know you were so into jazz?” they say, dropping the garment bags onto the sofa next to me and collapsing into an empty chair. Their accent makes their sentences lilt up like a question, but unlike when Acantha does it, Toby’s voice always sounds on the verge of sly amusement. “I like it.” They give me a small grin. “It suits you, your whole....thing.” They wave a hand around to indicate my entire person.

“I am not into jazz, I’m on hold,” I sniff, eyeing them. They’re taller than I remember. I guess that’s what happens to teenagers. They grow.

“Hey Tobes, how’s it going, mate?” Simon says, scratching at something in his notes. “Congrats on your leave from La Brick, by the way. You deserve this gap year.”

“La Brigue,” Toby and I correct.

“That’s what I said,” Simon says, frowning. “La Brick.”

“No, Simon. La Brigue.”

“La Br—whatever, the French magic school,” Simon pouts. Toby tilts their head and smiles at him, their dimples pushing in and crinkling around their hazel eyes.

“You spent two months there for an investigation, though?” Toby says, letting out tiny huffs of air. “Two months. Running around with your sword, tracking werewolves, scaring students. I remember it very vividly. And you still can’t say the name? You really learnt no French there at all, huh?”

“Everyone speaks English!” Simon growls. “You told me I didn’t need to speak French!”

Toby just gives Simon a lazy Gallic shrug, which makes Simon scowl.

I always forget how much I like Toby. They’re very French, so they’re a bit of a dick. But a dick in a good way, which cancels out all the French.

“What are those?” Simon asks, pointing at the pile of garments on the sofa in an attempt to divert the conversation. 

“These, gentlemen,” Toby says, leaning forward to pat the garments, “are your wedding duds. I’ve just picked them up, and I’m not allowed to leave until you try them on. Having just tried on my own suit, I can assure you that they are extremely itchy and will make you want to die.”

“Oh, Merlin,” Simon mutters. “You may be waiting awhile, Baz and I are both on hold with the bakery to see who gets on first.”

“Wait,” I say, staring at Simon in horror. “You mean we’ve been calling the same place? I’ve been on the phone this entire time just to talk to the same person you’re on the phone with?”

“Yeah?” Simon shrugs. “I figured double the effort, attack from both sides.”

“Aleister Crowley,” I mutter, reaching over and hanging up my mobile. “I refuse. I refuse to get pulled into you and Fiona’s wedding planning nightmare. I did not sign up for this.”

“You didn’t sign up for your family? Weird,” Toby says from their chair, a note of amusement in their voice. They run a small, dark hand over their face and then yawn.

“I’m exhausted. You’ve no idea what it’s like at that flat.” They flop their hand back and forth. (I’d also forgotten how much the French Hollows gesticulate while speaking.) “They just fight and yell and Fiona smokes and Charlie hides and then we all act like it never happened.” Toby makes a face and shakes their head. “Nope. Never. You cannot ever make me do this.”

“Amen,” Simon says, nodding. “That’s the spirit. Join us, hold out.”

“Weddings are just another symptom of a capitalist society and the oppression of the individual,” Toby continues, still smiling pleasantly. “We buy love now, did you know? We pay to prove our devotion to someone. It’s a war crime, I think. Human rights violation. Homophobic.”

“Yes!” Simon says, nodding. “I mean, I dunno about the war crime thing, but—”

He’s cut off by a pounding on the stairs.

“Simon, where the bloody fuck is my jumper? I know you washed—” Mordelia freezes in the doorway of the solarium, her eyes narrowed. She’s wearing black from head to toe, boots, ripped jeans, ragged t-shirt, and her hair is short.

Very short.

She’s gone and sheared off all her long brown hair, cut it right up to her chin in a messy blunt bob. It makes her thin features look sharp, her Billie Piper mouth look fuller. It makes her look much, much older. Less like my bratty kid sister.

“Who are you?” she asks, staring at Toby. Toby tilts their head a bit and smiles.

“I’m Tobin,” they respond. “Charlie’s my uncle.”

“You’re Toby?” Mordelia says, frowning. Her eyes dart to Simon and me as if seeking confirmation.

“Yes?” Toby still has that quizzical smile on their face, and Mordelia’s cheeks flush red.

“Sorry,” she says, shaking her head. She shifts her stance and runs a hand through her freshly shorn hair. “Sorry, I just.” She stops, bites her lip, laughs. “I just thought Toby was going to be like, some tall, annoying French guy who looks like Hollow and was into shit cinema.”

“Do I look like I’m not into shit cinema?” Toby asks, raising one dark eyebrow. I vaguely remember there being an eyebrow piercing there, once upon a time, but they’ve taken it out. A tiny scar has grown over its spot, cutting a thin break down the corner of Toby’s eyebrow.

“Are you?” Mordelia asks. Her eyes are locked onto Toby’s face, a small smile forming. She’s blushing.

Simon and I make eye contact.

“Typically I know people’s names before I tell them my movie taste.” 

I am very positive that Toby’s voice has just gone down several octaves and is substantially raspier than it was a moment ago. Across from me, Simon is biting down on his lip and actively trying not to laugh. Mordelia is bright red.

“It’s uh, Mordy. Mordelia. I’m Mordelia.” She shifts again and clears her throat, and for the first time seems to notice that Simon and I are in here. She goes even pinker.

“Did you cut your hair?” I ask, cutting through the moment. “When did you do that?”

Her flustered expression evaporates and she narrows her eyes at me.

“Obviously.”

“I like it,” Toby says, unsolicited. “It looks nice.”

Mordelia’s blush starts up again.

“Oh, uh, thanks.” She picks at a scab on her arm with her thumbnail absentmindedly. “I like your side shave.”

“Really?” Toby asks, bringing a hand up to touch the back of their head. Suddenly the weird, raspy French seduction voice is gone, and Toby’s tone is bright and eager. “I just did it the other day. My hair had been your length, and now I think I went too short.” Toby makes a face. “My curls are a mess, they never work how I want them to.”

“No, it’s really nice,” Mordelia says earnestly. She inspects Toby’s haircut. “Your lines are so neat. You did that yourself?”

“Mhm. I can show you how, if you ever want to shave.”

“Seriously?” Her voice goes up. “Oh, yeah, that would be brilliant, I’ve always wanted like a partial undershave, you know? Just the kind you see when your hair is up, like right at the back.”

“I can do that!” Toby says, nodding. “That’s not hard at all, it’s a great look.”

“You’re not seriously going to shave your head, are you?” I cut in, unable to stop myself. Toby and Mordelia both turn to glare at me, and I’m momentarily shocked by how quickly Toby has changed allegiances. “I just meant,” I continue, trying to salvage this, “your hair looks very nice like this.”

Simon makes a soft “booof ” sound and stares at the ground.

Mordelia narrows her eyes even further at me, then turns back to Toby. “Are you on instagram?”

“Yeah,” Toby says brightly, shifting forward to pull out their mobile. “I’m le_tobaggan.”

Mordelia’s mobile appears from nowhere, and she squints at it for a moment, her thumbs flying over the screen, before nodding. 

“Brill, found you. I’m The_Grimm_Bitch, I’m following you.” She shoves her mobile back in her pocket and looks back up at me. “I’m going out. I’ll be back later.” She glances at Toby. “Nice to meet you, finally.”

She knocks twice on the doorframe of the solarium, and then clomps down the hall. A moment later, the front door closes, and Toby turns back to Simon and me.

“She’s cool,” they say, grinning. “I like her.” They pause a beat and settle themselves more firmly into their chair. “Baz, why aren’t you that cool?”

Across from me, Simon is smiling widely enough to power a sun, and his mobile is still playing elevator jazz.

⚡⚡⚡

It sounds like someone is being axe-murdered in the kitchen.

Simon and I pause as we walk into the house, loaded down with shopping. There’s rattling noises of dishes, the slamming sound of the cabinets being shut, and the clomping thuds of Mordelia’s combat boots.

“Is she doing dishes?” I mutter to Simon, putting the bags down gently. “That can’t be good.”

“Maybe she’s upset?” he says quietly, turning back to close the door. “I dunno if you saw Pen’s instagram this morning, but there was a picture of Priya and some boy—”

The wind catches the door as Simon goes to shut it, and it slams closed with a sharp CRACK. In the kitchen, Mordelia shrieks, followed by the sound of several glasses shattering to the floor.

“Mordelia?” I call, darting toward the kitchen, “what was that? Are you alright—”

“Aleister FUCKING CROWLEY,” Mordelia shouts. “Why the actual fuck would you slam the door, Jesus fucking Christ, what are you trying to do, bloody kill me?” She drops to her knees, surrounded by fragments of shattered green crystal, and starts trying to pick them up off the slate flagstones.

“No, no, leave it,” I say, moving forward to help. “Mordy, don’t—”

“Christ, I’m sorry,” she says, shaking her head. “Fuck, I broke like ten glasses. I’ll replace them, I’m sorry, I—” she flinches, sucks in a sharp take of breath as one of the shards impales her hand and bright crimson blood starts to flow out. “Fuuuuuuuuuuuck! Oh my fucking—” She stops, clutches her hand, takes a breath, and then begins to scream.

Unintelligible, mindless, guttural screaming.

I jerk back from her, terrified by the force and suddenness of her scream.

“Right, okay,” Simon says, moving from his spot at the door. “Both of you, up. Baz, you clean this up, Mordy, come on.” He puts his hands on her shoulders, ignoring that Mordelia is breathing heavy and practically shaking, her nostrils flaring in and out. “Come on, let’s go.”

He steers Mordelia into the hallway and she allows herself to go, head head down, hair hanging in her face as she holds her wrist in her other hand. Simon marches them confidently, stopping only to grab the keys he’s just put down, and opens the front door.

“No, not you,” he says to me, shaking his head as I go to follow. “This is just Mordy and me. Got your wand?” Mordelia nods numbly. “Right. We’ll be back.” He leans in and preses a soft, quick kiss to my cheek. “Don’t worry,” he says quietly. “I’ve got this.”

I stand there, useless, as the door shuts in my face.

Feeling very awkward in my own home and at a loss for what to do, I retreat to the kitchen and clean up the glass. I finish the dishes Mordelia was doing, and then I tidy the kitchen table, organising my syllabus work and moving Simon’s wedding documents to the side. I water his tomato plant, unload the groceries, make dinner, putter around with a heating spell on the extra servings, then end up eating alone in the den, listening to The Cure and reading some soppy vampire romance novel that Mordelia left lying around.

I pack up the leftovers, drink some blood, clean the kitchen again. Take a shower. Listen to the entirety of David Byrne’s new album. Check the time. Look out the windows to see if I can see our car on our street. Clean the bedroom. Fold Simon’s laundry for him. Leave it on his side of the bed. Get twitchy and take it off his side of the bed and put it away.

It’s just past midnight when the front door closes and I hear Simon and Mordelia’s soft footsteps on the stairs. I’m in bed, propped up on the pillows, working on my syllabuses, when Simon staggers in.

“Where the hell were you?” I snap, putting my papers aside as Simon sinks to the bed with a groan.

“We went for a drive,” Simon grunts, bending over to take off his shoes. “Got some food. We had a talk.”

“A talk?” I echo. “About what? What did you possibly talk about for five hours?”

“A lot,” he says, pulling his shirt off over his head. “I talked a lot, mostly. About what it’s been like for me, being gay.”

He stands up to undo his belt and unbutton his jeans.

“What? You said that?” I ask, watching the muscles in his back as he bends slightly to pull down his trousers.

“Yeah,” he grunts, kicking his jeans away and turning to climb back into the bed. He lands on his back next to me with a deep, tired sigh. “And she called herself a lesbian again.”

“She talked to you about it?” My stomach is twisting. “Why would she talk to you and not me?”

He turns to his side with a small grunt, and I notice for the first time that his eyes look a bit red. Like he’s been crying.

Shoving the papers to the floor, I scoot down a bit in the bed so I’m closer to his level.

“Because I get it.”

“Get what ?” I know I sound shrill and stroppy, harping on, but I can’t help it. I cannot imagine what would posess my little sister to talk about her queer crisis with Simon, of all people, instead of me.

“See, you’ve been through a lot,” he starts. “But you always knew who you were. Even back at Watford, even in the third year, you knew, and you’ve got this…” he trails off, flaps his hand in a Toby-like gesture, “inner confidence that guides you. Even if you can’t trust the world, you can trust yourself.”

He shifts again, back onto his back, and stares up at the ceiling.

“It wasn’t like that for Mordelia and me,” he says. His voice is raspy, like he’s been talking nonstop. “We had no idea. We didn’t know people like us out there. Bisexuals. Lesbians. We had to learn and play catch up and… it’s scary.”

He shifts again, and tilts his head onto my shoulder. My hand comes up immediately to settle on his chest, right on his sternum.

“I know you think it should be easy for her because we did it first,” he continues, “but we didn’t. She’s her own person with her own thing and she has to figure out how to be herself without anyone to guide her. Just like we did.” He turns, moving his head fully onto my shoulder and burying himself against my shirt. His voice is muffled again when he speaks. “And then you add in the Priya thing…”

“Is she really that gutted?” I whisper, running my hands through his curls, snarling my fingers on the knots.

“She loves her,” Simon says. “Imagine how you’d feel.”

“I can,” I respond. “Very easily.”

“Well, there you go.” He yawns into my shoulder, his jaw cracking with it, and I feel his hot breath through my shirt. He snuggles in closer, twisting his hips to throw one leg over mine. “She’ll be okay. Your sister’s incredible.” He pauses. “You’re all kind of incredible. The Pitches, I mean.”

Mordelia’s a Grimm. But I don’t correct him.

“I just want things to be easy for her,” I say, quietly. “I just want to… fix things.”

“Yeah, me too,” he says, sighing. “I know we want to help and make things easy for her, and we think we know what she should do. Me especially, I’ve been a prick about things, trying to rush her because I don’t get why she’s holding back.” I run a hand through his hair. “But she’s not going to do things the way we did, because things are different for her.” He huffs. “She made that very clear. Yelled it at me, in fact. Like three times.”

“Poor dear,” I say, scratching at the stubble on the side of his face. “Did she make you cry?”

“Yeah. But that came later, when we were talking about being fucking terrified of the real world.”

“Oh?”

Simon pulls his hand away from me and tucks it under his head.

“Yeah,” he says, not looking at me. “It’s terrifying. All the expectations, and feeling like time is slipping away and taking you fast to nowhere and your life is pretty much over… I can relate.”

My stomach squeezes tight. “Do you feel like that?” I tug at a curl, carefully. “Like your life is over?”

“Sometimes.” He shrugs, and I feel the motion through the mattress. “I went through so much so young, you know?” He shifts again, his head cradled on his arm, and looks at me. “It sometimes feels like I’ve lived two different lives as two different people. Like Simon back at Watford was just lying in wait for Simon now, and that Simon now is like…a house after a fire.” My stomach feels like it’s shredding itself.

“Simon—” I start, but he shakes his head.

“Nah, don’t. There’s been enough fucking crying today.” He sits up with a grunt and stares down at his hands. Large, still freckled like they were at eighteen, but carrying far more scars and calluses. “Growing up isn’t bad, though. There’s still good things. I still have loads of good things waiting for me.”

He tosses me a tired, careless smile that makes my heart feel like it’s stuttering, and then leans over to turn off the light on his side of the bed.

“Like bed,” he says, readjusting the sheets and kicking his legs out as he turns and reaches over me to turn out my light.

“You are not seriously coming to bed without brushing your teeth first,” I say, even as I scoot further down the pillows.

“Yup,” Simon grunts, collapsing on top of me with an exhausted sigh. “And I’m gonna kiss you without brushing them, too.” He pushes himself up to hover over me, and brushes a gentle, tired kiss to the corner of my mouth.

“You’re disgusting,” I mutter, bringing my arms up to lock around him. He mumbles something, and I feel it reverberate through his chest and into mine, and he nuzzles at my chin with his cheek, his scruffy stubble scratching at me as he tilts up to kiss me again.

I hum, skating my hands down his back and over his boxers, letting my fingers lightly play with the hem of his shorts before I move my hands back to his hips. Flex my fingers on the dimples at his back.

“No,” he says, pulling away from the kiss. I chase him, capturing his bottom lip, and he pulls away again with a huffing laugh. “No! I’m serious, Baz, I’m so tired.”

But his right hand still slides down my chest, coming to rest on my hips.

“Lazy,” I say, kissing at the corner of his mouth and dipping my fingers beneath his boxers.

“Baaaaz,” he grunts, nipping my bottom lip and then shaking his head. “I’m so serious, babe, I’m way too tired for sex.”

“Fine,” I huff, lightening my grip and giving him a small shove so that he lands back on his side of the bed. “Fine, alright, if you insist.” 

Simon laughs, his weight shaking the bed next to me, and I roll slightly to curl up against his side.

There’s several long moments of silence, only the clock on the wall breaking it, and then Simon lets out a long huffing breath and a grunt.

“Ugh, Merlin, get over here.” He reaches for me and grabs me, pulling me on top of him and running his hands over my sides. “But you’re doing all the work.”

I adjust myself to straddle him and sit up, raising one eyebrow.

“How is that any different than usual? I always do all the work, you lazy sod.”

Simon throws one arm over his eyes.

“You really know how to seduce a bloke.”

“You lovely, lazy man,” I amend, leaning over to kiss him. “Fine, Snow. Just lay there and think of England.”

From under his arm, Simon’s mouth pulls up into a tiny, cheeky smile.

“England’s got no chance at the rugby cup this year.”

“No. No rugby in bed, I’ve told you this.”

“The Welsh side, though, they’re looking brilliant.”

“Stop it. I don’t want this.”

“Scotland too, actually, there’s one bloke—”

I lean over and kiss him, deeply, thoroughly, until his hands melt against me and his breath is coming fast and there’s absolutely no more talk of rugby.

⚡⚡⚡

“Agatha Wellbelove! What have you done to that jacket?”

The lean blonde standing near the luggage check turns, her massive bun of near-white hair bobbling dangerously on her head, her lips parted into a delicate, lovely little oh .

“Baz!”

The hefty canvas rucksack she’s carrying drops to the ground and she takes three long steps across the busy Heathrow terminal and throws herself at me. I have to take a step back to catch her and hold my iced coffee at an awkward angle, but then I use her forward motion to pick her up off her feet and spin her around twice.

She smells like fresh cotton and jasmine perfume and salt and sun.

When I set her back down, she’s beaming, and I have a horrifying suspicion that I am too.

“This is precious,” Toby stage whispers from behind me. “So lovely and straight.”

“They’re both queer,” Mordelia responds, sounding bored.

“Oh, even better.”

I ignore the children, who are both carrying huge iced coffees that have been dyed several different colours, and focus back on Wellbelove.

“Seriously though, what is this jacket?” I grip her elbow and turn her slowly. It’s blush pink leather (faux, I’m sure. Wellbelove is very into vegan things these days) that looks like it’s been partially shredded and doused with gold paint.

I’m sure it cost her a revolting amount of money.

“Don’t you like it?” she asks, popping the collar and sliding her large, round sunglasses down from the top of her head to strike a pose. “I’m going to a punk wedding, I thought I should dress the part.”

“Oh, Aggie,” I say, sighing. “How you’ve changed.”

She scowls, pulls her sunnies off and slaps me lightly on the shoulder.

“What about you, hm? What is this?” she reaches out and plays with the small bun I’ve pulled my hair up into. “Why in the world have you let your hair get this long? Grunge is out.”

“He likes being the cool professor,” Mordelia pipes in. “He’s in a contest with Charlie.”

“Charlie is very cool,” Toby says, giving a one shoulder shrug. “Baz has no chance.”

“Go get Wellbelove’s bags,” I snap at them. “That’s the only reason you’re here.”

Toby and Mordelia exchange a glance and then wander off toward the baggage claim to look for a bag they won’t recognise.

The combination of Simon’s apparently traumatic heart-to-heart and Toby’s friendship seems to have set Mordelia at ease. She’s speaking to me again, at least, and has decided to act like the awkward tension of our fight didn’t happen. Which delights me, don’t get me wrong.

It’s just that she and Toby spend so much time making fun of me, and they’re never not together.

“You look good, though, Professor,” Agatha says, turning back to me. “God, I can’t believe it’s been two years. We can’t ever do this again.”

“You’re the one who didn’t come for Christmas,” I remind her, moving to lift her rucksack from the floor. It looks worn and earthy, like the kind of things Wellbelove takes on hikes through the California mountains. But it’s Wellbelove, so it’s very possible that she’s never used it before, and simply bought it because it looks like it’s been on long hikes through the mountains.

“Why is it on me? You could come to California.”

“With this complexion?” I ask, gesturing at myself. “Never.”

Wellbelove rolls her eyes, and then pulls her arms up over her head to stretch out. She’s in yoga pants and some kind of workout shirt, and it looks extremely out of place next to her leather jacket and perfect make up, but somehow it works. Because it’s Wellbelove. Everything works on her.

“So how is Kyle?” I ask, because I’m polite, and because her not-boyfriend-possibly-platonic-partner comes up often enough during our Skype sessions that it would be rude not to mention him.

“Connor?”

“Yes. Him. The surfer with the cat.”

“He has a dog.”

“Same thing.”

Wellbelove huffs, and I have to keep myself from smiling at the sound of it. I’ve missed that noise, that pouting little annoyed burst of air that peeks through her polite and lovely exterior to reveal the ruthless, impatient bitch within.

“He’s good,” she says, leaning into my shoulder. “We’re taking it slow. We’re both so busy, you know?” She smiles. “It’s good.”

“Lovely.” I lean down and press a small kiss to the top of her hair. It’s hopelessly sentimental, but she lets me do this now. It’s a wonder what being an adult and confident can do for your friendships. “We need to meet him.”

“Let’s wait for it to get more serious. Simon will hate him.”

“Of course he will. I will too.” I eye the baggage claim. “Is that pink thing yours?” I ask, pointing toward a garish pink rubber suitcase stamped with at least a dozen old and fraying baggage tickets. She nods, and I snap my fingers to get Mordelia’s attention and point to it.

“So what’s with that?” Wellbelove asks, reaching over to take my coffee from me and taking a small sip. She gestures toward Mordelia with the straw still in her mouth, then lets out a tiny ah and goes in for another sip. “I thought she was with Priya?”

“Priya is in America with Bunce and Hernandez, posting all kinds of photos of herself with boys.”

“Of course,” Wellbelove says, stirring the coffee to distribute the whipped cream around. “Is this whole fat?”

“No, I got it skinny and soy for you.”

“So who is that, then?” she continues, pointing at Toby. “She’s cute. Seems right up Mordelia’s alley.”

“That is Toby and they,” I pause for emphasis, “are Charlie’s brother’s kid. Taking a gap year before uni.”

“They’re French.”

“Yes,” I say, sighing. “We try not to hold that against them.”

There’s a stuttering clang from the luggage conveyor, and we look over to see Mordelia and Toby struggling to get Wellbelove’s large suitcase off the belt. They’ve knocked at least four other suitcases off and to the ground, and Mordelia is trying to stack them back onto the belt as quickly as possible without drawing attention to it.

“Were we ever that young?” she asks, narrowing her eyes. I throw an arm around her shoulder and nod, doing my best to look like the wizened sage that I am.

“Never,” I say, shaking my head. “We were never like that.”

“Do you remember,” Wellbelove says, turning in my arms, her brown eyes lit up with shittiness, “that time you tried to send the Mage a bouquet of roses from the Humdrum that were charmed to smell like shit?”

I glare down at her and shake my head to get a stray strand of hair out of my eyes.

“And you wonder why we don’t visit you.” I make a face. “America has changed you, Wellbelove.”

“I know,” she agrees, nodding. “Isn’t it lush?” 

Mordelia and Toby appear — suitcase in hand, looking suspiciously innocent — and Wellbelove sighs and steps out of my arms. “Alright. I suppose I can’t put off going home any longer. Are you coming to dinner with my parents?”

“No, I have to help Fiona with the last minute plans for the duel dinner. Simon will be there, though. I think he’s been at your parents since this morning.”

“Oh, lovely,” she says, her voice dry. “You know, I never wanted a brother. I like being an only child. And of all the orphans to take in, I don’t know why my family decided we had to basically adopt Simon. Couldn’t we have taken pity on someone I didn’t date?”

“It’s the smile,” I tell her, ushering her and my sister and Toby toward the exit.

Wellbelove makes her shitty little huffing noise again.

“It is, isn’t it?” she mutters. “It is a great smile.”

“I dunno,” Mordelia says, slurping at the last of her iced coffee. “His teeth are kind of fucked up.”

“It’s the British dentistry,” Toby offers. “You all look like that to the rest of us.”

“Do I look like that?” Mordelia asks, her voice high pitched. “No, I don’t. Do I?”

“You don’t,” Toby says, shaking their head. “Your teeth are very nice. Very straight. So straight they’re practically Margaret Thatcher.”

Wellbelove and I catch each other’s eyes.

“Awe,” Mordelia says. I can tell from her voice that she’s blushing. “Thanks, Tobes.”

⚡⚡⚡

The duel dinner is a madhouse.

Charlie’s parents host it at the family country house in Hertfordshire and they’ve set out what must be dozens of tables out on their lawn. Mordelia, Toby, Acantha and Phee spent half the day spelling gold lanterns and fairy baubles into the trees, sprinkling pixie dust over water droplets to get them to hover and shine in the air, and arranging chairs and setting up the duelling field.

It’s a blissfully beautiful night, and I can barely hear myself think over the chatter and discussion. I’m sat between Simon and Magnus at the Pitch table, and the two of them are leaning across me to talk about rugby. I gaze longingly at the French Hollow table, where Mordelia has bunked off to with Toby. Mordelia has her chin on her hand, talking in rapid French to Toby’s mother — a tall, statue-esque black woman with incredible nails who is horrifically intelligent and much too good for Hollow’s brother.

They’re all nodding seriously and drinking wine, and I ache to be there.

Fiona and Charlie are at the top table, both looking lovely in the traditional blue and gold wedding robes. That was a concession to Charlie’s mum — Fiona had told her there was no way in hell she’d be throwing a traditional mage wedding, and it led to several fights and three nights of Hollow sleeping in our guest room.

I’m proud of Fiona for compromising.

Simon and Magnus have just begun shouting at each other over their picks for the Rugby World Cup (Simon is going for Wales; Magnus is going for Ireland; I’m just there for the thighs) when there’s a sudden crashing gong-like sound, and everyone jumps and turns to look at the French Hollow table where Mordelia is standing, wand in hand.

“Excuse me!” she shouts to the crowd. “If I may have your attention for a moment?”

All the family members fall silent, leaning forward eagerly. I don’t think anyone except Simon, Malcolm and I were expecting this. Expecting Mordelia to start it off, that is. No one truly knows how a duel dinner is going to go, or how many duels there will be, but in modern fashion the bride’s family typically pre-plans.

We’ve a hell of a plan in store. It was meant to be a secret, but I suspect Toby knows, judging by the fact that they’re grinning widely, their dimples practically ready to explode.

“Charles Hollow,” Mordelia says, turning to face him. Her voice is serious, commanding. She looks every inch of the etiquette lessons Daphne shoved her into. “You wish to marry my aunt, Fiona Pitch. By the traditions and code of the World of Mages, I challenge you to a duel for her hand. Do you accept, or forfeit?”

Across the lawn, older family members laugh, the younger ones let out whoops, and there’s a smattering of applause as Hollow stands up and drops his napkin to the table, an easy smile on his face.

“Mordelia, I’m your teacher. Are you sure you want to do this?”

“You’re on sabbatical, mate. You’re not my teacher anymore.”

Toby lets out a whoop.

“Very well,” Charlie says. “I accept.”

He takes off his heavy garb (Toby and Fiona let out matching wolf whistles) and moves to the duelling field that runs parallel to the tables. He makes a show of stretching out his back, then draws his wand as he and Mordelia square off against each other.

Toby comes to stand between them, their arms in the air, a shit eating grin on their face. The fairy baubles and pixie dust droplets send skittering reflections of light over their dark skin.

“First down or first blood!” Toby raises their hand, and I see their instrument; a silver cuff around their right wrist. “One, two, seeing stars!”

A burst of scattered sunbursts explodes around them and then Mordelia makes a vicious slashing motion and fires off a have a nice trip! Hollow counters with Can’t touch this, and throws back an achilles’ heel. Mordelia goes down on one knee as her left ankle gives out for a moment, and I think she’s about to fall, but then she’s sweeping her black onyx wand above her head. She looks fierce and determined, a lot like Fiona, and I can smell her magic from here; sharp and tangy, like chocolate and citrus.

“Head over heels in love!” she shouts, and Charlie stumbles, nearly going down, pinwheeling backward as he yells out shorty get low, low, low! Mordelia, who is already dangerously close to hitting the ground, gets forced backward. She overbalances, her wonky ankle giving her no support, and she lands, arse first on the grass, seconds before Hollow falls as well.

“And we have a winner!” Toby booms, reaching out a hand to each of them and hauling them up. Toby raises Hollow’s fist in the air in a victory salute, and the surrounding family members cheer and clap appropriately. It’s a good showing for a first duel. Lively, over fast, an excellent start to the night.

Hollow and Mordelia return to their seats as the chatter grows louder, and the wine begins to flow more. At some point Magnus goes off to bother my father, and Fiona stalks over to steal his spot.

“I can’t believe you let Mordelia start the duels,” she says, collapsing into the chair next to me. “I was positive you were going to start them off.”

“She desperately wanted to beat on Hollow,” I say, shrugging and taking another sip of wine. She raises an eyebrow and snorts.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Challenge him so we can get this going.”

“I’m not sure why you think I’m going to duel him.”

Fiona scoffs.

“Right, like you’d miss a chance to—”

“Excuse me! Oi, uh, excuse me!”

All eyes snap to Simon, who has stood up and is tapping his spoon against my wine glass. He clears his throat and squares his shoulders, and then smiles. Beside me, Fiona makes a strangled noise.

“What the fuck is Simon—”

“Right, so, Charlie. I, uh, challenge you to a duel. By the code and law of the World of Mages, for, er, your right to marry my, uh, her.” He points at Fiona and I try not to cringe. He’s done this before — he duelled Dev at his and Niall’s wedding, and duelled Micah twice — and yet he never, ever gets the words right.

I poke him in the side, and he startles.

“Oh, right. Fuck, sorry. I challenge you in honour of Basilton Grimm-Pitch to duel by combat.”

“What?” Fiona shouts. Simon shrugs, puts his hand to his hip, and twists it, calling up the Sword of Mages effortlessly.

“Sword fight,” he says. Then looks at Charlie. “You in?”

Hollow does not look amused.

“I don’t really have a choice, I suppose.” He stands from his spot near his mother, and Toby appears out of nowhere, handing him a sword.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Fiona hisses at me. “Why is Simon seconding for you?” There’s a pause as Simon and Hollow bow at each other and Toby counts them off. “Wait, Baz, are you going to fight for—”

With a grunt, Simon swings wide, coming in with a brutal slash that has Hollow jumping backward with a curse. Hollow catches himself and lunges back, but Simon knocks the sword aside easily and presses his advance, both hands wrapped around the hilt of the Sword of Mages.

Maybe having him challenge Hollow to a sword fight wasn’t my best idea.

He attacks and attacks, pressing Hollow back, off the field and back toward the tables. Hollow still has a smile on his face, but he’s grunting a bit, and when Simon pulls back to slash again, Hollow darts to the side, kicks a chair at him, and runs around the nearest table.

Simon stumbles on the chair, righting himself with a laugh, but it’s too late; Hollow has run up behind him and kicked him in the back of the knee.

Simon goes down with a shouting laugh, dropping to his knees and then dropping to the grass in a movement that I know is deliberate and exaggerated. I’ve seen him fight; seen him take out goblins while on his knees, seen him come back from any attack.

But he’s grinning and sweating slightly, and he holds his hand out for Hollow to help him up, and he gives him a slapping clap on the back and then raises Hollow’s fist high again.

“Hollow wins again!” Toby booms as the crowd cheers and jeers and whistles.

Next to me, Fiona is bristling with energy.

“Alright, now you’re up, right?” she says, turning to me.

“Christ, Fiona, give the man a chance to breathe. He looks close to death,” I drawl. Fiona shakes her head.

“No, nu uh, let’s get this going. The sooner we finish the duels, the sooner my hen do starts and I can get shit faced.”

“You’re getting married tomorrow. You can’t get shit faced tonight.”

“You want to bet?”

“Charles Hollow!”

For the third time, everyone’s eyes dart around, this time landing on Malcolm, who has risen from his spot next to Daphne and is standing, looking very composed, his wine in his hand.

I suppose sometimes we are rather similar.

“What the actual fuck,” Fiona says, but my father is already speaking, raising his wine.

“Charles Hollow,” Malcolm repeats. “You wish to marry my sister, Fiona Pitch. By the traditions and code of the World of Mages, I challenge you to a duel for her hand, in the honour and the name of my late wife, Natasha. Do you accept, or forfeit?”

“Merlin and Mother Mary,” Fiona says, her eyes wide. She swallows thickly, and stares at me. “But. I thought you were going to second for Nat.”

“I accept,” Hollow says. He looks far more serious than he did when accepting Mordelia and Simon’s duels. Maybe it’s because it’s Malcolm, who’s likely to be more of a challenge than a seventeen-year old or a block of butter with a sword. Or maybe because this is my mother’s challenge.

I thought about doing it myself. Seconding for my mother’s memory. Doing it for her, representing her here. But my relationship with Fiona is something special. Something unique, that’s managed to evolve and exist outside of the shadow of my mother.

I’ll always carry her and her legacy with me. But I think she would like what I have planned.

My father takes off his suit jacket and hands it carefully to Daphne before he lines up on the duelling field with Hollow. Toby is more subdued as well, less gregarious with their smiles and announcements, and as soon as they send up the burst of stars to start the duel, the night sky lights up with thunder.

“Blood and thunder!” Malcolm booms. Lightning strikes the field right next to Hollow, and Malcolm advances, his spells covered by the roaring sound of the storm, his wand slashing this way and that. I’ve never seen my father duel before. I don’t know if he ever has; I know that my mother defended him in three duels before their marriage, and I had always assumed it was because he’s a poor offensive magician.

I think I may have been wrong.

Hollow is darting and slashing and cutting, throwing back spells and singing verses and deflecting spells. He’s panting, openly sweating, but Malcolm doesn’t ease off. He keeps pressing his advantage, showering Hollow with an onslaught of spells that Hollow can barely deflect.

“Is he supposed to take it this seriously?” Simon asks, leaning over to whisper in my ear. “Isn’t he supposed to go easy on Hollow so he wins?”

“Nat wouldn’t have,” Fiona answers. Her eyes are glued to the field, watching Hollow as he weaves back and forth through Malcolm’s spells. Her bottom lip is pulled into her mouth, and she’s worrying it with her teeth, but she doesn’t look nervous. She looks entranced. And a bit like she’s going to cry. “Nat would never have taken it easy. Malcolm knows that, the sentimental bastard.”

“Now you see me!” Hollow screams suddenly, his voice cracking through Malcolm’s thunder. “Now you don’t!”

The collective family sends up a shout as Hollow suddenly disappears on the spot, shimmering out of the visible eye right as Malcolm sends a streak of green light toward him. Before my father has a chance to catch himself, Hollow appears behind him, visible again.

“Let’s call it a day!” Hollow shouts. Malcolm’s wand falls from his hand and Hollow reaches down to grab it, then backs away, brandishing both wands at Malcolm.

My father nods at him, then takes a knee and bows his head.

The families explode into raucous applause, everyone screaming, jumping up to rush Malcolm and Hollow to congratulate them. Fiona bolts out of her seat and over to Hollow, wrapping a hand around his waist and leaning up to whisper something in his ear. Hollow sags against her with a tired smile.

I feel breathless, a lump in my throat. I’ve never seen a duel like that. I’ve seen Simon fight, and I’ve seen duels, but that — 

That’s how my mum would have duelled, I think. 

I wish I could have seen that.

Clearing my throat, I take a sip of wine, only to find that my glass is empty. Simon silently hands me his beer, and I drink it down in one, even though I hate the revolting cheap beer he drinks.

He puts his hand on my shoulder and gives me a firm, manly squeeze.

“You can do it, love,” he whispers. I huff and pull my hair up into a tidy bun at the nape of my neck.

“Of course I can.” Squaring my shoulders, I clear my throat.

“Fiona Pitch!” I call.

The families go silent.

Fiona looks up from her spot next to Hollow, her arm still around his waist, a wine glass in her other hand.

“Fiona Pitch, by the traditions and code of the World of Mages, I challenge you to a duel for the hand of my colleague, my friend, my childhood crush, Charles Hollow.” All of my sisters collectively let out a shriek of laughter, and they’re not alone. Across the lawn, Fiona’s face has broken out into a wide, delighted smile. “Do you accept, or forfeit?”

“You bet your scrawny twink ass I do,” Fiona says, pulling off her robes and throwing them at Hollow. There’s a manic light in her eye as she pulls her wand out of her pocket. “Let’s fucking do this.”

We line up, everyone screaming and clapping, stomping the ground and throwing out spell suggestions. My blood thunders in my ears as Simon counts us down instead of Toby, and then the stars go off, and I settle into a fighting stance and the world goes calm.

Fiona sends a tripping spell at me, and I send it back. She has the grass grow up to tangle in my legs, and I have the fairy lights come down to whirl around her head and disorient her. I can taste her magic around me; tingling, sharp, like the electric smell after a storm mixed with damp earth, and I can feel Simon’s magic within my belly as I send out fire. She sends the fire back.

We chase each other down the field. Laughing curses, dizzy curses, more song spells than I can think of, until finally, laughing, her head tilted back and her neck exposed, she hits me with a momma said knock you out! and I fall back on my ass on the ground. I’m laughing when I fall.

Everyone applauds, screams, cheers, and Fiona strides toward me, panting, her hair everywhere, and holds out a hand. I take it and let her pull me up to a standing position, but she doesn’t let go. Just tugs me in, puts her hands on either side of my face, and leaves a wet, loud kiss to my forehead.

“You crazy, incredible fuck,” she whispers, grinning. She kisses me again and pulls me into a hug.

“Fiona, you’re embarrassing yourself,” I say, wrapping my arms around her.

In my mind, Fiona is an immovable, unshakable force, rooted into the earth itself through steel beams. But in my arms she’s soft, thin, shorter than me and more delicate than I’ve ever remembered.

“Fuck you,” she mutters. She sniffs. “You big bastard.”

“There we go,” I say, squeezing her again and dropping my head to whisper in her ear. “Good fight.”

⚡⚡⚡

“This is a nightmare,” I hiss as I pass Simon in the hallway. I’ve got drinks in both hands, and he has his arms loaded down with suits. We’re both still in joggers, because this morning has been absolutely insane. This is the first time I’ve seen him since we woke up at 7.

“Toby was right, weddings are war crimes,” he says, nodding. He sounds exhausted. His curls are all limp. “Do you know where Charlie is?”

“No idea,” I say. I’m deeply fatigued; it’s not even 11 and I’ve spent the morning attempting to chase down flower girls and figure out where Magnus put the rings. “Have you seen Magnus?”

“He and Dev went to the village.”

“They went to the village? Why?”

“Dev forgot his shirt and had to go buy one and Mag wanted to go along.”

“Why would he go buy a shirt? He could borrow one from you.”

“I didn’t bring an extra.”

“You didn’t— Oh, for Crowley’s sake.” I close my eyes, breathe. Open them and point at the suits. “Where are you going with those?”

“Trying to find Hollow.” Simon sags against the dark panel wall of the hallway of Pitch Manor. “I don’t know why this is so stressful? We planned everything so carefully.”

“Because weddings are awful.” I give in and take a sip of the coffee in my hand, even though it’s for Fiona. “We’re never doing this.”

“Absofuckinglutely not,” Simon agrees. He pushes off the wall and goes up on his toes to drop a quick kiss to my cheek. “Never. Never ever.”

“Glad we had this chat,” I say, chasing his head to try to kiss his cheek back. “Once more unto the breach, then?”

“Whatever,” he grunts, and keeps wandering down the hall.

Balancing my drinks, I take a deep breath and slip into Fiona’s room.

For as long as I can remember, this room has been an odd relic to Fiona’s teenage rebellion. Posters stuck everywhere, torn and tatty furniture, nevermind the bollocks! spray painted across the historic wallpaper. A Fiona trying very hard to be badass.

I don’t remember what she was like in those early days when I came to live with her — whether our tiny flat was decorated like this, whether she tried very hard to be punk — but the Fiona of my teen years, the Fiona who moved us into the bright, white-washed flat with the airy garden and the mismatched, deeply comfortable furnishings — exudes more coolness in a single breath than these faded anarchy posters ever will.

“Is that my coffee?” she asks, looking up from the vanity. She’s sitting carefully while Daphne applies makeup and Acantha tugs at her hair, and her eyes flick to me. She makes grabby hands.

“What do we say?”

“Fuck you, I’m the bride, give me my fucking coffee.”

Daphne’s lips grow thin and tight, and from the corner of the room Phee gives a snorting noise. She’s hidden behind a huge camera that has to be half her body weight, and I can hear it snap snap snap away as my sister takes dozens of moodily staged photos of white heels and garment bags.

I pass over the mug and Daphne backs away for a moment so that Fiona can take a long, chugging sip.

“Ugh, thanks.” She sets the mug down and I can see that her leg is jittering under her black satin dressing gown. “I didn’t sleep at all last night.”

“I don’t think I slept for a week before I married Malcolm,” Daphne says, busying herself with the makeup bag she has strewn out over the vanity. “Weddings have a way of bringing out nerves.”

“We should have just eloped. Or done a bonding and not told anyone.” She glances at me from the corner of her eye and grins sharply. “What do you think, Baz?”

“Daphne, girls,” I say, clearing my throat. “Could I have a moment with Fiona?”

Daphne smiles indulgently as she gets up and starts to shoo my sisters from the room, pausing to lay a hand on my cheek.

The door shuts behind them with a tiny clack, and the silence of the room echoes between us.

“Please don’t tell me this is the part of the story where you want to have some sweet moment and tell me how much you love me and shit,” Fiona says, grabbing her eyeliner and turning back to the mirror. “Because I don’t want it.”

“I would never dream of it,” I say, taking the chair Daphne has just vacated. “Instead I come bearing gifts.”

“Oh, Crowley, no. That’s worse.”

“Before we start, your Bucks Fizz.” I hand her the other glass I’ve been carrying and her eyes grow wide in delight at the sight of alcohol.

“Hate that band, but we’re off to a good start,” she says, taking the drink from me and taking a tiny sip. “Right. What’s next.”

“We’ll be working backwards this morning, starting with something blue, courtesy of Malcolm and Daphne.” I pull the tiny black box from my pocket and pass it over, and Fiona makes a face as she opens it. The face freezes, however, when she sees the lovely silver and sapphire ear cuff nestled within.

“If I knew you got nice presents when you got married, I would have done it sooner,” she mutters, running her fingers over the cuff.

“From me,” I continue, “something borrowed.” I pull out the tiny, wrinkled, aged tag and hand it over, and Fiona’s breath hitches for a moment. I deliberated over this for ages, unsure if it was too sentimental or too stupid, but Simon insisted. He said she’d love it.

Fiona blinks very hard as she runs her fingers over the tag that was attached to my old Paddington Bear, the one she brought me that first Christmas, tracing the black ink that reads please take care of this bear.

“The new comes from Simon and Mordelia,” I rush to continue, before she starts crying, or I do. I hand her another felt case and she opens it this time to find a smooth, polished thumb ring. “It’s made out of one of the chairs that were ripped up at the Rainbow Theatre during the May ‘77 Clash show. They found it online and are very pleased with themselves, so please make a big deal out of it.”

“Are you shitting me?” she asks, sliding the smooth metal over her thumb. “Christ, that’s brilliant. Is it really from one of the chairs?”

“Allegedly,” I shrug. “Who knows.” I clear my throat and shift, and her eyes snap up to me.

“So? Where’s the old?” she says, taking the ring off and placing it carefully on the vanity next to the ear cuff and Paddington tag.

“The old comes from my mother,” I say, speaking very quickly as I pass her the red velvet bag. I went to the bank the day I picked up Wellbelove to withdraw it from the safe deposit box my father set up for me when I was young. There are all kinds of jewels and gems in there, the ones from the Pitch side, and I’ve never known what to do with them.

Fiona frowns as she upends the bag and then goes very silent when she looks at the necklace in her hand. Delicately wrought silver strands, looping and braided together, coming down into a drop pendant with a simple snowdrop pearl at the end.

My mother wore it on her wedding day. Her parents had given it to her as her something new. I’ve seen it in the photos — lying against her traditional gold mage robes, standing out against the fabric and her long dark hair.

“Oh, Baz,” Fiona says, her voice like a whisper. “Oh. I’d forgotten about this. You didn’t—”

“I didn’t think it would suit Simon,” I say, shrugging. “Not really his style, so I had nothing else to do with it, honestly.”

Fiona sniffs. A wet, full sniffle, and then laughs as she brings her hand to her eyes.

“Fuck, I already did my make up. Fuck, you should have made me cry earlier.” She laughs wetly, sniffles again. “Baz, this is— I don’t —”

“And finally, a Penny for your shoe.” I cut across her emotional stumblings and pull out a tiny cutout photo of Bunce, scowling. Fiona sees it and laughs again, ducking her head and clearing her throat.

“Right,” she says, shaking her hair out and sitting up. “Right. Well done, you. Good gifts. I feel properly prepared.”

There’s a tap on the door, and it creaks open with a painfully slow screech. The tight tension of the moment between Fiona and I breaks, and roll my eyes.

“Sorry, sorry!” Hollow calls, poking his head through. “I can’t find— Oh. Fi.” His face is soft and overwhelmingly fond as he looks at her. “You look gorgeous, love.”

“Of course I do,” Fiona rasps, turning away and downing her Bucks Fizz in one. “Why are you here?”

“I can’t find my suit.”

“Your suit?” Fiona asks, turning to stare at him. “How do you lose your suit on your wedding day?”

“I can help with this,” I say, standing. I place one hand lightly on Fiona’s shoulder and squeeze. Her hand comes up to tap mine, just once, and then lingers there. “Come along, Hollow, you absolute mess. Let’s see a man about your trousers.”

⚡⚡⚡

The ceremony is a blur.

I feel like I take in seconds of it at a time. Watching Simon usher in guests and pull out his handkerchief for an already crying Ebb. Standing at the front of the back garden with Toby, making fun of Mrs. Hollow’s hat. Accepting a sip of the cheeky flask that Wellbelove sneaks me. Placing my hand on Charlie’s back to get him to stop fidgeting and handing him over to Mordelia to take him to his spot.

And then there’s Fiona, lining up in front of my sisters and the rest of the bridal party, looking absolutely stunning in a white tuxedo suit. 

Her dark hair is slicked back, her eyes lined with kohl, her lips painted blood red. She’s just wearing a jacket, buttoned daringly low to reveal a sternum tattoo I never knew she had and never wanted to see, my mother’s necklace nestled comfortably in the middle of it.

The first gentle chords of The Velvet Underground strike up. I Found A Reason. Our processional cue.

“Ready?” I ask her, offering my arm. She switches her bouquet to her right hand and takes my arm with a shaky breath.

“Ready.”

I don’t see the crowd as I walk her down the aisle, the bridesmaids and ushers following behind us, making our way down the grass toward Hollow’s back. He’s staring firmly ahead, his shoulders pulled tight. His brother and Toby are at his side, clapping him on the shoulder and whispering things to him.

When we reach the aisle and I give Fiona over, the look Hollow gives her is so full of glowing adoration that it makes my chest physically hurt.

There’s talking, praying, spell casting, the usual, and it goes by so fast that I can barely take in anything but the sight of Hollow and Fiona in front of me, both hands clasped together, and the feeling of Simon sitting at my side, his knuckles brushing lightly against my outer thigh.

⚡⚡⚡

Fiona and Hollow make their way back down the aisle in a shower of bird seed and applause. Charley’s Girl plays.

We stand for photos for hours, smiling in different combinations, shouting at each other when Hollow tries to arrange us into an imitation of Pulp’s Different Class album cover.

I chase Ophelia and some boy out from behind the garage.

Fiona and Hollow enter the wedding breakfast to a crowd of cheers. What Is Life, George Harrison plays.

Hollow’s brother gives a speech with several failed jokes. There are pity laughs. Toby delivers a side-bursting imitation of Hollow’s professor voice. My toast involves a Powerpoint presentation, the Ramones Greatest Hits album, and a collection of hungover Fiona photos that I’ve been collecting since I was fifteen.

I chase Simon away from the wedding cake. He swears over his shoulder at me while Magnus comes from behind and tries to take me down in a rugby tackle.

Daphne cons me into dancing with her, and I spend half of Fool In The Rain trying to avoid being gouged in the eye by the very large feather on her fascinator.

Malcolm keeps handing me drinks. So does Simon.

Fiona doesn’t stop smiling.

⚡⚡⚡

“Excuse me, ma’am. May I have this dance?”

Mordelia turns from where she’s been talking with Ebb, and a few strands of hair come out of the messy-chic bun she’s wearing low at her collar.

“According to Grannie Hollow, it’s not proper for young ladies to dance in trousers,” she says, lifting an eyebrow. I step back and survey her suit. A dark, muted burgundy, hanging loose on her frame, her sleeves rolled up. White shirt buttoned to the collar and tidy brown loafers.

She looks as good in a suit as I had expected.

“Grannie Hollow is going to die soon,” I retort, holding out a hand. “Shall we?”

The wedding breakfast is in full swing, and we’re in that break between dinner and cake and first dance where the crowds of families have taken to the floor. I’ve a list of dances I need to get through; Fiona, Wellbelove, and Simon at some point. But I thought I’d start it with Mordelia.

Elvis Costello’s Pump It Up strikes up as we take our position on the dancefloor that’s been constructed between the two towering oaks at the edge of the lawn of Pitch Manor. Around us, it seems like everyone is dancing. Simon is twirling Ebb around, Wellbelove is in a very polite waltz with her father, and Dev and Niall have captured both Phee and Acantha into unwilling foxtrots.

I’ve danced with Mordelia at countless weddings over the years, from the time that she was small enough to stand on my shoes and let me walk her through the crowd. I’ve twirled her through years of itchy taffeta dresses and boring wedding breakfasts for people we don’t know. But something about today feels different, and I don’t think it’s the suit.

“Mordelia, I—”

“Baz, look—”

We both stop, and Mordelia stares down at the ground as we move. “You first,” she mutters. I sigh.

“I’m sorry,” I say. Gently. Not unwillingly. “For the fight at the beginning of the month, and everything. I haven’t been there for you this summer, not the way I should have been.”

“No,” Mordelia says, shaking her head. “No, that’s bullshit. You have been there for me, you’ve been really patient. You and Simon both.”

“But you were right,” I insist, cutting her off and pushing her into a spin. When she comes back, I keep moving. “I haven’t been taking this seriously — taking you seriously. I never wanted you to feel like I didn’t support you.”

“But you did try to talk to me!” she insists, stepping backward too forcefully as we sidestep around Simon and Ebb. “I just kept shutting you out. I was treating you like Mum and Dad and just expecting that you wouldn’t get it and would be weird, and then I didn’t give you a chance to get it, and then—”

“We’re both awful at communication.”

Mordelia blows out a long huff of air.

“Yeah. We are.”

I spin her silently, one hand on the small of her back, taking her through the crowd.

“I’ll always be there for you, you know that, right?” Mordelia makes a face. “We’re the token gay Grimms. You, Dev and I have to stay united.”

“Crowley, can we stop?” she asks, laughing as she ducks her head to my shoulder for a moment. “This emotion is so gross.”

“I’m a sentimental old man now, you can’t stop me.” I spin her again, less careful this time, then again, again, messy and energetic and in time to the song. Mordelia lets out a shrieking laugh and lets me spin her around and around until she’s barely a blur of burgundy and laughter.

⚡⚡⚡

I find Simon at the cheese table, talking with Dev, Niall and Wellbelove. He and Dev have their plates loaded down with different kinds of cheeses, while Niall and Agatha look on with frowns. In the afternoon sun, Niall and Simon’s hair look nearly the same colour.

“If you eat all that, you won’t have room for cake,” I say as I saunter up. Dev shoves a piece of goat cheese smeared on a cracker into his mouth and shrugs.

“It’s fruitcake,” he says through the cheese. “No one’s eating it.”

“I will,” Simon says, handing me a grape. I open my mouth and refuse to take my hands out of my pockets, and with an annoyed huff he places it on my tongue. Wellbelove rolls her eyes and takes a sip of her champagne.

“You and Mordelia were very sweet out there.”

“Impossible. Mordelia has never been sweet for a moment in her life.” I turn to survey the crowd. Mordelia is hovering near the DJ, yammering something at him while the man shakes his head in confusion and keeps focusing on the music that is playing. A very sedate Zombies song.

“Fruitcake aside, this food is really good,” Dev says, cutting through my thoughts. Simon feeds me another grape. “Why wasn’t the food this good at our wedding?”

“Because we had to pay for it ourselves,” Niall says calmly.

“Oh yeah.” Dev gives a dejected sigh. “Wish we’d had this much cheese.”

“The food is good,” Simon agrees, quickly growing bored of the grape game. “I really like the caterer.”

“Me too,” I muse. “You and Fiona did a good job.”

He shrugs and spoons some brie and apricot onto a piece of bread. “Food’s important, you know? A wedding is supposed to be about like, bringing together people you care about, and nice food is a good way of showing that you love them.”

“That’s lovely,” Niall says, pulling his head back and looking shocked. “That’s such a lovely way to think about it.”

Simon flushes.

“I’m just saying, if we ever did this, food would be probably the most important thing. To me.”

“I’m more concerned about the music, but knock yourself out with the food.”

“Are you two ever going to do this?” Dev asks. Simon and I turn to him and he throws his hands up defensively. “That wasn’t prying! Just genuinely curious.”

“Probably not,” Simon says with a shrug. I clear my throat and look away.

“Yes. Probably not.”

An awkward silence falls on the group.

“If we did, it would be small though,” Simon says suddenly. “Not like this. Just low key.”

“Of course it would be low key, we don’t like enough people to make it high key.”

“Would it be weird to do it at the house?”

“No. The garden would restrict how many people we could invite, it’s the perfect excuse.”

“You know, we could do it over Christmas or something, when everyone is in town anyway and that way no one has to plan their summer around it.”

“Guys, are you two actually planning your wedding right now?” Wellbelove is staring at us, a laughing grin on her face as she holds out her champagne. “Like, is this actually happening?”

Niall and Dev are watching us, their heads tilted at the same angle, their eyes narrowed.

“Of course not,” I say quickly, pushing away from the table. “Wellbelove. Care to dance?”

“Christ you’re a weirdo,” she mutters, passing her champagne off to Simon and taking my hand. “I don’t miss that.”

⚡⚡⚡

Fiona and Hollow have their first dance to Livin’ Thing. Electric Light Orchestra.

The dance floor clears for them and they walk out, hand in hand, the horn intro of the song starting soothing and slow, until the drums kick in and ELO starts up. I’d expected something ridiculous for their first dance, some kind of raucous punk anthem that they’d head bang and burn the Union Jack to. But this is perfect. Happy. Unique. Very sweet. Very them.

Simon is at the edge of the crowd, a drink in his hand as he watches them dance and I walk up behind him, wrapping my arms around his waist and tucking my chin to his shoulder. It’s hideously soppy. The kind of public affection I never traffic in, but I can’t help it. Weddings bring out the sentimental part of me.

“They’re kind of brilliant,” he says, leaning back against me slightly. On the dancefloor, Hollow pulls Fiona into an elegant dip, and she cackles her way through it. “I kind of want to be them when I grow up.”

“Me too,” I sigh. “Isn’t it fucking awful?”

“Nah, it’s not. If we have what they have when we’re older, I think that would be great.”

I tighten my arms around him and tamp down the hideous fond feeling that’s swelling in my chest and making me feel like a teenager again.

“You look lovely in this suit, by the way,” I whisper. “Did I tell you?”

He snorts and takes a sip of his gin.

“For the record, if we do this wedding thing, I’m not wearing a suit.”

“Wear whatever you want, but I’ll be in a suit.”

“No!” he huffs. “If you wear a suit then I have to wear a suit because otherwise I’ll look stupid.”

“Then I guess we’ll both be in suits, then,” I say, stepping away from him with a smug look.

“Fuck you,” he mutters, and then promptly turns bright red when the old woman next to him gives him a startled look.

I put one hand in my pocket and blow him a kiss with the other, and he looks like he wants to strangle me.

⚡⚡⚡

Shortly after the fruitcake, Toby starts shouting.

“You did not!” they say, loudly enough that several heads turn. Toby is standing by the edge of the dancefloor and Mordelia is approaching them, one hand in her pocket, the other hand held out. A song that I don’t remotely recognise is playing; something slow and old sounding.

“I did,” Mordelia says, grinning. She wriggles her fingers. Her face is bright red, but she’s not backing down. “Want to dance?”

Over the speakers, some man begins singing in fluid Italian, and Toby takes Mordelia’s hand. Their usual cocky grin is gone, replaced by something smaller, more restrained, but much more authentic.

“What is this?” Agatha whispers as she hands me another glass of champagne. I don’t know what number this is. It’s been a lot. I think I may be very drunk. I’m not sure I can even tell.

“Some kind of lesbian thing, I suppose.”

“I meant the song,” Wellbelove deadpans.

“Oh. Fuck if I know.”

“Baz!” Simon appears by my elbow, his face ruddy, his eyes bright. He’s absolutely pissed. “Baz!” he hisses again. “Look! It’s happening!”

He’s pointing at the dancefloor, where Mordelia is slowly circling Toby around the floor. She’s taller than them by several heads, and the two of them cut an absolutely lovely scene in their dark suits and short hair.

“Everyone remain calm,” Hollow says, popping up behind Simon. Fiona trails along behind him, two glasses of champagne in her hands. She downs one while I watch, then promptly starts on the second one.

“Did you all plan this?” Wellbelove says, looking around. “Like, did you actually plan this?”

“Of course we planned this,” Fiona says with a snort. “We’ve been planning this since they were twelve.”

“We actually decided to get married during a conversation about whether it would be feasible to have Tobes and Mordelia meet at a family wedding,” Hollow adds. Fiona grunts and tilts her head.

“There was a bit more to it than that, babe.”

“Ehhh. Not much more.”

Fiona pauses, shrugs, and takes Dev’s drink out of his hand and downs it.

“You people are so weird. Do you even listen to yourselves?” Wellbelove is laughing, which takes the edge out of her voice, but her tone is still sharp. “You all seriously need to make friends with people you aren’t related to. This is not normal.”

“Just because you have Kyle doesn’t make you superior,” I sniff.

“Connor. His name is Connor.”

“I thought it was Collin?” Simon asks. “Your mum thinks it’s Collin.”

“Pst,” Fiona hisses. “Look.” She points back to the dancefloor and we all do a very bad job of drunkenly pretending we’re not looking. Mordelia and Toby have gotten closer during the dance, both singing along to the Italian man currently screaming the words il mondo through the speakers, and their arms are tight around each other.

Toby has their head resting on Mordelia’s shoulder, and Mordelia looks so overwhelmed she may burst.

⚡⚡⚡

The sun is setting, the wedding is breaking up, but the music is still going.

Dev and Niall are engrossed in some deep conversation with Wellbelove at the far table, Mordelia and Toby have long since disappeared, the extended relations have begun trickling out, and Fiona and Hollow are draped over chairs, looking thoroughly exhausted.

Fiona took off her stilettos some time ago, and she’s entered a stage of happy drunkness where she just squints at everything.

And Simon and I are dancing.

Love Vigilantes is playing and there’s a light breeze coming in with the dusk, which feels good on my skin. We’re both drunk; drunker than we intended to be, but coming off the worst of it, so now we’re floating and happy and thoroughly relaxed. Simon is letting me guide him around the dance floor, skating past the other dancers, entirely wrapped up in each other and the sound of New Order. It’s lovely, to be honest, and I don’t want it to end.

It’s almost nauseating to remember that school is starting up again in less than a week, and I’ll be moving back to Watford. Without Simon.

“What are you thinking?” he asks, shimmying a bit, moving forward and backward in a lively step. “You have thinking face on.”

“I want us to take the house. From Oliver. The Watford house.” It blurts out of me, a sticky, drunken confession that I never intended to voice. “And I want you to move there and live with me during the school year. I want us to do that.”

Simon blinks at me, and turns us so the sun isn’t in his face.

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Okay?” I feel as though I’ve been punched in the gut. “That’s it? Okay?”

“Yeah,” he nods. “I want that too. I love the London house, I don’t want to get rid of it, but—”

“We don’t need to,” I cut in. “We can keep it. Half our family is going to uni in London in the next few years, we can let it to them. Live there in the summers if we want. Keep it for when we retire.”

“You’ve thought about this, huh?” He smiles at me. Simple and slow like honey. Indulgent.

“Excessively,” I confess. “You have no idea how much I’ve thought about this. I want it very badly.”

“Let’s do it, then. Let’s talk to Oliver about it.” He turns us again, and now I’m squinting into the sun. Simon’s head blocks it a bit, sending a bursting halo of light around his hair, throwing him into shadow. “My turn?”

“Your turn for what?”

“Asking for something.”

“I can’t imagine what you could possibly ask for that you don’t already have, but alright, if you—”

“I want to get married.”

I stop dancing, my hands going slack around his waist.

“You do?”

He nods, gives me a one shoulder shrug, and pulls me closer. His arm like an iron vice around my back, and he turns us again, moving slowly in time with the rhythm of the music. I let him.

“I do, yeah.” He pauses. “This summer has been weird. Like, really fucking weird. But I guess seeing Mordelia go through her shit, and watching Fi and Charlie be so happy, and… losing Gran, without getting a chance to tell her things… it just.” He bites his lip and stares off over my shoulder. “I already chose you. Back at school, and then with the bonding. I choose you every day. And I thought I wanted to keep you to myself, you know? Keep all that to myself. Because for so long I didn’t have anything, and when I found good things I had to grab them, hold on to them, protect them ferociously.”

“Simon—”

“You’ve given me so much. Love. Music. A family. You’re everything, Baz.” My heart does a small flip. I feel breathless, like something is stuck in my throat, and my chest hurts. But Simon doesn’t notice. He just keeps going, blundering forward like the romantic, courageous fool he is. “When people asked when we were getting married, or put these expectations on us to marry, it was like I was a little kid again, you know? Clinging to things. Being the Humdrum. Just trying to take and take and take all these good things to protect them and not give anything to anyone else. I freaked out and got shitty because it felt like people were trying to control my life and plan my future, and I didn’t want anyone to have control over our future. Over us, what we have.”

“Simon, you’re not the Hum—”

“I love you.” He smiles when he says it. “I love you and I choose you and I want people to know that. The people who matter. I want to dance with you and pick a song that is just ours and I want to feed these people and bring them to our home, and point at this life I have and say, ‘this is mine. I made it, and I want to share it with all of you, because it’s good and it’s stable and I’m confident that I won’t lose it.’”

“You won’t lose it,” I croak out. “You’ll never lose it.”

“So, I know I’m meant to do a thing,” he says, pulling back from me a bit and pulling his wand out of his pocket.

“Simon, what are you—”

“C’mere.” He pulls me in close again, and with his wand hand out, whispers in my ear, “and I’m floating in a most peculiar way.”

He sings, his voice flat and off key, because he’s never been able to carry a tune in his life, and I feel our magic spring tight and then release, seeping out around us. I feel breathless, caught off guard like I’m slipping or falling, and then when I look down, I realise I’m not falling. I’m floating.

We’re barely off the ground, only a few inches, hovering slowly, still dancing. No one around us notices; everyone is consumed with their own affairs, and we’re barely floating enough to look odd. But still. We’re floating.

“I know it’s not very impressive,” he says, still close to my ear. “Nothing compared to the spells you and Pen and Niall can make, but. I made it for you. For — for us. Ages ago, actually. It’s not much in the way of a proposal spell, I know, but… I want us to do this. Properly. Normally. Or as normal as we can be, for once.” He laughs, and I feel it reverberate through me. “So. Are you in?”

I pull back from his arms, just for a moment. So I can see the halo of sun in his hair, the shadowed crinkle of his smile. He has a small wrinkle, just at the corner of his eyes. Laugh lines that weren’t there the first time we stood like this, dancing on a lawn at sunset in suits. More sun freckles than he used to. More definition to his jaw, more weight on his shoulders, more comfortable in his skin and getting more so every day.

Love Vigilantes is still drifting around us, and we’re floating in a most peculiar way, and Simon is looking at me, waiting for an answer.

And I smile.