Any Way the Wind Blows (Simon Snow #3)(20)

“I don’t know. Utah?”

“Are you caught up in some new trouble?”

“No,” he says. “I mean, nothing new.”

“Simon…”

“Nearly done,” Niamh says. She must be rushing it. (Which won’t matter at all—she’s just cutting them off. I can’t believe she doesn’t have a spell for this.) She moves to the joint of Simon’s wing, the place where it juts out of his back.

He looks like he wants to crawl out of his skin.

“You’re sure this doesn’t hurt?” I ask.

“It’s more like someone is sticking their finger down my throat,” he says.

“Or shoving something wet into my ear. Every instinct I have is screaming, No! ”

“I wonder if you’ll have phantom pains when the wings are gone,” Niamh says.

Could she be less helpful?

“What did Simon save you from?” I ask her, hoping for a better topic.

“Paindeer,” she says.

He nods, still wincing. “Oh, right … On the Great Lawn?”

“No, but I was there for that one, too. This was on the lacrosse field.

During a practice.”

I remember both those attacks. The Humdrum rarely repeated himself, but he fucking loved paindeer.

“They cornered us, against the fence,” she says. “Some of us were casting spells, but we were too scared to do much good—” Simon is hunching forward over his knees again. Niamh lifts her cloth from his wing. “Is it better if I’m gentle or firm?”

He clears his throat. “Firm, I think.”

She goes back to it, scrubbing harder. The whole room smells like iodine.

“You came out of nowhere,” she says. “I don’t think you used any magic at all. You had that sword…”

Simon nods. “I remember that day. Agatha was playing.”

I was. It was my first year on the team … Did I play lacrosse with Niamh?

“The whole herd of them went after you,” she says. “We thought you were gone from this world, Mr. Snow. We were all screaming for you to run.”

“I don’t remember that part,” he says. Why should he remember that part?

Why should one near-death experience stand out from all the others?

“I’ve never seen anyone fight like that,” Niamh goes on. “You didn’t stop swinging till they were gone.” She stands up straight, holding his wing out to check her work. “It was the most foolhardy thing I’ve ever witnessed.”

Simon is looking down, past our joined hands. Maybe he’s trying to remember.

“Right,” Niamh says. “Let’s do the other wing now. I’ll make quick work of it.”

Simon pulls his left wing in, and Niamh helps him extend the right. She frowns at it—maybe that’s just her thinking face—running her hand along the bony ridge. “You did save our lives, though. Thanks for that.”





15

BAZ

“Hello, Basil, you look wretched.” My aunt sails past me into the kitchen.

She didn’t come home last night. Which means there was no one here to tell me to get up and wash my face and stop listening to the same James Blake song again and again. (I think the neighbours tried—they were banging on the ceiling around 2 A.M., I ignored it.) I’ve been lying here on the sofa, uselessly, in a little tribute to Simon Snow. This is apparently what you do when you feel terrible, and you never want to feel better.

I’d say that I’ve been reliving everything Snow said to me last night—but he didn’t say much, did he? It doesn’t take long to relive: “We’re done, this is over, I hate the sight of you.”

So I’ve been reliving all of it, our whole story. Every night I stayed awake to watch him fall asleep, every time I threw a punch just to touch his face …

I always knew Snow would ruin me. I thought he’d do it with his hands.

That he’d run me through with that bloody sword. ( Ha. Like Simon Snow would ever settle for a flesh wound.) He had to get me close to finish me off.

Our relationship was the killing blow.

Did Simon ever love me? I’m not sure.

Would it be worse if he never loved me—or if he loves me still, but doesn’t want to be with me?

As soon as I decide which is worse, I’ll know which is true.

Fuck, this is bad. It’s so bad. It hasn’t been bearable for even a breath.

I thought I was ready for it—losing him. I thought I’d been bracing for it, for months. But I couldn’t know how awful it would be. And I have a feeling it’s just starting, that I’m still in the slow-motion part of it—that scene in a film where someone takes a bullet, then it takes ten seconds for their face to fall and another eternity before they clutch their chest. I’m in that scene, and my hand hasn’t even reached my heart yet. I’m still opening my mouth to scream.

“Turn off that music!” Fiona shouts from the next room. “No emo shit in my flat.”

I am emo shit. “This is electronic soul,” I mutter.

“It’s crap!”

I sit up and rub my face with my shirt. I should corner Fiona while I have a chance. I should make sure she doesn’t get arrested again. I should talk to her about Daphne. The world hasn’t stopped turning just because I’m dead and slowly dying. It could still get worse.