Any Way the Wind Blows (Simon Snow, #3)(48)

Simon took the napkin, then licked the butter off his arm.

“Excellent,” Dev said. “I’ll call you next week. Cheers.”

“Cheers,” I said, hanging up.

“Who was that?” Simon asked, sucking on his thumb.

“One of my cousins,” I said, taking a piece of his toast. “Dev.”

“Dev from school? Your little minion?”

“If you like.”

Simon hadn’t made any tea. I got up to start it.

“So Dev is your cousin…” he asked. “Huh. He doesn’t look Egyptian.”

“Because he’s not.”

“Aren’t you?”

I was standing at the sink, filling the kettle, but I glanced Snow’s way.

“You understand how cousins work, right?”

I turned off the tap, careful not to drop my toast. “I think our great-grandparents were siblings … Mine became headmaster at Watford— Tyrannus Pitch, I’m named after him. Tyrannus grew up in Hampshire and married a woman from Egypt—Karima Pitch—famously powerful. Like, legendary. ”

I flipped on the kettle, and reached for two mugs, setting them on the counter. “They had a few kids. Two of them of them moved to Egypt. One stayed and became another Watford headmaster—you’ve seen his picture in the Weeping Tower, Balthazar. My grandmother was his second wife. She moved here from Sicily. Adolorata, another staggering witch. I can sort of remember her, she died the year before my mother was killed—”

I stopped myself. This was probably too much information. Literally no one is as interested in Pitch family history as I am.

But when I looked back at Simon, he was rapt.

“Anyway,” I said, winding it up. “Dev’s line goes off in the other direction. They’re mostly from Cornwall, I think. My ancestors married for power. His were all about dosh.” I took another bite of my toast.

Simon looked like I’d just given him huge news. “Baz … I didn’t know you were Italian. ”

I laughed. “I was so busy trying to hide my vampirism from you that I didn’t disclose my family tree. I’m only giving you the Pitch highlights, by the by, but that’s because the Grimms don’t really have highlights. They’re all middling farmers, a few of them from Scotland. My mother, it seems, married for love.”

The kettle clicked off, and Simon hopped up to fetch it. “So you have cousins all over?”

“Indeed,” I said, getting the milk. “The Grimm-Pitch network is vast.

Though I seem to be a dead end.”

Simon frowned over our mugs as he poured. “I don’t have any cousins.”

“Well, you might … yeah?” I sat back down at the table, watching him poke at one of the tea bags. “You could always do that thing the Normals do.

Genetic testing.” Simon might find cousins. He might find parents.

He pushed out his chin, rueful. “Best not. Who knows what they’d see in my DNA … Dragon parts, Humdrum holes.” He brought the mugs to the table and set one down in front of me. “Was Dev helpful? I always thought he was a ponce.”

I pulled out my tea bag. “You thought that because he hung out with me.”

Simon shrugged.

“Well…” I reached for the sugar. “He was a ponce. And he was helpful.

His grandmother’s entangled in a Greatest Mage scam on Facebook. And he’s heard of another rotter who’s out there performing miracles.”

Simon looked personally offended. “Chosen One miracles?”

“I gather.”

“Is he, like, going off?”

“Circe,” I say. I’m trying to stop saying “Crowley”—Bunce says he’s problematic. (Which seems obvious, but whatever.) Half the time, I forget. “I hope not. Maybe going off isn’t necessarily a Chosen One thing.”

“Yeah.” Simon poked at his tea bag again. “Maybe that was just me.”

“But Dev’s going to get some names for me, and I already have one name —my aunt told me about someone whose son may have run off with this circus. A friend of the family. We could go talk to her. I suppose it’s the closest thing we have to a lead at the moment.”

“Yeah, may as well start somewhere. What’s her name?”

“Lady Ruth Salisbury. She lives in Mayfair.”





27

SIMON

Baz makes me borrow more of his clothes.

“I don’t see why I have to be dressed up to talk to an old lady.”

“We’re strangers showing up at her door out of nowhere. We need to look presentable.”

For Baz, that means a full-on suit. Three pieces! It’s the colour of toffee sauce, and he’s got a bright blue shirt on underneath—blue like butterfly wings and unbuttoned a bit low for visiting an elderly person. (If you want to know the truth, he looks good enough to eat. He’s looked good all day. You should see Baz when he first wakes up: His eyes always look sleepy, but when he’s actually sleepy, he looks like somebody trying to seduce you in a silent movie. One of those black-and-white fellows with the heavy eyeliner. I feel like I’m following him around with my heart in my hand. It’s even more terrifying than it used to be—because before, I was telling myself that this thing with him would either fall apart before it killed me, or that I’d die before I had to deal with it. But now … What now?) I get off relatively easy—dark jeans and a pale-green knit, button-down shirt. Baz casts a spell to tailor it around my wings and another to magickally shorten the sleeves. “So you won’t be too hot in this coat,” he says, holding up a grey mackintosh.