Any Way the Wind Blows (Simon Snow, #3)(56)

“Oh,” she says, brightening up a bit, “are you here for a commission?”

“Yes!” he says. “A commission.”

“I can take my break in a few minutes. Just have a seat.”

I get my lemon muffin, and we park ourselves in the corner of the shop. “I wonder if there are magickal coffeehouses…” Shepard says. “Do magicians have their own coffeehouses?”

“We don’t need magickal coffeehouses,” I say. “We’re magickal wherever we go.”

“Yeah, but you’re so put off by Normals, I’d think you’d want a place to escape from them.”

“Magicians don’t mind Normals, in general.” I break my muffin in half and offer him some. “It’s just me who finds you off-putting.”

He takes the muffin. “So magicians make friends with Normals.”

“All the time.”

“And tell them about being magicians.”

“Never.”

“There must be exceptions.”

“There really mustn’t.” I think of Micah and his new probably-Normal girlfriend. Does she know what he really is? I always thought Micah liked me (in part, at least) because I was a good magician. We practised our spellwork together. We talked about the magickal life we were going to share.

Kipper sits down at our table, taking off her apron. “Hi again, thanks for waiting. Unfortunately I only have a few minutes before I have to go back to the register.”

“We’ll get right to it, then,” I say.

“I’m Shepard,” he says. “And this is Debbie.”

Kipper smiles at me. “That’s my mother’s name.”

I have no reply to that, so I cut to the chase: “We’re looking for someone who knows about languages, a translator.”

“Oh.” Kipper looks disappointed.

“We’re sorry,” Shepard says. “Is that not your area?”

“No,” she says, “it is. I just thought you wanted an actual commission.

I’ve been doing more watercolours. Portraits, mostly. Sometimes I do pets.”

“Really?” he asks, sincerely interested. “They didn’t tell us that. I’d love to see some of your paintings.”

Kipper already has her phone out, opening her photo folder. “I have a shop online, but sometimes people see my prints down at the Ogre and ask about me.”

Shepard is looking delighted by something on her phone. I lean over to see. It’s a watercolour of a cat wearing a bow tie.

“Oh my God,” he says. “Adorable. And really reasonable pricing.”

“People like to get their pets done after they die,” she says. “After the pets die, I mean. To remember them.”

“That’s a cool idea,” he says.

She smiles. “I kind of happened into it.”

“So you don’t know languages?” I ask.

Kipper looks like she forgot I was sitting here. “No, I do. A little. It’s sort of a family specialty. My mother can speak in thirty-nine tongues.”

“That’s impressive,” Shepard says.

“Yeah, especially for someone who only has four.”

(Four what? Four tongues?)

“Wow,” he says.

I elbow him. “Get out the thing,” I say. “The … writing.”

“Right, right.” He pulls the folded-up ritual from his inside pocket and hands it to Kipper.

When she spreads it out onto the table, two extra fingers unfurl from each of her hands. “Oh shit,” she says, sitting back, away from it.

“What,” I say, “what’s shit?”

“That’s, like, really obscure.”

“Yeah?” Shepard asks.

“That’s not even, like, from this dimension, you know? Like, this is not from Earth-616. You shouldn’t translate this. I can’t translate it, but you shouldn’t anyway—you could end up slicing a trapdoor into another dimension.”

Shepard gives her a sad smile. “Kipper, I think I already did.”





31

AGATHA

I am flattened by the time we get back to Niamh’s Fiesta. My legs feel like jelly, and I’m hungry besides. Niamh pops the back of her hatchback open and gets out two bottles of water. Her face is flushed and sweaty, and her dark hair is coming out of her bun and sticking to her cheeks.

She tosses me a water—it’s warm—and tips her own bottle up, emptying it one swallow.

I gulp some water down, then wipe my mouth on my wrist. “Hell’s spells, I won’t be able to walk tomorrow.”

“What happened to that championship lacrosse athlete?”

“Oh, ha ha.”

She’s undoing her bun. Her hair falls down past her shoulders in shiny, dark brown waves. It’s incongruous. Niamh’s face is too hard to be framed by something so soft. She’s already pulling it back up with her fingers and twisting it back into place.

“All that work,” I say, “for nothing.”

“It wasn’t for nothing,” she says, getting into the car.

I get in, too. “We spent hours herding those goats—and then we just left them in the hills.”