Any Way the Wind Blows (Simon Snow, #3)(68)

“No. Close. Rhymes with ‘tried’…”

“Penelope.”

“You lied to me, Shepard!”

“I didn’t! I just hadn’t explained yet!”

“We have literally been making lists of things that we know and things that we don’t, and not once did you say, ‘Here’s something I know: I have a fiancé in hell.’”

“She’s not my fiancée!”

“Wait, is it a ‘she’ or a ‘he’?”

“I really don’t know whether demons have gender.”

“But you said ‘he’ before. Is this another lie?”

“No! I mean—maybe. I just … I didn’t want you to think…”

“Think what?”

“That I’d been seduced by some she-devil!”

“Well, now I can assume that’s exactly what happened!”

“No, it wasn’t like that!”

“I don’t know what it was like, do I, Shepard? Because you didn’t tell me!

Apparently you told Kipper the truth as soon as you met her, but to me? You lied. ”

“Penelope, when I first told you, I didn’t know that I was going to see you again, that we were going to be friends. ‘Cursed’ covers a lot of bases.”

“It doesn’t cover ‘engaged’!”

“This isn’t a real engagement!”

“It’s legally binding!”

Shepard rolls his eyes at me, which he has no right to do, now or ever.

I start walking away from him. Then I realize I’m headed away from the train station and spin around and march past him.

“Penelope!” he shouts after me.

I keep walking.

He keeps shouting. “I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t want you to think I was in a relationship!”





37

BAZ

We’re eating at the kitchen table this time. Lady Salisbury has made another cake and given us each a far-too-generous slice.

She’s got a fork raised halfway to her face, and her mouth’s gone slack with shock. “Jamie…” she says eventually, “has been healed?”

“That’s what Daphne—Baz’s stepmum—said. She said he was Smith-Richards’s first miracle.”

“His first … miracle?” Lady Salisbury glances at her fork and seems to remember she’s holding it. She sets it down on her plate, then immediately picks it up again, and takes the bite. Then she starts to cry. Curling over the table, her shoulders hitching.

Simon looks at me, his mouth full and his eyes something like panicked. I scoot my chair closer to her and touch her shoulder. “Lady Salisbury…”

“Healed,” she says after a moment. She wipes her mouth with a cloth napkin and then wipes her eyes. She takes another bite of cake, then sobs again, covering her mouth. “Healed,” she says, coughing on crumbs.

I rub her back, fairly uselessly. She smells like buttercream icing and lavender.

“We don’t know what it means,” I say. “But Daphne says all the magicians Smith-Richards has … affected can do powerful magic now.”

“It’s just so hard to fathom.” She wipes her eyes again, smearing chocolate on her cheek.

I point at my own cheek, and she wipes most of the chocolate away, smiling to thank me.

“My Jamie…” she says, still looking shocked, “doing magic. ”

Simon has pulled his chair closer, too. “It’s good news,” he says carefully.

“Isn’t it?”

Lady Salisbury laughs, more tears streaming down her chocolate-smudged cheeks. “I genuinely don’t know, Simon.” She takes another bite of her cake.

Simon takes a bite of his, too. “On the one hand,” she says, “it is a miracle.



It’s what Jamie’s always wanted. It’s what we expected for him, once a upon a time.”

Simon smiles at her, hopefully. He wants this to be good news. I think he wants to believe that walking cologne ad is offering something real.

“As far as we know,” Simon kept saying last night, “Smith-Richards is the Chosen One.”

“By what logic?” I scoffed. We were sitting on his living room floor, eating peri-peri chicken.

“Well, we don’t know that he isn’t, ” Simon said.

“We don’t know that anyone isn’t.”

“We know it isn’t me.”

“All right, Snow, so everyone who isn’t you could be the Chosen One?”

He shrugged. “We watched Smith-Richards fix that guy’s magic. I never fixed anyone’s magic.”

“One” —I counted on my fingers— “you fixed the entire magickal firmament. Two, how do we know that Alan person was actually changed?

It could have been a trick. Or a delusion. Maybe there’s some sort of placebo effect.”

Simon stuck out his chin. “Your stepmum believes it.”

“She wants to believe it.”

Simon just shrugged again.

We kept arguing about it for an hour, even after we climbed into his bed.

(It isn’t a bed; it’s a mattress. I had to magic him up some sheets and pillows.)