Chapter Twenty
I wake up to an empty bed. I can hear the sound of the coffee machine in the kitchen.
I sit up and check my phone. There’s no message from Beryl.
I check my email. There’s one from my mother.
Nothing in the subject, just a link to a Parisian hotel in the body.
It’s the first time she’s ever done that.
Usually, I have no idea where they’re staying; even telling me a city is more precision than I’m used to.
Was it seeing me with Bastian that prompted this change?
A change that, if I squint hard enough in the right direction, could be interpreted as some bizarre variant of parental connection?
I stare at it for a long time and then glance at the painting of the selkie that they kept. I don’t know what to make of any of it.
“Good morning.”
I look up to see Bastian pushing open the door to the bedroom with his foot, carrying two cups of coffee.
He’s still wearing the T-shirt he slept in but he’s put on his jeans from yesterday.
I anxiously pull my hoodie back on, covering my bare chest. Blushing furiously, aware that he might have seen the scars on my bare arm, I pop my head out of it and quickly grab the coffee from him.
“You managed to make the machine work, then.”
“That thing is a beast.” Bastian shakes his head, leaning against the door and sipping his coffee as I pull my knees up inside my hoodie, like I used to do when I was little. Bastian smiles broadly over the top of his coffee cup. “You look good.”
I feel like my heart stops for a second.
“What, like a boy?” I ask sarcastically, giving him a glare.
“No.” Bastian looks entirely bemused. “Like you. You just look like you, with your hoodie … I don’t know, it’s cute.”
My cheeks heat up and I get that buzzy, mosquito/butterfly feeling in my stomach. Cute. Adorable. Would he keep saying these things if he didn’t mean them? Elizabeth’s face surges to the front of my mind and I feel so guilty I have to look away from him.
“Shall we get going after our coffee?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says, sitting down on the edge of the bed beside me.
The way he moves on so easily makes me think that I’ve imagined it.
He didn’t mean to call me cute in that way, just that it’s a cute hoodie.
Of course he doesn’t feel that way about me.
That chiding thought is immediately chased by the thought, Why would I care if he does?
“I have something to ask you,” Bastian says.
“Okay.”
“Are you sure you want to keep going with the spell?”
“Why would you ask me that?” I frown, sipping my coffee.
“Because you nearly died last night, and I need to know you’re not going to pull that kind of thing with the Black Shuck. It’s too dangerous. We can’t muck about.”
“What is it, anyway?” I try to remember the words from the spell: hair of the Black Shuck that stalks holy ground. “Some kind of werewolf?”
I say that half as a joke and then I realize that I don’t actually know if werewolves are extinct. Elizabeth would know, I think.
“It’s a hellhound.”
“Oh.” My stomach clenches. “A real hellhound? That’s … much worse than a boggart.”
Hellhounds are not magical creatures, not really, not in the sense that selkies or boggarts are, which exist in our world alongside us.
Hellhounds are made of magic and exist in other dimensions.
Historically, ancient witches used spells to pull them through to lay curses on people or places.
And now we’re going to try and pull one through to give it a haircut.
“Yes, it is, and I need to know you’re not going to do something … unexpected.”
I can tell he is holding back and I remember the things we yelled at one another on the beach last night: You’re so fucking reckless! He seems to be following my train of thought, because he leans closer before going on, his voice earnest.
“You were right yesterday. I fucked up by not telling you about my selkie plan beforehand. I should have, because we’re a team, Lando. We have to act like it.”
“We do?” I look at him a little skeptically. I appreciate the apology and everything, but I’m not going to say so if he’s just going to dump on all the ways I’m a bad teammate.
“Both of us.” He nods. “We’ll plan everything to do with the Black Shuck together, and …
I know you can’t control your shapeshifting but you can’t just go off and decide you’re going to throw yourself into danger when we’re facing down a hellhound.
There’s too much at stake and you’re too valuable. Okay?”
I remember the deal I made with the selkie to value my own life.
The first taste of coffee in my mouth has mingled with the salt residue around my lips into something bitter.
Does Bastian value me because he needs me for the spell, or because he values me?
Either way, he saved my life twice, but faced with a literal hellhound, he might not be able to do it again.
“Okay. I can … be more careful,” I say. “I don’t know why I keep shifting but I can try and pay more attention to it. Maybe, I dunno, warn you. There’s not much more I can do than that.”
“You don’t need to do anything more. Like I said, I know you can’t control it.” His voice is incredibly reassuring. “I just want us to be on the same page.”
“We are.”
He smiles at me. It’s distracting so I cough into my coffee and try to change the subject.
“So when will we do it?”
“I need to research what stage of the moon cycle is best,” Bastian says. “But once we know that, as soon as we can.”
“And then after the Black Shuck, we’ll be ready to do the spell?”
“Yeah, we need to get some earth from Elizabeth’s grave, but that’s it.
” Bastian shrugs, drinking his coffee. There’s something about the way that he says this, the casualness with which he throws out Elizabeth’s name, that feels like cold water poured on my head.
All the sweetness I’ve felt toward him suddenly sours.
He never even met her and yet he can talk about her grave so effortlessly, as if she’s just an ingredient on the list. It’s unreasonable, I know, because Bastian owes Elizabeth nothing, but it stings just the same and some of the old resentment I felt toward him slides up inside me, slippery and insidious.
“I’m going to have a shower,” I say shortly. “My hair is full of sand.”
“Cool,” Bastian says. “I’ll go in after you.”
As I clamber out of bed, I get a whiff of the scent of him, salty and sweaty.
Despite all my visceral annoyance, I can’t help myself.
It’s biological, utterly unhelpful, but I automatically wonder what it would smell like if I were to stand in the circle of his arms, held completely safe.
Don’t think about that, you idiot, I snap at myself, not daring to even look at him as I rush to the sanctuary of the bathroom.
I turn on the shower and am relieved to climb under it. I wash away sand and dirt and salt and try not to think about the scars I saw on Bastian’s chest. Yet I can’t get his words out of my head: You look good.
The drive home is painless. We talk about nothing and everything and I learn things I never expected to about him.
I learn that Bastian likes to sing along to songs while he drives, that he doesn’t have a great voice but his enthusiasm is infectious.
Soon, we’re both screaming lyrics to cheesy pop songs at one another as we bomb down the motorway.
I learn that his favorite book is Babel-17 (which I obviously tease him about for being a sci-fi nerd) and, when we stop at a service station, I learn that he loves pickled onion Monster Munch more than any reasonable person should.
I learn that his childhood in Cornwall was outwardly idyllic but inwardly full of complexity, a combination of finding magical acceptance and growth in his coven while also struggling with being the only nonwhite family in their town.
When they moved so Shasta could start college, he tells me how initially bewildering and then quickly affirming life in London was.
He describes the gigs he and Shasta attended, their adventures in the city, and a New Year’s Eve party gone hilariously awry.
Bastian is suddenly alive with storytelling, animated, sometimes forgetting to hold on to the wheel as he gestures wildly, forcing me to screech and lean across him to grab the wheel as he is caught up in recollections about his brother.
“It’s good to talk about him,” Bastian says quietly, indicating to change lanes.
“Tell me something about him that people don’t always know,” I ask. “Like … what did he order in a coffee shop?”
“What?” Bastian laughs and looks at me.
“It’s a way of getting a sense of a person.
” I smile. “When someone dies, we always talk about the big stuff, right? Their achievements and who their family were, but we don’t talk about how many sugars they had in a brew.
” After Elizabeth’s death, I unconsciously began making my tea the way she liked it, much too sweet, just to feel close to her.
I shake off that thought and try to lighten my tone.
“You know, a person who always orders a hot chocolate is a very different person to a Frappuccino drinker.”
“Not much different.” Bastian smiles. “He didn’t like coffee. He thought I was weird that I liked it so much. He’d always get a cup of tea.”
“Milk? Sugar?”
“White, no sugar.”
“See?” I nod. “That’s a steady, reasonable person right there. I feel like I know him so much better already.”
Bastian smiles at me widely and I can’t help admiring him, accidentally catching his eye for a second. I’ve never noticed until now what a beautiful color his eyes are, hazel but much more green than brown today. Like his brother’s, I realize, thinking of the photograph on his phone.
“What does my coffee order tell you about me?”
“Black Americano and a Samuel Delany book?” I snort. “That you secretly wish your life was a Kubrick movie.”