Chapter 5
Gwendolynne
My head jerks down to eye Percy, who is still tucked beneath one arm. I’d been so shocked by the news of the explosion that I’d forgotten to keep him hidden. Luckily, everyone else is too caught up trying to pacify their own pets, and no one seems to have noticed.
“Did you…speak?” I ask, staring at his one unblinking eye.
He narrows said eye and turns his head away.
Of course I did. His voice is still inside my head. What do you think I am doing? Does it appear as if I am performing a jaunty song and dance?
My pulse is drumming in my ears, and I squeeze my eyes shut, shaking my head. “But you can’t…I can’t…I don’t have a permit.” I open my eyes again, my brows knitted. “You can’t be my familiar.”
It appears that I am, Hairless One. Believe me, I’m not happy about it either. First, you stuff me beneath that awful cardigan. And then you attempt to feed me fish from a tin. A travesty! He huffs out a breath. This is not how I envisioned my life going, either.
My mouth is still open, and I shut it again.
To be honest, I’ve never thought about how familiars don’t get a say in the decision to bond with a human.
It’s the human who purchases the permit, and the Office of Magical Animals that opens the connection post-approval.
This revelation brings up all sorts of uncomfortable thoughts about the bodily autonomy of sentient creatures.
And, aside from that, this whole situation is just so very wrong.
Percy might not be aware of the Ministry’s rules and regulations, and how serious a transgression it is to have an unregistered familiar, but I am.
For Percy to have connected with me without the official bonding ritual…
Something has gone seriously awry. The normal procedure has been circumvented, as though the magical world has tilted on its axis, and the usual controls have just slipped away.
Was it some sort of power surge? Has an unprecedented swell of magic somehow short-circuited everything?
I don’t have time to find out. Already the animals, who are all going feral, have started to cause injuries to their human hosts.
Conall’s arms are covered in burn marks from where his guinea pig has scorched him, and Isla’s blond hair is a snarled mat from her parrot’s grasping claws.
Danny is nursing a bite wound inflicted by Artemis’s fangs, and Heloise…
I don’t even want to know what injuries Heloise is sustaining, being dragged along by a unicorn that can gallop at up to sixty miles per hour.
“Can you help?” I ask Percy. “Can you channel the excess magic?”
He raises his nose, sniffing the air, then wrinkles his lips back in a Flehmen response to taste it. Then, finally, he says, I certainly can. Unlike these amateurs, I have been adapting to excess magic for months.
My voice is breathless. “Then do it. Please.”
What will you give me?
My heart lurches in my chest. I don’t have time to negotiate, but the cat isn’t giving me much choice.
“I’ve already offered you everything I have,” I say, flustered. “Fish…cheese…beef jerky.” My voice is rising with my stress levels. “The only other thing I have is a tin of baked beans—”
Sold, Percy says, and I only have half a second to shoot him an incredulous look before he shifts his weight beneath my arm and lets his eye fall shut.
For several seconds, nothing happens. “What are you doing?” I ask.
He doesn’t bother to open his eye. I am asking the other familiars for their consent, he says, as though it is the most obvious thing ever. Before I drain their magic.
“Oh.” Of course he is, and rightly so. I fall silent, chagrined, thinking about the myriad of ways animals are better than humans.
Eventually, his small body starts vibrating, his black hair standing on end…
And then slowly, slowly, the magic starts to stream into him. The other animals begin relaxing. They stop thrashing and writhing and biting and scratching, and their owners slump their shoulders, letting out sighs of relief.
Percy, meanwhile, is getting hotter and hotter.
Sparks begin to fly off his fur, and although at first I can ignore it, it starts becoming more frequent, more relentless, the amplitude of the electricity higher.
And my arm starts to burn where he touches my bare skin, smoke billowing from his black patchy coat.
“You’re getting hot,” I whisper-hiss, and Percy just opens his eye. I could swear he raises one eyebrow at me, even though logically I know cats lack pronounced facial expressions.
Of course I am. If you thought that I could channel this amount of magic and remain at 38.6 degrees Celsius, then your common sense is sorely lacking.
I clench my teeth. Just my luck; I finally get a familiar and it turns out he’s a colossal jerk. Girding myself against the pain, I try to stay quiet. But just as the other animals all calm down, Percy has a surge of extreme heat that sears into my arm like a brand.
“Dragon’s balls!” I yelp, dropping him, and the other students all look up. Percy—the little shit—sprints off like a black blur, slipping into the forest of legs.
I bolt after him. I can’t risk him being caught, and me being found out. It was foolish for me to even pick him up—I only did because I had thought that he was scared.
So foolish.
He sprints down one corridor, and the next, and I follow, cursing him the whole while.
“Come back, you little turd!” I shriek, the words choked off by my shortness of breath.
“As soon as I catch you I’m sending you right back to Gertrude’s!
” It’s an outrageous lie, and I’m sure he knows it as well as I do.
As we run, I notice that many of the doors have been flung open by the magic surge. Some of them are hanging on their hinges, some of them are burned, some of them have had holes blown through. It’s a fucking mess. Magical Maintenance are going to have their work cut out for them tomorrow.
Finally, he slips into a room at the end of one corridor, through a jagged hole in the door.
I don’t recognize this place—it’s a wing I haven’t been to before.
It looks…nice. The doors here, though ruined, are all paneled mahogany, unlike the cheap MDF doors in the dorm rooms of my wing.
There’s plush carpet on the hall floor—a far cry from our scuffed laminate—and actual magetorches in sconces line the walls instead of fluorescent lighting.
This must be the south wing, where the rooms cost a bomb in boarding fees.
No matter, I think. Likely all the rich folk would have been at the charity gala, or else drinking in the bar downstairs where cocktails are like, thirty magecredits apiece.
They often do that of an evening rather than hanging out with us plebs in the common room (not that I hang out there, anyway).
I creep along the shadowed corridor, careful to keep quiet so that Percy doesn’t hear me and get spooked. I’m practiced at approaching skittish cats, and the plush carpet swallows the sound of my footfalls, so I’m practically silent as I enter the darkened room.
It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, and when they do, I have to stifle a gasp.
This room is so far beyond anything I’d imagined.
Our dorm rooms, the ones that the likes of me and Bridie Masters and Pen Ferguson occupy, are utilitarian, consisting of nothing but worn carpet, a single bed, a desk, and a wardrobe made of pine.
We try to make them look as nice as we can, we really do.
Some of us stick posters up, or perform decorating charms. And I have the bar fridge stashed beneath my desk—a lucky find I picked up off the pavement because a neighbor no longer needed it.
But this room? This room! It’s absolutely stunning.
The walls are a dark sort of paneled wood, and there’s an actual fireplace set into the far wall, though it’s not lit.
The bed is big, a four-poster, and lined with silky white curtains.
The bedclothes are rumpled, but in that styled-for-a-magazine-shoot kind of way: a navy duvet spread over crisp white sheets; pillows and cushions piled high at one end, leaning against a carved wood headboard.
I nearly salivate at the walls of bookshelves, all stuffed with leather-bound books.
And the antique desk is enormous, also mahogany, an elegant magelamp with an actual lampshade perched atop it.
I edge closer, unable to stop myself from running my fingers along the desk’s varnished surface. There are pieces of parchment scattered about, a fountain pen in a stand, and a high-backed leather chair. It’s all very elegant, and refined, and…
Where is Percy?
I drop to my hands and knees and begin to crawl around. I’m trespassing in some rich person’s room, someone who has way more money to pay lawyers than I do. I need to get in and out, fast.
Percy isn’t under the desk, and he’s not beneath the bed.
I search behind a cushy, wingback armchair that sits in what I presume is the “library.” I even paw through the unnecessarily extravagant number of pillows.
Who needs this many pillows, anyway? Fucking royalty?
I roll my eyes. Perhaps someone has stashed a pea under the mattress.
There’s only one more place to look. A door, fitted into the wooden wall, is standing ajar. I tiptoe over and push it slightly. It opens silently, without resistance.
The scent of men’s cologne hits me immediately, something that smells vaguely familiar. Ignoring this fact, I whisper softly into the darkness.
“Percy? Are you in here?”
There’s no answer. And it’s dark. So I flip on the magelights, which flicker into brightness.
Oh hell no. This wardrobe is enormous. It’s almost as big as my entire dorm. And no—oh no. Oh no no no no no.
I recognize the clothes here.
Lining each rack are rows and rows of linen shirts and equally many neatly hung trousers.
Hanging in the far corner are several clean, pressed coveralls, and on the opposite wall are scores of fancy robes; I spot dress robes and tuxedo robes and travel cloaks and numerous long, soft, woolen scarves.
A neat row of ties have their very own rack, and displayed on a shelf beneath the window there are cuff links, a spare strap, and a shiny silver fob watch, imprinted with the initials HFB.
Oh, lords save me. HFB.
I’m in the bedroom of my worst fucking enemy.
I need to get out. And quickly. Dropping back to the floor, I begin searching through the many shoe racks, all lined with shiny, expensive-looking shoes.
There are studded boots and loafers and dress shoes and—thank the gods—Percy himself.
He’s wedged himself unceremoniously behind a pair of brogues.
Or at least I think they’re brogues. From the looks of it, Percy’s let off a mini explosion, and the leather is kind of charred.
Good, I think vindictively.
“Percy,” I whisper, keeping my voice low and urgent. “Come on. Quickly! We need to get out of here.”
He’s silent for a moment, before his voice rings, loud and clear, inside my head. I don’t think I shall, he says. I am comfortable here, and besides, perhaps it would do you good to be exposed to someone with better fashion sense.
I scowl at him. “My fashion sense is just fine, thank you very much.”
He gives me an appraising look with his slitted yellow eye. The cardigan you are wearing says otherwise.
I give a groan of exasperation. It really isn’t my fault that I’m forced to buy clothes at charity shops. “This isn’t funny, Percy. Do you know whose room we’re in? If we’re caught, we’re going to be in so much fucking trouble. Harrisford Briggs is a selfish, pompous, arrogant prick and—”
And it’s like this—on the floor, insulting Harrisford, with my bum high in the air—that I hear the drawling voice behind me. The voice that never ceases to fill me with incandescent rage.
“Chan? Is that you?” Harrisford says. Then, he adds, as my heart pools in my stomach, “What the fuck are you doing in my room?”