Chapter 9
Harrisford
Gwendolynne appears rather frazzled when she arrives at the library, a full twenty minutes late. Today, she’s ditched the horrid brown cardigan and is wearing a scrub top over a long-sleeve blue-and-white striped top. Her long black hair is pulled back into a braid.
Pudding, who’s perched on the desk beside me, turns her head—very slightly. Her melodious voice echoes through my mind. For someone who claims to hate this woman, you seem to be noticing a lot about her appearance—
Oh, shut it, I think back. Pudding just chuckles and goes back to being a statue.
“Sorry,” Gwendolynne says, dropping her bag onto the table. “I got held up at the hospital, and then I couldn’t find you.” She glances at my familiar, who is still wearing her bandage. “Oh, hiya, Pudding. Glad to see you’re looking better.”
Pudding raises her chin, preening. I roll my eyes, but my lips twitch with a smile.
It’s not surprising that Gwendolynne couldn’t find me.
I suppose I should have been more specific with the location.
The library is five levels of stone archways, sweeping staircases, and scores of crumbling books.
It’s a veritable rabbit’s warren of shadows and hidden nooks and crannies, the dimness not helped by the stained glass windows.
I had to choose our location strategically, so that the books wouldn’t listen in on our conversation.
Being from a magical legacy family, I haven’t had much occasion to visit regular human facilities.
But according to what I’ve read, regular libraries are nothing like ours.
In regular libraries, the books are there only to impart information.
And while in the Seamere College library, there are plenty of books and scrolls that do that, there are also whole sections devoted to listening books: books that are designed to absorb information.
The idea being that you can take a book to a lecture at a magical sciences symposium, for example, and it will absorb all the most up-to-date information.
Within hours, you’ll find it all logically arranged into volumes and chapters, printed like a regular textbook.
You can even take an existing listening book along and it’ll update the information already there.
They’re rare, expensive, and tremendously important: They’re one of the ways that magical knowledge has been kept, recorded, and passed down through the generations.
And it’s one of the reasons the librarians are so hell-bent on keeping visiting students quiet.
The issue is that the books even listen when they’re shelved, dormant, in the library.
On more than one occasion, I’ve pulled out a volume about some dry topic, such as the history of magical revolutions, and been reading a passage about the 1642 civil war, when all of a sudden the text will segue into something like oh yes, oh god, just like that, that’s it and it’s obvious that at some point a couple of irresponsible students got overly frisky between the stacks.
Which makes for interesting, but irrelevant, reading.
So for tonight I’d had to find a desk that was expressly out of range of any listening books. Not because I’m planning on getting frisky with Gwendolynne Chan, of course, but because I don’t want us to get caught discussing a potential UK-wide magical conspiracy.
Gwendolynne slides into her chair and pulls out a bunch of scrolls. I arch an eyebrow at her. “What are those, Chan?”
She glares at me, as though I said something rude instead of asking her a simple question.
“They’re dates,” she says. “Dates of when human deaths have occurred due to magiphilia. Periods of time when human hospitals have experienced surges and magical outages, and records of all the injuries sustained from magical familiars treated at public hospitals over the past year.” She taps one of the scrolls, her lips pursing. “Even Heli is listed here.”
I don’t really know who Heli is, and I don’t much care. I just lean back in my chair and level a look at her. “I must say, I’m impressed.”
She seems to swell with pride before realizing who she’s talking to. The joy drains from her face and is replaced by her usual scowl. “Yeah, well, it wasn’t me, really. It was Heloise who got it all from her mother.”
I say nothing, and Gwendolynne raises her eyebrows in disbelief. “Nora Chapman? You know, the president of the British Magical Medical Association?”
“Riiiiight,” I say. “I believe I’ve met her before, at a function.”
“Figures,” Gwendolynne mutters beneath her breath. “Anyway, Dr. Chapman was so happy her daughter was showing an interest in human medicine that she was happy to give Heli all this information. I think she’s hoping that Heloise might transfer to medicine—”
“Why?” I cut her off, genuinely shocked. “Why would one transfer when humans are—”
“—disgusting.” Gwendolynne gives a delicate wrinkle of her nose. “I know, right?”
She lapses into silence, and I take her cue, lowering my reading glasses from where they’re perched on my head and turning my attention back to my book. It’s maddening. I’ve trawled through dozens of history books already, and have found nothing about magical surges in any of them.
Is it because it’s never happened before? Or because…the records have been wiped?
We continue researching for ages, only exchanging a couple of words here and there. About an hour into our session, she slips her feet out of her shoes. Ten minutes after that, she draws her feet beneath her, tucking them under her backside.
I catch myself watching her more often than is strictly necessary: at the way she chews her lower lip absent-mindedly when she’s concentrating.
At the way she periodically rolls her head and rubs at the back of her neck.
At the way she tugs at her braid as she reads, until strands of smooth straight hair come loose and fall haphazardly around her shoulders.
I force myself to look away. I’m stiff, sore, and agitated; something is uncomfortably hard and it’s not just my chair.
Abruptly, I stand, my chair scraping against the floor. Gwendolynne glances up, a distracted expression on her face. She seems utterly unaffected by the fact that she’s been sitting for hours, doing nothing but perusing scrolls.
I flatten my lips in disapproval. She really is an incurable swot.
“Where are you going?” Since she’s barely spoken a word since her arrival, her voice is a little husky, and it’s doing something to my nether regions that I’d rather not analyze too closely.
“To get a drink,” I say, jamming my glasses into the chest pocket of my shirt.
I wait at the library café on the ground floor, wondering how much longer I can do this.
Sit in close proximity to Gwendolynne while she reads scrolls and bites her lower lip.
I wonder what’s going on in her head, what she’s thinking, whether she’s been studying so much that she’ll actually beat me and win that coveted top spot.
You seem troubled, Harrisford. Pudding’s tone is full of worry.
I sigh. “It’s nothing to concern yourself with. I’m just tired. Hopefully coffee will help.”
By the time I return with both of our drinks, Gwendolynne is gripping a scroll so hard it’s almost shaking, and simultaneously staring at her strap screen.
“Briggs,” she breathes. She looks up at me, brown eyes wide, excitement wrought plain on her face. Something twists inside me to see her looking so goddamned…happy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that look on her face before. “I think I’ve found something!”
I set her drink in front of her. It’s still steaming since I have, very considerately, put a keep-warm spell on it. Then I flop down into my own chair and take a swig of my coffee, hoping the caffeine buzz will hit soon. “What is it, then?”
She pushes the scroll she’s holding toward me. It’s covered in pencil marks from where she’s crossed off each date. I frown at it. “And what am I looking at, exactly?”
Drawing the scroll back to her, she shows me her strap screen. It’s so small that I have to squint to see anything, even with my glasses on.
“It’s the Witches Truths Society web page,” she jabbers, excited. “All the big news sites have been completely silent on the magical surges, but WTS have reported on every single one.”
“WTS?” I scoff. “Come, now, Chan. Be serious. Everyone knows that they’re deranged conspiracy theorists. Everything they print is rubbish.”
Her face flushes red and she glares at me. “No it’s not, you twat! Look”—she jabs a finger at the marked-up scroll—“every single date Nora Chapman gave us matches up.”
I snatch the page off her and stare at it, double-checking Gwendolynne’s assertion against the WTS’s list. Fucking hell, she’s actually right. Even the mini power surge we’d had at the Briggs family breakfast table is listed on the WTS website.
As I read, Gwendolynne picks up her drink and takes a sip. “Oh!” she gasps. “It’s tea.”
I’m so absorbed in cross-checking the lists that I don’t look up at her. I just mumble, preoccupied, “Yes. Earl Grey with one sugar and soy milk, right?”
She doesn’t respond, but I feel her eyes on me, so eventually I raise my head and frown at her. “That’s your usual, is it not? Or did I get it wrong?”
She has a curious sort of look in her eyes. She keeps staring at me for several seconds, then blinks and looks away. “Uh, no, you didn’t get it wrong. I…um…thanks.”
The back of my neck burns, and I duck my head again, pretending I’m perusing the scroll.
I suddenly understand why she’s acting so flabbergasted.
I’d gone and ordered her favorite drink without even fucking realizing it.
And it occurs to me that, embarrassingly, the reason—the only reason—I know it by heart is because I’m more aware of her than I’d care to admit.
It’s just because you need to beat her, my mind insists obstinately.
And it’s true—I’ve been watching her for years, attempting to sniff out her weaknesses, trying to figure out her methods and why she’s so smart and how I can one-up her in each exam.
She’s my ultimate rival, the only witch who has ever unseated me from top place.
Though it still doesn’t really explain why I’ve noticed her in the lunchroom. Or why I’ve memorized the way she makes her tea when she thinks no one else is looking.
And perhaps it doesn’t explain why I insisted that she dress Pudding’s wounds, when I probably could have taken my myth.creat knowledge, applied it to a smaller reptile, and managed it myself.
No. I was just worried about my familiar last night, that’s all.
I wasn’t thinking straight. After all, Pudding came into my life at a particularly vulnerable time, and since then I’ve been very protective of her…
Some might say overprotective. I most definitely was not trying to spend more time with Gwendolynne Guiying Chan.
I swallow, suddenly extremely conscious of the movement my throat makes as I do so. Gwendolynne is no longer looking at me, but instead is staring very hard at her scroll, a faint tinge of pink dusting the tops of both cheekbones.
“Chan?” I say eventually.
“Yes, Briggs?” she responds, still determined to not look at me.
“Do you have plans for tomorrow night?”
She gives a nervous laugh, a flush creeping across her décolletage. “Oh, you know me,” she says, rubbing at her neck. “I’ll just be chained to my desk, studying.”
I almost spit out my coffee but manage to swallow it down. “Can you take a night off?” My hands are clammy; I tighten my fingers around my cup. Something about the dates on Nora Chapman’s lists has given me an idea…and unfortunately, it involves my father.
Finally, she looks up, giving me a wary look. “Why?”
“Because,” I say, my mood darkening, “we need to break into my father’s study.”