I think when I showed up at Watford, people had sort of given up on the old prophecies. Or wondered if the Greatest Mage had come and gone without anybody ever noticing.

I don’t think anybody expected the Chosen One to come from the Normal world—from mundanity.

A mage has never been born to Normals.

But I must have been, because magicians don’t give up their kids. There’s no such thing as magickal orphans, Penny says. Magic is too precious.

The Mage didn’t tell me all that, when he first came to get me. I didn’t know that I was the first Normal to get magic, or the most powerful magician anyone had heard of. Or that plenty of magicians—especially the Mage’s enemies—thought he was making me up, some sort of political sleight of hand. A Trojan 11-year-old with baggy jeans and a shaved head.

When I first got to Watford, some of the Old Families wanted me to make the rounds, to meet everyone who mattered, so they could check me out in person. Kick my tyres. But the Mage wasn’t having any of it. He says most magicians are so caught up in their own petty plots and power struggles that they lose sight of the big picture. “I won’t see you become anyone’s pawn, Simon.”

I’m glad now that he was so protective. It’d be nice to know more magicians and to feel more a part of a community, but I’ve made my own friends—and I made them when we were young, when none of them were overly fussed about my Great Destiny.

If anything, my celebrity status has been a liability for making friends at Watford. Everybody knows that things tend to explode around me. (Though no people have exploded yet—that’s something.)

I ignore the staring from the other tables and help Penelope get our tea.

Even though we go to an exclusive boarding school—with its own cathedral and moat—nobody’s spoiled at Watford. We do our own cleaning and, after our fourth year, our own laundry. We’re allowed to use magic for chores, but I usually don’t. Cook Pritchard does the cooking, with a few helpers, and we all take turns serving at mealtimes. On weekends, it’s help yourself.

Penelope gets us a plate of cheese sandwiches and a mountain of warm scones, and I tear through half a block of butter. (I eat my scones with big slabs of it, so the butter melts on the outside but keeps a cold bite in the middle.) Penny’s watching me like I’m mildly disgusting, but also like she’s missed me.

“Tell me about your summer,” I say between swallows.

“It was good,” she says. “Really good.”

“Yeah?” Crumbs fly out of my mouth.

“My dad and I went to Chicago. He did some research at a lab there, and Micah and I helped.” She loosens up as soon as she mentions her boyfriend’s name. “Micah’s Spanish is amazing. He taught me so many new spells—I think if I study the language more, I’ll be able to cast them like a native.”

“How is he?”

Penelope blushes and takes a bite of sandwich so she doesn’t have to answer right away. It’s only been a few months since I saw her last, but she looks different. More grown up.

Girls don’t have to wear skirts at Watford, but both Penelope and Agatha like to. Penny wears short pleated ones, usually with knee-high argyle socks in the school colours. Her shoes are the black sort with buckles, like Alice wears in Wonderland.

Penny’s always looked younger than she is—everything about her is round and girlish, she has chubby cheeks and thick legs and dimples in her knees—and the uniform makes her seem even younger.

But still … she’s changed this summer. She’s starting to look like a woman in little girl’s clothes.

“Micah’s good,” she says finally, pushing her dark hair behind her ears. “It’s the most time we’ve spent together since he was here.”

“So the thrill isn’t gone?”

She laughs. “No. If anything, it felt … real. For the first time.”

I don’t know what to say, so I try to smile at her.

“Ugh,” she says, “close your mouth.”

I do.

“But what about you?” Penny asks. I can tell she’s been waiting to interrogate me and can’t wait any longer. She glances around us and leans forward. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“What happened when?”

“This summer.”

I shrug. “Nothing happened.”

She sits back, sighing. “Simon, it’s not my fault that I went to America. I tried to stay.”

“No,” I say. “I mean there’s nothing to tell. You left. Everyone left. I went back in care. Liverpool, this time.”

“You mean, the Mage just … sent you away? After everything?” Penelope looks confused. I don’t blame her.

I’d just escaped a kidnapping, and the first thing the Mage did was send me packing.

I thought, when Penny and I told the Mage what had happened, that he’d want to go after the Humdrum immediately. We knew where the monster was; we finally knew what he looked like!

The Humdrum has been attacking Watford as long as I’ve been here. He sends dark creatures. He hides from us. He leaves a trail of dead spots in the magickal atmosphere. And finally, we had a lead.

I wanted to find him. I wanted to punish him. I wanted to end this, once and for all, fighting at the Mage’s side.

Penelope clears her throat. I must look as lost as I feel. “Have you talked to Agatha?” she asks.

“Agatha?” I butter another scone. They’ve cooled off, and the butter doesn’t melt. Penny holds up her right hand, and the large purple stone on her finger glints in the sunlight—“Some like it hot!”

It’s a waste of magic. She’s constantly wasting magic on me. The butter melts into the now-steaming scone, and I bounce it from hand to hand. “You know Agatha’s not allowed to talk to me over the summer.”

“I thought maybe she’d find a way this time,” Penelope says. “Special measures, to try to explain herself.”

I give up on the too-hot scone and drop it on my plate. “She wouldn’t disobey the Mage. Or her parents.”

Penny just watches me. Agatha is her friend, too, but Penelope’s much more judgemental of her than I am. It’s not my job to judge Agatha; it’s my job to be her boyfriend.

Penny sighs and looks away, kicking at the chair. “So that’s it? Nothing? No progress? Just another summer? What are we supposed to do now?”

Normally I’m the one kicking things, but I’ve been kicking walls—and anyone who looked at me wrong—all summer. I shrug. “Go back to school, I guess.”

*   *   *

Penelope’s avoiding her room.

She says Trixie’s girlfriend came back early, too, and they don’t have any personal boundaries. “Did I tell you Trixie got her ears pierced this summer? She wears big noisy bells right in the pointy parts.”

Sometimes I think Penny’s Trixie diatribes are borderline speciesist. I tell her so.

“Easy for you to say,” she says, all stretched out on Baz’s bed again. “You don’t live with a pixie.”

“I live with a vampire!” I argue.

“Unconfirmed.”

“Are you saying you don’t think Baz is a vampire?”

“I know he’s a vampire,” she says. “But it’s still unconfirmed. We’ve never actually seen him drink blood.”

I’m sitting on the window ledge and leaning out a bit over the moat, holding on to the latch of the swung-open pane. I scoff: “We’ve seen him covered in blood. We’ve found piles of shrivelled-up rats with fang marks down in the Catacombs.… I’ve told you that his cheeks get really full when he has a nightmare? Like his mouth is filling up with extra teeth?”

“Circumstantial evidence,” Penny says. “And I still don’t know why you’d creep up on a vampire who has night terrors.”

“I live with him! I have to keep my wits about me.”

She rolls her eyes. “Baz’ll never hurt you in your room.”

She’s right. He can’t. Our rooms are spelled against betrayal—the Roommate’s Anathema. If Baz does anything to physically hurt me inside our room, he’ll be cast out of the school. Agatha’s dad, Dr. Wellbelove, says it happened once when he was in school. Some kid punched his roommate, then got sucked out through a window and landed outside the school gate. It wouldn’t open for him again ever.