Page 43 of Witchlore
“Lando, I’m worried you’re going into shock. You almostdrowned,” he says, crouching beside me and pressing icy-cold fingertips to my pulse. “I could get us a hotel but it will take too long so it’s this or the hospital. What’s it going to be?”
I see his logic. Just the idea of getting back to the car seems impossible and the house I grew up in is less than five minutes away. I think longingly of getting out of the wind and my wet hair is starting to freeze my brain.They’re in Paris,I tell myself.The house will be empty.I nod wearily, and Bastian lets out a huff of relief before throwing my backpack over one shoulder and dragging me slowly back toward the car.
The vintage Mini doesn’t have proper heating, just a hot-air blower that I press my frigid fingers against as I give Bastian curt directions along the seafront to my parents’ house. We pull into the driveway of the semidetached Georgian-style red-brick, separated from the wide expanse of the sky of East Beach by a neatly kept green and a long, flat road. He comes round to open mydoor, carefully helping me out of the car like I’m particularly frail, which isn’t very flattering, but I’m grateful because my feet are so cold they’ve sort of gone numb.
“Come in,” I mutter, fumbling as I put my key in the door. I nearly fall through it when it opens abruptly. I stare at the woman on the other side, perfect blond hair waved in that classic 1920s style, her eyebrows flawless and frowning, always frowning. She looks at me with no recognition for a moment, until she takes in my coat, my boots, my earrings, and the key in my hand.
“Orlando,” she says. Her voice is just the same: melodious, with a clipped London accent reminiscent of her class and the time that she grew up in, utterly different from mine, which adapted to the northeast brogue of the postman and milkman.
“Mother. You’re supposed to be in Paris,” I say. Her frown deepens.
“Your father is in Paris. I am due to join him tonight; my taxi will be here in ten minutes. I put it all in the email.”
The accusation that I never read her emails beyond the subject line hangs in the air between us. Behind her legs, I see the small suitcase she always takes, an old-fashioned one without wheels and made of leather embossed withSOUTHERNSon the side. She’s looking me up and down with a critical eye.
“What have you done now?” she asks sharply.
“Nothing,” I say automatically, and feel Bastian gripping my arm tightly. I look at him as he frowns between me and my mother, clearly trying to make sense of our unusually hostile dynamic. I don’t really want to hang around long enough for him to figure it out. “Let’s… let’s just get back in the car.”
“Are you kidding?” he hisses at me as I lean even more of my weight against him. “You drowned!”
“Shh!” I hiss back, but my mother simply raises one arched brow and sighs with a slight slump of her normally rigid shoulders.
“Again?” she says to me. I don’t answer. With a click of her teeth, she opens the door wider, which Bastian takes as an invitation before I can even protest and maneuvers me over the threshold. When she closes the door behind us and the whistling wind is shut out, I am suddenly filled with a sense of urgent claustrophobia. I’ve not been in a space with just my mother since I left for college. Part of me hoped I never would be again. Both of my parents still prefer to dress in postwartime garb—a lot of tweed, wool, and linen—and tonight, in wide-legged palazzo trousers and suiting, she is frustratingly glamorous. She looks me up and down in my scruffy clothes and steps closer. I try not to flinch back. Then she lifts a delicate hand and pinches my wrist. I know she’s only taking my pulse but I can’t help it, I stiffen and hold my breath, fighting every instinct honed in childhood to snatch my arm back and run straight up to my bedroom.
“Well, you are not dying,” she says blandly, her frown smoothing away as she drops my arm and looks at Bastian. “You are?”
“Bastian Chevret,” he says.
“We go to college together,” I say. Mother’s eyes narrow slightly and I know that she’s thinking about Elizabeth, the last person I had a college acquaintance with.
“Chevret,” she repeats softly. “A French name,non?”
As she speaks, a glittery white sheen of magic flutters over her features. Her hair shifts from blond to dark, her eyes from blue to brown. The scent of her magic that comes off her in waves is overwhelmingly familiar, pungent lilies, the smell of the worst moments of my childhood. I am glad Bastian’s standing next to me, stinking of salt and ocean. Bastian, I notice, hasgone slack-jawed and wide-eyed, instinctively looking at her hands, expecting to see a ring and movement, and finding none, he looks even more impressed. I glare at her for this ridiculous overt display of exactly how shapeshifters should be able to manage their power, to fluidly alter their bodies at will.Making me look bad, as usual.
“Yes, Haitian, my dad grew up in Quebec,” he says eagerly.He can’t take his eyes off her,I think with disgust. “You know French?”
“I was there during the war,” she says smoothly. I could roll my eyes at this veiled boasting; everyone knows that the main thing shapeshifters were utilized for in the war was spying, and it’s clearly worked. Bastian is looking at her—the flawless skin, the high cheekbones, everything about her that doesn’t look a day over fifty-five when, really, she’s over a hundred—with such awe. Then he looks at me, and I know he’s trying to work out what makes me so completely shit at all this. Mother smiles, as if she sees his exact train of thought. Her perfect eyes rest on me.
“Still refusing to settle in a form, I see, Orlando,” she says, then clicks her teeth when she touches my wet hair. I can’t help stiffening under her touch. She sighs heavily, as if my turning up looking like a drowned rat is a deliberate fashion choice designed to irritate her, and spreads her fingers in the triangle position. Panic surges through me, tasting like tannin on the back of my tongue. The jerk of adrenaline thunders painfully in my jaw and is accompanied by a singular, all-encompassing thought:Fuck, no.I stagger backward, bumping into Bastian, my heart racing as I try to get away from the magic inside her, the ominous white light gathering in her palms. She has an expression of such powerful disappointment that I have to look down at my soggy boots. “It was only going to be a drying spell,” she says.
“I’ll just change and sit by the fire,” I mumble. The awkwardness stretches. She always makes me feel this way, ungainly and clownish, naive and overly sensitive next to her implacable veneer of smoothness. Mother looks at Bastian.
“Forgive my daughter,” she says with the politest of smiles. The one she uses to humiliate me. “She’s always been uncomfortable with magic. If you could credit it.”
“They,” I say forcefully. “And I wonder why.”
She simply looks at me, as if I am a puzzle piece that refuses to fit and she didn’t cover me with the anger of her unmet expectations every day of my childhood.
“Your father was disappointed that we needed to send you the shroud,” she says softly. “There is a new tutor in Paris, up and coming, in fact. He would be more than happy to—”
“No,” I say firmly. No more tutors or specialists or tortures they call “techniques.” I won’t go back. “I’m working it out. On my own.”
We stare at one another. I can feel Bastian starting to fidget, because she is always the one who brings an air of etiquette to every situation and my bluntness, my rudeness, is like a social burr in the cogs of this exchange. This is what she does, turning even the most brash of witches into bumbling courtiers, cordially offering her back phrases they would never normally use—“Oh, thank you ever so much” and “Quite kind of you to offer”—and then every cruelty she gives me, every delicately crafted embarrassment can only be met with pleasantries. I won’t do it anymore. I refuse to say thank you, even if they raised me that it was the only correct thing to do. This was a house that esteemed politeness, all the way until the front door closed. Then, behind it, there was nothing but frosty recriminations. Finally, she blinks,and I know it’s over. This is how battles are won here, with a protest of silence.
“So I see.” Her eyes slide to Bastian and then back to me. There is a barely perceptible lift of the corner of her mouth, the edge of a sneer. “Another witch.”
It’s so rude, so unnecessary, and yet Bastian says nothing, because why would he? She’s an enchanting shapeshifter, she can get away with anything, but I know that comment wasn’t for him. I remember the look on her face the one time she came to the hospital after my suicide attempt, when Counselor Cooper explained about Elizabeth. The utter disdain, bordering on disgust. I won’t take the bait. Instead, I look at the clock in the hallway.
