“Oh, yeah, I have a subscription; extra beans are under my desk in the bedroom.”
“Okay.” I drop my backpack on the sofa and hesitantly kiss the top of his head. I feel warm and tender when he smiles at me, basking in the blissful normality of affection between us. I watch him throw the squeaky toy for René and I think that maybe I’m trying to sabotage my own happiness. Maybe Counselor Cooper was right and I’m afraid of something new. Bastian is perfect and here I am, recklessly risking everything we have on some story from a peer mentor on a power kick. I’m mad at Kira, suddenly, furiously angry with her for trying to ruin it.She’s wrong about him,I think fiercely.She doesn’t know him like I know him!
I duck into Bastian’s bedroom and instantly smile. Unlike therest of the house, with its depersonalized decor and futuristic furnishings, Bastian’s bedroom feels like the home of a witch. Despite Eric’s taste imposing in the furniture and paint, Bastian has statues and little shrines and piles of books teetering everywhere so that the desk is practically inaccessible. I navigate round a structurally unsound stack of library books on conjuring circles and look at the many framed photographs he has cluttering up the surface. His grandparents, cousins, his mum, all scattered among the spell ingredients. I glance fondly at the evidence of our adventures: the bone in its jar, the name of the boggart rolled up in a little scroll, the vial with the black hair of the Black Shuck.
My eyes settle on a picture of Bastian and Shasta together, taken in summertime with Shasta wearing sunglasses and Bastian pulling a silly face. I smile at it, thinking that when I met Bastian I would never have imagined him capable of such a goofy expression. I pick it up, thinking he looks adorable, then I frown. Hiding behind the framed photograph, just peeking out from behind yet another book, there is a jar of dirt. I stare at it. Why would Bastian already have a jar of dirt? We’re meant to get the dirt from Elizabeth’s grave on the weekend.Unless he already had dirt from a different grave,a sly voice in my head says. A voice that sounds sort of like Kira Tavi.Unless he’s been lying to you about the ritual all along.I pick up the jar of dirt, holding it in my hand. It’s gray and dusty. It looks old. He definitely hasn’t dug this in the last week.
“Lando?”
Bastian is leaning in the doorway. He sees the jar of dirt in my hand. His face pales, just like it did when the Black Shuck attacked him, and in that horrible, ground-shifting moment, I know that everything Kira said was true.
“We don’t have our dirt yet.” I hold up the dirt and look at Bastian. “Whose grave is this from?”
Bastian swallows.
“Don’t lie to me,” I say, trying not to plead. There’s a sharp pain between my ribs, and if he lies, I will howl.
“Lando—” he starts, but I cut him off.
“Is it true?” I demand. “Did you try the ritual last year with a different shifter?”
“Who told you—”
“Just tell me!” I slam the dirt down on his desk and Bastian flinches, nodding.
“I… yes, I have tried it before, but I didn’t—that’s not what this is about—”
“Whose grave is this from?” I point at the jar.
“Shasta’s,” he whispers. I stare at him, waiting for an explanation, but I realize I don’t need one. Shasta’s name is the piece of the puzzle I need to understand everything the report said. It’s the context that was missing, because now I know the one thing, the only thing, that Bastian would do anything for.
“You told me you’d moved on. That you were moving forward. I wanted to move forward, too, but this… this was never about moving forward or about me,” I say slowly. “This was always about Shasta.”
I remember how, when we first read the book, he had muttered to himself,If this is all of it, why didn’t it…?He was referring to the time he’d tried before. The full sentence inside his mind must have beenWhy didn’t it work before with my other shifter?That first night I asked him if this was the kind of thing he did, weird and dangerous spells. He asked,Did someone say something?I was too wrapped up in scoffing at the idea that anyone at college wouldtalk to me to realize that he was worried I’d heard about Cameron Mackay. He was concerned I’d already heard the truth about him.
“You’ve been hiding this from me since the beginning.”
“You don’t understand.” Bastian’s eyes take on a frantic edge. “Back then, all of that, I was different. After Shasta died, I completely lost it. I told you I went a bit wild; I didn’t tell you how.”
“Tell me now,” I say, wondering how I am still managing to get words out.
“I was so angry all the time, I just needed to get himback.My family was broken and I was failing in college, looking at all these ancient spells, trying everything, and then one of my nana’s friends from our coven, she had an old photocopy of a fragment of the spell. I tracked down the book online, started trying to piece the spell together from the photos on the web page. I didn’t care how many classes I missed or anything.…”Arrogant in a way that disregards the safety of others.I remember those words from the report. I wonder, for the first time, if Bastian’s confidence that we would manage the boggart and the selkies and the hellhound was actually something else. Maybe he really didn’t care what happened to me.
“So you tried it for Shasta, you tried it with another shifter.” I nod, feeling a coldness settle inside me. “And she died.”
“Cameron,” he whispers. “From college. It was an accident.”
“How could you not tell me that you’d tried it before, and that someonedied?” I stare at him. “Unless you didn’t care, unless you didn’tcarethat you might kill me, too? They’re saying you targeted her.”
“No! Cameron recognized from some of the pages online that they were shifter spells, she thought it might need a shapeshifter! We hadn’t seen the whole book online, we didn’t know about theblood lock and what was missing, how could we? Cameron and I were on the same course, it wasn’t like I sought her out—”
“Like you sought me out,” I finish scathingly, and Bastian flinches. I realize that it’s true. “Is this the whole reason you came to Manchester?”
“After Cameron died, I… knew I needed to see the spell in person and… I needed to go somewhere else for college,” Bastian admits. “Dad told me this was my last chance. So I asked to move here.”
“Because your last shifter hadn’t been up to snuff, right? Inconvenientlydyingon you?”
“No!” Bastian’s face is twisted in sadness. “Cameron encouraged me, she gave me something to concentrate on after Shasta, she was into the idea of the Merlin Foundation, too—”
