So I veer away from talking about familiars. “Do your parents know if anything like this is happening in humans?”
“Magiphilia?” Heloise reaches beneath one of her pillows andwhips out a brand-new-looking laptop. “Hang on,” she says. “I’ll ask.” She takes a Magecorp-branded powerbank and plugs it in, booting the computer up.
I lean back in my chair as Heloise taps out a message to her mother, her long fingers flying across the laptop’s pristine keyboard. It’s not long before we hear thedingthat tells us Dr.Chapman has replied.
Heloise’s eyes scan the screen, and she reads out her mother’s message, paraphrasing it slightly. “She says that there are sporadic reports of magical surges affecting humans too.” I grip the armrests of my chair as my friend continues reading aloud. “People have been randomly disappearing. Apparently there have even been deaths, though they can’t identify a pattern. There’s been an increased incidence of bites and scratches from magical familiars. And some hospitals across the country have been experiencing random magic outages.” Heloise raises her big brown eyes to meet mine. “It’s chaos.”
“Deaths.” My mind has snagged on that word, which tumbles from my mouth like a stone. I do a quick search on my strap, tapping the cracked screen. My heart starts pounding until all I can hear is roaring. “People havedied, Heli…” I shake my head in disbelief. “But it hasn’t made the news.”
Heloise frowns and returns her attention to her computer screen. “Listen to this: Mum also says she’s been trying to secure some grant funding to study this phenomenon, since nothing like this has ever been reported in any of the medical literature. She says there’s a group in Bristol who are keen to spearhead the research, but the Ministry keeps on declining their application…” Heloise trails off, two fingers pressed against her lips. “That almost never happens, Gwen. Everyone knows that with my mum’s connections, if she backs a grant application, it almostalwaysgets approved.”
My stomach churns, and all of a sudden I feel sick. Deaths in themagical community. Explosions at a charity gala. Familiars going feral. Hospitals randomly losing magical power.
And behind it all, Darghan Briggs acting strange, and the Ministry declining grant applications that should technically be a shoo-in.
I force myself to dig my fingers into the cracked vinyl of the hospital chair to keep from clawing at my face.
As much as I’m loath to admit it, Harrisford Briggs is right. This problem is big. Bigger than I’d initially thought. “All the way up to the Ministry” big.
And if we don’t figure out what’s behind it, it could destroy us all.
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 ofcrumbling 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 arenothinglike 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 tolisteningbooks: 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 likeoh yes, oh god, just like that, that’s itand 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.Notbecause I’m planning on gettingfrisky 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.”
