“It’s not like the world’s going to end if it’s not open for a few hours,” Luna said. “You close it up all the time.”
“I close it up. Operative word: I.”
“I’m supposed to be your apprentice,” Luna complained. “It’s not like you’re paying me to be shop assistant.”
Luna used to work for me part-time finding and buying magic items, but when I took her on as an apprentice I started paying her a stipend; mage training takes as much time as a full-time job and I wanted her focused on her lessons. “Actually, your apprentice duties are whatever I say they are,” I said. “So in fact, right now, shop assistant is exactly what I’m paying you to be. Besides, you need the practice.”
“Shadowing you seems like practice.”
I gave Luna a look.
Luna put her hands up. “Okay, okay. Look, I’m bored. Nothing’s happening at class, there aren’t any tournaments so no one wants to practice, and I hardly ever see Anne and Vari these days. Even Sonder’s stopped showing up. And you haven’t exactly been Mr. Sociable.”
I didn’t answer. I don’t know what my expression was like, but Luna drew back slightly. “Well, you haven’t,” she said defensively.
We walked a little way in silence. A pair of girls came towards us, talking, and we split to let them pass between us. “What were you doing there?” Luna asked.
“Looking for someone.”
“Is it something to do with Richard?”
“No.”
“I was just wondering—”
“It’s nothing to do with Richard.”
“Okay.”
“I was thinking of talking to the guy giving that lecture.”
“Okay.”
I gave Luna a sharp look. She had a carefully neutral look, which made me suspicious. “So who was he?” Luna asked after a pause.
“Who was who?”
“The lecture guy.”
I very nearly told Luna to get lost. It wasn’t a nice way to treat her, but I’ve got a knee-jerk reaction to talking about anything really personal. My instinct with anything like this is to keep it to myself.
Up until last summer, my life had been going pretty well. I’d taken in a pair of young mages named Anne and Variam, and between them, Luna, and a Light mage named Sonder, I’d had something close to a real social life for the first time in ten years. I’d started to believe that I might have finally gotten away from my past.
I was wrong. In August, a group of adepts calling themselves the Nightstalkers showed up, looking for revenge for one of the uglier things I’d done while I’d been Richard’s apprentice. They couldn’t find Richard, but they found me all right and would have killed me if my friends hadn’t come to help. In the aftermath I’d told Luna, Sonder, Anne, and Variam why the Nightstalkers were after me and what I’d done for them to hate me so much.
Luna had taken it surprisingly well. She’d read between the lines and figured out most of the story before I’d even told it to her, and had decided that her loyalties lay with me. Variam, prickly but fiercely honourable, had chosen the same way. But Anne and Sonder had been less sure, and while they were still making up their minds I’d led the Nightstalkers, young and inexperienced and painfully idealistic, into a trap in which nearly all of them had been killed. I hadn’t had much choice, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it.
Both Anne and Sonder cut off contact with me when they found out. I’d had a short and painful conversation with Anne in which she’d made it clear that she thought what I’d done was unforgivable, and from the brief attempts I’d made since then to talk to Sonder I was pretty sure he felt the same way. A part of me agreed with them.
Keeping my past a secret hadn’t done me any favours that time. In fact, it had probably made things worse.
“He’s my father,” I told Luna.
“Really?”
“What’s with that tone of voice? I do have parents.”
“Uh . . . you never talk about them.”
“Yeah, there’s a reason for that. After they split up I didn’t see my dad for a long time, and when I did it was after my time with Richard.” I hadn’t been in good shape back then. I’d spent most of the previous year as a prisoner in Richard’s mansion, getting periodic visits from one of Richard’s other apprentices. “I told him bits of the story, skipped over the magic parts, but I did tell him what I did to Tobruk.” Namely, that I’d killed the evil little bastard.
“Okay.”
“My dad’s a pacifist,” I said. “He doesn’t believe in violence.”
“Seriously?”
“Why is that so hard to believe?”
“Well, you’re, um . . .”
I gave Luna a narrow look. “What?”
“. . . I’m not finishing that sentence. So the conversation didn’t go well?”
“My dad’s a political science professor who thinks violence is a sign of barbarism. I told him to his face that I’d committed premeditated murder and didn’t regret it.” With hindsight that had been a spectacularly bad idea, but I hadn’t been in much of a condition to think it through. “How do you think the conversation went?”
“Badly?”
We’d made our way off the university campus and back out onto the London streets, heading north towards Euston Road. “Do you talk to him much?” Luna asked.
“Last time was a couple of years ago.”
“Does he know that you’re . . . ?”
“A mage? No. He thinks I got involved with criminals and that Richard was some sort of mob boss. I suppose if I worked at it I might be able to convince him that Richard was a Dark mage, but I don’t think that’d be much of an improvement.” And if I told him what I’d done to those adepts last year . . .
“How about if I went and talked to him?” Luna suggested.
“No.”
“I could—”
“No. This is one area I do not want you messing around in.” I looked at her. “Clear?”
I saw Luna’s eyebrows go up and she shot me a quick glance. “Clear,” she said after a moment.
We walked in silence for a few minutes. I waited to see if Luna would push her luck, but she stayed quiet. We worked our way through the London back streets, the traffic a steady noise in the background. “So,” I said at last. “How about you tell me why you’re really here?”
“What?”
“You’re working up to asking me for something.”
Luna made a face. “Yes, it’s that obvious,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”
“If it’s a bad time—”
“Luna . . .”
“Okay, okay,” Luna said. “Have you heard anything from Anne? As in lately.”
I looked at her curiously. “No.”
“You sent her that message.”
“And I got a very polite nonanswer.” It had been my third try. Give Anne credit, she does at least answer her mail. “Would have thought you’d be in closer touch than me.”
Luna sounded like she was choosing her words carefully. “Do you think you could invite her to move back in?”
I looked at Luna in surprise, about to ask if she was serious. The look on her face told me she was. “I know things didn’t end all that well,” Luna continued hurriedly, “but it was nine months ago. She might have cooled off, right?”
“Why are you asking about this now?”
“Well, it’d be safer, wouldn’t it? I mean, that was why you invited them to stay.”
Back when I’d first met Anne and Variam, they’d been staying with a rakshasa named Jagadev. Rakshasas are powerful tigerlike shapeshifters from the Indian subcontinent—mages don’t trust them and vice versa, both with good reason. Jagadev had kicked them out shortly afterwards, leaving them as apprentices without a master, which in magical society is a lot like skinny-dipping in a shark tank. Anne and Variam’s only real protection had been their membership in the Light apprentice program, a kind of magical university. Trouble is, you’re not allowed into the program unless you’re a Light or independent apprentice in good standing, which Anne and Vari weren’t. To fix that I’d invited them to move in with me, effectively taking Jagadev’s place as their sponsor, up until last summer when they’d both moved out. In Vari’s case he’d become a Light apprentice for real, signing up with a Light Keeper. Anne hadn’t.