Modern Magick

The Road to Farringale: 3

Jay stared at the staircase in consternation.

'Thanks,' he said faintly.

I made a flourishing gesture of invitation, indicating the proffered stairs with a sweep of my free arm. 'After you.'

'Uh. Why don't you go first?'

'Don't worry, the House won't hurt you.'

Jay gave me the are-you-crazy stare. 'I've narrowly missed having my car crushed by a ball of earth the size of four of my heads, almost been flattened by a flying set of stairs, and all of this has happened in the last ten minutes of my life.'

'All right. I'll go first.' I picked up my discarded creature carrier and set off up the steps. After a few moments' hesitation, I heard Jay's footsteps ringing behind me.

There was no door at the top, but there was a long window set with many small panes of glass. When I reached the top, about fifty of those panes flickered and vanished, creating an entryway just large enough to admit Jay and myself.

'Thank you,' I said. 'How convenient.' For beyond the makeshift doorway I could see one of the larger, oak-panelled drawing-rooms of the first floor, or what had been a drawing-room once. It was now used as a kind of common room, and one of its occupants was Miranda Evans, our vet and specialist in magickal beasts of all kinds.

'Hi,' I said as I wandered through the window, and set the creature carrier down at her feet.

She was lounging in the kind of shabby, velvet-clad wing-back chair in which Home abounds, her red robes partially open to reveal a chunky hand-knitted jumper worn underneath. Her blonde hair was half out of its bindings, as usual; she took one look at me and Jay and the present we'd brought for her, and immediately scraped it back into a more business-like ponytail. 'More work,' she said with her quirk of a smile. 'Lovely.'

'Alikats, breeding pair. Extracted from South Moors.'

Her brows went up at that, and she hastily swallowed the dregs of her cup of tea. 'Injuries?'

'None visible. I think they're unharmed, they just need a check-up and then resettling.'

By the time I had finished this sentence, Miranda was already on her knees, peeking through the bars at my slumbering alikat. 'Gorgeous,' she commented.

I'd lost her attention altogether, but that was all right. Jay and I watched as she gathered up our beleaguered pair; with a nod to us both, she left the common room at a smartish pace.

Jay glanced behind himself. The door we'd used had sealed itself up again, turning back into a window. 'Is it a coincidence that we found Miranda right here?'

'No,' I said, making a beeline for the kettle and the tea cupboard. 'That was the House helping us out. It does that.'

'When it isn't trying to kill us.'

'It wasn't trying to kill us.'

'Yeah, right.'

'It was trying to kill you. I was fine.'

This was a joke, of course, but I regretted it when Jay developed an expression of mingled anxiety and affront. I put a cup of tea into his hands to pacify him, or at least to distract him, neither of which worked. 'Haven't you seen the House do that before?'

'Nope.'

'It's because you're new,' I decided. 'It hasn't figured you out yet. It will soon.'

'Then it will stop trying to kill me?' Jay looked profoundly sceptical.