thaumaturgics, mate.”
Reg rattled her tail feathers so hard she nearly overbalanced. “Right. That’s it. Call him a freak one more time, my boy, and I really will poke you in your unmentionables!”
“Reg…” Gerald shook his head. “Honestly. What have I told you?”
“Bugger all worth listening to when it comes to Monk bloody Markham!”
Melissande dug her elbows into Monk’s ribs. “For the love of Saint Snodgrass just apologize, would you?” she muttered. “Or Reg’ll go on about this until the end of next week and I’m the one who has to live with her.”
“Sorry, Reg,” said Monk, rubbing his side. “Sorry, Gerald. Just kidding. No harm meant.”
“Ha!” said Reg, and chattered her beak. “I’ll remember that sincere apology for when I poke you in your-”
“Reg, give over, would you?” said Gerald. “We both know you’re not poking him anywhere.”
“You don’t know anything of the sort,” Reg said darkly. “Because there’s a great deal you don’t know about me. I may be a sweet and harmless bird these days, sunshine, but when I was a queen I did more with men’s unmentionables than poke them!”
“ Anyway,” said Monk, breaking the hotly embarrassed silence, “about my wonky wavelength expander…”
Gerald cleared his throat. “Yes. Right. Well, as I was saying, the problem’s fixable. I mean, I could fix it right now if you like, only-”
“Only no thanks,” said Monk, alarmed. “With my luck Uncle Ralph’s got a whole roomful of monitors trained on the house and with your screwball thaumic signature you’d set off an alarm, sure as shooting. Besides. It’s my mistake. I want to fix it. And I will fix it once I’ve got unlimited thaumaturgic power at my disposal again. But in the meantime…”
“Never mind,” said Bibbie, as her brother returned to the expander’s control panel and began to shut down his wonky contraption. “You’ll get it to work eventually, Monk. You always do.”
Monk flashed her a small smile. “Bloody oath.”
“So are we done here?” said Bibbie. “Or are you expecting me and Mel to climb back on those stupid pushbikes and pedal until our feet spontaneously combust?”
With a final shimmer and a series of clicks and groans, Monk’s expander deactivated. He closed the control panel, gave the contraption a last, regretful look, then frowned. “Sorry? What did you say?”
“Never mind,” his sister groaned. “Is there really food in the pantry or was that a lie to keep my bum on that bike seat?”
Melissande caught Monk’s guilty eye and smiled, with faint menace. “No, there’s food, Bibbie. What say we go downstairs and I make us all pancakes?”
“Pancakes?” Bibbie clapped her hands. “Really? With lemon and sugar and whipped butter and maple syrup?”
“And castor oil for afters,” she said. “Yes. Why not?”
“Oh Melly, I do love you,” said Bibbie, beaming. “Come on! I’m famished.”
She had to smile. Sometimes, for all that Bibbie was a breathtakingly beautiful young woman and a devastatingly powerful witch to boot, more often than not Monk’s little sister was hardly more than a child.
“Go ahead and fire up the stove, why don’t you?” she suggested. “Tell Gerald about what happened today with Mr. Frobisher. Monk and I will be right behind you.”
Taking the hint, for once, Reg flapped over to Gerald’s shoulder. “Mr. Frobisher,” she said, witheringly scornful. “That soggy old noodle! Didn’t I say he’d give us a headache, eh? Didn’t I? I swear, the next time that manky Sir Alec sticks his nose into the office I’m going to give him such a piece of my mind! Who cares if Frobisher is that Department stooge’s friend? Ha! Forget about caring. Who believes it? Friends? Sir Alec? Don’t make me laugh!”
“Hey,” said Melissande, as Gerald, Reg and Bibbie made their way downstairs, Reg’s ongoing outrage echoing in the stairwell. “Monk. Are you all right?”
Monk shrugged, not looking at her. “I’m fine.”
“Monk…”
With a heavy sigh he shoved his hands into the pockets of his threadbare jacket. “No. I am. Really. It’s just…”
She slipped her hand through his arm and leaned her head on his shoulder. She could feel his unhappiness like a small, damp cloud. “I know.”
His cheek came to rest on her newly-washed hair. “It’s not that I don’t understand that we need rules and regulations. Thaumaturgics are dangerous. Without rules and regulations, all those tedious checks and balances, well-”
“You get something like Lional,” she said quietly. “It’s all right. You can say it.”
“You never talk about him, Mel.”
“What is there to say? Lional’s the past. I’d rather think about the present.” And the future.
Specifically our future, as in-do we have one?
Except the time never seemed right to have that conversation. And while she was perfectly confident running Witches Incorporated, either on its own or as a disguise for Sir Alec’s mysterious Department, when it came to matters of the heart-when it came to her and Monk-all of a sudden she felt ridiculously shy and totally tongue-tied.
“Hah,” said Monk gloomily. “If I think about the present I get a nosebleed. I mean, for all anyone knows, Mel, I could be on the brink of a thaumaturgical breakthrough that will change the world as we know it. But Uncle Ralph-all of them-they insist on playing it safe to a ridiculous degree. I don’t understand it. What’s thaumaturgy for if not to make progress?”
Instead of answering him straight away, she looked around his crowded attic. Aside from the unreliable multi-dimensional expander she could count seven other experiments and inventions in various stages of completion. Everything from a scaled-down thaumic combustion engine to a funny little contraption he swore blind would brew tea without the need for human intervention.
“Maybe,” she said, her gaze inexorably drawn back to the deactivated expander, with its faintly ominous implications, “it’s that they feel Ottosland’s progressed far enough for the moment.”
“But-but that’s ridiculous!” he protested. “Thaumaturgy’s like a shark, Melissande. If it doesn’t keep swimming it’ll die. We can never stop challenging the limits of our understanding, if for no other reason than to make sure we don’t get left behind and some other country, like Jandria, say, a country without our conscience, gets ahead of us in the thaumaturgical race. Because if that should happen…” He shook his head. “Well. I dread to think.”
“I’m not saying I agree with your uncle, or the rest of those Ministry dodderers,” she said. “I don’t. If it was up to me I’d hand you a big bag of money and say have at it! Invent me something to make the world a better, safer place!”
He slid his arm free of hers and walked away a few paces. Shoved his hands back in his pockets and brooded down at a portable thaumic cauldron he’d said was cooking up a new and improved hex to keep Gerald’s silvery eye brown. Then he glanced at her.
“But?”
“But you’re forgetting about the politics of the situation,” she said gently. “And politics-”
He pulled a face. “I hate bloody politics.”
“I know you do, but so what? Politics is the sinew of our society, Monk. And like it or not you have to take that into account. You can’t just-”
“No, Mel. What I can’t,” he said, turning on her, his eyes wide and full of turmoil, “is stomach this constant interference. You know, they take my work, my inventions, the ones they find out about, anyway, or that I tell them about, and the ones I’m working on down at R amp;D, and once they’re out of my hands I don’t know what happens to them. I don’t know what they’re doing with them. I don’t know if they’ve been stuck on a shelf in a warehouse somewhere, or if they’ve handed them over to some other wizard to-to fiddle with-or-” He folded his arms over his head and stamped his haphazard way around the attic, neatly avoiding his various works-in- progress. “At least I know what happens to the work I do here, Mel.”
