‘No.’
‘But Mum!’ Edie waved her arms in the air, almost hitting the sofa as she did so.
‘I said no.’ My voice was calm, even though, inside, I felt anything but. I hoped it conveyed to Edie that what I was saying wasn’t open to negotiation.
‘It makes sense,’ she argued.
I shook my head, pointing at her. ‘It does not make sense for this to interrupt your college work so close to your final exams. I will not have anything – natural or supernatural – damage your exam results, do you hear me?’
Edie huffed, folding her arms over her chest. ‘It’s not going to interfere. How am I supposed to concentrate with all this happening?’
‘You’ll find a way.’
I was really glad Ben and Fadil had gone home and that Thomas was still upstairs with Spectre. The three of them witnessing our argument would’ve felt too much like airing dirty laundry and brought back too many bad childhood memories.
‘What if I don’t want to?’ Her folded arms tightened around her.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Was she implying she didn’t want to study? That she didn’t feel it was worth it? Oh no she didn’t.
‘I don’t even want to go to uni anyway! So what’s the point?’
‘What?’ If I could’ve spit fire, I would’ve. ‘You will not miss out on educational opportunities because of this crap! Your studies are more important than that!’
‘But all this is so much bigger than my studies! Why don’t you get that?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘I do get that, Edie. But you deserve a life, too, don’t you? You deserve to be educated and happy and have friends and do all the other normal things that kids your age do. Otherwise, you’ll just get more and more isolated as you get older. And trust me: that’s not a fun place to be.’
Edie’s shoulders slumped. She knew I was talking from experience. My whole school had found out that I could see ghosts before I’d done my GCSEs, and it’d ruined my last couple of years of school as a result. I was lucky because I’d had Javi, Maggie, and Manju by my side, standing up for me when people called me crazy. Although sometimes, it was the people who believed that were worse – they saw me as some sort of messiah, or prophet, or messenger, and wanted to follow me around like lost sheep. I was so not a leader, nor did I want to be. My friends had helped keep everyone off my back.
Edie didn’t have that, though.
Josh had been her only friend at college, and now he could barely look at her. Barely acknowledge her presence. If she sacrificed her studies for the supernatural, I wasn’t sure if she’d ever be able to fully recover. It was a dangerous path to go down. She needed people without powers to keep her grounded. She was already surrounded by too many people who had powers as it was.
‘Look, I get it,’ I said, trying to reach out to her. She jerked away so that I couldn’t touch her. As much as it hurt, I didn’t blame her. ‘You want to save the world. You don’t want anyone else to get hurt. But you can do just as much from college.’
While I only half-believed that, it did seem to perk her up.
‘What do you mean?’
I sat on the sofa, the adrenaline from our argument wearing off.
I patted the spot on the sofa beside me. Edie took a seat, turning slightly towards me, but also keeping farther away than she usually would’ve.
‘Tessa is the only victim we know of who hasn’t crossed over,’ I explained. ‘We never know when she’ll be able to remember something. It could also make her ghost form a target for Goodfellow.’
‘You think?’
‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘Right now, we don’t know enough about him to know what his end game is. All we know is that he’s desperate for power. But the way he sought it when he was alive is unlikely to work when he’s dead. Powers don’t work the same without a body. If he hasn’t figured that out yet, he will soon. Then he’ll panic.’
‘So you want me to keep an eye out? See if he appears at college? Doesn’t that put Josh at risk when he’s at home?’
‘I don’t think he’d show up in rooms full of people, but he might be watching somehow. There has to be some way that he scouts his victims. If we can find that, we might be able to find out more about him or even how to get to him.’
Edie nodded. ‘All right, fine. I’ll go to college in the morning. But after, I’m going to see Tobias to see what he knows.’
I clenched my teeth. ‘I can’t go with you. I have a client meeting.’
‘That’s fine. Fadil can come,’ she said. An answer for everything.
‘Are you sure he’ll be up for that?’
‘I’m sure he’ll be up for an excuse to get out of the house,’ she said. ‘And he won’t want me to go alone, so even if he doesn’t want to go, he’ll come anyway.’
And she’d got me. There was nothing else I could say or do to stop her from visiting the bloody alchemist.
‘All right, fine. But you don’t skip your studies because of Goodfellow. Got it?’
‘Got it.’