The hotel Felix booked isn't really a hotel at all, at least not what I think of when I hear the word “hotel”. It's more like a bed-and-breakfast, this little cottage type house made of brick with climbing plants growing all over the front. It's owned by a couple and when we walk in, there's hardly anyone else there apart from the owners. They give Felix and me a key each and show us to a room down the hall, one with a window that looks out over a meticulously landscaped backyard.

“It's... nice,” I say, standing awkwardly in the middle of the room as the owner closes the door behind her, leaving Felix and me alone.

He gives me a look with one of his eyebrows raised as he tosses his backpack onto one of the two twin beds.

I flush in response. Well, what the fuck am I supposed to say? I couldn't think of a damn thing to actually talk to Felix about, not conversationally. I could pull my weight in a discussion about trying to find the staff or how much as an ass he could be, but casual small talk was outside of my skill set with him.

Besides, it is a nice place.

I throw my duffle bag onto the other bed and then drop onto it myself, staring up at the ceiling. “All right then, what now?”

Felix unzips his backpack and pulls out this huge white binder, laying it out in front of him. “Now I tell you where we're going to start looking first thing tomorrow,” he says.

“What about dinner?”

“You just cleaned out half of a Starbucks less than an hour ago.”

“Yeah, but that was an hour ago.”

Felix rolls his eyes so hard I'm surprised they don't get stuck in the back of his skull. “Fine. I'll order delivery or something. You're going to owe me a shit ton of money after all of this is over.”

“I don't have any money.”

“I'll accept an IOU, but there will be interest.”

I can't tell if he's serious or joking.

He scrolls through his phone for a few minutes, until he finds a pizza chain that lets him make an order completely online. I begin to suspect his French might not actually be that fluent after all, despite how good he had made it sound in the taxi.

“Okay,” he says, tossing his phone down, “it'll be here in twenty. Satisfied? Now can we get started on figuring out how we're going to keep you from becoming a victim of the public good?”

I grunt. He takes it affirmatively.

“Okay, so not much is known about the details of Merlin's actual life,” he begins, flipping through the pages in the binder. “A lot of it has become warped and corrupted through time, and a lot of the stories about him appear to have been combined with legends about other magicians around the same general time frame. The Merlin you hear written about in the 10th to 15th centuries is more like a semi-mythical amalgamation of dozens of unnamed magicians. But since the late 1700s, scholars have been able to do a decent job of piecing the reality of his life back together.”

I'm interested, and I can't really see what Felix is looking at from all the way over on my own bed. I hesitate, but then get up and go sit next to him, leaving a couple of feet of space between us, but giving me a much better view of the contents of the binder.

“But we don't really care about his life,” Felix continues. “It's his death that concerns us; specifically, his final resting place.” He turns a few pages, until he comes to what looks like a photocopy of a family tree, hand drawn and filled out in a tight, illegible cursive scrawl. The date on the bottom is from the mid-1800s. “Now, whether or not Merlin himself actually had any heirs is uncertain. There are some references after his death that he definitely did, but these are from people who never actually met Merlin himself, just quoting what Merlin's surviving contemporaries had told them. It is known that he had a sister, and she was married off to some powerful, wealthy non-magical landowner. Because of her status in the mundane world, family records of her and her children and her children's children have all been recorded. Her husband died soon after they married, but not before she had two children by him. Her husband must have had a little magic in him too at some point in his own ancestry, because at least one of her daughters was a magician as well. She married that daughter off to another magician, and re-incorporated the family line into pure magical blood. That line can be followed all the way down to about 1862,” he traces the family tree with a finger from the very top, down the the final name crammed into the bottom of the page, “when the last surviving direct descendent of Merlin's sister dies, childless. There are indirect descendents, of course. Most magicians are related in one way or another to this line, making us all great-great-great etc. grandneices and grandnephews and second cousins twice removed from Merlin and his family.”

“Sooo,” I say, looking up at him, giving him an expectant shrug. “What does that have to do with us?”

“Well,” he says, pulling out another family tree and laying the two side by side, “if you take into account overlapping family lines and general settlement regions, and if you're willing to make a few educated guesses where the known information becomes spotty, it could be possible, even likely, that my family line is one of the only ones remaining that is directly related, not to Merlin's sister, but Merlin himself.”

Now it's my turn to raise my eyebrows. “Uh huh,” I say. “You know, back in middle school I knew a girl who wanted to be an actress and was convinced she was a cousin of Angelina Jolie because she had the same last name.”

Felix glowers at me. “This isn't some vanity thing, the information is all really here.” He taps the second family tree angrily. “There are a few gaps in the records, but magicians were just as uncommon back then as they are now. If you can trace what magician families were nearby when the records go dark, you can make good guesses as to where the family lines pick up. My mom has been working on this for decades, and she's almost positive she's right.”

“You took all this from your mom?” I ask, looking down at the huge binder. “Won't she notice her life's work is gone?”

Felix shifts, and a flash of guilt passes over his face for the briefest of moments. “She won't notice, there's too much going on right now with the Council and St. Bosco's. We'll be back before she ever realizes it's gone.”

“Okay,” I say, “even if somehow you are right and you're the heir to Merlin or whatever, how does that actually help us find the staff?”

“Because it helps us narrow down where he might have been buried,” Felix replies. “It's known that he lived here, in Brittany, in Paimpont.”

“I thought Merlin was British?”

“Did you just not pay attention in Ancient Magical History at all last year, or what?”

“I remember learning about Merlin, but not his home address,” I snap back.

“He went to England for a while and earned himself a measure of fame and fortune doing odd jobs for powerful lords. His sister married a Saxon lord and that line settled in England, but by all accounts Merlin returned to France—though it wasn't really France back then of course. That's one part of the legends that seems to be entirely true, that he lived, and died, in the forest of Paimpont, and that whatever family he left behind carried on here. And that's the part that my mom has been able to trace. This branch of our family here,” again Felix traced through time with a finger, “goes all the way back to this region. She had to supplement a lot of oral history and old stories that have been passed down for generations for actual records, but we know we had family in this region at the right time, and there are only a few other known magician families that were settled in this area then.”

Then Felix pulls out a map, I assume a map of where we currently are because all the names look French to me, and he's outlined a region in red sharpie.

“According the King Arthur legends, a small area of Paimpont was the forest of King Arthur, called Brocéliande. It's only about 25 square miles, and pretty much certainly has nothing to do with King Arthur. If Arthur ever existed at all, it was in the 5th or 6th centuries and he was a Roman, long before Merlin's time--though the real Arthur may have had a powerful magician working for him that later became a part of the legends that were attributed to the real Merlin from the 8th century. But the legend of Arthur put him forth as a famous king, and Merlin was known to work for powerful English leaders, so I guess people just thought that the two would have made a good pair, and crammed their separate histories together into one super-myth.

"But what does remain true, is that Paimpont was definitely the known home of Merlin, and that the Brocéliande region may narrow it down to a more specific area, which later became associated with the King Arthur legend. Then you can narrow it down even further if you know what I do, which is the area of the forest of Brocéliande in which my family history claims we hail from.

"According to legend, Merlin was killed by a powerful female magician. Her name has been passed down as Vivienne or Nimue, but it's unclear whether either of those was ever what she was really called. Whether or not she actually did him in isn't totally clear either, but it seems likely. There are conflicting accounts, but her existence is pretty well confirmed even if her name has been lost to the centuries, and all of Merlin's contemporaries mention a woman who seems to vary between lover, enemy, and murderer.

"The legends claim all kinds of things, like she encased him in a tree or in stones, or the Lady of the Lake took him, but that's all Arthurian crap. There's a pile of stones in the forest called 'Merlin's Tomb', but it's really just a neolithic burial site. Most magical historians have guessed that if Merlin was killed in some kind of battle between them, his body would have been buried by his surviving family and she would have fled the region to escape punishment by the local community."

"Okay, so he's probably not buried in some giant magical tree or heap of stones. It seems to me like that actually makes it harder for us to find him, since there won't be a huge monument marking the spot."

"Oh how wrong you are!" Felix practically crows, and I lean away from him slightly in surprise. With a flourish he whips one one final piece of paper, a photo he printed at home, and holds it in front of my face.

It's a photo of a long, low stone building at the edge of a lake.

"What's that?" I ask.

"Paimpont Abbey," Felix replies, and he's grinning triumphantly. "Built in the 1200s in the heart of the forest of Brocéliande. And it was built on the spot of a monastery that had rested there previously which had been built in the 6th century, a stone's throw from where my family was known to be living at the time! Merlin was a respected and powerful magician, and I'd bet my life--well, I guess I'm betting yours, that he was buried in the monastery cemetery."

I take the photo from him and stare down at it, and then back up at him. "But... do you have any proof of this? Like, at all?"

Felix's face falls, and I can tell that the fact that I'm not falling at his feet to praise his genius is pissing him off. "Well we won't have absolute proof until we go there to check, but I'm pretty damn confident."

"Based on what, the fact that you had family living in the area Merlin might have lived in, and they they were near a monastery at the time? Merlin might not have been buried there at all, he wasn't a monk or anything, why would they? Hell, he might not even have died in Paimpont at all, and your family might not have been related to him at all. This is just a lot of 'ifs' that you're following like they're actual evidence, and I just..." I struggle fix words to the emotions that are boiling through me right now, "I just think that you dragged me all the way out here without any real idea of where the staff is. I think you made a lot of guesses and you think are right because you're always convinced of your own intelligence, but that this is probably going to end up some wild goose chase that's going to end in me getting run out of the magical world."

"I don't-" Felix begins, but I'm getting too worked up to stop talking now and the words are just tumbling over my lips now.

"This was all a huge waste of time, and when Ms. Cross finds out I'm gone, I wouldn't be surprised if she let the Council take me! I'm supposed to be in Mexico right now, learning how to actually control my magic, not in fucking France chasing after a staff that probably doesn't exist anymore! If the Council discovers I'm gone before I get back, they'll never let me have the chance to get to Mexico, they'll have me arrested the second I get off the plane in California and they'll take me straight to trial, where they'll strip every drop of magic I have out of me! My only choices are to go back to that, or to try to get to fucking Mexico from here without getting a chance to say goodbye to anyone that I care about! I'll have just disappeared in the night without even a goodbye or a thank you, leaving behind everything I ever knew because I thought you knew what you were doing!"

I'm on my feet now, but I don't remember standing up. I can feel myself shaking and my vision's gone sort of tunnel-y, and all I can see is Felix's stupid fucking face right in front of me.

He stands up too, and he's right in my face. I can feel his breath on me as he jabs a finger into my chest.

"I didn't have to do any of this for you, you ungrateful prick," he snarls. "I thought you might want another option than having your magic stripped. It's not like anything is going to fucking change if I'm wrong, is it? I'm either right, or your life as a magician is over. And I am right, even if you're too much of a moron to see it. But I don't care if you believe me or not, it's not my damn problem anymore. I gave you the option, I got you here. If you want to fuck off to Mexico, go right ahead, I won't stop you. I didn't make you come with me, it was your own damn choice. Do what you want, I don't fucking care."

He shoves me, not hard, just enough to force me out of his way. He crosses the room and leaves, slamming the door behind him.

I have to lay on the bed with a pillow over my head to calm down, and to keep me from exploding random objects in the room whenever I look at them. I made the mistake of looking at the idiotic binder right after he left, and all I could think was I just want to tear that goddamn thing up, and all the hundreds of paper inside suddenly rose in a whirlwind in the room, tearing loose and spinning around me until I was covered in dozens of papercuts.

Now they were scattered across the floor and the beds, so mixed up that they could probably never be put back in order again.