PART 4.

She wakes to a hesitant tap-tapping against the window glass. For a moment she considers lying still, pretending she isn't awake because she still doesn't know what to say to him. Her everything hurts – her broken body, the dripline feeding medicines (at best, a stall) directly into her bloodstream, the leaden chain of her guilt tying her down.

But she made sure the window was left open for him. Just in case.

"You can come in," she says, her voice dry and scratchy from her restless nap.

The tiny owl awkwardly levers itself into the room, offering only a sad little hoot in greeting. Kitty pushes herself up into an almost-sitting position, and distracts herself by pouring a glass of water. The owl perches gingerly on the back of the guest chair, its golden eyes focussed on a point somewhere behind her head.

"If you're not going to help, the least you could do is make yourself look reasonable," Kitty complained. She was elbow-deep in washing up, a situation that had only eventuated due to the way her so-called friend had described her kitchen, and found it highly troubling that he now refused any kind of assistance that wasn't cheekily pointing out any bits she'd missed while buzzing around as the world's most irritating beetle.

"I would take a larger form, but I'm afraid there just isn't any room." Bartimaeus alighted on the tap, shiny blue carapace folding neatly over his delicate wings. "And all that water. I'm afraid that does not do a djinni's essence any good, goodness me no."

"B, if you don't pick up a damned washcloth right now, I will dunk you in here."

He tilted something that could have been a face up at her. "You wouldn't."

Kitty lifted a dripping hand. "Try me."

Bartimaeus gave a deep sigh, rolled his possibly-eyes, and changed. A brow-beaten, but still very pretty, Roman slave-girl stood beside her, her shapely legs barely concealed by a torn tunic.

"What would you have me do, great master?" Bartimaeus looked up at her through thick lashes, his voice as gentle and lovely as his new form. "Must I scrub your filthy floors? Or perhaps launder your stiffest clothing? Anything to avoid your harsh punishments."

In hindsight, Kitty should have just laughed. He was only teasing her, playing the part of the oppressed and the fearful in defiance of her asking him for an honest favour.

But Kitty couldn't laugh at it. Not when she knew he had said such things entirely in earnest so many times before. Not when hundreds of his other masters would have looked at his beautiful form, heard his desperate pleas, and razed his essence anyway.

"I'm sorry -" she stammered, taking a step away from him. He's still a slave, her mind rumbled, you can't forget that, he wouldn't even be here if he had any choice in it...

Bartimaeus moved before her mind could even comprehend why – he caught the teacup that had slipped from her fingers barely an inch from the floor. Her thoughts of guilt were rapidly replaced by far more confusing ones: how his skin radiated heat where it pressed against hers, how he smelled, not of sulfur or brimstone, but like summer after a bitter winter.

Bartimaeus stood again, but didn't move away. "Careful," he said, his wide doe-eyes sparkling. "It's one of your only nice ones."

Kitty had never worried that she was like Martin and Timothy, and their not-so-secret regard for each other. She never felt drawn to other women. But Bartimaeus was as lovely to her then as he had ever been, with his half-smirk and teasing eyes, and it didn't matter to her if the rest of him looked female. In the farthest, fuzziest, deepest recesses of her sub-standard human mind, Kitty finally admitted to herself just how badly she wanted him, in a purely biological sense.

He was so close, she could have – but she didn't. She whispered the dismissal instead, and didn't even try to stop the teacup from smashing on the tiles.

Their last conversation plays itself over and over in her head. She hopes with everything she is that this isn't their final one. The water trembles back and forth in time with the shaking of her hands, but still she waits for him to break the silence.

"You look terrible," he says eventually.

"So do you," she shoots back. "And you don't even have an excuse."

That ruffled his feathers. His essence softens into Ptolemy's form, legs carefully crossed, a hunted look in his borrowed eyes.

"I can have you dismissed, if that's what you want." Kitty forces the words out. "You won't be summoned again."

Bartimaeus laughs. It sounds cold, and hollow. "Trust me Kitty, if I wanted that the kid would be dead. He garbled the protective clauses something awful."

"What do you want, then?"

The question sneaks past her lips, tainting the air with all its unspoken possibilities. She tries her best to restrain it, but the sight of him like this, still surprised after all these years that she actually has an interest in what he wants, reignites old hope.

"A promise," he says, so quietly she can barely hear.

She nods. "Anything."

"See, you say that," the djinni speeps out of his chair, forfeiting his view of her for one of the stars. "But you don't really mean it, do you? You can't. You don't understand what 'anything' means. Two thousand years is just a number to you, Kitty." He sighs, deep and tired. "You don't understand how heavy they are to carry."

"Two thousand – what?" Kitty leans forward, as much as she is able. "Is this about Ptolemy?"

Bartimaeus bows his head, Ptolemy's dark hair covering his face. "He'll be happy there," he says, his voice a tender, wistful breath. "If you're right. He belonged there. Even when he was just..." The Egyptian boy's delicate fingers trace the thin scar, always so dutifully replicated, on his chin. "He fit in there. Exactly the way you didn't."

Kitty's pride was such that she would not allow herself to cry, even when faced with such undeniable scorn. Would Bartimaeus ever take her form, after she was gone? Would he remember her with such fondness that he couldn't help but recreate her likeness out of himself?

"Ptolemy will not be summoned, Kitty. I want your word on that."

"Of course," she promises. "But you have to promise me something in return."

He tilts his head to hers, listening. Kitty casts her resolve in stone.

"That I will be."

Kitty refused to summon him for almost a year after that. It wasn't fair, she knew: he was a spirit, she was a human. If he wanted to see her, he had to damn well wait until she was ready.

She kept busy. She worked on the book mostly, spending her days locked up with illegal books on demonology and her typewriter, picking out stilted word after stilted word. She missed Bartimaeus, yes, but her feelings faded as they always did. After eight months she could even write about him – careful and unbiased – without wishing he was there by her side, feeding her words when she had none.

"You can't be serious. Not even – not even you Kitty, you couldn't be so wilfully stupid to actually want -" His fingers clench and unclench, some combination of nervous, scared and angry, like he's trying to clutch some semblance of sanity from a world so rapidly losing it. "You can't actually want this. I know you think you've done away with summoning, but if there's one thing I know, it's that things never change. Soon enough we'll be back where we were, enslaved against our will at the behest of some other petty human empire and you want to be a part of it?"

"B –"

"Thousands of years, Kitty! Thousands of years, back under the heel of the magicians you hate! You can't possibly understand what that means! And that's not even taking the naming itself into consideration..."

"Bartimaeus!" Her use of his full name has its desired effect. "Would you shut up for just five minutes? I'm trying to tell you something."

His form stills.

"I thought... That if you weren't going to be alone any more... That you'd want it to be him."

"Kitty..."

"No. Just... Listen, would you? Please."

Bartimaeus nods, and sits Ptolemy's body cross-legged on the floor.

"I'm going to die. Soon. My body's ruined, B... I made peace with that. I made peace with it a long time ago. But now?" She glances at him and his unreadable, unearthly face and wonders if he's as confused by this as she is. "Now I'm thinking that all I've done to make your – spirits' – lives better... It's not enough. I want... I have to do more."

"If it's the book you're worried about -"

"It's not the damn book." Her voice sounds bitter, even to her own ears. "It's you."

His dark eyes widen, like twin stars going supernova.

"I thought I'd have to leave you one day." The words are coming thick and fast now. "That it was selfish of me to keep summoning you, knowing that you felt obligated to care about me because of what I did for you, that in the long run it's better for you spirits not to care about – about us. Hell, you said it yourself. You even try not to care about each other." Her wrinkled hands are tying themselves in knots. "I never wanted to leave you alone, B. And now I don't have to."

"Kitty, you don't have to do any more. The naming, it's -"

She looks up at him then and he's blurred with all the fat tears that won't fall. "Ptolemy gave you a last gift. Let this be mine."

Something in his face breaks. He's up in a split second, his bare feet slipping on the tiles to get to her. Once again she feels the heat of his counterfeit skin against hers, this being of air and fire compressed in human form, two hands on her cheeks, his black eyes searching her for any evidence of dishonesty.

"Thank you," he whispers, and presses his lips against hers.