Evie reached into the trunk and took hold of the longest blade that she could find. It was something she’d seen Ash fight with once. An Oriental antique sword with intricate engravings wrought down the length of the blade. It looked like it had been hewn with cruelty in mind and it slid into her hand as if it belonged there.
She caught the nervous glance Vero shot Ash as she turned back around to face them, holding the blade at her side.
‘Ready?’ she asked, the lightness of her voice belying her jangling nerves.
Ash nodded, closing the trunk. ‘Let’s get this over with,’ he said, taking a deep breath.
They walked up the street, their footsteps ringing in unison, and for a moment Evie had a sense of the brotherhood that Cyrus, Ash and Vero had once shared. She felt as if her sides were protected, that she was being looked out for. She hadn’t felt that since Lucas had died.
She slowed almost to a standstill as she absorbed that truth, falling out of stride with the others. They slowed too, instinctively, and she quickly upped her pace, not wanting them to think she was having second thoughts about what she was about to do.
As they approached the house, she felt the atmosphere grow heavy around them. The house was completely, ominously, dark. As silent and still as a graveyard.
‘He’ll have sensed us,’ Vero whispered, as they made their way up the path.
Evie pushed the hood of her sweater down so she could hear better. ‘Good,’ she said, scanning the front of the house. ‘I want him to hear me coming. I want him to be ready. I want him to fight back.’
She caught the troubled sideways glance that Ash gave her but ignored it and stepped forward, heading along the path that ran down the side of the house. Breaking in through the back door would be less conspicuous, she figured. She couldn’t afford to be interrupted by the police.
The back of the house was also sunk in darkness. Evie crept slowly towards the door. Her senses were blazing. ‘Can you feel anything?’ she asked the others.
‘No,’ Ash and Vero both answered simultaneously.
Evie scowled at the back door. Damn it. He wasn’t here. Had he ever been? She tried to zone out all the other noises – the hiss of cicadas and thrum of traffic in the distance – and focus on her senses.
Yes. It was the right house. He might not be here now, but Victor had been here once. She could feel the trace of him in the air, almost like a scent.
‘Let’s take a look inside,’ Ash said. ‘We may as well while we’re here.’
Evie didn’t need any further invitation. She smashed her elbow into the glass panel in the back door and then pushed her hand through and unlocked it from the inside.
They stepped over the broken glass and walked into a kitchen – clean, modern, a coffee cup on the draining board, but no other sign of life.
Evie strode to a door straight ahead of them and opened it. It led out into a narrow hallway. Her eyes fell immediately on a pair of leather loafers sitting neatly by the front door. There was a coat stand to the left. On it hung a suit jacket and a red silk cravat. Three swords were sticking out of an umbrella stand beside it.
‘Well, we’ve definitely found him,’ Evie remarked, feeling her heart rate almost double at the sight of the swords and cravat.
She turned her head, scanning the hallway for the best place to hide in order to get a clean strike the moment Victor walked in the door.
‘Er, guys?’
Evie spun around. Vero was calling to them from another room.
‘You might want to come and take a look at this,’ she shouted.
Evie’s stomach clenched. She followed Vero’s voice down the hallway and into a front room, the hairs on her arms bristling. Something wasn’t right about this house.
She found Vero standing in the centre of an empty room. She glanced around, unsure what she was supposed to be looking at. The room was bare – there was no furniture, not even a lampshade.
Then she saw it. What Evie had first dismissed as wallpaper was actually a collage made of newspaper clippings, maps, sheets of paper and large colour photographs. It covered the entire far wall of the room.
Evie took a faltering step forward, trying to take it all in, trying to understand and make sense of the