the sun. He heard the creak of wooden wheels on paving, saw the slaves shoveling horse dung with the marks of the lash on their backs. There was a girl standing beside him, a girl whose black hair fell straight to her waist and whose eyes were the pure turquoise of sea shallows. “—help,” she was saying. “You must help me—“ but her face changed, dissolving slowly, the contours re-forming to a different design, and he was in the dark, and a red glimmer of torchlight showed him close-cropped hair and features that seemed to be etched in steel. The first face had been beautiful, but this one was somehow familiar; he saw it with a pang of recognition as sharp as toothache. There was a name on his lips—a name he knew well—but it was snatched away, and he was jerked abruptly, not knowing where he was, reaching for the name as if it were the key to his soul.
One of the male nurses was leaning over him, clasping his shoulder with a scrubbed pink hand. “You called out,” he explained. “I was outside. I think you said: ‘I need help.’ “
“Yes,” said Lucas. “I did. I do.”
The young man smiled a smile that was reassuring—a little too reassuring, and knowing, and not quite human.
“Help will be found,” he told Lucas.
A damp spring ripened slowly into the disappointment of summer. Wizened countrymen read the signs—“The birds be nesting high this year,” “The hawthorn be blooming early,” “I seed a ladybird with eight spots”—and claimed it would be hot. It wasn’t. In London Gaynor moved back into her refurbished flat and stoically withstood the advances of her host of New Year’s Eve in his quest for extramarital sympathy. Will Capel returned from Outer Mongolia and invited his sister to dinner, escorting her to the threshold of the Caprice before recollecting that all he could afford was McDonald’s. Fern drank a brandy too many, picked up the tab, and went home to dream the dream again, waking to horror and a sudden rush of nausea. In Queen Square, Dana Walgrim did not stir. Lucas devoted more time to the pursuit of venture capitalism, doing adventurous things with other people’s capital, but rivals said he had lost his focus, and the specter that haunted him was not that of greed. And at Wrokeby the hovering sun ran its fingers over the façade of the house and poked a pallid ray through an upper window, withdrawing it in haste as the swish of a curtain threatened to sever it from its source.
It was late May, and the clouds darkened the long evening into a premature dusk. The sunset was in retreat beyond the Wrokewood, its last light snarled in the treetops on Farsee Hill. Three trees stood there, all dead, struck by lightning during the same storm that had shattered the conservatory at the house, and although there was fresh growth around each bole, the three crowns were bare, leafless spars jutting skyward like stretching arms. Folklorists pointed out that Farsee Hill was a contraction of pharisee, or fairy, and liked to suggest some connection with an occult curse, the breaking of a taboo, the crossing of a forbidden boundary, though no one had yet come up with a plot for the undiscovered story. That evening, the clouds seemed to be building up not for a storm but for Night, the ancient Night that was before electricity and lamps and candles, before Man stole the secret of fire from the gods. The dark crept down over wood and hill, smothering the last of the sun. In the smaller sitting room, another light leaped into being, an ice-blue flame that crackled and danced over coals that glittered like crystal. On the floor, the circle took fire in a hissing trail that swept around the perimeter at thought-speed. The witch stood outside it, close to the hearth. Her dress was white, sewn with sequins or mirror chips that flung back the wereglow in tiny darts of light. But her hair was shadow-black, and her eyes held more Night than all the dark beyond the curtains.
Dibbuck crouched in the passage, watching the flicker beneath the door. He heard her voice chanting, sometimes harsh, sometimes soft and sweet as the whisper of a June breeze. He could feel the slow buildup of the magic in the room beyond, the pull of power carefully dammed. The tongue of light from under the door licked across the floorboards, roving