her breath, Sera opened herself.
Muddy tracks, made by the heels of shoes being dragged along the floor. They were attached to a man’s feet. And someone was dragging the man along the floor to the door.
Sera gasped, and the vision vanished before she could see either of the faces. She stumbled to her feet and lurched toward the back door, dragging her hand along the wall. Death surrounded her. Murder. Anger.
“You,” she whispered to the poltergeist. “It’s you, isn’t it? Oh God, I don’t want to do this…”
But she did it anyway. She always did. She wanted to call to Blair for help, lashed herself for thinking first of him and not of her earliest and longest ally, Jilly. It didn’t matter. Neither of them could help here.
She turned the key in the heavy door and stepped outside, still following death.
****
The pursuit and the sabotage might never have happened. War and occupation might never have been, for this part of Paris in spring 1942 seemed ridiculously serene. Sure, there were a few soldiers in German uniform in the café, two of them sitting at a table not far from Jilly and Adam, but the conversation surrounding her was civilised and jovial, and what she could see of the street outside the café window was quiet.
A man in the corner played soft, rhythmic piano music, and a few couples danced in the middle of the floor.
“I never imagined it like this,” Jilly observed. She had taken off her raincoat, beneath which she wore a figure-hugging cotton print dress. A tiny hat with a ribbon of the same print adorned her head. She’d found the hat in her coat pocket and looked at it quite carefully before she’d put it on under a corner streetlamp. “Shouldn’t we be surrounded by fear and tension?”
“We are. We’re just used to it and enjoying the lull.” Adam, his trilby on the table beside their wine, had put on a tie and unbuttoned his trench coat. He looked unexpectedly smart as well as handsome, although he still lounged untidily on his café chair and loosened his tie before raising his glass to her. “Salut.”
“Salut,” said Jilly, who’d done French at school. She clinked glasses with him and drank. Although wine wasn’t her usual tipple, she thought she could get used to it. There was something curiously beguiling about sitting in a Paris café drinking wine with him…having given the Nazis a successful kick in the pants and being about to make contact with their Resistance colleague, of course. Life didn’t get much more exciting than this. And it was stunningly real.
Unable to help herself, Jilly reached out and touched Adam’s coat sleeve. “Wow. It looks and feels exactly as if that’s what you’re wearing. And yet you’re in a T-shirt…”
He shrugged. “I’m in a box somewhere, six feet under. The T-shirt is just my default program from when the machine first scanned me.”
Jilly blinked. Stupidly, she felt as if her fondest illusion had been shattered. Although it had felt good, and strangely thrilling to be playing a game with him, she really wasn’t.
“Isn’t our contact late?” she said, just a shade desperately.
“Can’t say I mind,” Adam replied with a lazy smile. He leaned back even farther in his chair, as if he was about to put his feet up on the table.
Laughter caught at the back of her throat, and, as if he understood, his smile broadened.
Clearly rethinking his feet, he straightened. “Want to dance?”
Jilly laughed. “I can’t.”
“Me neither, but if we were around in the 1940s, I reckon we’d have been good at it.” He held out his hand like a challenge. “Come on, good for cover.”
What the hell. It was only a game.
Jilly laid her hand in his with pretended primness and rose to her feet with him. He swung her into his arms and onto the dance floor.
“See? How cool are we?”
“Cool?” she retorted. “You’re a walking anachronism.”
He grinned. “Dancing anachronism.”
She tried to draw her hand free to slap him, but he held on to it and spun her around to distract her.
“I don’t think this is a real 1940s dance,” she observed.
“Hey, it’s Paris. Anything goes.” He drew her a little closer, and the odd comfortableness which had been growing all night suddenly vanished. He was too close, too real, ironically enough, and she felt suddenly overwhelmed, not so much by his hold which remained light and unthreatening but by her own reaction to his nearness.
She recognised it as sexual desire. After