dance to this,” Scarlet protests. “It’s too fast.”
“Pish,” Walt says. “Don’t be so defeatist. Anyway, you’ve got cause to celebrate.”
“I have?”
Drawing Scarlet to his chest, Walt starts to twirl her across the kitchen floor. “I’ve left your invoice on top of the till,” he says. “I’ve just come from fixing the air-con at Pembroke and . . .”
Scarlet slows, pulling back. “How’s that cause for celebration?”
Walt smiles. “Because I only charged you for parts, no labour. A hundred and forty-five pounds total.”
“No, but I . . .” Scarlet stops. “You can’t do that.”
“I can and I did.” Walt shifts his feet. “So come on, let’s dance.”
Walt shrugs. “It’s my company, I can do what I like. Now, shut up and dance!”
Scarlet squeals as he twirls her, around and around and around. Her grandmother claps. If I could be any happier right now, Scarlet thinks, I can’t imagine how. As Simone starts to sing “Go to the Devil, the Lord said . . .” Walt reaches out for Esme and brings Scarlet into her grandmother’s arms. Throwing him a grateful smile, Scarlet starts to slowly waltz across the kitchen with her grandmother.
“Rube used to do that sometimes,” Esme whispers.
Scarlet frowns. “What?”
“That,” Esme says, nodding at the sparks firing from Scarlet’s fingertips.
“Oh, sh—” Scarlet glances to Walt.
Mercifully, the electrician isn’t watching but sneaking a cinnamon bun from an open tin on the counter. Mercifully too, Esme doesn’t seem remotely surprised or troubled by the phenomenon.
“Did she—this happened to her too?” Scarlet whispers. “Are you sure?”
“What?” Esme asks.
“This,” Scarlet says, nodding at her hands. But the sparks have gone and her fingers are cool. And no matter how hard she tries, Scarlet cannot will them to spark again.
11:48 p.m.—Leo
Leo still plans how he’ll kill Goldie, even though, paradoxically, he now feels he can’t bear to hurt her. Lately, he finds himself increasingly thinking of the night he killed Goldie’s mother. He can’t tell Goldie, since it’ll cause her such pain and it’s the one thing that’ll ensure she’ll never love him in return.
He’d done nothing unusual. Most mothers meet the same fate, since they’re defenceless when they come unwittingly to Everwhere on the coattails of their daughters’ dreams. Just as Goldie’s mother had done—her body remaining on Earth, her auric form in Everwhere—though teenage Goldie could, of course, no longer join her. So, once their spirit is extinguished in one world, their body simply dies in another. The soldiers kill them for sport, for practice. Or because their light is low and a mother’s death will buy them another month of life.
However, since these kills are so unsporting, Leo has never taken any particular pleasure in extinguishing those flames. And he disagrees with his demonic father’s belief that the sainted mothers pose any great influential threat for the good—didn’t most daughters rebel against their mothers anyway? So their deaths tended to weigh on him, as the deaths of their daughters never had. Although he couldn’t have known that he’d have cause to regret one death so much.
There’d been nothing remarkable about that night. Nothing special, nothing different, nothing strange. He’d been given his target. He’d heard her name, closed his eyes and seen her.
Leo was fourteen. The nearest gate was in the grounds of the British Museum, fifteen minutes’ walk from home. He knew the way by heart, every street, every stone step. He followed streetlamps, golden breadcrumbs in the moonlight, his path curling past darkened windows and silent doors. The gateway stood behind the museum, a small side entrance on Bloomsbury Street. It was locked and looked as if it had been for the best part of two hundred years. It’d been Leo’s birthday three months earlier and his father had bought him a Patek Philippe watch at, as Charles Penry-Jones was always at pains to point out, great expense. Its intricate and delicate platinum cogs glinted in the silvery light. Leo kept his eyes fixed to its hands as they ticked towards the half hour. At 3:33 a.m., the silver light illuminated the ancient rusty gate and Leo pushed it open and walked through.
He stepped not onto the clipped lawn of the museum’s grounds but into a place of falling leaves and rapacious ivy, of mist and fog, of moonlight and ice; a place always shifting but always still.
It didn’t take Leo long to find her. Even as a child, his senses were stronger than any other soldier’s, including those who’d