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The claustrophobic echoes of Evelyn’s voice ebbed away as she concluded her tortured confession, reflected off the dirty tiles in the horrible little cellar room. I hiccuped out loud. Disgust clutched at my guts, and I shook my head at the child-sized dentist’s chair.

“Evee.” My voice cracked.

“Mmhmm. I know,” she grunted.

Dank subterranean cold leeched residual heat from the safe embrace of my hoodie, and wormed icy fingers up the back of my neck. I wrapped my arms around myself, felt awfully sick. The crushing press of the broken magic circle above and around us seemed to hang poised like open jaws. We stood in the maw of a dead beast.

Suddenly I very much needed to be out in the sunlight, but I wouldn’t flee and leave Evelyn down here alone with her memories, not even for a half a minute. She looked rooted to the spot, set and solid, sheltering inside that over sized grey jumper and leaning on her walking stick next to Praem’s impassive form.

“ … I, Evee … that’s horrible, I-”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” she grumbled.

I shrugged, quite lost for words.

“Scared of me yet?” she asked, an oddly sarcastic quirk to her lips. I blinked in confusion.

“Um, should I be?”

Evelyn sighed and sketched an uncomfortable half-shrug. She deflated, shoulders slumping, and I sensed she’d run out of carefully rehearsed words. She’d confessed, but now she needed to actually talk. “No. It was a bad joke, a bit of gallows humour – implying the demon is still in my head. Get it? Trying not to get too grim, that’s all.”

“Evee, don’t joke about that. I’d never think that about you. Why would I be scared of you? You’re sweet, and lovely, no matter what you think of yourself.”

“Yes, well.” Evelyn cleared her throat and averted her eyes. I didn’t care how embarrassed she felt when praised – it embarrassed me too, but it was true. No wonder she felt barely human half the time. “I got rid of it five years ago. Sort of what precipitated killing my mother. Trust me, the demon wouldn’t want to return even if it could.”

“Good. Good.” Unfamiliar vehemence entered my voice. “God, fu- … fuck your mother.”

“Fuck,” Praem echoed.

Evelyn raised an eyebrow, ignoring Praem. “That’s rare enough, from you.”

“I think your mother deserves a bit of foul language.” I huffed and shook my head. “Why did she even do it? Her own daughter.”

“So the Outsider she summoned could talk and think from the get go, trapped in a bound vessel. So she could force it to share it’s knowledge. It got a functioning human brain and a human consciousness to pattern itself on. The process went very fast, though I wasn’t exactly … coherent enough to observe,” she spoke with such bitter scorn lurking in her voice. “It had full sentience in a handful of hours, then found itself strapped to that damned chair, in the body of a nine year old girl, at the tender mercy of my mother.”

I wet my lips and took a deep breath, struggling to master the high-pitched ringing in my head; it wasn’t magic at work, just disgust and the anger of empathy for my friend. “That’s not the why, not exactly. Why do it at all? What did she hope to gain?”

“Real knowledge, from Outside.”

I spoke a question with my eyebrows, still stewing in second-hand outrage. Evelyn continued her explanation.

“Magic is unreliable, extrapolated from scraps in old books, written by insane monks and murderous desert cannibals, a thousand years ago. Trial and error can be lethal, you and I both know that from experience.”

“Too true, yes.” I sighed.

“I managed to teleport myself Outside, completely helpless when I got there. Remember?”

“Evee, of course I remember.”

“Mm, Well. So, my mother figured that maybe there was some kernel of truth, to the old stereotype of medieval wizards summoning demons, binding them with God’s language, forcing them to divulge their secrets – all that dark ages nonsense. Turned out she was right. Imagine an Outsider, something almost like your Eye, trapped in a weak body. Imagine it. If you had the stomach for the act, imagine what clarity you might extract from it, what magic it could teach.” She shrugged. “I think she tried other methods before deciding to use her own flesh and blood, but she didn’t hesitate when the time came.”

Evelyn seemed to run dry at last. Her breath shuddered on the final word and her eyes slipped toward the chair, like water sucked down a drain. Before I could stop her or summon the courage to pull her into a hug, her maimed hand reached out and touched the wipe-clean plastic headrest. Her fingers shook ever so slightly.

“Evee, you shouldn’t-”

Praem grabbed Evelyn’s wrist.

I froze. Evelyn shot the doll-demon a razor-sharp frown. Praem didn’t pay the slightest bit of attention to our surprise and disapproval, staring right back at Evelyn. Gently but firmly, she removed her mistress’s hand from the chair.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Evelyn hissed.

Praem released Evelyn’s wrist, folded her offending hands neatly in front of her, and returned to staring straight ahead.

“She’s trying to help,” I blurted out before Evelyn could explode. She whirled on me instead. “I don’t think you should be touching it either, I really don’t. Except maybe to pull it to pieces. Isn’t that right, Praem?”

“Nonsense,” Evelyn spat. “What does she care? She – it isn’t even capable of understanding.” Evelyn rubbed at her wrist.

Praem declined to answer. I sighed at her.

“You need to learn when to help your own case,” I said. “Please?”

“No touching,” she finally intoned.

Evelyn whacked the chair’s base with her walking stick. “It’s completely inert. This whole set up is inert. It’s harmless now.”

“Not emotionally,” I said quietly. “Not to you.”

“Yes,” Praem added.

Evelyn glared daggers at the doll-demon, shot a stormy look at me, then huffed and rolled her eyes. “I suppose you’re right.”

“It’s a hateful thing. Even if I didn’t know what it was used for.”

Evelyn withdrew from the chair by half a step, shaking her head. “She never kept me in it for long. A few days at a time, four at most, then maybe a week to recover between sessions. Longer than that with a demon at the controls and the physical changes would have been too much, it would have taken over and broke free, or I would have expired.”

“You mean, died?”

“Yes. And then she’d have to procure another child.”

I reached down and squeezed Evelyn’s maimed hand. She didn’t squeeze back, but she didn’t let go either. She shot me a look of resigned understanding, then glanced down at our interlocked fingers.

“Possession,” she muttered. “Possession by a vast outer intelligence takes a heavy toll on the human body. Makes changes as it settles in, adapts the shell to suit the inhabitant, but it never got to finish any DIY on me – my mother was ripping it back out every few days. It’s nothing like – what’s that film, The Exorcist? Nothing like that, more like what we saw with Zheng. Perhaps it tries to do impossible things with human muscles, pushes them too far, breaks bones and fixes them wrong, or forgets to pump blood and lymph to an extremity.” She tapped her prosthetic leg with her walking stick, a dull clunking sound in the little tiled room. “Hardly matters with a corpse.”

“You’re not a corpse, and you won’t end up as one,” I said with all the certainty I had. Evelyn cocked an eyebrow at me and half-smiled.

“What, ever?”

“When you’re a hundred and two. Not a day earlier.”

She snorted, then frowned at me. “Have I told you I have a detached retina? I can’t recall. Here, the left eye.” She opened her eyes wide. “Another legacy of my unwelcome cranial passenger.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I can see any difference between your eyes.”

“Mm.” She turned away and resumed staring at the chair, the instrument of her past.

“We should go back upstairs, Evee. Thank you, for sharing with me, but I don’t think it’s good for you to linger down here. It creeps me out rather badly as well.”

“I haven’t reached the point yet,” she grunted.

“Ah?”

“Twil.”

“Um … ”

“Twil. What you asked me. My … ” She grumbled low in her throat. “I’m getting there.”

I looked at her sidelong, then reluctantly let my eyes slide over to Praem.

Ah. Finally this was all falling into place, or so I thought. Demons in her head at the start of puberty – was Evelyn about to confess that’s what she found attractive? Had I finally, after weeks of speculation, uncovered the real reason she’d wrought her doll-demon in the image of a cuddly voluptuous motherly type? I swallowed, and held my tongue.

“It had a name.”

“ … it?” I blinked, catching up.

“The demon – the Outsider my mother housed in my body. I can pronounce it, in theory, but it’d make my throat bleed and my tongue ache for a week. Probably make you chuck your guts up. Not because it’s you, Heather, sorry,” she added quickly. “The sound of its name would make anybody ill. Do you understand what that means?”

I shook my head, feeling three steps behind.

“Because it told me its true name. It hated my mother almost as much as I did. It didn’t want to be here, not like her,” Evelyn nodded toward Praem. “She’s game for a few strawberries, and apparently dressing up like a fetish object. She’s barely more complex than we are.”

Praem turned her head to stare at Evelyn.

“She doesn’t mean anything rude by that,” I said.

“Rude,” Praem echoed.

Evelyn ignored the banter. “It was like a king, or an emperor – a crap metaphor, but the closest I can get. It resented the sheer indignity of being summoned, of my mother’s demands, of being forced to speak, but most of all it resented this.” She tapped her chest. “Imagine yourself trapped in the body of an insect. It felt such revulsion.” Evelyn all but spat the word. “We came to an understanding, it and I, over the span of, oh, three, four years, in what passed for the privacy of my own head, despite … despite … ” Evelyn swallowed, hard, and screwed her eyes up for a second.

I squeezed her hand. “It’s alright. You’re not there anymore.”

“You want to know why I call Praem an it, Heather? Because I’ve had one of these things in my head. Because it is alien. It taught me things it withheld from my mother, made sure the secret knowledge it did share with her was subtly flawed. It showed me how to cast it out and keep it out, and how to kill her. When it finally left, in the space it had occupied, stuff was missing.”

“Stuff?”

Evelyn shrugged. “Bits of memory. Some bodily functions it had taken over – I was incontinent for a week after. Disgusting, mm?”

“Not- not at all. That’s hardly your fault.”

“It was disgusting. Anyway,” she sighed and waved a hand down at herself, at her abdomen. “I’ll let you in on a secret. I’ve only had two periods in my entire life, when I was twelve. If anything still works down there, I don’t know. I … ” She frowned, cleared her throat. “As far as I’m aware, I’m incapable of orgasm. I don’t know who or what I’m attracted to, and I don’t know if that’s just me, or if my capacity to feel such things was ripped out, overwritten.” She turned to look at me, shrugged with her eyebrows, very matter of fact. “There’s your answer.”

I took a very deep breath, glanced around the horrible little tiled cell, and then locked eyes with Evelyn. “I think it’s high time we got out of here. I’m going to take you upstairs and give you a very big hug now.”

Evelyn started to shake her head. “Heather, I’m-”

“No ifs or buts. Up. Up!”

I held fast to her hand. Luckily she didn’t offer much resistance as I dragged her from the room and back into the main cellar, then up the stairs, clonking on the hollow wood. Praem followed smartly behind, and to my immense relief she shut the steel door. She clomped up the wooden stairs as I pulled Evelyn back into the sitting room, with the huge fireplace and the low ceiling. Already I began to shrug off the cold, the dank smell of the cellar replaced with dust and winter sunlight.

“Shut that door, Praem, if you please,” I said, and she obeyed, closing the door to the cellar.

Evelyn wormed her hand out of mine and clacked her walking stick against the floorboards.

“I’m not looking for sympathy,” she said. “I didn’t tell you all that to-”

“Evee. Shut up.”

I gave her the very big hug I’d threatened to. She made a half-hearted attempt to pull away, but I wrapped my arms around her knobbly shoulders and held on tight, refused to let go.

I’d never had a friend like Evelyn before; I’d never really had any friends before, except a few fleeting teenage moments during my least bad times. I’d never felt this way about a friend before either – shared her pain, outraged at her mistreatment, aching to help.

I wanted, in my weak, circuitous fashion, to protect Evelyn.

How silly was that? She was a mage, she was far more in control of her powers than I, she had a supernatural bodyguard and Raine and the weight of family history behind her, not to mention money. It was not in the least bit romantic or erotic – despite how soft and fluffy Evelyn could be when one got past her thorns – but I did love her.

Evelyn grumbled and I felt her blushing, but after a moment she returned the embrace, awkward and hesitant.

The handle of her walking stick pressed against my back.She let me take her weight, for once.

“I’m fine,” she muttered. “This is all old stuff, history. I’m fine.”

“You are,” I murmured.

Eventually she cleared her throat and set her walking stick against the floor, and I let her go. She turned away, sniffing and rubbing a thumb under her eyes. I spared us any further embarrassment with a bit of quick thinking.

“Praem,” I said, lifting the corner of one of the dust covers on the nearest of the two leather sofas. “Help me get one of these off, will you please?”

“Heather?” Evelyn frowned as Praem crossed to help me.

“I’d rather not sit in the dust, and I assume you wouldn’t either?”

Praem ‘helped’ by whisking the entire dust cover off with one sudden jerk of her arms, the sheet billowing out with a crack of displaced air.

I flinched; hadn’t seen her move that fast since the chaotic fight in the cult’s castle. With a wince I braced for the heavy plastic sheet to slam against the wall and slide to the floor – but, at the precise moment of maximum extension, Praem flicked her wrists to fold the cover in half in the air, her maid uniform’s skirt twirling as she turned and pinched the edges together and folded it again with a whipping motion. She caught the neatly stacked bundle on one outstretched hand, paused for a single heartbeat, and then placed it on the coffee table.

She resumed staring straight ahead. Several long strands of hair had escaped her loose bun.

“Um, thank you?” I managed.

“Bloody showoff,” Evelyn grunted, then covered her mouth as she coughed in the cloud of settling dust.

“Yes, very impressive. Though a gentler touch would perhaps have produced less of a mess?”

Praem tilted her head upward. The milky white of her eyes juddered back and forth rapidly. Was she counting the dust particles?

“Suppose I don’t have a choice now.” Evelyn coughed again, then batted at Praem’s ankles with her walking sick. “Shift yourself.” The doll-demon did as she was told. Evelyn settled uncomfortably onto the sofa, rubbing at the place her thigh joined her prosthetic. “Am I the only one sitting down or what?”

I shook my head. Praem took the question as an order, and perched on the opposite sofa, right on the dust sheet. We both watched her for a second, but she seemed content to stare into space.

“Actually, I’d like to do a thought experiment first,” I said.

“Thought experiment,” Evelyn echoed. “Why does that phrase make it sound like a profoundly bad idea?”

“It’s nothing embarrassing. Or it shouldn’t be, at least.”

Her eyebrows climbed her forehead. “I never said anything about embarrassing.”

“Just close your eyes. Please, Evee? I want to try to … get you to imagine something.”

“If you creep up and shout boo in my ear I will thump you, Heather, friend for life or not.”

I huffed and put my hands on hips. “Would I do that? I’m not Raine.”

Evelyn relented with a sceptical frown, and closed her eyes.

“Okay, now just relax, try to … try to release as much tension as you can. Breathe deeply.” I had zero idea how to accomplish this, too far out of my wheelhouse. I didn’t even have Raine’s examples to go on, but we had to start somewhere.

“Breathing deeply,” Evelyn grumbled, unimpressed.

“I want you to picture Twil.”

“Oh bloody hell, you’re serious.”

“Play along, please? Ignore the sexual aspect, all of that. Let’s pretend for a moment that none of the magical stuff exists, either, forget that she’s a werewolf, all of it.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Please try. Please.” I paused, to let her think. “How does thinking about Twil make you feel?”

Silence.

“Imagine her … ” I gulped, a little embarrassed. “Imagine her hugging you.”

Evelyn cracked one eye and frowned at me. “That’s all you’ve got? Bit tame, isn’t it?”

“Just do it!” I flustered. “Close your eyes. Imagine her putting her arms around you.”

Evelyn grumbled but closed her eyes again, fingers playing with the handle of her walking stick. I bit my tongue, in case she was taking this seriously. I didn’t want to disrupt any rose-coloured imagination with the jarring of my awful scratchy voice.

Eventually Evelyn sighed a big sigh. She opened her eyes again and stared at me like I was a quack doctor.

“Well?” I prompted. “Anything?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Twil … she … she’s irritating. And stupid.”

“Oh Evee, she’s not stupid. That’s hardly fair. She’s impulsive, and passionate, and straightforward.”

“She’s dumb as a brick.”

“She’s going to university to do bio-medical science next year. That’s not stupid,” I said. Evelyn grumbled under her breath and looked away, but I pressed on. “And even if she was stupid, it’s beside the point. Do you want to hug her for real?”

“How am I supposed to know the answer to that?” Evelyn growled. I sensed I was losing her.

“Okay, how about … how about this? Imagine that you can hug her, for real – but!” I held up a finger as Evelyn scowled at me. “But afterward she won’t remember it, and nobody else would know you did it.”

I let the suggestion – rather underhanded and creepy, I admit – hang in the air for a moment, and hoped I hadn’t given Evelyn the mage any nasty ideas. She opened her mouth to reply, then stopped and frowned, then blinked twice and looked down at her lap.

“Ah.” I lit up. “Did that-”

“Don’t you breathe a word of this to Raine. Not a word,” she snapped, then frowned left and right before rubbing her eyes, an expression of mild panic crossing her features. She began to blush, and covered her mouth. “Fuck.”

“Evee, it’s okay, it’s okay.” I struggled not to giggle, to respect the moment.

“Goddammit, what am I supposed to do now?” She demanded. “What does that even mean?”

I slid onto the sofa. “Whatever you decide it means. You don’t have to act on it if you don’t want to. It’s just … something to think about. Something nice?”

She sighed and glared at me. “You and Raine make it all look so easy.”

“Oh, Evee, no, it isn’t. It absolutely isn’t. Even between us it’s pretty complex, most of the time.”

Evelyn leaned back into the old cracked leather of the sofa, trying to find some physical comfort to ward off this fresh confusion. I did feel a little guilty; the last thing she needed was more dilemmas in life, but at least this one contained potential pleasure for her, and took her mind off the cellar beneath our feet.

“Does she scare you?” Evelyn said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Raine. Does she scare you?”

“Oh.” I blinked. “No, not at all. Though, ah, I am aware that sometimes perhaps I should find her a little scary. That’s something I’ve been discovering about myself. I don’t like violence but … when she does it, it’s different. It’s part of what I like about her. That’s terrible of me, I know.”

“She scared the shit out of me when we first met,” Evelyn admitted.

“I’d heard.”

“Mm.”

“You’re deflecting again, by the way, Evee.”

“Mm,” she grunted. “What else am I meant to do? I’ll … think about Twil, alright? I’ll give it some thought. Maybe I can … can … ” She waved a hand vaguely. “Maybe next time I talk to her, I can … see.”

“Whatever you decide, I can always help.”

Evelyn gave me a sceptical frown. “You’re not exactly a lesbian Casanova.”

I shrugged. “It’s me or Raine, and while she is lovely I don’t think she’s a reliable source of romantic advice.”

Evelyn snorted, and we fell into comfortable silence. Her gaze drifted down, until she was staring right at the floorboards. My mind wandered backward through the last half hour, through other ways I might help, might protect.

“Why is the chair still down there?” I asked, softly, loathe to ruin the moment but sharply aware we might never get another opportunity.

Evelyn shrugged. “Bolted to the floor.”

“Then smash it apart.”

She glanced sidelong at me, then did a double take when she saw I was serious. “I … how? It weighs a ton. We’d need industrial machinery to get the bolts out. It’s not as if anybody’s been down there in years. Let the damned thing rot.”

“With … I don’t know.” I cast around. “Is there a sledgehammer anywhere on the estate?”

Evelyn looked at me like I’d suggested we go skinny dipping. “A sledgehammer.”

“I don’t know, for building fences? At least one of those outbuildings is full of garden tools, isn’t it?”

“Heather, I am relatively certain neither you nor I can lift a bloody sledgehammer. We’re both noodle-arms. I’d ruin my back.”

“I can try. For that, I’d try. Praem certainly could.”

Evelyn paused mid-word, then frowned thoughtfully, an unfamiliar aspect lighting up inside her. Her eyes slid over to look at Praem.  “ … I suppose she could. She could.”

The doll-demon seemed to catch wind of what we were brewing. She stared back at Evelyn, then at me, then stood up and brushed her skirt neatly over her backside.

“Sledgehammer,” she intoned in her bell-like voice.

Evelyn and I shared a meaningful glance.

==

“Raaaine! Over here!”

“We’re in the kitchen.”

“We’re in the kitchen, Raine!”

“We’re eating cake without you.”

“Evee! No, shhh, shhh.”

By the time Raine followed our voices, picked her way down the mansion’s spinal corridor, and rounded the kitchen door, Evelyn and I had descended into a fit of giggles – well, I had. Evelyn retained a touch more self-control than I possessed, but even she started laughing at Raine’s bewildered grin.

Raine pointed finger-guns at us and leaned against the door frame. “I see that I’m missing cake, but I hear that I’ve missed a hot-boxing session. What’s got you two so giggly?”

I shrugged, trying to control my laughter. “Just feeling nice.”

“It is a good day,” Evelyn announced, and jabbed her little fork back into the chocolate sponge cake her father had dug out of the fridge about twenty minutes ago, when Evelyn and I had bumbled into the kitchen, badly in need of celebratory food. “It is a good day to be alive, and it is a good day to eat cake. Rest’s in the fridge if you want some. And grab the strawberries too,” she added, waving vaguely at Praem behind her.

Raine, however, wasn’t listening – cake and laughter could only distract her for so long from the sledgehammer in the middle of the kitchen floor, balanced upside down so perfectly on its own steel head.

“Hello, this wasn’t here an hour ago. Think I would have remembered that. We having an emergency?”

“Only a dire lack of whipped cream to go with the cake,” Evelyn said, and flourished her fork. I spluttered with laughter again, despite the fact it wasn’t even funny – I felt wonderful. Released.

“I’ve missed some serious fun, haven’t I?” Raine ran a hand through her damp hair, grinning. She was still pink and slightly raw from her shower, wearing pajama bottoms and a baggy black tshirt with a cartoon kangaroo on the front, feet bare. I wanted nothing more in that moment than to hug her and touch her all over, but there was Evelyn and cake and explanations to linger over first, and we did have more important things to do than make out.

“Fun,” Praem echoed.

“So what’s the sledgehammer for?” Raine asked.

“For hammering!” I broke into giggles again, but spluttered to a stop when Praem’s voice echoed a half-second behind, “For hammering.”

“I smashed up the chair,” Evelyn said. She sat up straighter and raised her chin.

“The what?” Raine’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, bugger me sideways, it’s still there? The-”

“The chair. The demon engine. It’s gone, in a hundred pieces. Heather helped.”

“Praem did most of the hard work,” I admitted. Evelyn grunted, but even that didn’t seem to dent her good humour.

Evelyn and I had landed one symbolic hit each. She’d required the extra support of my arms around her waist and Praem holding the hammer head up in the air for her. I’d barely been able to lift the hammer from where we’d found it in the garden tool shed, let alone swing the damned thing, but I’d put my whole body into the motion and managed to half-drop half-flail the heavy steel head into the chair’s right arm.

I’d squealed, Praem had to catch the hammer, it was all very awkward and embarrassing, and I’d feel the muscle strain tomorrow morning, but it had all been worth the effort. The doll-demon had done all the heavy lifting, no matter how glowing and sweaty Evelyn and I felt, after kicking pieces of the chair across the floor of that horrible little chamber.

“Blow me down with a feather,” Raine said, shaking her head at us. “I didn’t even know it was still there. You should’a told me to get rid of it years ago.”

“It’s fine. It was a bonding experience.”

“It was,” I agreed.

“Cool stuff. Anything else need hammering before we scoot?” Raine strode forward and lifted the sledgehammer with one hand, caught the haft in the other and hefted the weight, grinning to herself. I sighed inside at the way her muscles flowed and tightened, the easy strength on display. Praem had lifted the hammer just as easily, but it wasn’t the same. She was cheating. Raine’s muscles were real.

“We can be off whenever you like, by the way,” Raine said. “Shown her the map yet? Probably best to get away before dark, unless you both want to sleep in the car.”

“We can stay as long as we need.” Evelyn’s voice was suddenly sober.

“ … we can?” Raine blinked. “We can. What?”

“This is news to me as well,” I said slowly. “Evee?”

“We’re staying another night. Perhaps two,” she declared, then cleared her throat and smiled a grim sort of smile. “Got to show Heather the map, sure, but I’m also going to clear out the whole bloody lot. Everything of mother’s in the east wing. The project room, the dungeon rooms we left, the clockwork man, all of it. Destroy anything I can’t appropriate. Put some flowers on my grandmother’s grave. Have dinner with my father’s squeeze, whatever.”

“Evee. Right on,” Raine said with a surprised grin. Evelyn waved her off.

“This house will be mine eventually,” she said, and gestured up and around with her eyes. “These servitors, they’re older than my mother, they’re family property and she’s not family, not anymore. This is mine. It doesn’t belong to her bloody ghost.”

==

When I was a little girl I’d never been afraid of creeping to the toilet at night, because I never had to do so alone. I never did anything alone.

The constant presence of a twin blinds one to certain aspects of life. One is never alone, not really, though in retrospect I believe Maisie and I were even closer than twins usually should be. If one of us woke and needed to pee, the other would often wake without prompting. A familiar hand to hold makes a big difference to a small child groping her way down a dark corridor. We knew, in that strange shared childhood heart, that no shadow creatures or bogeymen could touch us when we were together.

That all ended after the Eye took her. Teenage Heather hated leaving the dubious safety of her bed covers at night, let alone braving the nightmare-haunted hallways of the family home. I developed a borderline complex about getting up alone in the night, and still felt a touch of the old discomfort even in the heavily-warded Sharrowford house, with its creaky floorboards and strange old corners.

So it was that I found myself shivering in the frigid air, gum-eyed and drowsy, bladder very full, as I dug myself out of a blanket nest on the armchair.

This was not going to be an easy journey, in this spooky echoing mansion drenched with century-old darkness; I couldn’t even recall exactly where the nearest bathroom was.

Evelyn was curled up right on the edge of the double bed, wrapped in a cocoon of sheets. Moonlight crept silver around the curtain, picked out the jut of her hip. I’d taken the armchair tonight, and not brooked any argument from either of them. Raine slumbered on, snoring softly, spread out on her front. I suppressed a sleep-addled urge to grab one of her ankles. Bad Heather.

I would not demean myself by waking Raine to request an escort. I was a big girl and I could go to the toilet by myself.

The hallway was almost pitch black. Moonlight struggled to reach down here with those clean silver fingers. A tired old servitor – some kind of articulated mantis-creature – shifted in the deep shadows, and I forced myself not to flinch. Suddenly I felt considerably more awake.

“It’s fine, it’s fine. It’s the ultimate safe place, Heather,” I whispered to myself, fingertips of my left hand brushing the wall as I traced my way down the corridor. “Fortress and refuge. Castles are spooky too, aren’t they? You love castles.”

I groped for the bathroom, stepped inside and clicked the light on, blinking sore eyes against the sudden light on tarnished chrome and old porcelain – and realised what I’d missed.

Praem hadn’t been standing guard by the bedroom door.

I frowned in thought as I sat on the toilet, eyes closed, half asleep. Perhaps Evelyn had set the doll-demon to a specific overnight task. Evee had been a whirlwind of activity since our impromptu ritual exorcism of her mother’s memory.

She’d stomped all over the house, pointing at things with her walking stick, rifling through the big project room we’d found her brooding in the night before, Praem carrying bin liners and a plastic tote behind her. Lots of staring at alien objects and nodding, muttering to herself, making a list in a little notebook she’d commandeered from her father. Eventually Raine and I had let her get on with it, made ourselves scarce but available.

Evelyn even put in a proper showing when her father’s lady friend had pulled up to the house that evening. ‘Angeline’ turned out to be exactly what I’d expected – a high-flying city lawyer in her late 40s, exceptionally well-groomed, talkative and slim, all easy laughter and more glasses of wine, eager to regale us provincial college girls with tales about growing up poor and black in north London. Lewis had laughed and boomed and shared a couple of utterly ineffable legal world anecdotes of his own.

I’d even accepted a glass of red wine myself, after some coaxing by Raine. Hadn’t liked it much, but it did make me relax.

An hour of two of pretending we were all normal.

Except, of course, for how Angeline’s gaze had slid right off Praem, even though she’d stood behind Evelyn the whole time.

I finished up, flushed the toilet, and suffered the indignity of ruined night vision when I turned off the light and stepped out into the corridor. Squinting at the silvery spill of moonlight helped a little, though the window at the end of the corridor was obscured by a shifting curtain.

A curtain that turned to look at me, two milky white orbs floating in the darkness.

I almost jumped out of my skin, a half-hiccup half-squeak caught in my throat. My body screamed with a pulse of adrenaline and only the absurd maid uniform stopped me from either running or screaming for Raine.

“Praem!” I hissed, a hand to my chest. “Don’t … stand there in silence! Oh my God, you frightened the life out of me.”

Praem turned away, resumed her vigil at the window.

“Praem?” I whispered again, and crept forward, to peer over her shoulder.

Rural night and a clear sky. A beautiful sight. The thin lawns had transformed into a shadowy dream realm of half-glimpsed shapes under the bulk of the house, the trees a darker bulwark before the mirror-like silver expanse of the lake. The moonlight dusted Praem’s face with a ghostly sheen, but she betrayed no hint of wistful longing or quiet contemplation. She stared. Hard-edged and intent. Down.

Another fox. Almost invisible in the moonlight, russet fur a dark blotch against the grass.

It sat on its haunches barely ten feet from the rear of the house, and stared up at Praem.

I sighed and resisted a desire to roll my eyes. “Once, twice, maybe three times, I could have accepted as coincidence, but this is getting silly,” I muttered. “That’s not a fox, is it?”

“Fox,” Praem echoed, at full volume. I winced.

“Praem,” I said her name very carefully. “If it’s not just a fox, I think Evelyn or I or Raine should know about it. What is it?”

Praem turned her head to me, then back to the fox, then took a sudden step back from the window and marched off down the corridor, long maid’s skirt swishing around her ankles.

“Praem? Praem, wait!” I hissed, and scurried to catch up.

She made the stairs, and managed to click her heels the entire way down without thumping her feet. I felt clumsy and awkward, groping through the darkness behind her. By the time I stumbled onto the ground floor, she’d turned away around a corner. I really didn’t want to be alone in the maze of corridors, menaced by the shadows in the kinking corners, at real threat of getting lost. I hissed her name again and hurried after her.

I found Praem at the back door onto the patio, the very same one I’d led her through that morning.

She was pulling the door’s bolt and turning the key, her hands moving with exquisitely inhuman slowness of intention. Her eyes were locked on the moonlit lawns beyond the door’s inset glass, at the fox staring back at us, a silver ghost.

“Praem, what are you doing?” I hissed, hugging myself, curling cold toes against the carpet. Should have put my socks on before I left the room.

Praem straightened up, the door now unlocked, and slowly wrapped one hand around the door handle.

I saw the fox sit up, fur bristling, eyes alert and intelligent. The canine snout inched backward.

Praem eased the door handle down.

“Praem, not- … not … ” Not alone? What was she going to do, catch the fox with her bare hands? I didn’t have time to think, my head still too heavy from sleep, my guts tight with sudden anticipation.

“Not?” she asked. Her hand paused.

“What are we doing, Praem?”

“Opportunity,” she intoned.

“For what? What?”

“Hunting,” she intoned. “Opportunity.”

She was waiting for approval. The fox backed away, paws slinking across the field of moonlit grass – and slowly, so slowly, a horrible, unspeakable notion entered my mind.

Earthworms and the things which ate them. My mouth went dry, my heart fluttered in my chest; maybe we’d never get another chance.

“Okay, do it,” I hissed.

The fox bolted, a shadow in the dark.

Praem reacted so fast I flinched hard enough to almost trip over my own feet. She slammed the door handle down and shot out into the night, a dead sprint from a standing start, beyond what any human could achieve, certainly not in a full-body maid uniform. I flew to the door, staring after her. Cold night air sucked the breath from my lungs, slammed the heat right out of my thin pajamas.

The doll-demon sprinted across the grass, like a machine, going full pelt. A dark blur bounded ahead of her.

I stumbled out onto the patio, freezing my toes off, teeth chattering. The cutting cold whipped around the sides of the house, trees swaying in the distance. I was fully aware I should be yelling for Raine or Evee, or locking the door and staying inside, but it all happened too fast. The possible implication of that fox made my head spin, clutched my guts with a deep sickness.

In the back of my mind I repeated a mantra: this was a safe place. Safe place. Nothing to fear here. Just don’t touch anything suspicious.

Praem tackled the fox halfway across the lawns in a tumble of splayed skirts. A strangled animal screech split the night. She rolled twice, lay very still for a moment, then stood up and walked back toward the house.

As she mounted the stairs to the patio I put a hand to my mouth.

She’d pinned the fox with an expert’s grip, an iron hard vice, as she clutched it to her chest, back legs and head both immobilised.

The poor animal’s front legs twisted and lashed, desperate to scratch, the torso bucking and heaving, fighting exactly like the cornered fox it was, but the doll-demon’s strength came from a place other than mere muscle. The fox couldn’t move. Praem’s wonderfully pressed maid uniform was scuffed with grass fragments and a smear of dirt, and her loose bun of hair had finally given up, loops of blonde hanging down in disarray.

“Fox,” she intoned, staring at me.

I gulped and tried to think, tried to focus on the animal she’d caught. It whined, letting out these awful, pitiful yelping noises, and I think it had urinated down her.

I thought back to what Evelyn had said in front of her mother’s grave, about worms and the flesh of dead mages, about lead coffins. I thought about apex predators and mercury and DDT, about food web contamination, and imperfect hazard containment.

The fox foamed at the mouth, yellow eyes wide and rolling.

“Is it just a fox?” My heart was still pounding. “How do we tell?”

Praem stared down a the animal in her grip. “Kill it,” she intoned.

“No, no,” I held up a sudden hand. “It’s just a fox, don’t. It doesn’t deserve this. We need to … ” I swallowed, blew out a deep breath, and gathered my thoughts. This was crazy. “You stay right there, Praem. If you … hurt an innocent animal, I won’t forgive you, okay? Okay?”

Praem stared at me again.

“Just don’t hurt it.” I repeated. “I need to go wake Evee, she needs to see this and make a decision. Yes, Evelyn’ll be able to … work it … out.”

Every hair stood up on the back of my neck. My skin crawled.

At the sound of Evelyn’s name, the fox had gone still.

Not limp. Not an animal giving up to conserve strength.

Still. Watchful.

“Oh,” I breathed. “Oh, it-”

With a sound like a clicking tongue, the fox was suddenly no longer in Praem’s grip. It reappeared twenty feet away, hit the lawn running, and raced off under the moonlight.

“Oh no. Oh no no no,” I blurted out.

Praem didn’t miss a beat. She whirled on the spot and sprinted after the animal. I picked up my feet and stumbled after her.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Life continues to confront me with difficult questions, over and over. Did I ever really have a twin sister? Do I have the courage and strength to rescue her? Am I willing to love a sociopath? Is magic real, or am I just insane?

Sitting on a cold stone bench before a wizard’s grave, sheltered by the skeletal winter trees, Evelyn needed answers to a question I couldn’t even begin to unpack.

Why did she still feel guilty for killing her own mother?

Doubtless she didn’t expect a real answer from me, but the weariness on her face wrenched at my heart. She was groping for a handhold, from the bottom of a very deep pit. She’d been doing so for years. I struggled to summon the right words; it wasn’t your fault, you had no choice, she forced your hand. She crippled you, she was going to kill you. She was evil.

Evelyn didn’t need to hear any of that. Raine had probably said those exact words to her a hundred times before.

I hesitated, my lips half-forming the first word of a dozen different sentences. I’d tried to play therapist and waded far out of my depth. Great job, Heather. Some friend I am.

Evelyn turned away with a little shake of her head. “Never mind,” she murmured. “You don’t need this.”

“But you do, Evee. It’s always okay to ask for help.”

“Doesn’t make much difference.” She shrugged. “Not a day goes by I don’t think about this, at least a bit. If I can’t figure myself out, how could you? It’s unfair of me to ask.”

I felt her slipping away, slipping back into performative grumpiness and the comfort of her barbed tongue. Any moment she’d change the subject, wave a hand at her mother’s grave with a bitter comment, smother the pain under sullen aggression. I had to buy time.

Luckily, my hand was still on her back; so I did the first thing that came to mind.

“Regardless,” she huffed. “At least the old bitch-”

“W-wait, Evee, don’t- don’t say anything.” I held up a finger. “Just- just stay perfectly still, don’t move, stay right there.”

“Heather?” She frowned hard, looked me up and down briefly. “What are you going on about?”

“Just, just stay. Stay sitting.” I hopped to my feet and stepped behind the bench, behind Evelyn, shivering a little in the corona of cold air. She peered at me like I’d gone mad. “Please, you can face forward, how you were. It’s okay, I’m not going to do anything weird.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I … I’m going to touch your shoulders. Please Evee, you trust me, don’t you?”

“ … that I do.” She didn’t sound very certain, but she did face forward once more. Perhaps I’d piqued her curiosity.

The next step required no small amount of courage. Evelyn was not a touchy-feely sort of person. Hugs did not come easily to her, and her body was a litany of aches and pains, old injuries, bone problems and joint issues, before one even considered her prosthetic right leg or the missing fingers on her mangled left hand. But I was committed now, I had to see this through.

Gentle but firm, so she knew what I was doing, no surprises – I wrapped my fingers around Evelyn’s shoulders. Beneath the thick grey jumper I could feel her muscles tight with permanent tension. I tried to recall the basics of Raine’s technique. I had to get this at least partially correct or it would be pointless, and I didn’t possess anything near Raine’s grip strength.

“And?” Evelyn asked. “Is that it? What happens n-”

I pressed down hard with both thumbs and squeezed with my fingers.

“Ahh!” Evelyn winced open-mouthed.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” My hands flew to my mouth, mortified. Idiot. I hiccuped. “Evee, I’m so sorry, I wanted to-”

“Don’t stop now,” she snapped. “Get on with it.”

“Oh … um, okay. Right.” Hiccup. “Right then. I’ll just start with … okay.”

My hands fluttered as I hesitated, as I touched my fingers back to the thin muscles in Evelyn’s shoulders. I pressed down hard, put my back into it. She grunted. This time I didn’t stop.

We took several minutes to find a comfortable rhythm. Evelyn growled and hissed, grumbling under her breath as I dug in with my thumbs, telling me “left a bit”, “down, no, further down”, or “press harder” when my grip slackened. Her shoulders were terribly knotted with old strain, bunched and uncomfortable. Her habitual slouch probably didn’t help.

Eventually she stopped wincing and grunting, and I felt the stress drain from her body inch by slow inch. She sighed deeply, sagged on the bench, and moved her walking stick off her lap to support her weight. Working my hands and arms chased away the worst of the chill air, or perhaps it was just proximity to Evelyn. Skinship does wonders for homoeostasis.

I’d bought time, now I needed to wheel the big guns into position. I wet my lips, weighed my options, and did the only thing I was certain of: I talked about myself.

“It’s not on the same scale,” I began quietly. “But I didn’t feel any special relief or sense of justice after I killed Alexander.”

Evelyn was silent, so I carried on.

“In the moment I won, I was satisfied, yes, I think so, in a brute sort of a way. But afterward? I still suffer all the same anxieties, still feel the same way about myself. He was a monster, he kept people in cages and fed their minds to his Outsider. The world is a better place with him gone, certainly, and I did what I did to protect myself and my friends, all of you. We defeated an evil wizard in his magical castle, put his monstrous minions to flight, and freed his captive. Aren’t I supposed to feel victorious? What did I prove, in the end?”

As I spoke, a weight lifted inside my chest. I hadn’t realised it was there. I’d bottled this up for weeks, barely expressed a word of it to Raine, couldn’t make sense of it to myself. It didn’t hurt, not like Evelyn did, but I did struggle to keep a catch out of my voice. This wasn’t for me, this was for her.

“Proved him wrong,” Evelyn murmured.

“Exactly. So why do I feel this way?” I asked. “I don’t feel big or strong, I certainly don’t feel like a hero. All I did was commit murder. A necessary murder, perhaps, but I still made the decision to kill a person, clear headed, not in the heat of the moment. And I don’t feel any different. I’m still me. That was me, all along.” I had to take a deep breath. “I’m still terrified of ending up … other, different, that the brainmath will make me inhuman. All I proved in the end is that I had the strength to kill him, that’s all. It’s self-referential.”

Evelyn nodded slowly. “I know. I know exactly what you mean.”

I let out a controlled sigh and resumed rubbing Evelyn’s shoulders, simply to occupy my hands.

“It was important,” Evelyn muttered after a moment. “To me. That you were there. In that castle. You, Raine. Fuck it, even Twil, I guess. Even that thing,” she gestured at Praem with a sideways nod. “I didn’t have to do it alone. Thank you, for that.”

“That’s what friends are for.” I tried to sound bright. “Or so I’m told.”

“I’m … ” Evelyn cleared her throat. “I’m learning that too, yes.”

“I very much doubt I would have been friends with your mother, Evee. Goodness, it’s no wonder you worry about ending up like her, she tried to take over your mind. You’re not her. You’ll never be like her.”

“Mm.”

We were deep in the core of it now, the most dangerous part, and I had to push on. “Killing one’s own mother, even in self-defence, is going to mess anyone up. Let’s forget for a moment that we’re all neck-deep in supernatural doodads, that she was a monster, a magician, all of that. Boil it down to the fundamentals: you had to kill your own mum. You had to. Even without everything else, without the magic, without all the other stuff she did to you, that’s a choice she inflicted on you. Of course you’re going to be wounded by that. Anybody would be.”

Evelyn frowned. “I suppose so.”

We slipped into silence. I focused on rubbing her back, kneading out the deeper knots.

“Serves you right,” she mumbled.

“Evee?”

“Mm, pardon.” She cleared her throat and straightened up, nodding at her mother’s grave. “That was directed at her. She’s sludge in a box, and I’m getting a shoulder rub.”

“You’re very welcome. I think you rather needed it.”

Evelyn sighed. “Never used to like it from Raine. She gave up trying years ago.”

“You do tend to get the claws out for her.”

“She deserves it.”

“So, you’re saying I give better back rubs than her?”

“I’m saying I’m … oh I don’t know. More comfortable with you, I guess.”

“Should I take that as a compliment? I think I shall.”

Evelyn grunted, still staring at the grave. She hesitated over a word, opening her mouth before thinking better of it and lapsing back into silence. I squeezed her shoulders harder, enough to draw a wince from her gritted teeth.

“Uunh.”

“I-I’m sorry.” I blushed. “I don’t know why I did that, I’m getting carried away.”

“Then you should get carried away more often.” Evelyn twisted her back to one side, producing a trio of pops from her spine. She let out a throaty grumble. “I want to tell you how it happened.”

“How … how what happened?” I hedged my bets, though I could guess.

“Don’t be obtuse, Heather, it doesn’t suit you. How I killed my mother, what else?” She spoke in a very matter-of-fact way, like we were discussing the weather. “I’ve never told anybody. No point telling Raine, she was right there when it happened, all the way through the whole bloody business.”

“Okay then.” I swallowed, steeled myself. “I’ll try not to be squeamish.”

“Not much to be squeamish about. I stopped her heart.” Evelyn made a squeezing gesture with her left hand – her maimed hand, the one with the missing fingers. “That was the end of it, the final move, checkmate. We’d be out here all day if I told you the entire story, but that was the end. It’s not easy, forcing cardiac arrest, not something I could pull off these days, not against another mage. I was … different, then. I had help, of a kind.”

What on earth does one say to that? “Wow,” I breathed, then flustered and hurried to correct myself. “I-I mean-”

“Wow is right. It’s okay, Heather.”

I swallowed. “Okay. You had … help?”

Evelyn shrugged. She was absently tapping her artificial leg, right where the stump ended and prosthetic began. “It’s complicated. Raine, in part. It was messy, you have to understand that, not a clean dramatic confrontation. It wasn’t like I declared my intention and challenged her to a duel. We were planning to kill her, but we didn’t chose the moment, or the day. It just happened. Raine’s always insisted we bear joint culpability. Nonsense.” Evelyn sighed and shook her head. “She was too busy keeping the zombies off me. The real ones. She never put a scratch on my mother, not in a way that mattered, though I do distinctly recall Raine attempting to brain her with a log at one point, but that can’t be right, there was no fireplace in that room.”

“Sounds like Raine to me,” I added, feeling far too flippant for this subject.

“Yes, quite.” Evelyn sucked on her teeth. “Always the enthusiast for a bit of fisticuffs.”

“Are magicians always so hard to kill?” I asked. “Alexander didn’t seem bothered by a bullet, but … and I mean this in a very good way, Evee, but you don’t seem as robust as that.”

“Good,” she grunted. “What’s the first thing a ruthless person does with power? Hm? Protect themselves, that’s what, but if you want to be invulnerable, you have to make sacrifices. Leave certain things behind.” She let out a sudden, sharp sigh. “Ahh, Heather, I can’t say I haven’t been tempted, sometimes. If it wasn’t for Raine, or … for you, maybe I would have given up on being human, just to feel a little safer.”

I squeezed her shoulders. “I for one am glad you didn’t.”

She nodded, sniffed. “My mother wasn’t like Alexander, not exactly, but she did have ways of defending herself. She couldn’t have survived a bullet through the chest though. God, that would have been so much easier. So, yes. I stopped my mother’s heart, and I had a hundred good reasons to do it. I was right, and I saved myself. But I still feel guilty.”

“It’s okay to feel that way. And to talk about it.”

Evelyn grunted. This wasn’t something one simply ‘got over’, I couldn’t ‘solve’ it for her, to presume so would be awful. She’d carry this for ever, but at least I could be here for her. At least she knew I understood.

As we’d spoken, I’d spotted furtive movement on the far side of the graveyard, in the undergrowth between the trees. Slowly, as I’d been concentrating on Evelyn, a black nose and sleek russet snout eased out from beneath the ferns. A cautious, skittish fox emerged into the cold sunlight, raising his head and looking about.

“Evee, do you see that fox over there?”

“Yes, yes, I see it too. It’s just a fox, not whatever you saw last night.”

I glanced over my shoulder, to where Praem still stood at attention with her hands clasped. “Praem? Do you see it too?”

“Fox,” she intoned.

The fox caught wind of us, or perhaps Praem’s voice carried a little too well between the gravestones. His head jerked in our direction, yellow eyes flashing in the sunlight, and then he scurried away, hindquarters vanishing into the undergrowth with a swish of his tail.

“The wall’s always been full of holes and gaps,” Evelyn said. “All sorts of things get in and out.” She rolled her shoulders with a grimace. “Thank you, Heather. You can stop now. I feel … ” She waved a hand. “Buttery.”

“Buttery?”

“Soft. Oh, I don’t know. I’m no good at this. Sit down, will you?”

I almost giggled as I slipped back onto the bench next to her, despite or perhaps because of the weight of our conversation, the release of tension in my gut. Evelyn blinked at the grave one last time, then finally lifted her eyes to the sky. I felt closer to her now than I ever had.

Close enough to ask the question that had lingered on my mind, during the unquiet night of tossing and turning.

“Evee, yesterday, in the car, you said something that got me thinking.”

“Hm?”

“You said you weren’t very happy with Raine or I – which makes perfect sense, considering where we’ve dragged you.”

“We’ve been over this. You didn’t drag me.”

“Be that as it may,” I tried to stay on topic. Despite the strange bonding session we’d just shared, I felt I was verging on unsafe ground, but I had to clear the air. “I’ve been really selfish the last couple of weeks, completely wrapped up in myself. When I thought about it, about why you might be angry at me, I realised you’ve barely been talking to me lately, and some of the things you’ve said-”

Evelyn cleared her throat and turned her face away from me. “Heather, it’s not your fault, it’s nothing you’ve done.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes! Yes.”

“Evee, you’re the last person to pull your punches, but I still get the impression I’ve angered you in some way.” I made an effort to keep my voice steady, to hold onto my courage. “You can tell me. I promise.”

Evelyn directed a tight frown at me, her lips pressed together. I did my best not to falter.

“I’m serious,” I said.

“Surely you’ve figured out by now I’m an extremely difficult person? You really want to open this can of worms?”

“Of course I know that.” I couldn’t help but smile a little. “And I’m still serious.”

Evelyn let out a long sigh. She looked off at the lake in the distance, and spoke haltingly, as if selecting each word with great care. “You’re the first real friend I’ve ever made.”

“Raine doesn’t count?”

“I don’t know.” Evelyn shrugged. “You tell me, does she?”

“I like to think so.”

“We met under rather different circumstances, and she’s always been … Raine.” Evelyn gave me a sidelong look.

“Yes. She is. Very.”

“You’re my first real friend. I think. And then your mysterious bloody dream pixie comes along and … ”

Evelyn threw up both hands and huffed in frustration. I blinked at her, and incredibly enough she began to blush, shooting me a mortified sidelong glance before averting her face, hiding her eyes behind her hand.

“Evee … you’re saying … you’re jealous? Of Lozzie?”

Evelyn shrugged, still hiding. “I don’t bloody well know. All right? I rather took your words to heart, all that stuff you said weeks back about not keeping things from you. Well. Here it is. I’m impossible, I know. It’s unhealthy, but I can’t help it.” I was about to reply, to tell her it was okay, when suddenly she emerged from behind her hand and launched off again, flushed in the face and embarrassed to her core but still strong-voiced. “Why did she get to waltz into your life, monopolise your time? Raine, I understand; you sleep with her and I want no part of that, but unless I’ve utterly misread you I’m pretty certain you weren’t going wrist-deep in your Lozzie.”

“Um, wow.” I felt a blush creeping up my cheeks too. “You’re right, no, I didn’t do, um, that.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad we rescued her. She looked like a wreck. Perfect case for Raine. But … ” Evelyn sighed sharply and threw up her hands again.

“Evee.”

“I know, I’m a bitter, twisted weirdo. Evelyn Saye, turbo-bitch. Of course you can have other friends. I have no idea why I feel this way.”

“Evee, don’t talk about yourself like that.” A smile tugged at the corners of my lips. Evelyn looked away again, so I got to my feet and stood up in front of her, tucking my hands into my hoodie to keep the cold at bay. “I don’t exactly have a lot of experience at this friend stuff either.”

“More than I do,” she grunted. I saw she was about to retreat behind her hand again.

“Why don’t we watch some of your anime magical girl shows together?” I asked.

That earned me her attention, an incredulous frown; gave me guts, for once.

“’I’ll punish you in the name of the moon.’” I said. “All that stuff?”

Evelyn squinted at me like I’d gone completely off my rocker. Perhaps I had. “That’s from Sailor Moon. I don’t even like that show. And you don’t even watch anime. What does this have to do with anything?”

“Then introduce me to it. We can do regular, normal friend things together, Evee. I’d enjoy that, I really would. Not everything has to be life-or-death magical shenanigans all the time.”

“I-” Evelyn came up short, frowning to herself. “I guess I can think of a few you might like. Something with lesbian romance in it. I suppose.”

“Good. I’ll look forward to it.”

Evelyn shook her head, still mired in disbelief.

“While we’re on embarrassing personal subjects, I’m going to take a huge risk,” I said, plunging ahead before I had time to stop and rethink. If I planned this out I’d never ask. My heart thudded against my chest and my mouth went dry. This was absolutely going to get me shouted at, but I doubted I’d get another good opportunity, perhaps ever. “This question might make you angry, Evee, but considering what you’ve said, I think I need to ask it, because you deserve some good things in life.”

“ … I’m not going to like where this is going, am I?”

“Are you attracted to Twil?”

She blinked. “What? No.”

“Because, the way you act around her-”

“No. Nullum. Twil? Have you lost your senses?”

I faltered, babbling to explain myself as my cheeks flushed. Oh dammit, I’d gotten this wrong. “M-maybe I’ve been misreading the situation, but it’s in the way you treat her. I admit, I’m … incredibly gay, so maybe I’m reading a meaning into your actions which isn’t there, maybe you like men and that’s fine and maybe we need to get you a boyfriend instead, but I can’t help-”

“Do you really call Raine ‘mommy’?”

“No! Oh God, that joke in the car. No. No … once.” I blushed beet-red. Felt like steam was coming out of my ears. “It was really weird and I doubt I’d ever do it again. Not my thing.”

Evelyn merely raised an eyebrow.

“Mommy,” Praem intoned.

“Don’t you start on that too,” I said to her. “You’ve hardly got room to talk, you’re wearing a maid uniform.”

Perhaps it was my flustered imagination, but I swore I saw a hint of amusement on the doll-demon’s face.

“Fascinating,” Evelyn muttered.

“S-stop deflecting, Evelyn. I know what you’re doing. Is that really your answer? I’m wrong, you don’t like Twil in that way, at all? Look, I-I’m sorry for asking, but I had to know.”

I saw the barbed joke gather on her tongue – but at the last second Evelyn stopped, the ghost of a frown creasing her forehead. “Twil hasn’t been playing silly buggers with you, has she? Made a stupid joke along these lines? Is that what brought this on?”

I shook my head. “No. Nothing.”

Evelyn watched my face intently. “You’re sure?”

“Quite certain.” I declined to share my impressions of Twil’s private feelings. “Would it make any difference if she did like you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know any of this. Will you take that for an answer?”

“You mean, you don’t know if you’re attracted to Twil, or you don’t know what you’re attracted to in general?”

“It’s not a topic I spend a lot of time thinking about.” She sounded deeply unimpressed.

I was about to apologise, withdraw the subject, allow Evelyn her privacy – we were close friends, but maybe this was difficult for her. Not everybody felt such clarity about their sexuality as I did. Perhaps she was asexual, and perhaps that was none of my business.

Before I could say anything, Evelyn suddenly let out a huge sigh. She attempted to rally her forces once more, but then gave up and spread one hand in the ultimate lazy shrug. “I don’t know, Heather. I don’t know if I’m … ” She grumbled in her throat, covering awkward embarrassment. “If I’m into girls, like you are. It’s not as if I think about cunts all the time. But I have looked at those,” she made a wide gesture at Praem, and I assumed she was talking about the demon’s impressive chest. “Men … I don’t know. I don’t even know if I have a functioning sexuality. At all. Half my body doesn’t work, my brain’s a mess. My mother broke more than even I understand. Fuck it, do you seriously want to hear all this?”

“If you want to share, absolutely. We’re best friends, Evee. If we can’t talk about this then who can we talk about it with? If we can discuss murder and dead mages then I’m pretty sure I’m comfortable talking about what gets you off. Or, what doesn’t. I’m not going to judge you.”

“Of course you won’t, don’t be stupid, I’m not worried about that.” She huffed, then put her weight on her walking stick and held out a hand. “Help me up, my false leg’s gone numb.”

I gave her my hand. In the corner of my eye I saw Praem twitch, as if she wanted to help instead. Evelyn levered herself off the cold stone bench and brushed off the backside of her long skirt. “Was that meant to be a joke?” I asked.

“Sort of.” She shared a grim smile. “I think it’s time I showed you something.”

I stared at her. “Not a … not a porn collection?”

“What?”

“I-it’s what we were talking about! I assumed … ahhh.”

Evelyn snorted with laughter. “No. But keep that lightness of spirit, Heather. It makes you wonder-… ” She cleared her throat. “It’s good. We’ll need that where we’re going.”

I asked a silent question with my eyebrows. Evelyn nodded through the sheltering trees, toward the bulk of the mansion towering over the landscape, the roof still visible even from this woodland grotto. “Raine already knows all this, she was here. She’s seen it all. You’re weren’t, you don’t understand. But you’re right, you’re my best friend, and I want you to … ” She shrugged. “Whatever. It’s time I showed you what my mother used me for.”

There was no good answer to that except to follow her.

As we left the graveyard behind, Evelyn did not glance back at her mother’s grave, but I looked over my shoulder to check Praem was following.

She was not. She was locked in a staring contest with a little russet snout that poked from the undergrowth on the far side of the graveyard. Yellow eyes glowed back at her. How bold. I suppose it had little to fear from people, out here.

“Praem.” Evelyn clicked her fingers. “Stop dawdling.”

The doll-demon turned away, shoes clicking to catch up. The fox slipped back into the wild.

I put the animal from my mind; just a fox.

==

Back inside, shrouded once more in the oppressive shadows of the mansion’s heavy beams and solid brick, Evelyn led the way down the kinking spinal corridor. The heavy carpet soaked up the sound of our footsteps and muffled Praem’s escorting tread. Somewhere off in the depths of the house I could hear the pipes gurgling, a boiler running; perhaps Raine was taking a shower after her exercise. We passed by the kitchen, Lewis happily clanging pans around inside, humming to himself as he worked on tonight’s dinner.

The locked door to the mothballed east wing didn’t look particularly special, no different to any other door in the house. Solid, stout, dark wood. A little dust had gathered on the handle.

Evelyn produced the key she’d browbeaten out of her father, and fitted it into the lock. My throat and my guts both tightened.

I forced myself to take a deep breath. Evelyn wanted to show me her past, she needed me to understand. I had to focus past my natural anxiety. There was nothing to be afraid of here, this place was dead and done. Besides, we had Praem with us. Only Raine made a more effective bodyguard.

Evelyn frowned sideways at me. “We’re not even down there yet.”

“I’m okay. I’m fine.” I smiled, a little embarrassed. “Please do lead on, Evee.”

She did. She pushed the door wide, left it open and unlocked as we ventured beyond. For some reason that reassured me.

The mothballed wing was saturated in darkness, far denser than the rest of the house. All the curtains in the corridor were shut tight, some of them double-layered, all covered in dust. What sort of prying eyes did they hope to keep at bay, out here in the back of beyond, in the woods? Evelyn found a light switch, apparently from memory. Nothing happened when she clicked it up and down.

“Tch. He’s removed the bloody light bulbs,” she grunted. “Idiot.”

“Is it safe to open a curtain?”

“Eh? Why wouldn’t it be?” Evelyn used the tip of her walking stick to sweep one of the heavy curtains aside. Dust billowed into the air. Weak winter sunlight crept over us and filtered down the long barren corridor, catching the edges of wooden door frames and metal handles. The light didn’t reach far, soaked up by the darkness.

“I thought perhaps there was a reason they’re closed? It’s hardly an unreasonable assumption in here.”

“The reason is wilful ignorance,” Evelyn muttered as she squinted along the corridor. “This’ll have to do. You,” she clicked her fingers at Praem. “Open them as we go.”

Praem stepped ahead of us to obey. She grabbed the next set of curtains and drew them wide. Sunlight touched her face, highlighted those milk-white eyes.

“Light,” Praem intoned.

“Yes, light,” Evelyn grumbled.

Most of the mothballed wing was closed up, doors shut, a couple of rugs rolled against the corridor wall. We passed a few open doors, the rooms inside stacked with furniture beneath ghostly transparent dust-covers. A stale smell hung in the air, with undercurrents of harsh cleaning chemicals and aged wood. Evelyn strode with a purpose, walking stick swinging, shoulders hunched, knowing exactly where she was going. I followed a step behind. The shadows retreated before us.

Eventually the corridor ran out, terminated by a stout oak door. This door looked older, shorter, the frame a little crooked. Evelyn clacked the handle down. “Mind your head.”

The room inside would have been beautiful under any other circumstances, a long sitting room with a very low ceiling and a wooden floor, covered in thick rugs. A pair of cracked leather sofas faced each other over a slab of glass and metal trying to pass itself off as a coffee table, all draped with dust sheets. A huge soot-blackened fireplace dominated the entirety of one wall, crowned with a marble mantelpiece, bare except for a skin of dust.

Evelyn ignored all of it, and my curious look. She stalked across the room to a door which hadn’t been apparent until she pushed it open, hidden as it was behind a column of load-bearing wall. Darkness yawned beyond.

I peered over her shoulder. Wooden steps descended between whitewashed concrete walls.

“A hidden door to a secret cellar,” I sighed. “What’s next, eyes in the back of portraits? When does Scooby Doo turn up to solve the mystery?”

Evelyn wasn’t laughing. She shot me a sidelong look. I didn’t blame her, the joke was a weak attempt to push back my own trepidation. I mumbled an apology.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Place is fucking ridiculous, I know.”

“It really is.”

Evelyn slapped a switch and a light guttered on far below.

“Too gutless to go down there and remove the bulbs, I see,” she grunted.

“Evee.” My voice caught, and I had to swallow. “I don’t mean to sound worried, but I’m getting deja vu doing this.”

“Hmm? For what?”

“You led me to a semi-secret underground magical treasure trove once before. You may recall I had a very uncomfortable face-off with a giant spider? Is there anything down there I need to know about, preferably before it surprises me with a giant stinger?”

Evelyn grunted, taking me seriously. “Nothing pneuma-somatic. My mother would never have things she couldn’t see so close to her most important work. The whole place is warded. Best not touch anything though. Raine and I cleaned up everything … ” she waved a hand, searching for the words. “Everything independently mobile, but there’s plenty of sights you won’t want to see, remnants of her constructs. Just follow me.”

I nodded. “Okay. I trust you, Evee.”

“Mm.”

She led the way down the stairs, walking stick clacking. We were spared the cliche of ominous creaking wood – instead the stairs echoed, a hollow space beneath them. The echoes multiplied as we descended to the cellar floor.

Surprisingly spacious, the cellar was filled mostly with empty wine racks, containing only a few moldering old bottles, half-blocking several doors. A sort of butcher’s counter stood in the middle of the space, stacked with old metal kegs, casting a long shadow as the single bare light bulb struggled to illuminate the rear of the space. Modern concrete gave way to mortared stonework, open archways leading off into deeper darkness.

Dank cold air crept down the collar of my hoodie, dark and somehow unclean. I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself.

“How old is all this?” I murmured. The whitewashed concrete surroundings multiplied even the beating of my heart, let alone Praem’s precise tread as she brought up the rear.

Evelyn cocked an eyebrow. “Old enough. Don’t fret, we’re not going back there.” She gestured for Praem. “Open that.”

I felt a modicum of relief as Praem headed for the nearest door, modern and clean, but stared and felt a shiver again when I realised it was hewn from a solid block of stainless steel, with several arm-thick bolts on this side. The doll-demon opened it without effort, on perfectly balanced, silent hinges, then reached inside and clicked a concealed light switch. Harsh bright florescent illumination flooded out, the bulb buzzing in the echoing cellar. Evelyn let out a shuddering breath. I realised her knuckles were white on the handle of her walking stick, her jaw clenched hard.

“Evee?” I reached for her hand, very gently. “Evee it’s okay. I’m right here, okay? We can- why don’t we got back upstairs, wait for Raine too?”

She swallowed hard and shot me a frowning look. “It’s just a Pavlovian response. There’s nothing here anymore. Not really.”

“If you’re certain. Whatever you need.”

“I’m bloody well here already, aren’t I?” she spat. “Fuck it, let’s go.”

Evelyn led me inside, through the steel door. Praem swung to follow us without instruction.

I wasn’t even remotely prepared.

It looked a little bit like one of the less savoury rooms at Cygnet hospital, and a little bit like a torture chamber. A real one. Not a medieval parody; no iron maiden, no rack, no table of rusty implements. That would have been easier, cartoonish.

No, it was a sordid little place. A sour taste filled my mouth as I took in the implications.

The floor and walls were tiled, white, sloped slightly toward a drain in the corner. Easy to hose down. A tap jutted from one wall. An interior wall of thick steel bars split the room a few feet in – a cell, allowing an observer to watch in safety. The cell door stood open, the bars buckled and bent.

Inside that tiled cell, every single inch of wall and floor was covered with a vast, intricate magic circle, in deep midnight black strokes, like dried tar instead of paint. Four layers of magic circle. Between each, entire passages had been written in a script I’d never seen before, ugly and angular.

My head swam at the sheer complexity – but it didn’t hurt my eyes or make me feel sick. The design had been ruined, disarmed. Several sections had been wiped away, smudged, a few tiles shattered.

In the centre of the circles stood a chair.

A little like a dentist’s chair. Reclined. Bolted to the floor. Plastic, wipe-clean. Leather restraints for the forehead, ankles, wrists. Somebody had torn at the armrests, ripped out bits of stuffing.

The chair was child-sized. I swallowed a hiccup.

Evelyn took three steps into the cell, staring at the chair, then turned her head to watch me, watch my reaction. Her breathing was steady, controlled, expression dark but not distressed. She seemed to have mastered her memories. I followed on numb feet. Praem stepped forward to stand a few feet from Evelyn, prim and straight-backed. Only later did I realise she’d positioned herself between Evelyn and the chair. Perhaps she felt protective.

I didn’t even have to ask the question.

“It doesn’t work anymore,” Evelyn said, matter-of-fact. “It’s defanged, no power source, and I ruined the circle.”

I shook my head, glancing around again, then back at her. “But … Evee, what is this? Was this … you were down here?”

Evelyn wet her lips with a flicker of her tongue, and I realised she’d rehearsed this moment. How many times had she relived whatever had happened in this horrible little room? How long had she waited to unburden herself? Raine knew it all, what could Evelyn tell her that she didn’t already know? I steeled myself as best I could. She needed somebody to listen.

To my surprise, she nodded toward Praem. “So, she’s started talking.”

“ … yes?” I felt a catch in my chest. “She has.”

“Why do you think it’s taken her so long?” Evelyn reached up with her free hand and tapped the side of Praem’s head with a knuckle. Praem turned to look at her. A glare? Evelyn ignored her, kept speaking. “Wood. Praem had nothing to work with. Summoning an incorporeal Outsider into a vessel is relatively easy, but Praem didn’t start with a human brain to run on. She had to bootstrap herself, mimic, learn how to think in our reality. Adaptation is slow. The visitor takes time to remember itself, even with a simple thing like Praem here. You following this so far?”

Her voice echoed off the tiles. I nodded, and in my heart I began to see where this might be going. “I think so. Okay.”

“Remember the zombies in the Sharrowford Cult’s castle? Actual corpses. Barely functional, maybe a week or two old, easy to beat and not very clever, certainly not sentient, let alone lucid. Their potential was greater in the long run, yes, dangerously so. A brain, nervous system, sinews, it all gives the demon something to work with, a framework to base itself on, though the shock is greater. With time, every single one of those zombie would have been lethal.”

“Like Zheng?”

Evelyn shrugged. “Perhaps. I don’t know how she was made, or how old she is. A demon that strong would need a very short leash. She might just be stupid, intentionally crippled.”

I nodded. “I’m sorry for interrupting, go on.”

“Even with a real corpse, there’s no electrical activity in the brain, nothing to hijack, nothing to communicate with, to teach it how the mouth works or what words mean, to give it context for what it’s being asked.” Her voice lowered, quiet, almost to a growl. She hunched her shoulders, leaning heavily on her walking stick. The dirty little tiled cell seemed to press in on us.

“I think I see where this is going,” I murmured. My head felt tight, almost feverish. A high-pitched whine threatened at the edge of my hearing.

Evelyn eyed me. “Do you?”

“I’m sorry.” I hiccuped, the horror of this almost too much. “I … this is … please. Tell me. I’m listening. I promise.”

Evelyn nodded. “A real Outsider, a hundred times more complex than Praem, something not far off your Eye – summon it into a corpse, it won’t be able to speak properly for weeks, maybe even months. By that time it’ll have burnt out whatever vessel you’ve crammed it into. Certainly it won’t be able to share secrets from Outside with a ruthless bitch of a mage, no matter what deals she tries to strike with it. No. You want to make deals with a real Outsider, an alien god, you need it sentient from the word go. This,” she glanced at the chair, then stared at me. “This device was made to invite possession of a living human host.”

“Evee. Oh, Evee.”

Evelyn put her maimed hand to her chest. “No prizes for guessing who.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

The old mansion didn’t look any more welcoming by the light of day. Different, but no better.

Fortified in my jeans and pink hoodie once more, I wandered in the general direction of the stairs, surprised by the depth of lingering shadows in the kinked and twisted hallways.

Small windows and heavy beams conspired to limit the stark winter sunlight to a few slim handholds, leaving most of the corridors and larger rooms as a haven of shades. The house clung to a fermenting darkness, and I felt the most intensely domestic urge to start dusting, pulling curtains, opening windows. Family circumstances aside, growing up here would be morose for any child. When we got back home to Sharrowford, I swore I would help Evelyn banish any remnant of melancholy from her bedroom. We’d put up posters, go shopping for plush animals, paint the walls if we had to.

Praem followed me.

I’d discovered – not much to my surprise anymore – that she’d waited for me in the corridor, standing with her hands clasped before her in that absurd maid outfit.

Where had she even found it? Was this how Evelyn’s mother had dressed her own terrifying zombies, back in the day? I pictured a dozen creatures like Zheng, stalking this shadowy maze while dressed like domestic servants.

Okay, yes, that would act as a pretty effective deterrent. I knew Raine could be brave to the point of stupidity, but I still marvelled that she’d once snuck into this house, as a teenage runaway. The place hadn’t been empty back then.

Nobody was in the kitchen, but for the first time since we’d arrived it contained real signs of life. Dirty cereal bowls in the chrome sink, a few crumbs by the toaster, and this month’s issue of Anime UK magazine on the table; Evelyn’s area of interest, though that didn’t seem like the sort of magazine she’d read, due to – or despite? I wasn’t sure – the candy-haired cartoon girl on the cover. Neither did the shiny magazine look like it had spent a car journey crammed into a backpack.

Praem was staring at the dirty bowls in the sink.

“Do you want to wash them up?” I asked after a moment. “Are you trying to be a real maid, or is this just an aesthetic experiment?”

Praem turned her head to look at me, then back at the sink, then back at me, then the sink again. I stifled a laugh.

“Praem, why aren’t you with Evelyn right now?”

“She has sent me away,” Praem intoned, her voice clear and almost musical.

“Sent you away?” I echoed. “From where? What does that mean?”

Praem turned to stare at me again, this time in silence. I studied those milk-white eyes, but her expression betrayed nothing.

“You don’t feel like answering that one?” I mused out loud. “Or maybe some questions are too complex for you? You can’t parse the context, or the web of meaning required to … ”

Praem tilted her chin downward, as if to fix me with an unimpressed glare over a pair of imaginary glasses. Her expression didn’t change, but the intent was crystal clear, and I hurried to correct myself.

“Oh, okay. I’m sorry, yes, you’re more intelligent than that, aren’t you? Perhaps you … don’t like to answer certain kinds of stupid question?”

Praem straightened up, back to normal. I sighed and set about making myself some toast to quieten my rumbling stomach – normally I’d feel terribly intrusive making myself at home in somebody else’s house, but the Saye mansion didn’t feel like a real home. Praem returned to staring at the dirty dishes in the sink, so I formulated a fresh question between mouthfuls of toast and jam.

“Praem, where is Evelyn?” I adjusted my phrasing as the demon-doll turned to me. “Or, where did you last see her?”

“In the garden,” Praem said.

I glanced at the small window inset in the top of the kitchen’s back door, at the sliver of visible lawn and the dark trees beyond. The grounds had looked quite extensive when we’d pulled up in the car last night, there was no way I could spot Evelyn or Raine from in here.

“And why did she send you away?”

That earned me another silent stare.

“Okay, um, what did she tell you, exactly?” I tried. “What were her words?”

“Why don’t you fuck off and make yourself useful? Go see if Heather is awake or something. Go on, shoo,” Praem quoted, empty of emotion or emphasis.

“Oh. Indeed. That does sound like Evee.”

I frowned in thought as I chewed my toast, looking up and down Praem’s immaculate maid uniform again. Assuming she hadn’t lied to me – which seemed unlikely – she’d just demolished my top theory for why she was dressed in that ostentatious outfit. I’d suspected, deep down in a dirty unspoken part of my mind, that Evelyn had squeezed her into the uniform; this must be part of what she got up to behind closed doors with her cuddly obedient demon-host, and Praem had wandered off before Evelyn could stop her.

But that couldn’t be right. Evelyn would never send Praem off to ‘make herself useful’ while the demon still looked like an extra from a raunchy B-movie.

In the cold light through the kitchen windows I had to admit that servility didn’t seem like Evelyn’s thing.

“Did you dress yourself in that uniform?”

She didn’t answer that one either.

If Praem was a human being I could have guessed a dozen possible motivations for that outfit – a sex thing, a bit of silly fun, a joke, an experiment with personal identity, a penalty for losing a bet. If Raine had turned up dressed like that I’d have understood her intentions precisely. If Lozzie had appeared to me dressed head to toe as a maid, I would know for a fact she was just messing about.

Praem was not human, and wondering about the maid outfit made it easier to keep that in mind. Her increasingly bizarre behaviour didn’t worry me exactly, though I was vaguely aware that perhaps it should.

At least she didn’t have two bodies anymore. I doubted I’d be able to deal with identical twin maids. Far too high-level for my twitchy, starved sexuality.

“Yes?” Praem intoned after a few moments of my half-amused scrutiny.

“I’m sorry for staring. I was thinking about you, that’s all.” An impulse took me; with Praem so much more talkative, perhaps I could begin to understand how she thought. “Praem, do you know what you are?”

“Do you know what you are?”

I blinked at her. The emphasis was unmistakable. I sketched a shrug, wrong footed. “A human being. Homo sapiens. Female. Nineteen years old, almost twenty.”

“That is the most essential classification from which to understand and interpret your actions. You do the things you do and think the thoughts you think because you are a human being. Indistinguishable from all other human beings.”

My mouth opened and closed in shock. I tried to process what she’d actually said, rather than the fact she’d used big words. She really was more intelligent than she let on.

“Are you … are you being sarcastic?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Point taken. I suppose it would be terribly rude if somebody asked me what I am. I’m sorry if I offended you.”

Praem dipped her head very slightly. Apology accepted.

“So, who are you, then?” I asked gently, though I doubted she cared about tone of voice.

Another silent stare for another stupid question. I flustered and tried to rephrase – when she finally answered.

“You should know that,” Praem intoned. “You named me. I am Praem.”

Now it was my turn to sigh and look unimpressed. “That doesn’t really answer who you are. ‘Praem’ is just a designation. I’m Heather, but that doesn’t tell you anything about me, does it? Did you have a name before ‘Praem’? You had a … an existence, before Evelyn summoned you, didn’t you?”

“Do stars have names, before humans give them such?”

Praem smiled.

It was no better than the first time she’d smiled, when I’d made the mistake of feeding her a strawberry many weeks ago. She could contract and relax the correct muscles – or the tactile illusion of muscles wrapped around a core of inanimate life-sized doll – but that was all, mere mechanical motion. Nothing behind the eyes.

She was trying her best. I forced myself to smile back.

“You don’t have to pull a face,” I said. “Cool and composed suits you better.”

She switched the smile off as quickly as it had appeared.

Her words had reminded me rather uncomfortably of how classical demons were supposed to work, the power of true names. Had I somehow redefined Praem’s nature by naming her?

I sighed at myself. Judeo-Christian demonology was unlikely to apply here – ‘demon’ was just a word we used for an Outsider. Praem was neither fallen angel nor one of Satan’s lieutenants, she was something from outside our own reality, crammed into a physical shell and offered simple rewards. Old literary myth was not a reliable instruction manual for real magic. I needed to ask Evee. I should probably tell her how much Praem was talking, if that wasn’t why she’d shooed the doll-demon away this morning in the first place.

“Feed me a strawberry,” Praem intoned.

I resisted the urge to shrug, feeling a little overwhelmed. “Doesn’t Evee have them?”

Praem glided over to the fridge, her neat black shoes clicking against the kitchen’s slate floor. She opened the door and looked pointedly at me. I’d missed the transparent plastic tub of strawberries when I’d rummaged around for jam earlier.

“Oh.” I took the box from the fridge and opened the lid before the obvious struck me. I squinted at Praem. “Can’t you take one for yourself?”

“Feed me a strawberry.”

“Yes, yes, okay. I suppose there wouldn’t be any point to your deal with Evee if you can just scarf them all down whenever you like.” I selected a nice fat juicy strawberry for her, and held it up, the scarlet fruit cool against my fingertips. “Don’t make this weird now, not like last time.”

Praem’s lips parted with a soft click, and I pushed the strawberry into her mouth, careful not to touch my flesh to hers. Not because I believed it would have some nefarious magical effect, but simply because it embarrassed me. It had last time. Whatever Praem was inside, her exterior was a very voluptuous young woman, and my basic instincts still responded to that.

“Or maybe it’s the act of being fed that matters?” I mused as she chewed. “Somehow, I suspect you’re unlikely to answer that one.”

Praem swallowed. “The fridge air is escaping. It is cold.”

“It is, yes.” I started to close the tub of strawberries when an idea struck me. I watched Praem’s face carefully. “If I give you another strawberry, will you tell me why you’re dressed in that uniform?”

“Yes. Feed me a strawberry.”

“Oooh, not immune to bribery, are you? It’s a deal, okay?” I almost giggled as I picked out a second helping for her, feeling very mischievous indeed. “We’re making a deal, one more strawberry, then you explain, best as you can, okay?”

“Feed me a strawberry.”

I popped the second strawberry into her mouth, then watched her chew as I put the box back in the fridge. She let the door swing shut. Praem swallowed, staring at me. Perhaps I imagined the faintest ghost of amusement passing beneath her features.

“Well? Why are you dressed like a maid?”

Silence.

“Praem?”

“I lied.”

“You … ” I tutted and sighed. “Praem. You lied to get another strawberry? You’re worse than a cat. I think we need to go see Evee.”

==

Out in the grounds of the Saye estate the winter sunlight felt harsh and crisp in the cold air. I was very glad for my hoodie, and the larger tshirt I’d borrowed from Raine’s bag.

Rather than slipping out the kitchen’s back door, I’d retraced my steps to a place we found during last night’s search for Evelyn, a set of wide French doors more glass than frame, which looked across the lawns behind the mansion. I’d stepped out onto a long low patio of grey slabs, neat brick stairs leading down to the lawns. A pathway snaked off between islands of droopy flowers and patches of thin grass, sloping toward the placid surface of the dark lake at the back of the estate. Trees crowded the far bank.

All the brickwork badly needed pressure washing, at least to dislodge the moss and lichen growing in the cracks, though I rather liked the effect. An old-fashioned charcoal barbecue stood off on one side of the patio, next to some rain-warped wooden garden furniture.

I made my way gingerly down the steps, but Praem lingered by the doors. The old brickwork path forked off in two different directions, one vanishing into the trees far to my right.

“You won’t be disobeying Evelyn by showing me where she is,” I said.

Praem stared at me, unmoving. I let out a little sigh.

Above her, the towering exterior of the mansion still crawled with spirit life. The local fauna looked far less ominous in the daylight, hardly the coal-black leering gargoyles my mind had supplied under the cover of darkness. Most of the creatures clinging to the roof tiles and chimneys were small and twisted, scaly green, blinking large slow eyes at the weak sun like lizards in torpor.

They mirrored the house itself, uncomfortable and confused to discover itself still standing to witness yet another dawn. Last night the place had seemed to radiate such grim grandeur. By day it looked huddled and wounded, an aged behemoth with a wasting disease.

I cast around the grounds again, trying to figure out where Evelyn might be, and spotted Raine instead.

She’d just emerged around a copse of trees far off to the left, jogging alongside a visible stretch of the estate’s perimeter wall. Of course, I couldn’t actually make out her features at that distance, but I’d never mistake her fluid athletic gait for anybody else. I raised a hand over my head and waved.

The tiny figure in the distance raised a fist in reply, and Raine changed direction, jogging across the thin lawns toward me.

Even in the nipping chill, with my hands tucked into my armpits, I felt a deep warm flush accompany the smile on my face, as Raine jogged up and pulled to a stop.

“Morning, you,” she said between deep breaths, rolling her shoulders and flexing her neck. “I’d give you a hug, but I’m pretty ripe. Get my message?”

“Yes, thank you. And it is a very good morning, indeed.”

Raine was dressed – or perhaps ‘stripped down’ – in a tight white athletic top and a pair of shorts, absolutely drenched in sweat and panting hard, a big grin plastered across her face. She’d dragged her hair into a short ponytail to keep the sweat from her eyes. How did she bear the cold like that? I had no idea, but I was very appreciative of the sight, and the way she stretched her arms over her head when she caught me staring.

“Like what you see, miss Morell?” she asked, a cheeky glint in her eyes. “I do breakfast delivery, you know? Does it still count as your breakfast if I eat you?”

I rolled my eyes but couldn’t keep a smirk off my face. “You brought exercise clothes with you? Really?”

“Hey, it’s a great place to run.” Raine didn’t stop moving. As she spoke she began to bounce from side to side on the balls of her feet, shadow boxing with the air. “Better than a treadmill, no cars, ground’s nice and springy, don’t have to worry about pedestrians. May as well get some exercise. Plus, you know, clearing my head.” She shot me a wink.

“Are you going to be alright to drive again later today?”

Raine stopped bobbing about and straightened up. “Absolutely. Hundred percent. We can be out here soon as we’re ready. Shower, lunch, Evee shows you the map, we’re gone.”

I nodded absently. We had serious matters to think about, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off the way Raine’s sweat-soaked top clung to her abdomen and sports bra. Perhaps it was mere imagination, but for a moment I could smell her over the countryside scents of earth and leaf mulch and damp brick, that spicy hot feminine sweat.

“Heather? You feeling cold?” Raine grinned and thumbed over her shoulder. “Wanna join me for a lap around the lake? It’ll warm you up. I’ve got some spare joggers upstairs, you don’t have to ruin your jeans.”

“Are you serious? Raine, there’s no way I could keep up with you. Don’t be silly.”

She shrugged. “We’ll go at your pace.”

Weeks ago, Raine had coaxed me into accompanying her on one of her trips to the university gym. Once. I’d lasted less than ten minutes on a standing bike before my stamina had given out, sweating and heaving and red in the face. A complete disaster. I’d expected at least a little teasing, but Raine treated me as if I’d subjected myself to the same hour-long punishing treadmill routine as her, not to mention the weights she’d lifted first. At least I got to watch her working out, and she made it very worth my while when we got home and got in the shower.

I hesitated, genuinely considering her offer. Raine pulled a wide windmill stretch with both arms.

“You work up a sweat, I’ll scrub it off you.” She grinned.

I let out a shaking sigh and closed my eyes for a second, to avoid the temptation of her body. I knew I was blushing rather badly. “That would be lovely, but I really need to talk to Evee. I don’t think we should be getting all worked up with each other right now. But thank you. You … you look great, Raine.”

“You know I do.” She winked at me again. “Evee’s over by … the … ” Her eyes drifted up and past my shoulder.

Praem clicked neatly down the steps from the patio to stand next to me.

“Good morning,” she intoned.

Raine stared at the flawless maid uniform, running her eyes up and down Praem, mouth open in disbelief. She glanced at me and I pulled a yes-I-know-I-see-it-too face.

“Good morning,” Praem repeated.

“And a good morning to you too.” Raine burst out laughing. “Bloody hell. You got something you need to tell me, Heather?”

“It wasn’t me, I didn’t dress her like this. It’s not really my sort of thing.”

“She looks like an escapee from a fetish porno. No offence, I mean, you look great, yeah,” Raine added as Praem did that unimpressed head-tilt in her direction.

“I take it you’re not responsible either, then? She won’t tell me.”

“If I’d done that I’d be parading her around.” Raine let out a low whistle. “Wouldn’t say no though. Hypothetically. If she was human I’d say she needs a reduction to save her back muscles.”

“I know. It’s- they’re- yes. A-anyway, I assumed Evee had dressed her, but the more Praem said the less likely I find that explanation.”

“Said?” Raine raised an eyebrow at me.

I shrugged, unsure how to explain, and eyed Praem sidelong. “We had an actual conversation, much more extensive than the good morning she gave you. She’s talking. Not quite like a person, but almost there. I think it’s this place, perhaps it’s waking her up.”

Raine frowned and a sudden shift flowed through her body language, one I knew very well by now. She peered closer at the demon-doll. Praem stared back, perfectly level, expression empty.

“You’re alright, aren’t you?” Raine murmured. “You’re on our side. Or you better be.”

“Yes,” Praem answered.

Raine straightened up and shrugged, relaxed and loose again.

“She’s what I need to talk with Evee about,” I said. “Among other things, I suppose. You’ve seen her?”

“Yeah. Spat fire at me though, so, you know, duck and cover. Might not be quite as bad with you.” Raine looked off to the far side of the estate’s grounds, along the brick pathway which vanished in the trees. “Actually, I dunno if either of us should talk to her right now.”

“Raine, we can’t leave her alone while we’re here. It’s not fair on her.”

“It’s cool, she’s not alone. Her dad’s with her. He took the day off work, spend some time with his daughter, you know. Lucky he can do that. She was … thinking. It’s sort of the spot for that.”

I peered down the pathway too. Beyond the trees, if I squinted, I could just make out a jumbled grey shadow, like fallen masonry.

“That’s where she is?” I asked. “What’s over there?”

“Trees mostly. Leaves. Dirt. Probably a bird or two.”

“Raine. What’s over there?”

Raine gave me a pained smile “Evee’s mum.”

==

Despite the dilapidated neglect, I rather warmed to the grounds of the Saye estate. I’d never spent time in the countryside before, not the real countryside, as far as you could get from a proper town anywhere in England. I was a city girl at heart, by habit and history, even if the cities were small and provincial.

Few cars passed on the distant main road, and I had to listen closely to hear them. Birdsong was intermittent but everywhere, and as I made my way through the little wood, the occasional pigeon lurched into the air from the trees above.

Roots had undermined the brickwork pathway, cracked and buckled it from below. The wooden edging had long since rotted away to stubs, overgrown with moss and long grass. These trees had probably once been well-tended, now choked with lichen and creepers, the rich earth between them colonised by a thicket of ferns.

I liked that, for a strange double reason; nature reclaiming imposed order looked good, but more importantly this had all been left to fall into disuse because Evelyn’s mother was dead.

Perhaps she’d enjoyed this garden, perhaps she’d want it to endure. It would not.

The trees parted and fell back. The path continued on, into the Saye family’s private graveyard.

When Raine had told me what lay beyond the trees I hadn’t believed my ears. She’d had to repeat herself, and eventually I’d rolled my eyes and imagined a scene from a gothic horror novel. Exactly what this disaster of a trip needed, the cherry on the cake of stupid spooky house – a private family graveyard full of dead wizards. I’d pictured marble mausoleums, gnarled trees, maybe one of those awful suffering statures with frozen stone tears running down its cheeks, let alone whatever pneuma-somatic guardians the Saye family had left behind. What denomination was a family of hereditary mages likely to follow? Somehow I doubted they were domesticated Church of England types.

The graveyard surprised me. A low masonry wall enclosed less than a dozen headstones, along with empty space for perhaps two dozen more, all the stonework clean and much of it relatively new.

Only two graves at the rear looked truly old, slabs of plain granite, but the inscriptions were still legible. The grass was trimmed and neat. Trees formed a sheltering enclosure on three sides, even without their leaves. The fourth side opened out, the land dropping away in a slow hill with a view of the dark waters of the lake.

There was a mausoleum, but it was tasteful, small, in cream stone with a plain cross on the permanently sealed doors.

Not creepy at all. A peaceful place, very well chosen.

Evelyn was sitting on a stone bench halfway down the graveyard, her walking stick resting across her legs, her back to me. Lewis Saye stood nearby, in the middle of saying something to his daughter. I hesitated at the entrance, suddenly feeling like an intruder on a intimate moment.

Lewis spotted me in the corner of his eye, broke into a big smile and waved one huge hand. “Hullo there! Do come over, don’t be shy.”

Evelyn looked at me over her shoulder. She grunted a good morning as I approached.

“Good morning, Evee, Mister Saye.”

“And a good morning to you too!” Lewis boomed at me, shattering the peace of the graveyard. “I do hope you slept well? The place does tend to creak like a leaky old ship at night, I do know.”

“Tolerably well, thank you.” I forced a smile. Poor man deserved to feel like a good host.

“And you helped yourself to some breakfast, I trust? Can’t have growing girls going without a good breakfast. If you’re still hungry – either of you – I’ve got some bacon in the fridge, I could do omelets for lunch, there’s … there’s … ”

I saw, on both their faces, the exact moment Praem emerged from the trees in my wake.

Lewis Saye did a pretty job of hiding his reaction after the first second of confused shock, and from that moment onward he didn’t even look at the doll-demon again. I realised too late what the sight of her might be doing to him, if Evelyn’s mother had indeed dressed her zombies up as a mockery of domestic help.

Evelyn pulled such a frown. A frown like, well, like Praem had just turned up in a maid outfit.

“She’s following me. I’m sorry,” I muttered, and didn’t know where to look. “I should have made her stay indoors. Sorry.”

Lewis Saye clapped his huge hands together before anybody could reply. “Well, I should really get started on marinading the chicken for dinner, especially if Angeline manages to get away from work early. She’s going to try to make it down to see you again, Evelyn, and I’m sure she’ll be delighted to meet all your friends too. Evelyn was just telling me about you in fact, Heather. All good things though, I assure you, haha!”

The laugh ever so slightly too loud, the grin ever so slightly too forced.

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said, to have something to say.

“Don’t let her stay out here too long, will you?” he asked me with a theatrically serious frown. I caught Evelyn rolling her eyes. “She does tend to mope, my girl. You two come back indoors and I’ll have something hot from the oven quicker than you can get your boots off.” He clapped a hand – gently – to Evelyn’s shoulder, then let go and strode down the pathway back toward the house.

“Dad,” Evelyn snapped.

“Yes? Yes dear?”

She raised a hand. “Keys.”

Lewis hesitated and swallowed. He glanced at me. “Is it really … really necessary?”

Evelyn huffed. “How am I supposed to show Heather the-”

“Yes, yes, I suppose you’re right, you’re completely right.” He blustered over Evelyn’s specifics with a smile. “You’re out-thinking me already. I’m getting old, I swear, you’ll be running rings around me in no time, just li- yes, yes. Quite.” He cleared his throat and extracted a keyring from his pocket, fumbled around to unhook a barely-used spare, before striding back and handing it to Evelyn. He closed her fingers around the key before she could withdraw.

“Now- I- I mean-” he struggled, voice low. I felt like I should turn away, close my ears. “Now Evelyn, you know you mustn’t- mustn’t-”

“Mustn’t what?” Evelyn snapped. “I’m not going to turn into her by spending twenty minutes in her dungeon.”

Lewis Saye straightened up and nodded, big smile strained with effort. He smiled my way as well, nodded again, and then walked off, pointedly stepping around where Praem now stood stock-still behind us.

Evelyn watched him go. I’d rarely felt more awkward in my entire life. Neither of us spoke until he’d disappeared into the trees.

“I’m really sorry I interrupted that, Evee.”

“It’s not as if anything important ever comes out of his mouth.” She caught the poorly disguised shock on my face and sighed sharply, waving me off. “I know, I know I’m harsh with him. It’s hard not to be. He was never there.”

Evelyn looked a little brighter and healthier than she had yesterday, as if the countryside air was doing her good, her face a little less wan, her back slightly straighter. Freshly showered, a clean change of clothes, and I could see she’d even waved a brush in the general direction of her hair. She wore a thick grey fisherman’s jumper, far too large for her, so enclosing and heavy it could have kept out a bullet, let alone the cold. Her hands were half-lost inside the sleeves.

There was a bitter defiance in her face and the way she held herself, moreso than usual.

I suppose I would have felt the same, sat where she was.

“Is this Raine’s sick idea of a joke?” She eyed Praem’s maid uniform up and down.

“No, it wasn’t her, or me either. I assumed you’d put her in it, but then I realised that was quite unlikely, to say the least.”

“It’s grotesque.”

“I think it suits her. I mean- it-” I swallowed, withering under the force of Evelyn’s unimpressed frown. “It makes her boobs look amazing. She seems to have a good sense for that.”

Evelyn huffed and shook her head. “Where did you find that, hm?”

Praem turned to stare at her, but declined to reply.

“She wouldn’t tell me either,” I said.

Evelyn clicked her fingers. “Answer.”

“In a cupboard,” Praem intoned. Evelyn fixed her with a steely look, but then sighed and gave up with a shrug of her hands.

“Maybe,” I ventured, softly. “Maybe she’s acting more like a person, because we’ve been treating her a little bit like a person?”

“That’s not a good thing. She’s going completely off the rails.”

“Make myself useful,” Praem intoned.

“See?” I said before Evelyn could snap again. “I think she was only following your orders, the best way she could. She came to say good morning to me, too.”

Evelyn frowned at me. “Wait, how do you know what I told her to do?”

“She’s been talking. Almost like a real person. We had an – almost normal – conversation. I thought I should tell you. I asked if she knew who she is, and she replied by saying I should know that, because I named her; she’s Praem. I think she’s made that her identity, Evee. I think she’s trying to be a person.”

Evelyn looked between Praem and I, then squeezed her eyes shut and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Great. Wonderful.” She opened them again and shot Praem a look fit to fell an elephant. “I should have you destroyed and sent back where you came from.”

“Evee!”

“You won’t,” Praem intoned.

I blinked at the doll-demon in surprise, but Evelyn seemed to expect that reply. She knuckled at her eyes. “Yes, thank you for telling me, Heather, but I can’t do a damn thing about her now. I’ve lost control, called up what I cannot put down. Be thankful I used a mannequin to make her, otherwise we’d have yet another cluster-fuck bearing down on us.”

“Evee, I really do think she’s on our side.”

“She’s not on any side. She,” Evelyn spat sarcasm. “It. It doesn’t have sides.”

I wet my lips and decided to let this one drop for now. Here, in front of her mother’s grave, was perhaps not the best place to convince Evelyn of anything. Maybe I could find some way to help Praem prove herself, but not right now.

“She,” Praem said.

Evelyn frowned at her, then sighed and glanced back to me. “What did you want, anyway?”

“To see you?”

“Can’t imagine why,” Evelyn grumbled.

“Evee, you’re my best friend, and you’re having a rough time – and yes, I know that’s a strong contender for understatement of the decade. Of course I want to see you, I want to help you. I want to get you back to Sharrowford as soon as possible.”

Evelyn looked away, glowering at nothing, but she did nod ever so slightly.

“You’re my … my friend too,” she muttered. “Yes, that’s right.”

“May I join you?” I asked. She nodded and sniffed, so I sat down on the stone bench next to her. It was exquisitely uncomfortable. “Isn’t your bum cold sitting on this?”

“’Course it is. Easier than standing though. I wanted … needed to be down here, to … ” She waved a dismissive hand at the gravestones in front of her, at one in particular. A slab of black marble, scrupulously clean, the inscription picked out in gold leaf.

I had no doubt who was buried beneath.

‘Loretta Julianna Saye’, the inscription read. ‘1965-2014’

‘God Grant She Stay Dead.’

“Goodness me,” I struggled. “Those are quite the words to put on a headstone.”

“I chose that,” said Evelyn.

I sighed, more at the world in general than this specific moment of absurdity. “Anywhere else I’d assume it was just bad taste, but I’m going to guess in this case it might be literal?”

Evelyn looked at me sidelong to see if I was serious. “She’s in a sealed lead coffin. The burial was a compromise, I wanted the body burned.”

“You mean cremated?”

Evelyn shrugged. “My father insisted she have a proper burial. At the time, I was in no state to stop him, and he could easily have had Raine arrested if he’d wanted. I wouldn’t have survived without her, but he didn’t understand a fraction of what was going on. He never fucking did. Put it out of his mind. Pretended we were normal, even when he was surrounded by all her constructs. The first couple of days after her death, she did attempt to migrate.”

“ … migrate. Okay.”

“Mind transfer. Best with a pre-prepared vessel or a close blood relative, before the magician slips away entirely. So she would inherit my body, crippled as I was, but young and alive, while I would be trapped in her corpse.” Evelyn stared at the grave as she spoke, her eyes boring holes in the packed earth. “She failed, because she hadn’t expected to die, so she’d spent years exposing me to exactly the kind of thing which taught me how to resist. And that’s why she’s the one rotting in the fucking ground,” she shouted the last two words at the grave. I flinched, and Evelyn slipped back into silent smoldering hate.

Very, very carefully, I put one hand on Evelyn’s back, as gentle a pressure as I could. A calculated risk, even if only to let her know I was here, within touching distance. She was not in the ground. She was here.

“That’s one of the most monstrous things I’ve ever heard,” I murmured.

She didn’t shrug me off. A minor miracle. Instead she let out a long sigh, and I knew she was trying to let go. The anger drained out of her muscles, the tide receding to reveal a cold bleakness in her voice.

“Mm. So yes, to answer your question, the inscription is literal. The lead coffin isn’t for her benefit. I found things in her notes, in some of the books, about how the flesh of a mage might imbue certain qualities on the very grave worms themselves. A back up plan, another way out. But she’s never coming back. I got her. I won.”

We skated very thin emotional ice here, and I could see two possible paths. On one path I rubbed Evelyn’s back, I spoke soothing pleasantries, I did everything that one was supposed to do with a friend in intractable emotional pain.

On the other path, I went digging.

All I had to do was speak a few words, prompt her in the right direction. She’d do the rest, if she needed it. How much had Evelyn ever spoken about this? It wasn’t as if she could visit a therapist, what on earth would she say?

Would digging make me too much like Raine? Manipulative, underhanded, trying to manoeuvre a friend into emotional vulnerability, even if it was to help her? Even if my intentions were pure?

Despite no idea what I was doing, I’d spent weeks dragging Evelyn into a real friendship, by following my gut; I had no reason to change tactics now.

“You don’t sound too happy about that,” I said.

Evelyn eyed me oddly, almost hesitant. I could feel the tension bunch up in her shoulders. “I’m not sure you’d understand. I’m sorry, I know you … you mean well … I-”

“I’m not stupid, Evee.” I plunged into the risk, my heart rate spiking. “I can put two and two together, from the things you’ve said, from the way Raine spoke about it. You killed your mother, didn’t you?”

Evelyn let out a huge sigh and nodded slowly, staring at the grave. “She was a monster. A real one.”

“She was. From everything I’ve heard, she was.”

“It was self-defence. It was, Heather, it really was. She took my leg. She ruined my spine. She would have used me up and moved onto another, maybe had another child or adopted one. She was a monster, and I put her down.”

Evelyn turned to look at me, biting her bottom lip – I don’t think she was aware of that, I’d never seen that look on her face before. Her eyes were so bleak.

“So why do I still feel guilty?” she murmured.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

The first and most obvious place to check for Evelyn was in her old bedroom.

Praem trailed behind as we made our way down the twisty, cramped hallway, and I found myself hoping that she’d merely gotten confused. Perhaps the house had befuddled her inhuman senses in some obscure fashion. Perhaps we’d find Evelyn sitting right in plain view, death-glaring at us and ready for a nasty argument. Raine would apologise to her, and that was going to be messy, we had some serious issues to work through, but she would be right there. She had not gone missing. The alternative did not bear thinking about.

“Evee? S’just us,” Raine called, knocking before she opened the door, a slab of polished wood with creaky hinges. “Evee? No Evee. Under the bed? No? Worth a shot.”

I followed her in, and put an involuntary hand up to my mouth.

“Her bag’s still here,” Raine was saying. “And, yup, here’s her phone, so I guess we won’t be calling her. Hey, hey, Heather.” Raine must have caught the look on my face. “There’s nothing to worry about. She’s probably gone back to the kitchen, scarfing down comfort food, or stepped out to clear her head. We’ll find her in minutes, okay? Come on.” She offered me her hand.

“Raine, look at this room.”

“Ahh?”

“This isn’t a childhood home for her. Not even one full of terrible memories. This is an open wound.”

Evelyn’s bedroom – her childhood bedroom – was like a little girl’s princess fantasy. A regular sized sitting room could fit in here quite comfortably. Heavy curtains veiled a pair of deep windows, three spindly chairs ringed a little oaken table, and a huge vanity mirror and double bed dominated the far wall.

The room had been gutted.

I’d seen the effect on a much lesser scale, in my own bedroom at home on the last day before I’d left for university. Treasured possessions missing from their customary places, practical necessities removed, empty gaps instead of living memory.

The bed lacked sheets, a chest of drawers stood open and empty of clothes – except a lonely pair of mismatched socks – and the walls showed dark rectangles where posters had once occluded the light. A low bookcase held only a dictionary and a copy of The Lord of the Rings, rumpled as if tossed down in disgust. I could picture the spots where Evelyn would have stacked soft toys, the way she would have piled the bed with quilts and pillows, the enclosing comfort so evident in her room back in the Sharrowford house. This place felt anonymous, nothing of her in here.

Raine gave me a pained smiled. “Yeah, yeah I know. I helped her strip the place out. Never thought we’d have to come back.”

“It’s horrible. Raine, she can’t stay in here.”

Raine nodded and puffed out a slow sigh. “Maybe she went to get some bedsheets?”

I gave her a capital-L look.

“Yeah.” Raine cleared her throat. “Probs’ not.”

==

Over the next half hour I came to know the Saye family mansion, as one might know an intricate and broken torture device, designed by a sadistic genius.

A simple inventory of the house might look perfectly sane on paper – x number of bedrooms, y number of bathrooms, one grand dining room and so on – but could never do justice to the way the snaking corridors kinked in on themselves as if built around the rooms.

Old darkness had saturated the beams and corners down the centuries, lurking in the back of brick fireplaces and underneath heavy wooden furniture, never fully retreating each time Raine slapped about for a light switch on the walls. Blind corners and shadowy recesses were always sneaking up on the unwary explorer – that would be me.

Many rooms joined to others via side doors and little cubby closets. Other than an obvious effort to fight back the dust, most of them looked as if they’d been left untidy for years. Cushions discarded haphazardly, furniture pushed back in strange configurations, beds hastily stripped with the sheets still in piles on the floor. One room struck me as particularly ominous; a side-door had been barricaded with a pair of upturned chairs, long ago left to gather dust.

We peered into empty sitting rooms with cracked leather sofas, and wandered the circumference of a great dining table in a hall with tall windows and tarnished silverware on the sideboards. We wormed our way back to the kitchen and peeked out into a re-purposed utility room, with a little walled-off outdoor courtyard for the bins. We found a locked study where Raine peered through the keyhole. We heard Lewis singing in the bath, and assumed Evelyn was not in there listening to her father butchering Bohemian Rhapsody.

We also passed several tired, listless servitors, hibernating things wound down and curled up, their orders long forgotten.

I’d thought I loved old buildings, such venerable beauty from a different age. This mansion was the exception which proved the rule, cold and vast, too much akin to an impersonal concrete box on a larger scale. The house told me that my tiny flickering life could never fill this void.

I couldn’t think of this as Evelyn’s home. That honour belonged to the house in Sharrowford.

“What if we don’t find her?” I asked as we retraced our steps along the ground floor’s main spinal corridor, my voice an unbidden whisper. “The last time Evelyn went missing, she got lost in another dimension.”

Raine shook her head and shot me one of her easy confident smiles. “She’ll be around here somewhere, might be hiding from us though. This old hulk sure is a good place to play hide and seek, full of nooks and crannies. We might be at this for a while yet. You holding up okay, wanna go sit down?”

“What if she’s hurt herself?”

“On purpose? She’d never do that, not our Evee.”

“Raine, she self-harms constantly. It might not be razor blade marks on her wrists, but the way she punishes herself is just as real.”

Raine paused with an oddly thoughtful frown, then nodded. “Yeah, yeah there’s places she could go here that would mess with her head. We should check out the mothballed wing, that’s where her mother used to keep all the hocus pocus, but I asked Lewis and he told me it was all locked up. Here, back this way.”

Creeping around dark corridors together had smothered my earlier arousal, given me time to watch Raine and think uncomfortable thoughts.

Raine had lied to me.

She’d lied to Evelyn and I, manipulated us – yes, ostensibly for our own safety, in her self-appointed role as bodyguard, and I did believe that justification. Or at least I believed that she believed.

I couldn’t help how that had turned me on, made me feel safe, made me feel right. Even thinking about it now I felt a little shiver of attraction. Raine’s elemental nature pressed all my sexual buttons, buried my anger and frustration under a tidal wave of arousal. She hadn’t even meant to do it.

From the first day I’d met her, I’d let Raine get away with so much, because she was hot and she liked me and her unhealthy behaviour made me feel good.

Sooner or later I was going to have to deal with the realities of being desperately head-over-heels in love with a sociopath.

Praem wasn’t reassuring company right now either. She’d lapsed back into her habitual silence, lurking a dozen paces behind Raine and I. Several times she’d made me jump when I’d turned around and she’d been standing there in the shadows, staring at nothing. At least she was easy on the eyes. I could ogle her chest through her jumper all day long and at least she wouldn’t try to manipulate me.

“Heather?” Raine called.

“Mm?”

I turned away from the voluptuous doll-demon. I’d gotten distracted, as Raine had pulled ahead a few paces.

“She say something?” Raine asked.

“No, sorry. I was just admiring the view. So to speak.”

Raine quirked an eyebrow in surprise, and I felt a sudden blush colour my cheeks. Oh dear, I had actually said that out loud, hadn’t I?

“W-what?” I tried to meet Raine’s amazement with smoldering indignation – and the feeling came far too easily. “I can’t look at her? I’m sure you must do, on occasion.”

Oh no, oh Heather, what are you doing?

Baiting your girlfriend into an argument, because you’re angry and can’t express yourself properly, because an argument with Raine is a hundred times easier than dealing with how Evelyn has vanished into her ancient crumbling ancestral home full of exhausted spirit life and the wreckage of her family.

Let’s have it out, Raine, right here in the middle of this absurd old house with my best friend missing and a demon watching us. Let’s have a blazing row about sexual attraction and basic respect and I’ll break down at you for lying to me and you’ll try to win me back by screwing my tiny stupid brains out but I’ll shout at you before you get the chance and-

Raine laughed.

“Course you can look at her. She doesn’t give a damn, and her jugs are out of this world.” Raine grinned, cheeky and confident and a little dirty. The sort of grin that made me melt. It faded when I failed to laugh at her joke. “It’s just, you know, you never say stuff like that. You’re horned up real bad, aren’t you?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“Ah.” Raine swallowed and dipped her head. “Right, yeah, you’ve got every right to be mad at me.”

“I’m-” Not mad? I looked down at my feet and crossed my arms, so I could tell the truth. “I am mad. And aroused, and pent up. And worried and hurt. I want you to not lie to me ever again.”

Raine took a step closer, in my peripheral vision. “I can’t make that promise. You know I’d only lie to you to get you out of harm’s way.”

“And I hate that I’m okay with that,” I hissed.

“Do you hate me?”

Not a shred of accusation in her voice. No bitterness, no uncertain tremor. We’d shared each other for months now and she was utterly unafraid of rejection. How did she do it? She took another step closer.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said to her feet. “I’m in love with you. I just wish … ”

“Wish what?” Raine murmured, and touched her fingertips to my folded arms.

I pulled away.

“Don’t. You’ll turn me on again and I’ll forget what I’m trying to say. You want to be my protector? Well then. Oh dammit,” I snapped, as much at myself as at Raine. “Are we really having this talk right now, with Evee missing, in a dark corridor in the spookiest house ever? Raine, if you want to be my protector, then you may need to protect me from aspects of yourself. You need to never lie to me again.”

I forced myself to look up and meet Raine’s eyes – a mistake. Deep, rich brown, always so expressive and intelligent, and right now creased with such confused conflict.

She almost shattered my hastily constructed defences with a mere shake of her head.

“Heather, I never meant-”

“And don’t say it was to keep me safe, because I like it when you say that, it makes me feel good, and I don’t want to feel good about you lying to me. You can’t do that to me, Raine.”

Raine drew herself up with a deep sigh and closed her eyes, as if cleansing herself, and suddenly I was the one wracked by fear of rejection.

Was this what Evelyn had warned me about, so many weeks ago?

My mind raced a hundred miles an hour. Of course Raine was going to lose interest sooner or later. Look at me, small and scrawny and weird, compared to this amazonian beauty, the simplest of my emotions tied up in knots in front of her blazing clarity of purpose. If I wouldn’t serve those purposes, she’d move on, as soon as all my complaints could no longer be drowned out with sex.

I did my best to harden my heart.

I did not do a very good job.

“You’re right,” Raine said, eyes still closed. “You are completely right, Heather. Yeah, I know I’m not very good at seeing these things. Promises don’t mean much if they’re easy to keep, so-” She opened her eyes and juddered to a halt at the sight of me. “Heather? Woah, woah, Heather, it’s okay, you-”

“Finish what you were saying,” I managed to squeak.

“Are you-”

“Finish!”

“Sure thing, boss,” she almost laughed, amusement covering her concern. God, I loved the way she could laugh anything off, even when it infuriated me. “It’s a difficult promise, but a promise I have to try – I’ll never lie to you again. Even to protect you. Might have to make some forced tactical errors, but you’re right, you’re more important than that. I’m kind of a fucking idiot that you had to explain that to me. Some philosopher I am.”

I nodded. Had to look away from her.

“Heather? You really look like you need a hug right now. Can I?”

“You may,” I whispered.

Raine wrapped her arms around me and I buried my face in her shoulder. Oh, that was better. That was much better. Silly, paranoid Heather; Raine was an impossible sociopath, but sometimes it was easy to forget she had chosen me, even if I didn’t understand her reasons. She rubbed my back in muscle-melting circles. Neither of us spoke for a long moment. I listened to her heartbeat.

“Thought you were about to break up with me,” I eventually croaked.

“What? No fucking way. Oh Heather, I’m still kind of a mystery to you, aren’t I?”

“I suppose you are.” I managed a little shrug.

We let go of each other after another moment of shared comfort, but Raine made a point of holding my hand and ruffling my hair. I sniffed and nodded at her smile, and then she raised her eyes past me.

“Hey Praem,” Raine said. “Sorry for all the drama.”

How embarrassing, to have an audience for such a personal moment. At least Praem wasn’t capable of caring. I glanced over my shoulder at the doll-demon – and found, to my incredible surprise, that Praem’s milky white eyes were creased by a subtle tightness. She stared for a heartbeat, then spoke.

“Find. Evelyn.”

“ … is she pissed off with us?” Raine asked.

“I think she is. I’m sorry, Praem. And also she’s right, we do need to find Evelyn. I can’t believe we stopped to have a miniature relationship crisis in the middle of all this.” I rolled my eyes to gesture at the absurdity of the house all around us.

“Right you are then.” Raine rolled her shoulders. Always a good sign.

“You have a fresh idea?”

“Smart money says she’s either gone out to the car, in protest, or she’s hiding, maybe pressured her dad into unlocking the east wing. We’ll check out the front first, then go find Lewis. He’s probably done with his bath now. We’ll just have to hope we don’t get an eyeful of naked old man.”

“Ew.”

“Come on.” Raine grinned at me and turned to set off.

I glanced back at Praem one more time. “Do you have suggestions … for … ”

Praem did not have any suggestions, but perhaps she would have if I’d been able to finish the question.

A fox was sitting behind her.

Right in the middle of the corridor, those cute little black-furred paws pressed neatly into the carpet, golden eyes glinting in the gloom. We made eye contact; I froze in shock.

A tug on my hand, Raine attempting to lead me onward. Suddenly the fox stood up, twitched its ears, and raced away down the corridor on silent paws. It slipped around a corner, a flash of russet in the dark.

“Heather? You getting one more dose of Praem’s rack?”

“No! No, Raine, didn’t you see that?”

Raine shook her head, eyes flicking down the corridor on instant high alert. “A spirit?”

“No. It was a fox, it was normal. It just … Raine, where does that hallway lead, around that corner?”

“That way? Couple of connecting rooms between the two wings. All the stuff on the far side’ll be locked though, Evee wouldn’t- oh.”

“Oh? Oh? Don’t ‘oh’ at me and stop.”

Raine shot me a pained smile. “Oh as in ‘oh shit’. I know exactly where Evee is. Come on.”

I struggled to keep up, even hand in hand. Raine’s stride threatened to break into a run, though we walked less than fifty feet. Hurrying down the side corridor where the fox had vanished, thinner and more claustrophobic than the main spine, we climbed a small set of stairs. Raine paused with a sharp frown at a trio of doors. I gulped down air to get my breath back.

“Where is she? Raine, where are we going?”

“This uh, reading room thing. Place. I should have known, but she hasn’t been back there, ever.” Raine remembered the correct door, grabbed the handle, and led me through.

A short stub of corridor, with only one door at the far end. Raine let go of my hand and raced ahead. She burst through the door all in a rush, raising her voice. “Evee? Evee, it’s us. Evelyn?”

I crept in behind her, my heart in my throat.

Reading room, right; Raine did display an occasional talent for understatement.

We’d emerged through a side-door into a space more akin to a library hall or great viewing chamber, or the study of a master inventor from the age of discovery. The vast room occupied both floors of this part of the mansion. The upper floor formed a wide walkway around three walls, ringed with meticulously organised bookcases, reached by a staircase at one end. The echoing space was poorly lit by wall sconces, half the bulbs burnt out or missing. A pair of free-standing lamps put up a valiant defence against the oppressive gloom. The towering curtains were caked in old dust.

All dark heavy polished wood, several tables and desks stood at different points around the room’s bare floorboards as if for separate projects, stacked with all manner of bric-a-brac in a state of terrible disarray: disassembled electronics, a half finished oil-paint canvas of a landscape scene, an entire deer skeleton laid out bone by bone, a series of anatomical specimen jars filled with cloudy liquid, a set of grotesque clay statues of worms with wings and teeth, and a half-dozen other mysteries too complex to take in at a glance.

One table was on its side, contents strewn across the floor. It had been that way for a long time. Dust covered every surface, including the floor, except for a single pair of dragging footprints and the trail of a walking stick.

A part of one wall was cracked and cratered, the plaster scorched black around the edges, the damage blurred by time and dust.

Evelyn was sitting in a chair, hunched over with her chin in her hands.

She’d been staring at the old scorch mark, but she looked up as Raine and I blundered into the room. Even before she opened her mouth, even with that thunderous frown on her face, relief flooded my chest.

“Evee!” I said.

“Stop shouting, the pair of you,” she snapped. “My ears work perfectly well.”

Raine sighed through a smile, relief plain as she shook her head.

“What?” Evelyn demanded.

“Evee, are you okay?” Raine asked.

Evelyn pulled a face as if Raine had suggested she take up molesting animals. She glanced at me. “What have you been doing to her now? Are you both high on mushrooms? What an utterly idiotic question. Do I seem alright? You tell me.”

“Of course you don’t seem alright,” I said before Raine could put her foot in her mouth. “Praem couldn’t find you, we were so worried. I-I thought maybe you’d- I don’t know. I was worried about you, Evee.”

Evelyn snorted and looked away.

“Wow. Well. This sure is the last place I’d think of to look for you,” Raine said, as she crossed to the nearest of the heavy old desks and cast an odd look around the room, at the scorched crater Evelyn had been sitting and staring at. I realised there was a huge stain on the floorboards nearby, a years old splatter that had stripped the polish and warped the wood. Two more scorch marks, like meteor trails, had chewed into the floor not far away. “What on earth are you doing in here, Evee?”

“Sitting down,” Evelyn drawled. “To enjoy my holiday.”

Raine dipped her head in silent apology. Evelyn frowned at her like she’d gone mad.

“Is this where it happened?” I asked softly. They both looked at me, Raine with a frozen wince and Evelyn with deep shadows in her eyes. “I apologise for asking, but under the circumstances I think it’s better to have it in the open. This is where your mother died, isn’t it?”

Evelyn nodded and made a grumbly throat-clearing noise. She followed my awed glance at the cratered wall. “Not there. That was where she tried to stop me.”

What on earth could one say to that? ‘I see’, or ‘I’m sorry’, or some other useless platitude? None of that would help Evelyn.

“Why hasn’t any of this been cleaned up?” I asked instead.

“Nobody’s set foot in here since.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t be sitting alone in the room where your abusive mother died. If you want to sit here, I’ll pull up a chair too.”

Evelyn looked like she wanted to slap me for that one. I didn’t blame her, and I’d take it too. Some wounds never close.

Praem chose that moment to join us, crossing the room to stand next to Evelyn’s chair, prim and proper and very straight-backed indeed. Evelyn eyed her with open suspicion, until Praem turned her head to meet her mistress’ gaze.

“You required help,” Praem intoned.

“Shut up. Not another word. God dammit, I specifically told you not to … ” Evelyn trailed off in barely contained frustration, with a telltale guilty glance at Raine and I.

“Wait a moment,” I said. “Did she lie to us? Praem, did you know where Evelyn was this whole time?”

Raine raised her eyebrows and let out a low whistle. “Clever girl. Very impressive. She found a way around your orders, Evee.”

“She’s getting worse,” Evelyn hissed. “Should never have made her.”

“Evelyn,” I said. “She saw you were in pain and went for help. That’s not evil voodoo zombie territory, not at all. Thank you, Praem. Was that you, with the fox back there?”

Praem turned to stare at me, in silence.

“What fox?” Evelyn asked. “What’s she done now?”

“Back in the corridor?” Raine asked. “Heather saw something, I thought it was a spirit, and then I worked out you’d come here.”

“I-” I struggled to phrase the words. It hadn’t looked anything like a spirit. “Sort of, I don’t know. Praem?”

Evelyn slapped Praem in the leg with her walking stick. “Answer.”

“Not I,” Praem said, icicle cold.

Evelyn shrugged with shoulders and eyebrows, more than a little unimpressed.

“Did you see a fox come through here?” I asked her.

“A fox.”

“I’m serious. Evee, don’t look at me like that, stupid things happen to us all the time. Woodland creatures walking through walls is relatively minor compared to half the things I’ve seen since I met you two. Yes, I turned around to ask Praem if she had any ideas about where you might be, and I saw a fox in the corridor. It went around a corner, and technically it led us to you. Is there any reason there would be a magical fox in here?”

Evelyn rolled her eyes and spread her hands. She couldn’t have looked more exasperated if I’d enquired as to whether bears defecated in the woods. “This place is lousy with magical echoes and leftovers. It could have been anything. A pneuma-somatic fart.”

“Okay, good. Thank you. I’m sorry for snapping.” I swallowed and felt a little sheepish.

“Could Praem be telling another porky?” Raine asked.

“Truth,” Evelyn snapped her fingers.

“Not I,” the demon-doll repeated.

“It was probably just a spirit.” I was trying to convince myself as much as my friends. “I’m not used to them looking like real animals. That’s never happened before.”

“Hey, maybe Lozzie sent it,” Raine suggested. I demurred with a silent frown; I’d love that, but it seemed unlikely.

“Yes, that would be all we need, wouldn’t it?” Evelyn grumbled, venom in her voice. “More unexplained visitations from your mysterious friend. Let’s complicate matters as much as possible, shall we? Raine can seduce my father’s latest romantic prospect, and I’ll go play with my mother’s unfinished work.”

I let it wash over me. Evelyn was in a kind of pain neither of us could share, and we needed to make this right.

“Evee,” I said with a meaningful glance at my girlfriend. “Raine has something she needs to tell you.”

Raine cleared her throat and straightened up. Evelyn’s frown thundered back onto her face.

“Oh no, don’t tell me you two have decided to get fucking married?”

“What? N-no. Evee, no, it’s nothing to do-” I halted, blushing. “Raine, stop grinning, you’re meant to be apologising to her.”

“Yes, yes, ahem. Evee, Evelyn, I’ve lied to you about something. To you and Heather. She figured it out, and made me realise I owe you an apology, because I’m a shit and I’ve hurt you. I … I think the Sharrowford Cult was about to hit the house, so I lied to get you and Heather out of the city for a week. I’m sorry. It’s my fault you’re here, dealing with this.” She gestured at the echoing hall all around us. “We’ll leave tomorrow, we’ll get out. I’ve been a dickhead.”

Evelyn listened with a raised eyebrow until Raine was done. “Repeat that last part.”

“I’ve been a dickhead?”

“Again.”

“I’m a huge dickhead.”

“Mm, you are.” Evelyn allowed herself a thin smile. “But you’re also not half as clever as you think. It’s not a very good lie if I see through it before you finish telling it.”

“You knew?” I asked, gaping at her.

“Of course I bloody well knew.” Evelyn shot me an incredulous look. “You didn’t? Raine’s awful at lying. One of the few things that makes her tolerable.”

“Ow,” said Raine.

“I thought she bullied you into coming.”

Evelyn scoffed. “Not likely.”

“So I’m the only one who didn’t know. Lovely.”

“I assumed we were all in on it,” Evelyn grumbled, then shot Raine a look. “You must be armpit deep in the doghouse.”

“Evee,” Raine tried to stay on course. “You’re my best friend, and Heather made me realise that maybe I’m jeopardising that, regardless of our history.”

Evelyn gave her a long, silent look. “You get points for fessing up. Barely.” She sighed as if letting go of something, and pinched the bridge of her nose. “You know, Heather, she never would have apologised in the past. She’d just have lied and moved on. And no, I don’t want to fucking be here, but you didn’t bully me into it. The filth in Sharrowford are broken, I accept that, they won’t touch my territory again. I came because I owe Heather a proper look at the map.” She cracked her eyes open and shot a bitter, sidelong glance at me as she spoke. “What the hell are we doing back here, Raine? I waited years to get out of this Godforsaken hole.”

“Like I said, we can leave tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s too far away,” I said, and made a snap decision. “Evee, you’re sleeping in the same room as us tonight. Not in your old bedroom. I saw it, and just, no. I won’t let you. I’ll sleep in an armchair, you and Raine can have separate sheets on the bed.”

“Don’t be-”

“Evelyn Saye, you are not spending this night alone.”

Evee blinked at the force in my words. She turned away and nodded. “Fine.”

“I’ll take the chair,” Raine offered. “Come on Heather, you need the bed.”

“And you drove all the way here. You take the bed.”

“I can sleep in the Goddamn chair,” Evelyn grumbled. “But if you two start humping I’ll have Praem turn the garden hose on you.”

==

Winter sunlight woke me, and I woke alone.

Evelyn’s absence I’d fully expected. A night in an armchair is uncomfortable for anybody, let alone with Evelyn’s catalogue of aliments, but I hadn’t wanted to spark an argument by insisting she take my spot in the bed. I’d had just as much trouble sleeping in the unfamiliar surroundings, with all the creaking sounds of the house’s ancient frame settling in the cold weather, so I’d had plenty of chances to see Evelyn curled up in the chair as I’d tossed and turned in bed.

Doubtless she was up and about, dealing with her aches and pains. Her bag was still by the chair, along with a spare skirt and thin jumper draped over the arm.

“Raine?” I called into the silence, sitting up and drawing my legs to my chest under the unfamiliar covers. Then I tutted at myself. This was a safe place, I didn’t need her for every little thing. I disentangled myself from the sheets and climbed out of bed, winced in the cold and the lance of harsh light through the room’s one small window.

My mobile phone had one new message – from Raine.

It was a picture of me asleep in bed, sent about an hour ago, with a pink heart shape drawn in the corner. I’d rolled over to hug the pillow in lieu of Raine herself. She’d attached a message.

‘Looked like you needed the extra sleep! Gone for a run around the grounds, need to work out the kinks. As I type this, Evee’s downstairs eating breakfast with her dad, big score!!!’

I smiled at the picture and blushed, enjoying the feeling. I looked terrible, drooling on the pillow. This was better, this was how we were supposed to be.

When I turned around to find my clothes I almost jumped out of my skin.

“Don’t sneak up on people like that! Oh my God.” I put a hand to my chest. “ … what on earth are you wearing? No, that’s perverse, this must be a joke. Praem?”

Praem stared back at me from just inside the now open door. She must have opened it and stepped inside in perfect silence as I was reading Raine’s message.

Praem was dressed in an utterly immaculate, perfectly pressed, rigorously starched maid uniform. Not some faux-saucy fetish outfit, but a full-length black skirt and those stupid ruffly shoulder straps which crossed over the middle of her back. She even had a pair of shiny black shoes on her feet, though her long blonde hair was still in the same messy bun from yesterday, exactly like she was a teenage girl in low-effort cosplay. The whole ensemble served to emphasise her already sizable chest, and I did find myself staring for a moment, before I shook my head. I suddenly felt a little exposed, in rumpled sleep-smelling tshirt and pajama bottoms.

“You should not be wearing that,” I said. “It might suit you, but signalled servility is no virtue. Who dressed you?”

“I am not servile,” she intoned, in that ice-cold knife-sharp enunciation of every word. “I am saying good morning.”

I boggled at her. Was that the longest, most complete sentence she’d ever spoken?

“Good morning,” Praem repeated.

“Good- good morning, Praem.” I swallowed. “I do need to get dressed now, so if you could … ”

Without another word, the doll-demon turned on her heel and marched back out. Her head briefly reappeared around the door frame. She stared at me, and closed the door after herself.

“We really do need to get out of this place,” I muttered to myself.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Evelyn’s father was indeed at home.

He was a huge bear of a man. Despite the initial shock at three hundred pounds of six-foot-five blonde bearded viking bounding down the estate’s front steps, I warmed to him instantly.

“Evelyn!” He boomed, arms wide, ruddy face lighting up in a huge smile beneath a squashed boxer’s nose. “You should have called! I had no idea.”

“Yes, well.” Evelyn gave him a very level look. “Here I am.”

He laughed, a jolly, rolling sound. “Here, give your old man a hug!”

He strode up to us and lifted Evelyn right off her feet. I had to suppress a flinch. That would have been terribly rude of me – this man was no monster, just uncommonly large, in every direction. I contented myself with a small step backward, though I needn’t have bothered; he was completely absorbed in embracing his daughter.

“Don’t pick me up, you oaf!” Evelyn spat. “Put me down!”

He weathered his daughter’s outrage with more jolly laughter, and set her down very gently.

I couldn’t help but notice he held onto Evelyn for a moment longer than necessary, to help her find her unsteady feet and brace her walking stick firmly against the ground. He’d swept her into that hug many, many times before. I wondered if he’d dropped her once, how often she’d stumbled and fallen over as a child, unused to her prosthetic leg and the chronic pain.

“Here, let me get a good look at you, I haven’t seen your face for months,” he said, hands on her shoulders. He pulled a theatrical expression of careful scrutiny, bunching up his bushy eyebrows. “Mmm, yes, I suspected so.”

“Suspected what?” Evelyn snapped.

“That you are as fantastic as the last time I saw you, my dear.”

“You’ve been drinking.”

“Two glasses of wine with dinner, that’s all. No harm in a little lubrication now and then.” He chuckled through Evelyn’s very unimpressed look.

“A little,” she growled.

“Oh, Evelyn, Evelyn, you really should have called ahead, I would have put something in the oven for you and your friends. You’re lucky I was even here, I spent yesterday night in the city. We just won a big case, and I went out drinking with the judge afterwards – all a bit hush hush on that though.” He winked broadly and put a stubby finger to his lips for a moment. “So, tell me, how long are you and your friends planning on staying? The university term is just ending, isn’t it?” He cast a cursory glance over myself, Raine, and Praem, and didn’t seem to take us in before he looked back to his daughter. “All the way ‘till Christmas? I was supposed to be taking Christmas dinner with Angeline, but I can change plans, we could have your aunt and uncle over. It’ll be wonderful, the house will be full up for once!”

When Evelyn had opened up about her past, she’d called her father a ‘weak fool’. No description seemed less apt for this animated giant of a man, the wide sweeping gestures of his ham hock hands, the weight of muscle beneath his gut. He should be striding across some ancient battlefield in a Norse Saga, hefting a war axe – not squeezed into suit trousers and a neat shirt with the sleeves rolled up, in 21st century rural England.

Father and daughter shared little resemblance – except for the glorious golden blonde hair. Evelyn had inherited that from him, just as wild and thick, though her father was going grey from the temples upward.

Everything else must have come from her mother.

“I’m not staying long,” Evelyn grunted.

Her father did a poor job of concealing his puppy-like disappointment, though he did try, and I believe in that moment I came to completely understand the man.

“Well! Well, however long you’re planning to stay, first off you should probably all come inside and get out of this dammed cold!” He laughed at his own simple wit, playing the gregarious host, making big gestures with his hands as he looked around at the friends who had brought his daughter home.

“Bloody right,” Evelyn muttered, but she made no move toward the front door.

He wasn’t exaggerating. A biting cold was creeping up on us. Even sheltered by the bulwark of the house and the density of the trees, the December night’s chill cut through my pink hoodie and sapped my strength, leeching away the lingering heat from the car ride. I seemed to feel the cold more acutely these days, as if the repeated use of hyperdimensional mathematics had turned me partially cold-blooded. I did rather desperately want to get indoors.

One of my greatest flaws, I was too polite to make a move before our host did. I scrunched up the ends of my sleeves around my hands. At least my teeth weren’t chattering, yet.

 “Have you eaten on the road?” Evelyn’s father was asking, as he gestured at the house. “I’ve got leftovers, all sorts. Some cold lasagna in the fridge, probably some part-baked garlic bread to spare too. I’ve got some, um … ” He nodded in recognition to Raine, who smiled back at him. “Raine, yes, uh, glad to see you’re well.”

“Always doing great, thank you.” She hefted our bags in one hand and closed the car’s boot. “And how have you been?”

“Oh, fine, fine, yes, quite.” He swallowed, purging himself of a nasty taste. he turned his smile on Praem and I. “And who are you two young ladies? You must introduce us, Evelyn.”

“This is Heather,” said Evelyn. “She’s my … friend.”

“A friend? An actual friend? Well, blow me down with a feather.” His eyebrows climbed like a pair of fat caterpillars and he grinned with genuine delight and stuck out a hand toward me. “Very pleased to meet you then, Heather. You have no idea how much of a relief it is that she’s finally making some friends at university.”

He presented a strange sight, this giant of a man framed by the bulk of the spider-servitor behind him, that he couldn’t see. What was it like, living in this house, in the unseen wreckage of his dead wife’s work? Two minutes earlier I would have found him intimidating, but now I felt sorry for him. I gave him my best smile and shook his hand.

“Heather Morell,” I said. “That’s me, I mean. Mister Saye?”

“Do call me Lewis, please.”

“She’s one of us,” Evelyn added.

“Ah.” Lewis Saye’s smile froze for a fraction of a second; another fumbled attempt to suppress his gut emotional reaction, and this time it made me feel awful. For an eye blink, so short I would have missed it if I hadn’t been shaking his hand, this viking throwback was wary of me.

Then the moment passed, and he was all welcoming and big smiles again.

“Ah, well.” He shrugged, then burst into a good natured belly chuckle. “I shan’t hold it against you.”

I was gripped by the most bizarre urge to apologise. Instead, for once in my life, I managed to say the right thing. “Evelyn’s a great friend to me. She really is.”

“Ahhh, I expect no less of my girl.” He beamed at me, though in my peripheral vision I saw Evelyn roll her eyes. “That’s wonderful, wonderful. And who might this be?” Before anyone could stop him, Lewis Saye turned to Praem and stuck out his hand. “Delighted to meet you as well, I’m sure … I … oh.”

Praem stared back.

That little ‘oh’ was so small and defeated. His bluff and bluster fell at the hurdle of Praem’s eyes. Lewis Saye’s smile died, leaving only numb shock. He retracted his proffered hand and took an uncertain half step back from the doll-demon. Praem just stared, a few strands of her long blonde hair loose in the wind.

Lewis looked to his daughter for help, tried to form a question, managed only to swallow.

“Oh for God’s sake, yes.” Evelyn scowled. “It’s exactly what you think it is. Deal with it.”

“She,” I corrected softly. Evelyn let out a huff.

Lewis was absolutely lost. He blinked at Praem with a shadow of the expression I had imagined for my mother’s face when I presented her with Raine, but tainted with equal parts fear and surrender. The look of a man who knows he is powerless to avoid certain horror.

“She’s made of wood,” Raine said quickly, stepping up to fill the gap with her effortless confidence – and literally, stepping forward and handing Praem one of the bags, looping the strap over the demon’s shoulder. Praem adjusted to the weight, tilting slightly. “A life size doll, you know, like a shop mannequin. We’ve had her for weeks, she’s perfectly safe. Not that bright, either.”

“Her name is Praem,” I added.

Lewis blinked at me. “Na- name?”

“Y-yes. Yes,” I said, and felt especially lame.

He turned back to Evelyn. “In- in the house? You want it … to come in?”

In the tremor of his voice I heard an echo of how he must have been with her mother; this was what Evelyn had called weak. My heart went out to them both.

“No, I thought we’d station her out here to stand around and scare off the birds,” Evelyn said. “Of course in the house, what’s the point of having her otherwise? You lived most of your life with far worse under your feet.” She shouldered past her father’s wavering hand and trudged up toward the house’s front door, leaning heavily on her walking stick.

“Have things-” he turned to Raine, a distraught frown on his face. “Have things gotten that bad in Sharrowford?”

Raine smiled that endless confidence and shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing major. We had to deal with a couple of problems, that’s all. Praem’s just insurance.”

“Nothing major?” I couldn’t stop myself. Raine had the good grace to look a little sheepish as she shot me an apologetic smile.

“I-I thought … ” Evelyn’s father shook his head, casting his eyes across the semi-circle of tarmac and the thin grass beyond as if searching for help. “I- I should- she can come to me about anything. She- … ”

“About our kind of stuff?” Raine asked.

Lewis Saye stared at her blankly. Then he swallowed and turned away, to follow his daughter up the steps to the front door, underneath the overhanging bulk of a giant pneuma-somatic spider he couldn’t even see.

When he was beyond earshot, I let out a huge sigh. “That went less than well.”

“Give him about twenty minutes, he’ll be right back to normal,” Raine murmured. “Hey, he’s a hell of a bloke, he spent twenty years dealing with her mum. You don’t marry a mage for two decades without pretty thick skin.”

“Raine, that is a deeply traumatised man,” I muttered under my breath. “How much does he even know?”

“Oh, he’s totally clued in. Sort of.” She shrugged. “He doesn’t like it. Seriously, twenty minutes, he’ll be cracking bad jokes again. Even if Evee starts an argument with him. Hell, especially if she starts an argument with him, that’ll perk him right up.”

I shook my head, watching as Evelyn stepped inside the house with her father at her heels. The last dregs of sunlight drained from the sky, orange sunset snagged on the very tips of the distant trees. Darkness closed in tight behind us – rural darkness, no streetlights or urban light pollution out here. The windows of the great house cast the only illumination. Darker shapes scuttled and scurried in the deepening night beyond. When I looked up, I could see so many more stars than I usually would.

“Feed me a strawberry,” Praem intoned.

“Someone’s hungry,” Raine said. “Where’s Evee keeping the zombie food?”

“In her bag, I think. Later,” I added, glancing at Praem’s impassive face.

Raine gently touched the back of her hand to my cheek. Her fingers were so warm. “Hey, Heather, you’re freezing. Let’s get you inside, yeah? You know, the house has a couple of actual fireplaces, we could get some wood, light one of them up. I bet you’d love that.” She smiled and took my hand in hers, moved to lead me up the steps.

“As long as there’s no madwoman in the attic.” I let out a little sigh. “I suppose I don’t have a choice now, do I?”

Raine cocked an eyebrow at me. “You always have a choice, Heather. Always. You could tell me – right now, right here – to get back in the car, get Evee in with you, and drive out of here. And I’d do it, through the night. I would. If you feel unsafe, if you feel wrong here, I’d do it. I swear.”

“Raine, don’t be ridiculous.”

“You think I’m exaggerating?” she asked, dead serious, and stopped two steps higher than me.

The addition to her already considerable height advantage intimidated me in an obscurely pleasurable way – I ached to tell her so, and stumbled over a response.

“Of course you’re not exaggerating, but it’s still ridiculous. Why don’t you tell me what to do for a change?”

I hoped the darkness would hide the blush in my cheeks. I hadn’t meant to say that, and I didn’t entirely know what I meant by it.

On the steps of Evelyn’s house, beneath a giant pneuma-somatic spider, was not the place to have this particular conversation. I eyed the giant servitor hanging above us, attached to the side of the house. The size of the thing sent a little animal tremor through my chest, but somehow I couldn’t summon any deeper fear of the battered, ancient creature.

This place was done, a long time ago.

“Heather?” A curious grin broke across Raine’s face. “Should I be-”

“Besides,” I spoke a little too fast, a touch too loud. “This place isn’t scary. Not really. Like you said, it’s got beautiful architecture.”

“Mmmhmm, mmhmm, sure,” Raine nodded and eyed me with a quirk to her lips. “Come on, we should get inside. You need to eat something before you conk out, at least.”

I nodded, but turned to look behind me one last time, still hand-in-hand with Raine.

Praem had remained unresponsive amid all this drama, staring out into the darkening garden. At first I thought she was locked in silent communion with the night, and I was going to call for her to follow us, but then I realised something was staring back at her.

That fox again, barely twenty feet away.

It caught wind of my attention, huge vulpine ears swivelling to listen to all the little sounds of the night. It was beautiful, far more beautiful than the house; that sleek pointed face and deep russet fur, the way it locked eyes with me for a skittish heartbeat.

Then it bounded away. Praem turned her head to look at me.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” I said, talking about the fox.

“Beautiful,” she echoed, her icicle voice lingering on the air.

==

We didn’t last two hours until Evelyn went missing.

Raine was correct, Lewis Saye did perk up in record time. His transformation back to gregarious mirth was so fast and so complete that I would have suspected him of sneaking off to pop some pills, but he was around us the whole time for that first hour, not so much as five minutes in the toilet to fortify himself. Evelyn had forged ahead alone, but her father bustled back to the entryway all small talk and big laughter once more, to usher us deeper into his grand echoing shell of a home.

In the short walk from the front door to the main kitchen, the house revealed precious little of itself; from the white plaster and old tile of the entryway nook, we crossed the house’s main corridor, a kinked spine with a partial skeleton of exposed dark beams. Shadows lingered in the unlit depths to our left and right. Thick carpets soaked up the sound of our footsteps.

Lewis Saye was true to his word, he had a wealth of leftovers in his well-stocked fridge. He plied us with pasta reheated in an expensive microwave, fresh crusty bread and newly opened packets of fancy chocolate biscuits.

There was something wrong with that kitchen. Something out of place.

My mind chewed on the problem, as Evelyn brewed in sullen silence at the far end of the wooden table, as Raine dumped our bags on the floor and set about assisting Lewis with the food, much to his obvious discomfort.

“Please, please, do sit down, it won’t be a moment, won’t be a moment. Neither of you are allergic to anything, are you?” He boomed about, clattering plates and cutlery to fill the silences. “Never can tell these days. No? Healthy young women all of you, then. Double helpings!”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Raine.

The kitchen didn’t feel real – none of this did.

All faux-rustic brick and shiny chrome fittings, thick slab shelves and tan slate flooring. None of it could disguise the tilted set of the walls, the cramped ceiling, the tiny windows. A modern skin over a reality far older and far less grand. Nothing in here looked really used, like the kitchen in a holiday house.. Even the food in the fridge was too neatly wrapped in cling film, no half empty packets of sandwich meat or forgotten bags of cheese.

I sat down at the table, distracted, and Evelyn met my confused look with a dark frown.

“Why do you look so gormless?” she muttered.

“I … don’t feel like we’re really here.” I shrugged.

“Lucky you.”

Her tone could have etched steel.

A few minutes later Lewis was in full swing again, once he’d sat down at the table and I’d worked out the best way to politely phrase my real question, between mouthfuls of lasagna sauce.

“Oh no, I don’t do the cleaning myself,” he boomed with a grin. “You’re quite right, it’s far too much house for that. Even if I wasn’t such an old brute! Ha! Yes, I have a cleaner in twice a week. Though, of course, there’s places she can’t go. Of course, you all understand all that. Of course.” He waved a hand and smiled with boyish guilt. “The whole east wing is mothballed, in fact, pipes drained, furniture covered. Must keep the property price up, you know? Can’t be having it go to seed.”

Evelyn snorted at that, picking at her food.

Her father glanced at her fondly and allowed himself an indulgent chuckle. Perhaps complete tolerance was the only coping mechanism he knew. Had he learnt that from dealing with her mother?

The man did love to talk. I discovered he barely lived here, gathered he was a lawyer by profession, spent more time in London than out here in the ancestral pile – though he’d been the one to marry into it rather than the other way around. He punted easy question after easy question at his daughter. How was university going? How was the Sharrowford house faring? Was she getting any exercise? Did her leg need a replacement yet? All surface level. He didn’t even ask how she’d met me.

Evelyn fielded the conversation with monosyllabic disinterest, so Lewis made the effort to include Raine and I, asked what I was studying, where I was from, what my parents did.

What did any of those things matter?

“It’s a pity Angeline wasn’t down here with me this weekend,” he said. “I’m sure she would have loved to see you again, Evelyn. I know, I know, it’s a little strange for you, and she can never … um … well, you know. Family and all that.”

“Dad.”

He blinked. I froze up. It was the first time she’d used that word.

“Yes?”

“I don’t even remember who she is,” Evelyn growled.

“Oh, oh no, that can’t be right. You met her, when I came up to Sharrowford last year.” He grinned awkwardly and turned to Raine and I. “My lady friend. She was from another city firm. Rather a bit of drama about all that. A long story.”

“I remember her face,” Raine said. “Twenty years younger than you, right?”

“No, no! Certainly not!” Lewis blustered and harrumphed, then burst out laughing. “Ten years. I know, I know, I’m a lucky man.”

“You old dog,” said Raine.

I kept hoping he would launch into questions about goings on in Sharrowford, ask why we were towing a demon around, question how exactly I was ‘one of us’ – but he didn’t. He never asked a single real thing. He dealt with Praem by completely ignoring her.

Pretending we were all normal people.

Your daughter and I spent a night in a pocket dimension full of soul-eating monsters, where we killed an evil wizard. Why is this not important to you?

The sense of unreality grew worse, and I realised it had been lurking there in the back of my head for two weeks. This inane conversation over a bizarre meal was a mere catalyst. Why did I feel like I wasn’t really there, in that too-clean kitchen, surrounded by hollow talk?

I should have paid attention to Evelyn, small and shrunken in her seat, staring at nothing. She was hurting. But I didn’t belong here.

I belonged Outside, didn’t I? With Lozzie.

==

“We shouldn’t be here,” I said.

After the meal, Lewis had bustled about finding us a spare room suitably near Evelyn’s old bedroom. Not that the house lacked for spare rooms. By that point I was flagging hard, dragged down by a belly full of food and a need to curl up and shut the world out. Perhaps if I slept then this feeling would go away.

Up a staircase with two small inset landings, through more corridor of bone-white plaster and dark brown beams. I glimpsed a servitor or two lurking down the hallways of the great house – a spider the same size as the ones back in Sharrowford, and some kind of monitor lizard in a cold fireplace, but they paid me no attention beyond a passing look.

Once Raine and I were alone – Lewis having bustled off somewhere down the corridor – I’d sat, then flopped backward onto a clean white bedspread. We had a double bed in a high-ceilinged room, panelled in dark wood, dim wall lights sculpted as fake candles. Like a room from an early twentieth century detective novel.

Raine had rummaged in our bags for a toothbrush and a change of pajamas, said something inane about how I must be sleepy.

I’d pulled myself back into a sitting position, hunched inside my hoodie with my arms folded, and spoken.

“We shouldn’t be here.”

Raine raised an eyebrow. There was something dark and smoky about her in the low light, in this antique room. “I meant what I said earlier. The moment you feel unsafe, we can be out of here.”

“No, no,” I shook my head and squeezed my eyes shut, partly to clear my mind and summon what scraps of focus I could. “It’s not that. Where’s Evee gone?”

“Ahh? Her old bedroom, I think. It’s just down the end of the corridor.” Raine gestured over her shoulder at the half open door, then pulled a sheepish, toothy grin. “Didn’t you notice? I tried to go with her, but … ” she shrugged.

I gave her the best hard look I could manage.

“Heather?”

I sighed, then set about struggling out of my hoodie. Suddenly it felt constricting. I got it halfway off my head before I felt Raine’s hands on my arms, helping me take it off. I shook myself out and smoothed my hair down.

“I know, Evee’s having a rough time of it,” Raine was saying. “Give her five minutes alone and we should go on a charm offensive, cheer her up a bit, get-”

“A ‘rough time of it’?” I echoed – exactly as sharply as I’d intended, puffed up with indignation as I hunched on the bed. “She hates this place. It’s hurting her. I can’t believe you bullied her into coming here.”

Raine laughed it off, my pink hoodie limp in her hands. “Bully Evee? I don’t think either of us could bully her into anything.”

“You did, Raine. How can’t you see it? It’s like forcing me to go back to Cygnet hospital for a scenic weekend.”

“She … ” Raine glanced away from me, her smile flickering. “She needs to face it. It’s therapeutic.”

“Raine! That’s not your decision to make!”

“Ahh … I mean … yeah. I … ”

It hit me the split-second before Raine crumpled, before she let out a huge sigh and slid down with her back against the wall until she was sitting on the floor, face in her hands – I’d never seen her so conflicted, never seen her struggle like this. I could barely believe the impact of my own words.

“R-Raine?”

“Ahhhhh shit. I’ve been a right fucking dick, haven’t I? I’ve really fucking messed up this time.”

“Raine? It’s okay, it’s not the end of the world, we can- A-are you okay?”

She looked up with a sad smile, defeated but not broken, and raised both hands in surrender. “I’m fine, I’m fine. You’re completely right. It wasn’t my decision to make, and I’ve … really hurt Evee this time. And now you think I’m a nasty bitch too,” she gestured at me and puffed out a mirthless laugh. “Bang up job, Raine old girl. Well fucking done. Can’t even pull off protecting you two without screwing up.”

She sighed and ran a hand through her hair, that rich chestnut hair, a few errant locks standing up in bold loops.

I’d never seen Raine vulnerable before, not really; with the strange alchemy that lay in the junction between emotional distress and sexual attraction, I suddenly wanted to get up and go over to her.

She wasn’t doing it intentionally. I don’t believe she was aware of the effect.

I shook my head, trying to concentrate. “Raine, I don’t follow. Protecting … ?”

Raine gestured vaguely, at the house around us. “An old magical fortress. One of the safest places in the whole country.”

“Not for Evee, it isn’t. Raine, you … you … ” Realisation dawned with a sudden click. “Wait, is that why we’re here?”

Raine dipped her head, an instinctive bob of pleading for forgiveness.

“That’s why we’re here,” I said. “Oh my God. Raine.”

“I may have been economical with the truth,” she said.

“You thought the Sharrowford Cult was going to attack the house!”

“Maybe.”

I stared at her in disbelief.

“If I’m right,” she continued, “then the house gets hit, the spiders deal with it, and none of us get hurt – not you, not Evee. Maybe she has to spend a few hundred pounds on a new front door, but that would be the worst of it. If I’m wrong, then hey, we needed to do this trip sooner or later anyway. You have to see that map if we’re ever going to rescue your sister. We can leave tomorrow, I promise.”

“Why … ” I swallowed, my throat dry, but Raine already knew the question. Why lie?

“I never would have gotten Evee out of Sharrowford. If I’d said I thought the cult might come for the house, she’d have boarded the windows and barricaded the door. You know how she is. Hell, I get the feeling you know her better than I do, these days. We both love her for it, don’t get me wrong, but she’s stubborn as an ox.”

“You- you didn’t have to-”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and I saw a tightness around her eyes. “I know, I’m a shit, but I have to keep you safe. Both of you. And I’m not doing a very good job of it lately.”

“What? Of course you are. Raine, I’m angry because you lied, not because I think you make a poor protector. For pity’s sake, I watched you shoot in a man in the head for us.”

“That doesn’t count for much.”

“Of course it does, don’t be absurd,” I hissed.

“After that woman in the library … all I could think about is how I wasn’t there. She could have done anything to you, and I wasn’t there. Blind luck that she wanted to talk. I wasn’t there, Heather, I wasn’t at your side. I wasn’t there for you in that castle. We got separated, and you were alone. I wasn’t there for you when that bitch of a zombie tried to snatch you again. I wasn’t there. I had to lie to get you two out of the house, out of Sharrowford, just for a few days. And I would do it again. I’m sorry. This is me.” She shrugged.

The intensity in her words, the passion, the iron-hot conviction; I felt myself shiver, and not in a bad way.

My lover had lied by omission. I should have felt hurt, betrayed, insecure – instead I was turned on by her justifications. This was vastly unhealthy, and I couldn’t make myself care, because I wanted to feel turned on.

Vastly unhealthy. Story of my life.

“You … ” I stumbled over a response. My words felt limp. “You could have told me the real reason, at least.”

Raine shook her head gently. “I would have been asking you to lie to Evee, and I can’t make you do that. This fuck up is my responsibility.”

“No, it’s not,” I hissed. “Killing for me – fine. Lying for me? No, never.”

Raine blinked in surprise, as if she hadn’t expected that. Truth be told, neither had I, and I was too caught between irritation and arousal to consider the implications of my words. Raine nodded, puffed out a humourless laugh and smiled at me.

“I’m sorry, Heather. You’ve been so stressed, ever since we came back from that weird castle place. Like you’ve been ill, or at one remove from everything. I didn’t want to stress you out any more than you already-”

“Is this why you haven’t been screwing me?”

Raine slammed to a halt.

The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. We had more important things to think about – not least, whatever pit Evelyn was stewing in, all alone – but I couldn’t help myself. A hot blush rose in my cheeks. I forced myself to stare at Raine.

“I- Heather?” Her distress lifted just a fraction, a grin edging back onto her lips.

“Oh God, it felt good to say that. That’s the most real thing I’ve said in days.” Suddenly I hiccuped. “So? You’ve been handling me like I’m a dying swan.” Another hiccup.

“We’ve … I mean … we have-” Now she couldn’t keep the grin off her face.

“Not in the good way.” Hiccup.

“The ‘good way’?”

I rolled my eyes. “You know exactly what I mean. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

She spread her hands in a shrug. “You want me to pin you to that bed and hold you there for an hour?”

Oh, damn her, that grin made my stomach flutter – that was more like it, that’s what I’d needed for weeks. This was real. With every second that passed, the bubble of unreality deflated further, and I felt more human again, less cold-blooded.

I gave her a bit of a look – more to cover up the pressure of my volcanic arousal than to tell her off for flirting.

“Come on, Heather. Yes or no?”

“Yes, obviously yes. You know that.” I shook my head in a vain effort to clear the pink mist, and hiccuped again. “Raine, I haven’t … haven’t felt completely human since whatever I did to kill Alexander. Since Lozzie left. Like I’m still there in that castle, in that moment I killed him. It’s always there. And I’m always cold.”

Raine wiped the teasing sexual mirth off her face instantly. She got up from the floor and crossed to the bed, sitting next to me without a trace of her former distress. She reached out, a silent question in her eyes. I answered with a little nod, and she stroked my head.

“You’re right here, Heather. You feel that way because it was a traumatic night, and you made a difficult decision. You’re right here. I promise.”

“Then why haven’t you been … ” I averted my eyes, blushing again. Courage had fled me.

Raine smiled. “I got it wrong. I misjudged all your signals. I thought you were feeling fragile, needed a gentle touch. You need the opposite?”

I nodded, deeply embarrassed, biting my lower lip.

“It’ll make me feel more human,” I said in a tiny voice.

“Sure thing,” Raine purred.

“Not right now though,” I managed, then swallowed. “We need to talk to Evee, tell her the truth.”

“That’s gonna sting.” Raine winced and sat back. “No less than I deserve, I suppose. It’ll have to be a proper apology. I’ll have to fetch my genuflection mat, flatten my forehead a bit.”

“We could have left her in Sharrowford with Twil for three days. That might have been therapeutic for her.”

Raine smirked – back to normal. “What, getting her laid?”

“O-obviously.”

“I still think you’re off the mark there. Twil’s not into her.”

I held out a hand for my hoodie. “Here, give me that back, please. I feel cold without it.”

Raine did one better than that, she helped me wriggle back into the fuzzy enclosing warmth of the hoodie, pulling it down over my body and sneaking her hands up inside. I squeaked and squirmed and felt myself flush. The little physical rituals of disarmament after a brush with conflict escalated too quickly. Raine got one knee between my thighs and suddenly I was on my back on the bed and-

Praem chose that exact moment to push the door open and step into the room.

Raine and I sat up and parted, brushing hair back into place, like guilty teenagers caught necking. As if Praem cared. I hadn’t realised how close we’d gotten, how flushed my face was, how we’d been inches away from grabbing at each other.

“Hey there, doll-face, what’s up?” Raine asked, including me in a curious look. I shrugged.

Praem stopped two steps into the room, facing us. To my surprise she actually made eye contact – or what passed for eye contact when one didn’t posses pupils.

“I have lost Evelyn,” she announced, voice like a tone struck from a wall of ice.

“What? What does that mean?” I blurted out.

“It just means Evee’s wandered off,” Raine said, frowning at the demon as she stood up. “I’ll go find her.”

“We’ll both go find her. I could do with a little walk.”

“Walked for fifteen minutes,” Praem interrupted. Her head adjusted to regard me. “I have lost Evelyn.”

Raine and I shared another look.

“Praem just doesn’t know the house, that’s all,” Raine said slowly. Her frown gave the lie to her words. “She’s like a dog in a building that used to have lots of bigger dogs living in it, so many strange lingering smells everywhere that scream ‘threat’ – but no actual threats.”

“Implying I am afraid,” Praem intoned.

She did not sound impressed.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

We’d been southbound on the M1 for about an hour when I nodded off in the back of Raine’s car.

She let me sleep until we stopped at a service station on the outskirts of Leicester. Evelyn got out to stretch her muscles in the early December cold and glare at the world; climbing in and out of the car wasn’t the easiest thing for her. We all bought terrible petrol station sandwiches and a huge bag of cheese and onion crisps to share. Praem stayed in her seat with her hands folded in her lap, though when we squeezed back into Raine’s beaten up old car and pulled back onto the road, the doll-demon turned her head to stare at the passing farmland and skeletal winter trees.

There wasn’t much else to see on the motorway, the endless asphalt ribbon carrying us out of the North. I wondered if Praem saw what I did, the pneuma-somatic spirit life infesting every nook and cranny, tentacled masses of flesh dragging themselves along underneath the concrete overpasses, leering wolf-things loping down the hard shoulder, towering giants cresting the horizon between the towns and villages. At one point a moth as big as a bear alighted on the roof of the car in front of us. It watched the sky for a second, antenna twitching, then took off again in a blur of wings.

“Look at that lad, that is a hell of a car. Wonder how much all those mods cost him. Absolute beast. Hey, there’s a slogan etched on the back window, what does that say? Heather, you’ve got the best eyes here, can you read that from back there?”

“ … ‘The Piewagon’, it says.”

Raine burst out laughing. She slapped the steering wheel.

She’d kept up a heroic one-woman effort at conversation while she drove, and I did my best to help, but Evelyn brooded in dark silence. She’d spoken less than a dozen words all day.

At first it had all seemed an adventure, as we’d taken the winding route out of Sharrowford’s warren of streets that morning, and the grey rotting city had receded in the rear view mirror when we hit the motorway. This was the kind of adventure that university students were meant to have, a road trip in a rickety but reliable old car, a few changes of clothes in the boot, and the company of real friends. Stiff legs from sitting too long, cold hands tucked up into my sleeves, on a journey together that was neither dangerous nor suicidal. Normal. Explicable. Safe.

I didn’t understand the first thing about cars, but even I could tell that 270,000 miles on the clock was rather high, even for what Raine had affectionately called an ‘old banger’. But her driving made me feel perfectly safe. She was defensive, deliberate, decisive. If Raine said it was safe, it was safe.

Safe, yes. Raine was making me feel a lot of that, this last week.

And not much else.

I tried not to think about what that might mean.

Long car journeys were all bad childhood memories for me. Trips to or from the mental hospital, rocking and crying to myself at the things I’d seen following the car. Between hallucinations and blackouts my parents had quite understandably vetoed me learning to drive. My father had driven me up to Sharrowford at the beginning of fresher’s week in August, the start of term, and spent a whole day checking out the university with me, making sure I was settled in, that I wasn’t on the verge of a relapse. Cars were just another extension of the medicalisation of my life.

Except this trip. This was a road trip with my smoking hot girlfriend, our rich best friend with a family home in the country, and a demon possessing a dubious internet-bought sex doll.

At least, that’s what I reminded myself, while the car filled with the tension of Evelyn’s black mood and my inexpressible sexual frustration.

==

Evelyn had stewed in her foul temper for days, ever since Raine and I had returned from the unexpected confrontation with Amy Stack.

“You did say you’d think about it,” Raine had said to her, lounging in a chair by the kitchen table. “And we both know you need some real down time, as much as Heather does. You’ve been running yourself ragged for weeks now, and yeah, guilty as charged, I’m sort of responsible for letting you do that. Heather won’t let me live it down if I don’t stage an intervention sooner or later.” She glanced over at me with a grin. “Right? I promise, one hundred percent I won’t hold it against you if you disagree. Don’t you think we all need five minutes out? We should get out of the city, just for a few days.”

“I … ” I was lingering by the doorway, caught between the desire to support my girlfriend and an urge to flee the threatening storm clouds on Evelyn’s face. I was still frazzled after the ambush in the library, my mind still on Stack and Alexander, on giant zombies and my missing friend, my Lozzie.

Hadn’t quite adjusted yet to the implications of visiting Evelyn’s family home down in Sussex.

Evelyn glared from behind a thin barricade of dirty mugs. I believe she was dreaming up ways to murder Raine. Hunched down in her seat, glowering silently, she reminded me of a crocodile lurking beneath the water.

“I’m not so sure,” I said eventually, tried to put some steel into my voice. “What if Lozzie tries to contact me, or comes to visit? She won’t know where I am.”

Raine paused and nodded. She took me seriously, but Evelyn rolled her eyes in a moment of incredulity, one that would needle me for days before I admitted it.

“She can find you in dreams, can’t she?” Raine asked.

“I guess she can … ”

She hadn’t so far. Not so much as a peep.

“We could leave a letter for her as well, right here,” Raine patted the tabletop, then caught Evelyn’s glare again. “Loosen your grip for five minutes, Evee, I’m serious. Come on, we won.”

“We had won,” Evelyn corrected with a snap. “Until you two were accosted by an assassin in the bloody library.”

“Hey, she’s only an assassin when she’s doing the assassinating. Today she was a messenger. A crap one at that.”

“From another mage, in my city.”

“Apparently not in the city, like I said,” Raine spread her hands and smiled. “That’s good news, right?”

“You never cease to amaze me. Your stupidity is matched only by your credulousness.”

Raine shook her head and laughed without humour.

I risked Evelyn’s ire by clearing my throat, forced myself to speak when she turned that glare my way. She seemed equally as irritated, no special softening for me. “I think I agree with what Raine said earlier.”

“My condolences to your brain cells,” she grunted.

“Evelyn.” I put some gentle scold into my voice

She looked down at her lap with a long suffering sigh. “My leg hurts,” she muttered, scooted her chair back, pulled up her skirt to the middle of her thigh, and set about removing her prosthetic leg in full view. I blinked, taken aback for a moment, unsure if this was a passive aggressive gesture or if she really was in pain.

“Evee, hey,” Raine said, leaning forward, apparently unperturbed by the sight of Evelyn rolling the rubber socket down her thigh, and wiggling her stump out of the black prosthetic knee. “I know why you don’t want to go visit home, and-”

“Do you?” Evelyn snapped without looking up. “Do you really?”

“You two need to stop. Both of you,” I said. “Maybe we can all take a step back and … ” But Raine raised a finger toward me and I trailed off.

She stared at Evelyn. I shut my mouth, frowning and fuming in silent protest – what was Raine pushing for here? The silence stretched out as Evelyn massaged the muscles in her truncated thigh. I thought of a dozen excuses to leave the room. An explosion was brewing.

Eventually, Evelyn glanced sidelong at Raine.

“Yeah, I think I do know why,” Raine said very softly.

“Oh yes,” Evelyn snapped back. “Because my father is just going to love seeing you at the house, isn’t he?”

“S’not about me,” Raine said, just as softly. How she kept her cool in front of that razor tongue, I don’t know.

Evelyn glared for a moment longer, then she finally broke, a hard swallow making her throat bob.

“Hey, it’ll be fine, I promise,” Raine said, that beaming smile slowly breaking across her face. It didn’t seem to work on Evelyn. “We scoured that house from top to bottom, you know it’s probably the safest place in the whole country-”

“Safety there is not the issue,” Evelyn growled.

“And Heather and I are gonna be with you the entire time,” Raine continued. “It’s not like you’ll be by yourself, I’d never make you do that, I’d never even suggest it. I wouldn’t let you even if you wanted to. All three of us, together. Take Praem too, for insurance, or if you need a bed-warmer. It’ll be fun, and we don’t have to linger there for long. We can swing by Heather’s parents’ afterward – hey,” she turned to me with a big smile. “I gotta meet your mum and dad sooner or later, haven’t I?”

“Oh.” The bottom dropped out of my stomach. That was far worse than Evelyn’s glare. “Um, I suppose you should. You should.”

“The answer is still no,” Evelyn said.

“And we need to show Heather the map,” Raine said, as if it was an afterthought.

“Ah. The – the map,” I echoed. “I’d forgotten.”

“Evee’s map of the universe. Gonna have to do it eventually, so we may as well kill two birds with one stone. We can peep the map and then chill out, do whatever we want. We don’t even have to stay there more than one night. I promise.”

Evelyn let out a heavy sigh, mood sinking rapidly. “Is that what this is really about? The map? You two go if you must. I’ll call ahead and tell my father you’re coming, he can show you the blasted thing himself.” She shot a dark look at me. “You’ll come running straight back to Sharrowford, trust me. Won’t even make it through the front door.”

Raine laughed. “Evee, Evelyn, I love you, and there’s no way in hell I’m leaving you here alone.”

“Then I’ll invite Twil to stay for a week. How’s that, hmm? Does that satisfy you?” Evelyn snapped. “Will you allow me to drop out of your absurd trip then?”

“Twil’s got school, Evee.”

Evelyn waved a dismissive hand. “I am not leaving Sharrowford when there’s still these vermin infesting my city.”

“We’ll only be gone a few days,” Raine said. “Your spiders have got this house on lockdown, nobody’s getting in here uninvited short of a driving a tank through the front door. You know that, come on Evee. Stop deflecting.”

“Alright!” Evelyn exploded in Raine’s face. I flinched and could have sworn I jumped six inches back. “I. Do. Not. Want. To. Go. Alright?” She punctuated each word with a jab of her fingertip against the tabletop. “Is that what you wanted to hear? I don’t want to. God. You got me out of there, why make me go back again? I don’t want to think about it anymore.”

Raine adopted an expression I remembered all too well, one I associated with the most emotionally comforting moments of my short life, that unconditional compassion and penetrating understanding, the look she’d used with me in that dirty Sharrowford cafe on a cold and lonely morning. The look that had won me.

If I’d known what she was about to say to Evelyn, I would have hidden behind the door.

“Maybe visiting the grave will help,” she said.

Evelyn’s glare sunk into frozen darkness. For a moment I thought she was about to hurl her prosthetic leg at Raine. I opened my mouth and did my best to save them both, the only way I knew how.

“Evee,” I said her name as confidently as I could. “Don’t listen to Raine, she’s bullying you and I don’t understand why. You don’t have to come. Twil can keep you company.”

“Heather, I’m not bullying her,” Raine laughed it off. “She-”

“Raine,” I scolded.

Evelyn turned that abyssal glare on me. Oh dear, I thought, that was not what she needed to hear. I’ve completely misread her and I’m a terrible friend. Her mouth snapped open to bite my head off and I stiffened, ready to take the abuse, let her shout at me – but she stalled at the last moment, trailed off, left it all unsaid.

She seemed to shrink, retreat down inside herself. She covered the stump of her leg with her skirt and stared at the cold mugs on the kitchen table.

“Of course I have to bloody well come. You’ll fry your brain without me,” she muttered.

==

The vibration of my mobile phone woke me up again, just as we were turning off the M25 to take the long dual carriageway down into Sussex, as the London greenbelt sped past under the fitful clouds of the afternoon sky.

I blinked at my phone screen and rubbed my eyes, then started as a follow-up message made it buzz in my hand. I clicked the phone onto silent with an embarrassed glance at my friends in the front seats.

“Why not give her a call right now?” Raine asked, without taking her eyes off the road. “You could pass the phone forward, I’ll say hi.”

“Absolutely not,” I said. She didn’t even need to ask who it was from. “You’d say a lot more than just ‘hi’. I’d die of embarrassment.”

“No way, I’ll be on my best behaviour! I could introduce myself, we’ll get all the awkward stuff out of the way on the phone. By the time I actually meet your parents they’ll be totally adjusted to the idea. I’m serious, call them back.”

“I see that grin. I know what that means.”

Raine took one hand off the steering wheel and mimed speaking into a phone. I rolled my eyes as she put on her best good-girl voice.

“Good afternoon Mrs Morell, it’s lovely to meet you. I’m Raine, yes. Your daughter calls me mommy too.”

“Raine!”

I blushed terribly and wanted to thump the back of her seat. Raine laughed out loud, but the mirth didn’t last, drained away by the tension in the car. Evelyn didn’t tell us to knock it off, she didn’t even snort with derision or tut under her breath. She just ignored us, staring at the road.

Deep down I knew Raine was trying to help. My stomach churned again when I reread the text messages from my mother.

‘Let me know when you get there, dear, and send me the address,’ the first message said. The second continued: ‘I do wish you’d have told me about these friends earlier. You know how you can get.’

I closed my eyes and resisted the urge to rub the bridge of my nose. Thinking about Raine meeting my parents felt almost as bad as hyperdimensional mathematics.

Two and a half weeks ago I killed an invincible wizard with the power of my mind, and now I was scared of telling my parents I was gay.

“Who cares what your mother thinks?” Evelyn grumbled from the front passenger seat. “She can like it or she can keep it to herself. If your parents won’t accept their own daughter they can … ” She trailed off and muttered something under her breath. I think it was ‘go fuck themselves’.

That was the most Evelyn had spoken all day. Raine glanced over in obvious surprise. “Hear hear,” she added.

I braced for a follow up, but Evelyn folded her arms and slipped back into silence.

“I don’t think they’ll have a problem,” I muttered. “It’s just … ”

All very well in principle, but what exactly was I supposed to say to my parents? That I was a lesbian? Okay. That I’d known I like girls since I was eleven years old? So far so good, sure. But that confession was far less daunting than presenting them with Raine. Here’s my girlfriend, and yes, you may indeed notice she’s obviously and vastly out of my league, and I still don’t comprehend what she sees in me, except that having a person to protect appears to press all her buttons. Why yes, I’m regularly overwhelmed like I’m standing next to a raging inferno of pure sexuality.

Oh, that gleam in her eye? Please ignore that she’s probably a psychopath, and occasionally kills people for me. Why yes, I have watched her shoot a man in the head, how did you guess? In fact, in my most private moments I get turned on by the memory of how she moves when she’s beating monsters to death. But we haven’t had sex in nearly two weeks because suddenly she’s handling me like I’m made of spun glass and won’t-

My own thoughts juddered to a halt. I took a deep breath and tried to focus on the trees and fields passing by outside the car.

Won’t what? What did I want from Raine?

Did I want her to be Lozzie?

No, no it wasn’t that. I didn’t want Lozzie. I wanted Raine, oh yes, I knew that much, that was easy. Raine was treating me exactly like a responsible person should treat a trauma victim, so why did I feel this way? I couldn’t put it into words.

I thought I felt Raine’s eyes on me – my guilty conscience – but when I glanced up at the rear-view mirror she was concentrating on the road, still being a sensible driver, doing what we all needed. I sighed inside. I didn’t deserve her.

Then I flinched.

Praem was the one I’d felt staring.

The demon-doll was staring down at my phone, reading the message from my mother. Could Praem read? I’d never thought to ask. The phone screen chose that moment to fade to black. Praem tilted her gaze to meet my eyes, wordless and without expression, then turned her head away to watch the landscape roll past.

I didn’t find Praem creepy or off-putting, not in the slightest, though I knew I should have. I’d volunteered to sit in the back with her, to give Evelyn more legroom up front. I hardly needed the extra space, I was scrawny enough. I still felt a deep gratitude toward the taciturn demon, for when she’d turned up in time to thwart the cult’s attempted kidnapping.

Her inexplicable changes had made it progressively more difficult to keep in mind that she was not a human being.

Ever since we returned from the Sharrowford Cult’s pocket dimension, Praem had been changing colour, like a ripening fruit. Evelyn had repaired her wounds with epoxy and wood filler, and Praem’s exterior tactile glamour had fully reasserted itself – but her skin had continued to shift toward fresh healthy pink, her otherworldly blue now a mere underlying pallor. The icebound shade of her hair had lightened into a cold blonde.

Evelyn had spent an evening or two locked away in the ex-drawing room with Praem, trying to bring her to heel or bind her with stronger magic, but it obviously hadn’t worked, and Evelyn wasn’t talking about it now. The little human-like tics and gestures had only increased in frequency.

Was Praem modelling herself on Evelyn? Aesthetic osmosis?

I chewed on the idea for a while, glad for the distraction, and wondered if Praem was capable of selecting her own clothes. She was dressed for the trip in a turtleneck jumper – which left little to the imagination, she was too busty for it and I did sneak a guilty glance – one of Evelyn’s skirts, and some big boots. Her hair was pinned up in a loose bun to keep it out of the way, Evelyn’s only concession to humanising her.

Praem must have sensed me staring, because she turned to look at me again with those blank milk-white eyes. Even without pupil or iris I could somehow tell she was looking right at me.

I smiled at her.

“Yes?” she intoned, voice like the resonance of a gently struck icicle.

“What was that?” Evelyn snapped, twisting in her seat to frown at the demon.

“She speaks!” Raine laughed. “How you doing back there, Praem?”

“Doing,” Praem echoed.

“Sorry,” I said. “It was nothing. I only smiled at her.”

“Then don’t,” Evelyn tutted. “And you keep your mouth shut,” she added to Praem.

==

“Almost there, aren’t we? I don’t remember this junction.” Raine squinted through the car’s windscreen, at the lichen covered road sign by the village crossroads. “Left at the green, then we take the road out toward Little Ropley? S’that right, Evee?”

“Mm.”

“Hear that, Heather?” Raine said over her shoulder. “We’re almost there. You awake?”

“Quite awake, yes.”

No more sleeping for me, I was all napped out. Besides, after we left the main roads the landscape had become too enthralling to miss.

We’d wound through tiny little villages and clusters of houses clinging to the base of the downs, the ridge of hills which dominated the skyline, and then plunged into the deeply wooded parts of the county.

On a map the woods didn’t seem like much, not a real forest. They broke and crested, thinned out and reformed around towns and villages, or opened out entirely into the fields between, strung along ridge tops or huddled in dark copses. One was never really that far away from civilisation anywhere in England, especially in the South, but as tall trees crowded the road they penned the sky into a ribbon of dying light overhead; I could entertain the illusion of being deep in some mythical uberwald full of werewolves and fairies.

Of course, I knew the real werewolves shopped for video games in Sharrowford town centre.

Perhaps Raine had been correct, this was exactly the sort of decompression time I needed, to take my mind off Lozzie, off killing Alexander, off everything. But I felt guilty for enjoying the woods, the soft blanket of lowering dusk between the trees, the strange hidden places one might find in the undergrowth.

Evelyn was so obviously dreading our arrival. I could hear the tight hitch in her breathing, feel the discomfort radiating from the seat in front of me as she brooded. We turned off down a country lane between high banks of packed earth, and I leaned forward.

“Evee,” I said, softly. “We’re both here for you. You’re not alone, okay?”

A moment of silence. She shifted in her seat.

“You are not in my good graces right now,” she hissed.

“ … me?” I began to say.

Then the trees broke like a wave. The Saye estate loomed out of the gathering gloom, and took away all my words.

Weeks ago, Raine had described it as a ‘great big old farmhouse’, and I’d taken that description to heart. My subconscious had summoned images of thatched roofs and twee little windows, smoke rising from a chimney, set amid neat fields and picturesque hedgerows. Somehow I hadn’t internalised the darker implications – that as a teenager Raine had climbed a wall to get inside, that Evelyn had spent years imprisoned here, that this had been a fortress and magical atelier for more than one generation of her family, that it had once brimmed with monsters, and worse.

It was part mansion, part restored farmhouse, part rich man’s folly in the cleared woodland; vast expanses of discoloured pale brick between black oak beams the width of whole trees, topped with water-stained slate roofing. Two sprawling stories, plus cramped attic space, of double-winged structure like a hunched toad, pockmarked with tiny staring windows, much of the glass set in ornamental metal latticework.

“You are joking,” I murmured.

“Wheey, told you it was impressive,” Raine said, as she turned the car onto the sweeping driveway of poured tarmac.

The house itself was set far back from the road, and the driveway crept through an opening in a wall of irregular bare stone, probably once meant to look fashionable, now crowded by creeping weeds and draped with overhanging trees from the encroaching woods, the mortar crumbling away in wide patches. Black iron hinges stood bare, the gate itself long since removed.

Outbuildings crept into view as we approached, a squat garage with three automatic doors, a couple of tucked away sheds in once-tasteful stained wood, probably filled with groundsman’s tools and gardening equipment, and a dilapidated structure off to one side which had once been a stable, now abandoned to the elements.

A beefy silver four by four was parked by the house, the only other vehicle present.

Wide lawns and a sketched attempt at a garden stretched off behind the house, falling toward a dark expanse of still water barely visible in the failing light, and a dense tree line at the edge of the property.

Even in the falling dusk it was obvious the gardens weren’t really maintained anymore. Somebody had made a paltry attempt at fighting back the overgrowth, but roused little beauty from the threadbare lawns and thick moss.

Old stones, old money, old secrets. On an intellectual level I’d always known that Evelyn came from wealth. She lived in a family-owned house while she attended university – but she lived like the rest of us. She loved her much repaired comfortable clothes, watched Japanese cartoons on her beaten up old laptop, never turned her nose up or acted too good for anything. The most expensive thing she owned was her own leg.

Raine pulled the car to a stop in the semi-circle of tarmac in front of the house. She killed the engine and turned to grin at me.

“Amazing, isn’t it? No wonder I wanted to burglarise the place.”

I stared up at the looming bulk of the house, only the very top of the roof still lit by the setting sun.

“Heather? Told you you’d love it, didn’t I?”

I nodded, a little numb. “It is … impressive. Sort of beautiful. The architecture, I mean.”

Of course, they couldn’t see what I saw.

The place was crawling with spirits – or Servitors, left behind by Evelyn’s mother and grandmother.

Dark hunched things with spindly grasping claws and shuddering leathery wings dotted the roof and walls of the estate, sunning themselves in the dying light or retreating into the shadows like sleepy lizards. Scuttering shapes darted and cavorted beyond the tree line, imitations of woodland animals, half-glimpsed hide and bristly hair peeking out of the darkness and then hiding again as I peered back. Something like a squid made of bark and stone sprawled inside the ruined stable building, blinking six huge eyes with incredible slowness, drifting tentacles through the air as if becoming more plant than animal.

Raine popped her door and climbed out, stretched her arms, rolled her shoulders, and took a deep breath. The chill air crept into the car, but that wasn’t why I shivered.

“Let’s get in then. That your dad’s car, right?” she asked Evelyn, thumbing toward the big silver four by four.

“I assume,” Evelyn grunted.

Getting myself out of the car wasn’t as difficult as it might have sounded; at least none of this pneuma-somatic life was paying me any attention. And I wanted a better look at the monstrosity crouched over the house’s main entranceway, guarding the steps up to the front door.

It was a spider-servitor, kin to the one outside Evelyn secret occult collection in Sharrowford University library. That one had been bad enough, big as a horse, an encounter I would never forget.

This spider was the size of a fire engine.

It was also visibly much older. The armoured black body was mottled and greyed in places, flaking and ridged like the rusting hull of a great ship. Two of its legs – thick as trees – ended in ragged stumps, and the servitor’s carapace was covered in pits and gouges, old battle scars. The bio-mechanical vent stacks on its back lay cold, emitting no whisper of heat, and the giant stingers were wrapped around itself in the way a tired, aged cat might tuck its body into the crook of its tail.

Many of the spider-servitor’s crystalline eyes were dark and extinguished, but I felt a vast cold attention, felt the servitor stare back at me as I looked.

The passing scrutiny of an old hound. Though it was completely, perfectly still, I somehow felt it lose interest in us and settle back into its borderline coma.

This old creature, to borrow a phrase from Raine, had no more fucks to give.

“Didn’t you call ahead?” Raine was saying. “Your dad is home, right? We’re not blundering into the place when only his weekly cleaning lady is here or something, right?”

Evelyn straightened up as she clambered out of the car, steadying herself on her walking stick and massaging her leg with one hand. She shot Raine a silent glare.

“Hey, I’m serious,” said Raine. “We don’t wanna freak out some poor maid.”

“I haven’t been back here in almost two years,” Evelyn snapped. “How would I know? If he has a maid he’s probably screwing her.” She frowned at Praem through the car window. “Get out.”

At least the house was lit – well, some of it. A handful of the windows in the middle portion and the right wing glowed with soft light from behind closed curtains, and a porch light glowed above the main entrance, only a little obscured behind the bulk of the giant spider-servitor clinging to the front of the house. The old tarmac beneath my feet was crumbling and cracked, but in other places it had been patched recently.

Something sleek and small slipped around the edge of the house, then stopped and stared at us. For a moment I thought it was another spirit, but then I recognised that wonderfully curious vulpine face. It was a fox – a countryside fox, well fed on woodland prey, bold as it stared me down. I smiled to see the thing, then felt my smile die as the fox bounded away, replaced by one of the hunched servitor things as it crawled down the side of the house.

I shivered in the cold air and slipped my hands deeper into my sleeves.

As Praem got out of the car and Raine busied herself hauling our few bags out of the boot, Evelyn eyed me with a sidelong look. She didn’t need to say a word, she knew what I must be seeing.

“Maybe … maybe it’ll look better in the daylight,” I said.

Evelyn snorted.

“What? What’s wrong?” Raine asked, peering around the open car boot.

I shook my head. “It’s no worse than Sharrowford. At least everything here seems … quiet.”

“Hey, anything gives you trouble, I’ll swing for ‘em.” Raine said, then turned with a grin and talked to the empty air, to the spirit life beyond. “Hear me, fuckers? Don’t mess with my girl.”

I managed a token laugh and a little roll of my eyes, but Evelyn didn’t see the humour. She was staring at the house, and I’d never seen her look so small and hunched, so grim-faced, so unapproachable.

I started to realise what we might be doing to Evelyn by dragging her here.

“Evee, I’m- I’m sorry.”

“For what?” she grunted.

Then the front door opened, spilling light across the steps, and a giant strode out to greet us.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

The others stared at the empty space where Lozzie had vanished, at her footprints in the cold morning dew.

Lozzie’s departure hurt, yes; I’d always been useless at making friends, and now I’d made one literally in my sleep. But Lozzie had better things to do than spend time with me. Things I didn’t want to imagine. Outside things.

That cut me far deeper. Had I seen a vision of my own future, if I kept staring into the abyss?

Too exhausted and numb to face any of that right now, so I just closed my eyes.

Apricot colours of dawn glowed through my closed eyelids, transforming to burnt yellow as clouds veiled the sun. Fingers of crisp cold air brushed my face. Distant sounds of birdsong and the waking city lulled me over the border of sleep for a second or two. One of my friends spoke softly. I was safe now, drained completely, shutting down.

“I’m sure she’ll be fine, Heather.”

“Mm?”

I forced my eyes open again. Raine sported a rare smile, for her – pained sympathy lurking beneath the confidence, at a loss, a nothing-can-be-done sort of smile. She always knew how I felt, even when I was too tired to feel it myself.

“She seemed like a lot of fun, if you stay on her good side. Hope she comes back to visit soon.” The tone in Raine’s voice, that shining certainty, almost made me believe it.

“Mm. Sure.”

“Uhhh,” Twil made the universal noise for utter bafflement. “What the fuck did we just see? Where’d she go?”

“Outside,” I grunted.

“ … Outside? Outside what?”

“Reality,” Evelyn said with a sigh.

“ … right. Okay. Okay then. “ Twil nodded to herself, very much not okay. She sucked on her bloody knuckles, where her torn flesh had finished re-knitting. “Fuck me.”

“No need to swear,” I grumbled, then let my heavy eyelids close once more.

Somebody let out a huge sigh. Somebody else flapped their arms. My body ached for sleep, and I didn’t care that I was on park bench, covered with my own blood and vomit.

“Right then ladies and demons,” Raine said, “if there’s no last-minute objections, I’m going to call a taxi.”

Twil snorted. “Yeah, and the driver’ll call the police the moment he sees us. We look like we’ve been in a slaughterhouse.”

“You have a better proposal?” Evelyn grumbled. “Heather’s not walking home in her state.” A long pause, then a frustrated huff. “All right, all right, and neither am I. I’m in pain, yes. Happy?”

“W-well no, ‘course not. I could … like … carry you?”

I didn’t hear Evelyn’s response, but I didn’t need to; the silence spoke volumes.

“Plus,” Twil went on, “what about your … you know?”

Denied the peace of sleep, I opened my eyes again. Twil was thumbing over her shoulder at Praem.

“What about her?” Evelyn asked.

“She’s blue. How you have her walking around in public, I don’t-”

“Do I have to explain basic concepts to you?” Evelyn snapped. She frowned at Twil from beneath furrowed brow. “Nobody sees that unless they’re expecting it. She’s completely fine, she-”

“Doesn’t look so blue to me,” I croaked.

Stopped short, Evelyn blinked several times. “What on earth are you talking about?”

I shrugged my shoulders, or tried to. Seemed obvious. Evelyn’s magical servant, the demon from Outside possessing a wooden mannequin, her perfect expressionless face and bloodless wounds, her scuffed clothes, had won some colour. Several hours ago her skin had been like pale ice, but now she had lightened, as if flushed with heat and life underneath the surface.

“Praem’s not blue anymore,” I mumbled.

Praem turned her face toward me at the sound of her name, the name I’d given her. She merely stared at me. Demons riding dolls or corpses seemed to do a lot of that, I noted.

“Thanks for helping,” I managed.

Evelyn peered at Praem with a dark frown. With the panic and chaos of the last few hours, perhaps she’d only noticed the change when I pointed it out.

“Trust me,” Raine was saying. “We’re miles from the worst a Sharrowford taxi driver’s seen. We’ll be nice and quiet and polite, nobody has to freak out, and I’ll tip a fifty. We stay here any longer and we really are gonna run into somebody.”

Twil shrugged. “I guess, whatever. I’m still gonna walk though, I feel fine now.”

“You not coming back to the house with us?”

Twil stalled for a second, then puffed out a big sigh.

“Nah, nah. I should … ” She flexed her right hand, looking down at the mended bones, then swallowed and glanced at Raine and me with obvious discomfort in her eyes. “I should go tell my uh … my mum … about all this. Family needs to know, you know?”

“You sure?” Raine asked. “You alright doing that?”

Twil shrugged. “Been a busy day. I should go home.”

Evelyn turned that dark frown away from Praem and hit Twil with the full force of her glare. “If your mother – or the thing riding along in her head – gives you the slightest bit of trouble about what happened yesterday, then you can bloody well tell her that I … ” Evelyn stalled out, mouth half-open. She took a second to gather herself and looked away. “That I’ve always got a spare room for you.” She glanced back at Twil, frowning up a storm. “Understand?”

“Aww, Evelyn!”

Evelyn could not match werewolf speed. Twil pulled her into a heartfelt hug, though Evelyn did her best to resist.

“Get off me, you mongrel!”

Twil laughed and let her go, darting away to avoid the rap of Evelyn’s walking stick against her ankles. “You didn’t mean that.”

“Don’t push your luck,” Evelyn snapped.

 Twil grinned. “You love me really.”

“I love all of you,” I said before I realised I was speaking.

Perhaps it was the exhaustion talking.

==

Recovery was ghastly. To kill Alexander Lilburne, I’d pushed my grasp of hyperdimensional mathematics right to the limit, and this time the aftermath lacked the merciful unconsciousness of a fugue state.

Still, after we got home that morning – and got clean, though Raine had to hold me upright in the shower – I slept for fifteen hours straight.

Lethargy and the ghost of nausea haunted me for a full week, along with the chronic pain of stubborn headaches, fluttering tremors inside my chest, stomach cramps and muscle weakness. Raine encouraged me to dip into Evelyn’s private stash of painkillers, and I did, more than once. The hard stuff, the codeine and others, provided at least some relief. Evelyn and Raine had a hushed argument about drug dependency when they thought I was out of earshot, and about how to find me some cannabis on the university campus, though Raine knew I would never take that.

I caught myself staring into space or at the kitchen tabletop for minutes on end, or trailing off in mid-sentence until Raine said my name, my mind defragmenting itself after too much intimacy with the mathematical truth of reality. I shuffled around that creaking old house like a real zombie. Once I blanked out on the toilet for almost fifteen minutes.

On the fifth day Raine had a bright idea. She stuck a favourite book in front of my nose – Watership Down – and forced me to read it to her out loud.

She sat and listened for as long as I needed, until mechanical repetition of words shaded with the delight of the story, and of sharing it with her. That seemed to do the trick.

By the end of the week I was uncomfortably well reminded that I had an end-of-term essay due soon, on either King Lear or Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I chose Lear, popped more painkillers, and did my best to focus. Stubborn old men and bloody intrigue I could deal with. Imaginary realms full of sucking fog and personifications of death, not so much right now.

I told Raine and Evelyn everything, of course.

About Lozzie, about the dreams I’d been having and forgetting for weeks, about what I saw underground in the cult’s castle, the corpses and the bound god in the abyss – Evelyn didn’t seem surprised about the sacrifices. She’d seen that sort of thing before, I suppose, from the sharp end. I explained what happened in the throne room, what Alexander and I had discussed, but I couldn’t express why I’d needed to prove him wrong.

It touched too closely on the wound of Lozzie’s departure, on why I’d needed to remain myself.

“Don’t tell me you feel guilty about it?” Evelyn had asked, frowning at me over the kitchen table.

“No. Not guilty, just … ” I’d shaken my head, hesitated over what to say.

“Of course she doesn’t,” Raine answered for me, rubbing my shoulders from behind. “Pure self-defence, right? It was you or him, when it came down to it. You absolutely did the right thing, Heather. And hey, if you hadn’t done for him, I would have shot him in the mug about twenty seconds later, so in a sort of way you never really had a choice. Think about it like that, if it helps.”

“Killing him was the only solution,” Evelyn had grumbled, waving a dismissive hand. “Too far gone, a mage like that. Left him alone and he’d have come for us sooner or later.”

It wasn’t self-defence, and it wasn’t about removing a threat, not to me; I withered inside under Raine’s emotional support and Evelyn’s practical justifications.

Raine had rescued my notebook of hyperdimensional mathematics, scooped it up from the floor of the throne room at the last minute, after she’d pulled my unconscious body onto her back. When she returned it to me I almost couldn’t accept the thing, half hateful, half a source of strength, but it was merely a symbol of what I carried in my head.

Here was the instrument by which I might save my sister; here was the abyss in which I might lose myself.

When I was no longer quite so exhausted, Raine and I spent a quiet few hours refreshing the Fractal on my left arm, watching cartoons together. I relished the alone time, the attention, the slow intimate touch of her hands, and especially the part when she made me put my head in her lap – but there was a distance between us now, a barrier.

Lozzie dominated my thoughts.

She felt like a dirty secret I’d kept from Raine.

How responsible was I, for the convenient amnesia after every shared dream? Even the real Lozzie, bruised and dirty and twitchy, possessed an undeniable elfin beauty. I didn’t think I was attracted to her, she wasn’t my type, but how much had that beauty, that intimacy, influenced me? My secret bit on the side. Made me sick.

One night that week I woke from a dream about her. We’d been building a sandcastle together, an elaborate citadel of crumbling spires and collapsing gatehouses, and had watched hand-in-hand as the sea rolled in to lay siege to our work. I’d woken with tears on the pillow, and realised she hadn’t visited me. Just a normal dream.

Raine wanted to know everything about her, in total innocence she just wanted to know about my friend. And I couldn’t explain what it had felt like to see Lozzie for real, those minutes together underground, the need to hug her and know she was real. A weird, twisted little part of myself wanted Raine to be jealous, wanted her to suspect the worst of me, wanted her to claim me as hers all over again to absolve me.

Instead, she’d never been so attentive. Bringing me food, coaxing me to sleep, massaging away the aches and pains. She helped me with the end-of-term essay, listened to my woefully pedestrian undergraduate ideas, encouraged me and told me I was getting better. She was so gentle with me, too gentle, but I didn’t have the words to tell her what I needed.

Stupid, selfish Heather. So focused on myself, I didn’t spare a thought for what was going on in Raine’s head, for why she followed me everywhere, why she needed me to fall asleep before she could, why sometimes I found her sat up listening to the sounds of the night.

==

Autumn guttered, blew out, and winter cold descended.

Tenny didn’t seem to feel the chill or the rain. I went to see her a couple of times in the overgrown back garden, with Raine by my side. She didn’t respond to questions about Lozzie, didn’t seem to be much perturbed by our brief absence, too busy exploring and probing with her tentacles, waving the slowly regrowing stubs at me. I watched her capture a vole or a shrew, hold it immobile on the ground, turn the terrified thing over and over in her tentacles, before gently letting it go again. Her presence had driven off most of the other spirit life around the garden and the patch of street immediately in front of the house. Her territory now.

The cult really was gone; I began to suspect Lozzie’s mysterious uncle didn’t exist. Evelyn had repaired Praem and sent her into the city every day, investigating the cult’s little pocket dimensions and loops and hidden passages, but they were all collapsing like shrinking cysts, vanishing into whatever layer of reality they’d been carved from. The main pocket remained – the wound around the cult’s captured god – but in Evelyn’s delightful metaphor it had ‘gone native’. Not a place for unprotected human beings anymore.

Evelyn asked very little about Lozzie. I failed to realise how little she was talking to me. Chalked it up to her focus on Praem’s odd changes.

I should have noticed the warning signs.

Twil came round to visit once, not for any special reason. That brightened the day. Not because of the silly werewolf herself, but for Evelyn’s reaction, the surface bristling which I suspect even Twil herself was beginning to find rather transparent.

I tried not to think too much. I reread King Lear and added to my essay, went to the library with Raine to look up reference books.

She encouraged that. It got me out of the house, got fresh air in my lungs, worked the weakness out of my legs, occupied my mind with something I loved. Wrapped up in my coat and that beautiful pink hoodie she’d bought me, scarf around my neck against the cold, she never let me go alone. Things were returning to normal – whatever ‘normal’ meant anymore.

How could I read books and walk around, eat breakfast and pretend everything was normal, after a night spent in a pocket dimension full of zombies and monsters and atrocities, after killing a wizard with my mind?

What else could I do? I didn’t want to fail a class, so I worked. It was that or curl up in bed and never leave. Once, I would have thought that a real option.

I knew in a few weeks I’d have to tackle the brainmath again, think about Lozzie, take charge and sit my friends down and talk about the plan. But for now, I needed to rest.

Of course, if you knew anything about me, you knew the library was the most likely place to find me, other than at home.

So that’s where they found me.

==

A quiet corner desk on the third floor of Sharrowford University Library, flanked on one side by a pitted concrete support column and the open vista of windows looking over the back of campus. The gentle rustle and soft footsteps of the library at mid-morning. Buzzing strip lights compensating for the overcast gloom. One of my favourite spots.

Raine was nearby, maybe fifteen or twenty feet away, off somewhere between the library stacks. She was looking for a book she needed for her own university work. I wasn’t paying attention. She’d come get me if she needed to go much further away. I had two books open on the desk in front of me: Reading Lear and a literary journal with a fascinating essay called Dragon Fathers and Unnatural Children.

I was turning a page of the latter, mentally drafting the conclusion to my essay, when I happened to glance up. Why? I think it called me, lurking in my peripheral vision.

A tiny goat statue on the opposite side of the desk. A hateful little thing with a twisted satyr face, looking at me with pewter eyes.

Hadn’t been there when I’d sat down.

To my credit I didn’t freeze up. My heart leapt into my throat, but I turned, about to call out for Raine, her name on my lips – but I stalled for half a second, damned by library etiquette. Had I ever raised my voice in a library? Surely not. Oh dear.

In that half second, a person cleared their throat, right behind me.

Well, yes, then I froze up.

A woman stepped into my field of vision, at arm’s length from me – old raincoat over an athletic top, layers failing to conceal the flow of wiry muscle beneath. Cheap tattoos peeked out from her neckline and on her exposed wrists. She picked up the goat statue from the table with her good left arm. Her right was encased in a plain white orthopedic cast with the hand left free, her raincoat’s arm hanging slack because she couldn’t get the cast through the sleeve. A shaved head nodded a greeting to me, and I met the cold, flint-hard eyes of Amy Stack, the Sharrowford Cult’s skinhead assassin.

“Alright?” she murmured, at proper library volume.

I hiccuped. My eyes flickered toward where I thought Raine was standing. Couldn’t see her, she was on the other side of the library shelves, visible only as the corner of a leather jacket.

“Relax,” Stack said. “I’m not here for a fight.”

I felt like a mouse in front of a snake. Frozen solid but vibrating inside, preparing to launch myself from my chair and scramble away. Would I make it? Should I shout for Raine? I was still weak, stuffed with painkillers, and Stack radiated that slow potential for violence, that economy of movement so similar to Raine, that wound-spring effect in every muscle.

“How dare you?” I hissed, and surprised myself. “This is a library. I am trying to work.”

She blinked at me, once. Point scored.

My anger surprised me – I’d clung to essay writing and literary theory this last week because it was solid, it was certain, it was something I’m good at, something not magical or full of monsters or so dumb it shouldn’t exist.

“Caught you at a bad time?” she asked.

“Quite. And you are not a student. Do you even have a library card?”

“ … no, I don’t.”

“Then you’re not supposed to be in here.” A tremor in my voice. Chest constricted, palms sweaty.

Stack stared at me like I was the idiot. Then she nodded very slightly. “Fair enough. I won’t come back again.”

“See that you don’t.”

“We need to talk. You here alone?”

I shook my head.

“That’s good. Call your friends then.” She inclined her head. “Saye?”

“No, Raine.”

A slight frown. “Who’s that?”

“The woman you tried to shoot.” Oh, how I relished those words. I wish they’d had more effect on her. She raised her eyebrows in mild interest.

“Call her then.”

“Raine,” I said at normal volume, broke the most cherished library rule. Then I hiccuped again.

Raine heard it in the way I said her name. She was round the end of the shelves in two strides, her eyes taking in Stack and myself and the distance between us with a single glance. One hand slid inside her jacket before Stack could open her mouth.

“Not here!” I hissed. “Not in the library!”

Raine paused, eyes glued to Stack, and tilted her head in silent question. Stack stared back at her, eyebrows raised, unconcerned, or at least pretending unconcern.

Like watching a pair of tigers sizing each other up.

Even now, flushed with adrenaline, part of me filed away that look on Raine’s face, in the sort of mental folder one only opens in private. I wanted her to look at me like that.

Slowly, carefully, each movement wide and exaggerated, Stack turned out her pockets to show they were empty, rolled up her right sleeve, and lifted the hem of her top to reveal her empty waistband, turning once to prove she had nothing tucked into the back. Then she nudged the opposite chair away from the desk, and sat down, staring at Raine the whole time.

“Just here to talk.”

Raine watched her a second longer, then crossed to me, touched my shoulder, and asked a silent question with her eyes. I nodded and swallowed, and Raine dragged over a chair from the desk behind us.

She placed it forward of me, between Stack and I, then adjusted it again, forward by another couple of inches. She sat down very slowly. Posturing. I would have rolled my eyes at any other time, but right now she was perfect.

Stack watched Raine with strange interest. “You’re like me, aren’t you?”

“Eat me, baldie,” Raine said in a soft murmur. “Let’s get something real clear, just between me and you. Forget her for a sec,” Raine gestured at me. “I’m not like you, I’m not like you at all.”

Stack raised her eyebrows. “S’that what you think? You’re in denial.”

“See, you’ve got it all turned around. It’s not that I’m like you. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding, a category error.” Raine broke into a grin. Not the sort of grin she used on me. A different type, one that made my skin crawl. “The similarity between you and I, that’s because you’re a very, very, very little bit like me.”

Stack nodded slowly. “Interesting theory.”

“Stop it, both of you,” I hissed. “A psychopath penis measuring contest, really?”

Raine just grinned wider. Stack shrugged her shoulders.

“Only here to talk,” she said.

“Yeah?” asked Raine. “So who are we talking to? You?”

“My boss.”

“I punted your boss through a wall,” I managed, and felt much better for saying it, though I followed the words with a loud hiccup when Stack stared at me. I made a point of nodding at the cast on her left arm. “I broke all of his bones, instead of just one.”

“New boss, same as the old boss,” Stack said. I didn’t have a comeback to that, and Raine just stared her down – amazingly, it worked. After a moment, Stack let out a sigh and looked out the window. “Yeah, there’s been some restructuring. You know, change of management. Change of goals. I work for a slightly different person now.”

“Edward Lilburne,” Raine said, grinning as Stack turned to look at her. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

Amy shrugged. “He doesn’t want to meet you. He’s a coward.”

“Really now?” Raine raised her eyebrows.

“Yeah.”

“Funny way to talk about your boss.”

They stared at each other again, and this time I really did roll my eyes. “Amy, can I call you Amy? What does your boss want?”

“Couple of things,” she said, taking a deep breath and leaning back. “First one’s for you. Where’s Lauren?”

“She’s gone Outside.”

Amy’s eyes scrunched up in this weird tight quirk, like she hadn’t quite heard me right. A pinch of a frown, a little disbelief, almost a touch of fear, if she hadn’t been incapable of feeling that emotion.

“Pardon?” she murmured.

“She left,” I said.

“Buggered right off,” Raine added.

“Mm. Alright. Second question’s for Evelyn Saye. Wanna call her here?”

Raine snorted a humourless laugh. “If you want her to torture you to death, sure. She’ll do it. She’s crazy, our Evee. Better pray you don’t bump into her.”

“Fine. Can we coexist?”

Raine and I actually shared a glance. I shrugged. Raine straightened up and sat back, let out a long theatrical sigh and stroked her chin. It was quite the performance, but it was wasted on Amy Stack as an audience.

“Not really up to me, that one,” said Raine. “I’m not the one in charge here.”

“Where’s Zheng?” I blurted out.

Amy turned her slow regard on me.

“Yeah, Heather’s more in charge than I am,” Raine murmured. “You wanna make a deal, might be best to do it with her. She can bite your head off, you know.”

“The zombie’s done a runner,” Stack said. “Not a peep.”

“ … are you lying?” I asked.

Stack shrugged, wide and eloquent. “Doesn’t make any difference to you either way. This next part is between me and you, alright?” She looked at Raine, then back at me. “Or between me and Saye, take it however you like. My new boss probably isn’t going to mess with you. He’s scared shitless of Saye, and terrified of you, miss … Morell, right? Not Lavinia.”

“Yes. I’ll thank you not to use my middle name, please.”

She nodded. “He won’t even risk a phone call via my cell, in case you or Saye do something with sound, fry his brain or whatever. I don’t pretend to understand half of it, playing with fire if you ask me. He doesn’t really expect me to return from this little meeting.”

“Oh, I think we could prove him right on that count,” Raine said.

“I think otherwise,” Amy said gently. “You can even follow me when I leave here, but I’ve got instructions not to meet up with the rest of them, not for the next three weeks, and not in Sharrowford city limits. They’re too afraid. You broke ‘em. So, I think we can all coexist. Get me?”

“They?” I echoed. “Aren’t you one of them?”

Amy shrugged.

“You kept well out of that whole castle thing, didn’t you?” Raine murmured.

“Only been there once. I’m no idiot.”

“Oh? No? Could’a fooled me.”

“Still alive, aren’t I?”

“Point,” Raine said.

“I don’t think we can coexist,” I said very quietly, dredging up that core of conviction I’d felt in the castle, during those slow, numb minutes underground. “Edward Lilburne, Lozzie’s uncle, he was … responsible, for what was in the castle, wasn’t he?”

Stack raised her eyebrows. I just stared at her – no small feat, looking back into those stone-hard eyes. My heart fluttered and my stomach tightened, but I held her gaze. Eventually she sighed and nodded.

“S’a pity,” she said.

“Here’s what’s gonna happen,” said Raine, and scooted her chair even closer to Stack. “You come against us again and I’ll kill you.”

“Obviously.”

“No no, I don’t mean I’ll fight you and win, or stab you to death or something. I owe you. Shooting at me, eh, I can forgive that. Kidnapping my girl, that’s different. I’ll find where you sleep, or who your family are, or maybe you have a kid.”

Stack actually smiled, and a little puff of laughter escaped her. “You can try.”

“Or maybe you don’t care about anything except yourself.” Raine spread her hands. “I can work with that too.”

“I’m sure you can.”

Slowly, making no sudden movements, Stack got out of the chair and stood up. She nodded once to me, and once to Raine.

“Sit and swivel, slaphead,” Raine said.

“Same to you.”

She stepped away from the table, and without looking back, stalked off between the library shelves, light-footed despite the boots on her feet.

Raine and I watched her go. I didn’t breathe again until she vanished toward the stairwell, behind too many books.

“Are you … are you going after her?” I asked, swallowing on a very dry mouth.

“Nah, s’pointless. She wasn’t lying.” Raine sighed and looked at me. “Oh, Heather, hey, hey, it’s fine, we’re fine.”

She leaned over and wrapped her arms around me. I was shaking very badly, my breathing unsteady. My heart was hammering at a hundred miles an hour.

“I’m okay, yes, I’m okay,” I lied, then hiccuped. “That was kind of scary.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it was.”

Raine rubbed my back and held on for a while, then let me go so I could gather up my dignity. I concentrated on closing the book I’d been reading, and on placing both my hands flat on the tabletop to stop the shaking. Raine reached over and squeezed one of them.

“We need to tell Evee about this,” I said. “What- what do we do now? I thought that was the end of them, I thought … ”

“How much of that essay you got left?”

“I … I’m sorry, what? Raine?”

She looked right at me and repeated the question, completely unshaken, as if this was exactly the right thing to talk about after a brush with an assassin. I just shook my head.

“Serious question. How much work you got left before you can turn it in?”

“Um … I don’t know. Maybe four more paragraphs. And then I need to move a few parts around before I proofread it, I’m not happy with the beginning.”

“First draft isn’t the only draft?”

“Raine.” I tutted. “What are you getting at?”

“It’s almost Christmas break. I think we should get out of Sharrowford for a bit, the three of us. Well, four of us if you count Praem, I suppose. Can’t leave her here all by herself, no knowing what a demon riding around in a sex toy will get up to by her lonesome.” Raine lit up, beaming that endless confidence right into my brain.

I shook my head, stunned.

“We’ll go down south, go see where Evee grew up,” she said. “Trust me, you’ll love the place.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Can noble intention remain untainted, no matter the method used to reach the goal?

Alexander finished his proselytising, and I knew he wasn’t lying. Too much passion in him for this be an act, to get me to drop my guard. Besides, what did I have that he couldn’t take by force? I’d rarely felt so weak and small, with Zheng towering beside me, lost in this un-place. My friends might be about to rescue me, but Alexander’s pitch wasn’t a ploy to save his own skin. He shone with confidence. If Raine and the others made it here, he was certain he could kill them.

This rotten blood-soaked ogre perched on a stool, this eater of children, he wanted to convince me he was right.

And he was.

The stocky cultist tending to Alexander’s exit wound cleared his throat. “Boss, we-”

“Shhh, shh shh shh.” Alexander hushed him with a delicately raised hand. “Lavinia is considering our offer. Let’s not interrupt her calculations, that would be so terribly rude.”

I knew Lozzie was trying to catch my eye, peeking out from behind her mass of filthy hair, from where she sat on the floor next to her brother. She had a plan, didn’t she? A sharp trick up her sleeve. Was I still part of that plan?

Alexander was right. Maisie and I had been kidnapped, stolen, torn apart, and I’d been left half-alive. Now I had a few friends who understood that, who understood me. A ragged band of fools, and we were planning to – what? We had a few vaguely sketched intentions, all of which relied on my mastery of an abyss I barely understood and which nearly killed me every time I dipped into it.

 But the Sharrowford Cult? These people had trapped and bound an alien god. They tapped it for power, commanded its spawn, and built their own pocket dimension around a wound in its hide.

“You are right,” I said, so softly, barely a whisper.

Alexander broke into a grin, the most satisfied I’d ever seen a human face.

“And I’m still going to kill you,” I continued.

Can you use an evil tool, and yet remain unchanged?

Not only the dead and mutated children in the cages underground, but also the homeless people turned into zombies, each one of them was or had been somebody’s missing person, somebody else’s Maisie.

Yes, these people had bound a god. Allying with this monster might be the best chance I’d ever have of actually rescuing my sister, and I had to say no.

Alexander sighed with theatrical disappointment.

“This idiotic bravado is unbecoming of you, Lavinia. Be realistic now, you are not going to kill-”

“The end does not justify the means. The means determines the nature of the end.”

I made myself believe those words, no matter how weak my voice. When I rescued my sister, she would see me, not a self-loathing monster in my place.

Alexander rolled his eyes, as if I was wilfully ignorant, a naive and idealistic girl, an idiot on the way to self-destruction. Perhaps he was right about that too.

I felt a pinprick of real confidence, real conviction, not so slow and numb anymore. He rolled the little metal cylinder in his hand as if bored, his eyes leaving me and drifting to Zheng. I tensed up, expected her to grab me at any moment – but I forced myself to concentrate, to look down at the notebook in my hands. I flipped past a page of irrelevant mathematical notation. I knew what to look for now, I knew what to do.

In cold blood, I had to do this. Nausea crept up my throat and a spike of pain jabbed the back of my head as I hurried through the equations.

“You think I’m … ” Alexander gestured with the metal cylinder. “Bad? A cartoon villain, to-”

“You’re evil,” I said.

“Evil? Evil? Look at the world around us, Lavinia.” He stabbed with his voice, hard and angry now, the anger of a powerful man spurned. “Our world, the human world. I snuff out a few lives, yes, for an explicit purpose – knowledge, advancement, human survival. Not for the sake of my own enrichment, not for national power or personal prestige or for corporate profit, but for all of us. For a higher cause. The world is full of people far worse than I. Lavinia, look at me.”

I winced and fought to keep my eyes on the page.

“I said, look at-”

A shout echoed from somewhere below us, distorted by the winding sinus-like passageways of the corpse-castle. Was that my name I’d heard, was that Raine shouting for me?

Then, unmistakable, a gunshot. Far away.

“Boss,” the stocky cultist raised his voice in warning.

Alexander jerked a hand up to silence his underling. His eyes tightened in strangled frustration.

“Humankind is a dead end, Lavinia. Being human is a dead end. If not from climate change and resource depletion, then from the beyond. Your very way of thinking, this insistence on an archaic system of ethics and morals will serve you nothing in the long run. It will see you dead, your bones dust. What use is this way of thinking, if it leads you to failure? You cling to it only because it makes you feel good, but it ensures you cannot kill me.”

I found the right lines of mathematics and swallowed hard. The correct re-purposed dregs of the Eye’s lessons, separate scraps I was going to weld together with my mind; my stomach clenched up.

Alexander was speaking again. I interrupted him with the first words I could think of.

“Why not get into that machine yourself then?”

“Machine?” He paused. “The mind-interface device? I did! I have. It didn’t work on me. I am loathe to admit so, but it gave me nothing. Is that not right, sister? Did it work on me?” In my peripheral vision, I saw Lozzie shake her head. “You think I would sacrifice your precious innocents before myself? Lavinia, you are only trying to convince yourself to do what you know you cannot – you cannot kill me without convincing yourself I am a monster.”

Noises echoed through the gallery behind me now, shouting and crashes, a ripping sound, a scream; but I couldn’t just wait for rescue. I’d never forgive myself.

I had to prove Alexander wrong.

“If you admit it now, I will let your friends live,” he said, voice a touch softer, a smugness returning to his lips as he spread his hands in mock mercy. “If you persist in this nonsense, I will set Zheng on them when they arrive, and if by some miracle they survive that, I will do it myself.” He pointed vaguely at the ceiling. “Do you forget what I can command?”

My eyes tripped along the next line of equation and I felt the beginning of a white-hot burning inside my skull. My breath jerked, harder and sharper. The hyperdimensional mathematics began to slot into place, irresistible and unstoppable now, held tight in my mind. I grit my teeth, felt a nosebleed start, and finally looked up at Alexander.

“Shit, she’s doing it. For fuck’s sake,” the stocky cultist said. He dropped the bloody towel he’d been holding, but hesitated as Alexander showed no fear.

“You can’t kill me, Lavinia. You simply won’t do it.”

“Lozzie,” I hissed through gritted teeth. “Move. Aside.”

Lozzie half-rose, unsure and skittish, her eyes darting between her brother and I. The stocky cultist frowned at her. I kept my focus on Alexander, felt the levers of reality slick and burning under my hands. He sighed and rolled his eyes, glanced at his nervous underling at last. “She can’t hurt you. Settle down.”

“Yes, I can.”

I could barely speak. My head felt like it was going to explode and my eyes ached with fire, but I held on even as I trembled and struggled to stay standing, as I felt blood drip from my nose and leak from the corners of my eyes; I pushed the equation further, complicated it, added layers. Bullets wouldn’t kill him, this needed to be final.

“No, you can’t,” Alexander snapped, the last word spat in rage. He rose to his feet and pointed at me. “Because you won’t, because you are tied to a moral system which admits no legitimate breaking of human boundaries. This is a farce.” He grinned and threw up his hands. “Here, I will make your surrender even easier. I will let your friends live regardless of the choice you make. You will all walk free. There, I have taken away even that excuse to kill me. You have no enlightened self-defence, no principles to stand on but simple moral outrage. You cannot kill me, because you refuse to become anything other than a human be-”

The stocky cultist lunged to tackle me.

Lozzie leapt to her feet, yanked the hidden scalpel out of her sleeve, and landed on the cultist like a mad pixie. I think she got the knife into his throat, but it all happened too fast for me to react. They went down in a tangle of limbs and slippery spurting blood. I flinched and shied away so hard I almost tripped over my own feet.

Alexander sighed. He snapped three words in some angular, painful non-human language, a command at Zheng.

With almost superhuman effort, through blood clogging my nose and dimming vision, I interrupted him – by pulling the glow stick out of my hoodie’s pocket and hurling it at his face. I missed, badly. It sailed past him, but distracted him just enough, made him trip over a syllable.

“You will not!” Alexander screamed at the last second.

Then I let go.

This was no reflex, no scramble of self-defence, no fumbling in the ineffable dark. I lashed out with hyperdimensional mathematics fully conscious of what I was doing, after almost a minute and a half of painstaking, bleeding, brain-burning work. I made a decision, eyes wide open, and I followed it through.

Heat, light, and a god-awful tearing noise – perhaps a hiss of superheated air, I never figured it out. A backwash of oven-heat, a millisecond of sharp blue glow.

It hit Alexander like a train.

I barely understood that moment of destruction. It was so fast, too fast, and my vision was already throbbing and edged with black.

A terrible sound deafened me – the instant shattering of every bone in a human body, the floor around Alexander cracking into a million shards, the stool he’d been sitting on splintered to nothing, the table next to him smashed aside. A wrecking ball of invisible force flung a pulped bloody wreck against the back wall of the throne room, smashed the wall itself open, and carried what was left of Alexander Lilburne out into the grey fog and down over the side of the castle.

Wish I’d heard the splat.

I blacked out before I’d even begun to fall over.

In that last moment of shock and release, with the throne room spinning around me and my head splitting open with white-hot fire, with vomit forcing its way up my throat to choke me, I had only one thought.

I win.

==

I was out cold when my friends burst into the room, but I’m told it was suitably dramatic.

==

Pain rolled in the pit of my stomach, torturing me back to consciousness. My eyes were gummed shut. My mouth tasted of iron and bile.

I was collapsed forward against a warm, firm surface, my neck lolling, legs dangling, something digging into the underside of my thighs. I was jerked to one side then the other, the sensation of motion, stopping, moving again. No energy to roll sideways, no energy to even moan. Muffled voices trickled through my dulled senses. Angry shouting, a huge clang of metal, a grunt.

The reason I didn’t panic is because I could smell Raine.

Her sweat, mostly. Realisation filtered through the brain-fog; she was carrying me on her back.

“That’s enough. That’ll do for them.” Evelyn, snapping, nearby.

“One more!” Twil, shouting through too many sharp teeth.

A loud twisting tear of metal, nails down a blackboard.

I fought the aching muscles and the crust of blood around my eyes. Cracked my eyelids a millimetre or two, vision painful and blurry. Thick grey fog and copied Sharrowford buildings swirled and swam.

We were outside the castle, beyond the cult’s barrier of occult bollards. A dozen of the squat metal poles had been ripped out of the ground and strewn about. A wolfish form was busy uprooting another one. Twil. She ripped it from the ground and hurled it at indistinct figures in the fog.

I tried to move my eyes and suffered a wave of nausea for my efforts. I don’t know if it’s possible for an optic nerve to hurt, but mine did. I stared at what I’m pretty sure was Praem. She held a smaller figure in a double arm-lock.

“Twil, come on,” Raine said, right next to my head.

Parted my lips. Throat was so raw.

“ … -one … okay?”

“Heather?” Raine turned her head, but she couldn’t meet my eyes at this angle. Her profile was so clear through the haze. “Heeey, you’re awake. She awake? Lozzie, her eyes open?”

A small elfin face bobbed into my vision. I stared, half dead inside, unable to muster a reaction.

“Uh huh! Hey Heather!” Lozzie said. I managed to blink, once.

“ … okay?” I hissed again.

“Yeah. That would be a yes,” Raine said, loud and clear. “Nobody’s dead. It’s okay, we’re all gonna be okay. We’ll be out of here in no time, I promise.”

“Yaaaay,” I murmured.

I closed my eyes again. I think I may have been delirious.

I was certain I’d passed out, but I felt Raine moving, hurrying, the sound of many footsteps and the clipped anger of a short, tense argument. One voice I didn’t recognise.

A static crackle; a breath of cold against my face; a change of light behind my eyelids – a sudden blossom of soft warm orange.

“Goddammit all to hell, I don’t know how to close the blasted thing,” Evelyn snapped.

“Break the wall, break the wall, knock it down!” That was Lozzie.

“Right on,” Raine said. “Fuck that wall right up.”

“Me? Ugh, fine,” Twil grunted.

A crack of shattering brick. Somebody let out a huge heartfelt sigh, followed by soft swearing. For a long moment I heard only distant birdsong and the thrum of far-off traffic.

“I trust we’re all in one piece?” Evelyn asked eventually. “Excepting the obvious.”

“Yes ma’am. Present and correct,” Raine said, a grin in her voice.

“Here!” Lozzie chirped.

Twil growled. “Broke my fucking hand. Fuck, that hurts. Urgh.”

Blacked out again for a handful of seconds. Next thing I knew Raine was setting me down, sitting me upright on a cold wooden surface. I groaned and tried my best to cling to her, arms too weak. Couldn’t force my hands to grip. Raine steadied me by the shoulders, brushing my sweat-soaked hair out of my face, touching me to bring me back. I tried to open my eyes again, painful and stinging against the light.

 “Hey, Heather, it’s okay, it’s okay. We’re out, we made it out.”

Raine smiled down at me. Her face was side-lit by the apricot and peach light of sunrise, as were the trees behind her and the beautiful arc of the sky and the silken morning clouds. Raine was sweaty and dirty and her hair was a mess and she had a smear of blood – mine – drying on her neck and all down the shoulder of her leather jacket.

“ … best thing … seen all day … ” I managed. Speaking hurt.

Raine actually laughed, half in disbelief, shaking her head. “You are invincible, Heather. Have I been rubbing off on you?”

I did a tiny shrug and wrapped my numb, weak arms around the pain in my belly and diaphragm. My head lolled, couldn’t keep my neck straight.

“Hey, hey, hold still for me, love. I need to look at that bruise on your head,” Raine said, soft and coaxing, hands gentle and intimate on my face and forehead.

“Bruise?” I muttered.

Lozzie wriggled onto the bench next to me, warm and close, hands on my back and head against my shoulder.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “Wasn’t fast enough to catch you when you went down. Crack, bang, wallop. I’m sorry, Raine, I’m sorry I hurt your girl. Really, I’m sorry, please-”

“Hey, you stabbed a dude in the throat for her. You’re cool with me, pixie dust.”

Lozzie giggled.

I grunted as Raine gently probed my forehead. I felt for it too, despite her warning, and winced when my questing hand found a bruise the size of an egg. “Ow.”

“Looks worse than it is.” Raine sighed with relief. “Was worried for a minute you’d fractured your skull, but you haven’t. Here.”

Raine rummaged in her jacket pockets and I took a deep breath, forcing it down my raw throat. I struggled to sit up enough to look around, to take in the aftermath of our journey to nowhere. Numb, empty, exhausted, I felt like the living dead.

We were in a park, at dawn, next to a dilapidated children’s play area, with a couple of sad looking plastic slides and a rusty climbing frame. A wall for ball games lay half-toppled into the thin grass, fragments of strange symbols still visible on some larger pieces of shattered brick. Orange dawn glow suffused the line of sheltering trees and the distant rooftops beyond. A few spirits went about their unknowable business, waving tentacles and undulating lizard-skin, stalking through the trees and clambering over the roofs. None of them paid us the slightest attention.

I’d never been so happy to see Sharrowford, or to feel the sun on my face.

Twil lay on her back, spread-eagle on the grass, scuffed and spattered with other people’s blood. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, savouring the air. Evelyn steadied herself against the opposite park bench to the one I was sat on, sagging over her walking stick, but she was smiling with grim satisfaction. Praem stood a few feet away, expressionless and prim and straight-backed despite her battered and bruised look, clothes torn and filthy – and there was only one of her. The second body was gone.

She had a young woman restrained in a double arm-lock, the zombie-conductor cultist from the castle, the scrawny woman Raine had shot at and missed. She was wiry and terrified, watching us all, her face bloodied from a punch, cream-coloured robes half twisted off to show jeans and a thin tshirt beneath.

“Here, Heather, try to eat some of this, okay?” Raine said, as she pressed an unwrapped chocolate bar into my numb hands. “Emergency rations, in case you needed to get your jazz on.”

“Good thinking,” Evelyn grunted, though she was staring at Lozzie with a curious frown.

“Hey, I plan for everything. Only thing I’m any good at.” Raine allowed herself a little grin and a wink. I managed a tiny nibble of chocolate. Nodded the smallest thank you. Raine crouched down and peered at my eyes, marvelling at me.

“How are you even conscious right now?” she asked.

“Maybe … adapting?” I croaked.

“Turning away a bullet required much more complex physics,” Evelyn said. “This time she just hit somebody. Very hard.”

“We won,” I hissed.

“That we did,” Raine said, and her smile lit up my soul.

“That’s right, fuckers!” Twil yelled up at the sky. “You swing at the king, you best not miss.” She trailed off, then heaved herself up into a sitting position. “Anyone recognise where we are? That portal could have come out anywhere.”

“Park,” I croaked. Twil puffed out a token laugh. Lozzie giggled and hugged me tighter, cheek pressed against my own. I didn’t have the energy or heart to tell her that hurt, and the shared body heat felt nice.

“Maybe we’re not even in Sharrowford,” said Twil. “Or in England. How screwed up would that be?”

Evelyn just sighed.

“You okay?” Raine asked me softly. I nodded more with my eyes than with my head, and Raine straightened up, though she kept one firm hand on my shoulder as she produced her mobile phone. “Let’s ask. Hey Google, where are we?” She waited a beat, then raised her eyes at the map on her phone’s screen. “Oak grove park, apparently, almost out of the city, right on the southern edge. Never been down here myself. Home is … ” She looked up, oriented herself, and pointed over the trees. “A long walk that way. That over there, I think that’s the old brickworks. And oh, what luck, there’s a police station about five minutes away.” She flashed a smile around. “We really want to run into a bobby on his morning beat right now, yeah?”

“Shit,” Twil said, glancing at the still-terrified cultist woman in Praem’s unyielding grip. “What do we do with surrender monkey here?”

“Don’t-” the woman stammered, her eyes darting back and forth. “Don’t kill me. Please. Please don’t. You don’t want to.”

Evelyn rounded on the captured cultist, still unsteady on her walking stick. “Give me a good reason not to. Making zombies, in my city. I should put you in the ground.”

“I never killed anybody, I never killed anyone.” The cultist shook her head, eyes wide. “I swear, they just trained me and brought me bodies to work with. I never killed anybody. Lauren?” The cultist glanced at Lozzie. “Lauren, tell them, I’m not a murderer. Lauren, please … please, please.”

Lozzie looked away.

“Is she telling the truth?” Evelyn asked Lozzie.

“Um … ” Lozzie bit her lip, returned Evelyn’s sudden scrutiny with upturned eyes. “You’re Evelyn, right?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

Lozzie turned her head one way and then the other, the picture of a crazy person distracted by a cacophony of thought – or at least, that’s how she must have appeared to the others. I saw something quite different. She was glancing at the spirit life in the park, at a pair of canine shapes pacing along the edge of the trees, at squirmy little creatures edging up the children’s climbing frame, at a translucent floating squid-thing bobbing through the air.

More spirits than a minute or two earlier.

“Lozzie?” I croaked. “Are these-”

“It’s okay, it’s okay, they’re my friends. My friends,” Lozzie whispered for me, and squeezed me again. Then she spoke up, to Evelyn. “I don’t care if Flowsie lives or dies, but I don’t think she ever killed people.”

“See? See? You all heard that, right? You all heard that,” the cultist said.

“’Flowsie’?” Raine asked with a smirk.

“I-it’s not my real name.”

“I should still put you in the ground,” Evelyn said.

“Uh, hello?” Twil stood up and spread her arms wide. “We’re in a park in the suburbs? We gonna leave a corpse here?”

“Yeah, yeah, l-listen to her.”

“I can’t kill her, Evee,” Raine said. “She did surrender. She had zombies left and all, she could have kept fighting, and she led us out. I’m not going to break the Geneva Convention in a Sharrowford Park.”

Evelyn let out a slow sigh. “Fine. I still have to do something with her though. We can’t just let her go.”

“Mmm, fair point.” Raine nodded. The cultist woman shuddered as Raine turned to consider her.

“Yeah,” Twil said. “Let’s just argue about it until a morning jogger comes along, sees six girls covered in bruises and blood. Great plan.”

“ … you have a life?”

Everyone glanced at me, including the cultist.

“Do you have a life?” I repeated, my voice broken, throat raw, mouth still thick with the taste of blood. I stared at her with exhausted, heavy eyes. I wanted so badly to sleep. She gulped and stammered, glanced around at the others.

“Don’t look at me,” Raine told her. “The lady of the hour asked you a question, I’d answer if I were you. She’s probably your best chance right now.”

“W-what do you mean?” the cultist stammered at me.

“Other than the cult. A life.”

“T-the brotherhood, you mean?”

“Brotherhood?” Twil snorted. “You’re not even a man, dumb ass.”

“I-it’s a figure of speech.”

“I will shove this walking stick up your arse,” Evelyn grumbled. “How’s that for a figure of speech?”

“A life?” I repeated.

“No. Not … not really.” She gulped and averted her eyes, sagging in Praem’s grip. “I don’t have … anybody important, if that’s what you mean. I’m not important. I’m a nobody.”

“ … real name?”

She blinked at me. Mid-twenties, older? Mousy and scrawny. A little like myself.

“Kimberly,” she muttered.

“Job? Home?”

“I work at Poundland,” she said very quietly.

Raine laughed. “The Poundland Necromancer. Wow. I love it.”

“Go home. Be normal,” I croaked. “Make trouble – I’ll find you, send you Outside. I already killed your boss. You know I can do it to you.”

“Heather?” Raine said my name very softly, but I didn’t look at her.

The cultist – no, Kimberly, a young lady with a poorly paid job and little to live for – stared at me from behind bruises and blood. If I’d been more awake, less exhausted, the look in her eyes would have made me shiver.

Fear and reverence.

She glanced round at all the scary people, Raine and Twil and Evelyn, all people who could kill her, then settled back on me. She nodded. “Thank you,” she murmured. “Thank you. I won’t- I promise I won’t go against you.”

Evelyn sighed and shrugged. “Alright, alright. We don’t need the whole sob-story. One last thing. The big zombie, she didn’t stop moving with your other ones. Why?”

“W-what? I don’t … I don’t understand.”

“Zheng?” I croaked, frowning as I realised. The giant zombie woman wasn’t here with us. Of course she wasn’t.

“She jumped straight out that hole you made,” Lozzie said. “Right after my brother.”

“Ah. Thank you.” Evelyn nodded somewhat awkwardly at Lozzie, then turned to the cultist again. “Why did she do that? The others gave up when you did, but we saw her leaving through the fog, going somewhere else. Were you lying to us?”

Kimberly shook her head, shaking against Praem’s arm-lock. “Zheng’s not mine. S-she’s way too much for that, I couldn’t make something like her. I-I should be flattered, but- no, we inherited her.”

Evelyn raised an eyebrow to Lozzie in silent question. Lozzie nodded. “She came from my parents. They got her somewhere else. Zheng’s real old.”

“High time we let her go, Evee,” said Raine. She was busy rearranging her handgun and knife inside her jacket for proper concealment. “We are in public now, technically. Twil’s right.”

Evelyn’s jaw tightened. “I’m still not happy about this. I need insurance.”

“Fine, fine, fine,” Raine said, grinning to herself and shaking her head. She stepped away from me and up to the cultist.

Kimberly cringed and tried to pull away, to shrink back from Raine, but Praem held her firm. What had she seen Raine do in that castle, to react like that? She started to shake.

“Hey there,” Raine said, still smiling. “I don’t even have to say it, do I?”

“No, no no, I won’t- I won’t-”

“I need your address. Phone number. Whatever you got. Hey, don’t worry, I mean you did surrender, right? That was serious, you meant it. Yeah?”

“Yes, yes, yes I swear.”

“Then we’re cool. You and I. We’re cool. Unless you want me to have to find your address by myself. Kind of a bother, you know?”

Kimberly stammered out an address. Raine put it into her phone. Twil crossed her arms and rolled her eyes, muttered ‘psycho’ under her breath.

When it was done, Raine nodded to Evelyn, who sighed again, then then tapped Praem on the leg with her walking stick. Praem let the girl drop.

Kimberly didn’t linger. It probably took every ounce of her courage not to run away from us. She scurried off toward the edge of the park, after stripping off her robe. She balled it up and shoved it into a nearby public bin. She glanced back twice. We watched her go, until she was out of sight.

Twil broke the tension first. She stretched both arms over her head and yawned like a bear. “Well, what do we do now? I’m wiped the fuck out.”

“Dunno about you,” said Raine. “But I could murder some breakfast. I think we’re all in a fine state to go hit up the Aardvark, right?” Evelyn rolled her eyes and Raine relented, grinning. “Okay, serious, it’s time to go home and have a bath.”

“Several baths,” I croaked.

“Are we actually … you know … in the clear?” asked Twil. “Is it over?”

Evelyn shrugged at the pile of shattered bricks, the exit point from the cult’s exit gateway. “We’ve wrecked their containment, ruined their fortification, killed all their stockpiled zombies, and Heather apparently blew up their leader. So, maybe.”

“Easier than the first time we killed a mage, right?” Raine cracked a grin. Evelyn shot her a look that could have frozen a lava flow.

I opened my mouth. I needed to tell them all about what I’d seen below ground, about the star in the abyss, about the cages and the corpses, but I was too tired to confront all that right now. “Um … ”

“Heather saw more,” Lozzie said.

Slowly, gently, after hugging me softly, Lozzie climbed to her feet. I tried to hold on as her hands slipped away. Didn’t want her body heat to part from mine. Perhaps I knew, deep down, what she was thinking.

With clumsy but heartfelt formality, she bowed her head to all my friends. “Thank you, thank you, for coming for me.”

Raine lit up with the kind of smile she usually reserved for me, and to my surprise she reached out and ruffled Lozzie’s filthy hair. “S’what I do. Any friend of Heather’s is a friend of mine.”

Lozzie beamed back at her.

“Mm,” Evelyn grunted. “Yes, certainly. This has been quite the enigma. Heather?”

I made a grumbling noise in my throat. Evelyn didn’t seriously expect me to explain all this right now, did she? She fixed me with a pinched frown, then seemed to get the message, shrugging to herself.

“Hold up a sec.” Twil said. “Who exactly the hell is this?”

“I’m Lozzie! Hi!” She beamed at Twil. “You’re the werewolf, right? That’s so cool!”

“Oh, uh, thanks.” Twil couldn’t keep a smirk off her face.

“Long story,” I mumbled.

“Yeah, I figured,” said Twil.

“One I think we all need to hear,” Evelyn said, her voice a little tighter than I could deal with right now. “At home, not here in a bloody park.”

“Right you are.” Raine put her hands on her hips. “We gonna walk home, or … hmm.” She cocked an eyebrow, took in our bloody, battered little group. Lozzie and Praem were the worst, splattered with drying blood, and Twil wasn’t far off. God alone knows how bad I looked. Besides, there’s no way I could walk, and Evelyn looked pretty unsteady too. “Guess not, huh? I could call a taxi, make some poor driver’s week when he sees us rocking up.”

Lozzie was glancing back and forth between Raine and myself and the others, her mouth hanging open a little, eyes still heavy-lidded but widened in some private realisation. Evelyn noticed, nodded toward her.

“She doesn’t have anywhere to go. Does she?”

“Sure she does,” Raine countered, smiling at Lozzie. “You’re coming with us, no question about it. You are five hundred percent welcome. Right, Evee?”

Evelyn rolled her eyes. “Right.”

Lozzie stepped away from the bench and onto the grass, leaving petite little footprints in the morning dew. She turned, looked over all of us, chewing on her lower lip and then gnawing on a ragged fingernail.

“Oh, oh … I didn’t … I didn’t think … ”

“ … what’s wrong?” I managed.

She scampered back to me and threw her arms around my shoulders. She hugged me tight enough to hurt a little, and I did my best to return the embrace, my arms still weak and shaky.

Lozzie sniffed into my shoulder, and I realised she was holding back tears.

She pulled away and planted a quick, hesitant kiss on my cheek. Not a romantic kiss, nothing erotic about it at all. A fleeting touch of intimacy.

“I have to go,” she said.

“ … what?”

“Aren’t you coming with me, Heather?” I heard the catch in her throat. She tried to smile but only got halfway there, a strange melancholy fighting with her natural twitchy energy.

Slowly, dull and half-dead, I shook my head, wishing I didn’t understand. But I knew exactly what she meant, all too well.

She slid out of my arms, stood up and stepped back, still trying to smile. She curled her bare toes into the grass.

“I have to go,” she repeated louder, then took a deep breath and smiled up at the sky. “I think. Yeah, yeah I think I do need to. You killed my brother, and … thank you, Heather. Thank you, all of you. I’m free now. Thank you.” She sniffed and wiped brimming tears on the back of her hand, and looked round as the spirit life began to approach her.

Lozzie smiled at the warped hound-things which padded out of the tree line, trotting across the grass to sit at her heels. She held out a hand to the half-dozen squirming, wriggling bundles of chitin and claw that scaled her pajama legs and up her back to perch on her shoulders. She turned to welcome the bobbing jellyfish crowding around her head. She murmured soft little words to them all, but the picture was incomplete without the goat skull mask over her face.

The others glanced between her and I, by turns confused or tense, because of course they couldn’t see what I was seeing. Twil pulled a face like this was crazy, but I think Evelyn and Raine had some idea what was happening.

“Go? Where?” Evelyn asked, frowning sharply.

“Yeah, hey, what’s going on here?” Twil asked.

“You mean Outside, don’t you?” said Raine.

Lozzie and I both nodded.

“Beyond!” Lozzie lit up with this huge beaming smile which failed to cover the sadness beneath. “Are you sure you don’t want to come? Heather?”

I opened my mouth and couldn’t answer. No, no, of course I didn’t want to – but deep down inside, I understood the desire. After so many dreams together, so many wondrous places, I got it.

“Why? Why not stay here?” Evelyn asked. I saw her fingering the carved thighbone in one hand. Raine tilted her chin, waiting patiently.

“Because I’m not really meant to be here,” Lozzie said. She took a deep breath, filled her lungs as she looked up and around, at the beautiful morning glow breaking over Sharrowford. Her long, shuddering sigh and the melancholy of her forced smile cut me right to the quick, even through the exhaustion. “It’s so lovely, it really is, but … I’m like a deep sea fish too close to the surface.”

“No. Lozzie, no,” I managed to croak at her. She looked at me, then around at the others again, and I could feel her wavering.

“Besides,” she shrugged. “My uncle will be after me now. I couldn’t bear to be caged again. I need to fly.”

“Uncle?” Evelyn growled softly.

“Mmhmm,” Lozzie nodded, distracted by the spirits clustered to her, her idle hand trailing down to rub the head of one of the nightmare hounds at her feet. “The rest of the brotherhood will go to him now, probably. The followers, you know. He probably took control of Zheng, too, that’s why she didn’t … couldn’t, follow me.” She swallowed, shook her head gently, holding back tears.

“There’s another mage?” Evelyn asked through gritted teeth.

“Evee,” I managed, waving a mute hand at her to shut up. Lozzie blinked at her.

“Um … kind of. He’s not like my brother. My brother was the brains but my uncle was the organiser. He always found the recruits, the bodies, the … the kids,” she whispered, then tried to smile. “He’ll be after me now, and he’s already seen all of you once, when he tracked Maisie’s messenger. If I stay here … ”

I opened my mouth to say a dozen different things.

“Where can I find him?” Evelyn said, hard and cold.

“Ahh?” Lozzie blinked. “You’ve all seen him before. In that parking garage.” She turned her head to pay attention to another little spirit on her shoulder, a cross between a squirrel and a bat, tiny teeth bared as she tweaked its nose.

Evelyn pinched the bridge of her nose. “Great. Fucking great.”

“Evee,” Raine said softly.

“Where is he?” Evelyn demanded. “Is he in Sharrowford?”

“I don’t know. I think so. His name’s Edward, a Lilburne like me. He never cared about my brother’s stupid project.” Lozzie shrugged. “He’s good at finding things, finding people, but now I can go to places he can’t follow. Tell him the truth, when he finds you. He’ll leave you alone.”

She was trying to convince herself. I could hear the struggle in her voice – I suspected all this stuff about her uncle was mere justification.

Part of her wanted to go, part of her wanted to stay. Two natures in one body.

“We can protect you,” Raine said, not missing a beat. “Take a moment, look at us – or hell, just at me. It’s what I do. Like I said, any friend of Heather’s is a friend of mine.”

“Yeah, like to see this fucker try,” Twil said, cracking her knuckles.

“Damn straight,” said Raine.

Evelyn grunted.

But Lozzie shook her head. She backed up another step across the damp grass, forcing herself away from us with the spirits trailing in her wake.

“Thank you. I know. I know you could. But I still have to go. I don’t belong here.” She pulled a weak smile, then seemed to hesitate for a moment.

“ … only just found you,” I whispered.

Lozzie met my eyes – and lit up, a real smile, with a spark of joy underneath. She raised her arms to encompass the whole world, sending spirits scattering and scampering.

“Heather, I can help you now! I can go everywhere! Anywhere! You helped me, you freed me, and now I’m going to help you and Maisie.”

I shook my head.

“But I want to!” she continued. “There’s places I can go that you don’t even know about, Heather, places in the beyond. Outside. Places I can’t take anybody else, not even Zheng, because I’m not really human anymore, you know? I haven’t been since that thing used my head as a life raft. There’s things I can talk to, questions I can ask, help I can enlist, for you. Please? Please Heather, please let me help.”

If I’d been whole and well-rested, I would have stopped her, stood up and grabbed her and held on tight. Lozzie was a very special kind of friend, and I didn’t want her to go alone into dark places.

But in that moment, listening to all her justifications and reasons and excuses to leave humanity behind and go Outside, through my exhaustion and the echoing pain and the melancholy of her leaving so soon, I saw a vision of myself.

Was I going to end up like that? Torn between being human and – not?

She took my hesitation for agreement. How like her brother, in some ways.

“Oh, Heather.” Her face fell and she shook off her retinue of spirits to run back and hug me one more time. She clung on hard and buried her face in my shoulder. “It’s not like I’m leaving forever or something. Just until it’s safe, until … until I can help you. I’ll be back, I’ll come back to visit, I promise. Sooner than you think.”

I nodded. Hated myself for it, but I nodded.

Lozzie stood up and danced back into her little crowd of spirits. She turned to us and bowed her head. “Thank you.”

“Stay one day, at least,” Raine said. “You need a bath, a change of clothes. Have dinner with us. Come on, one day won’t hurt.”

“I don’t need any of those things,” Lozzie said, an odd smile on her face, refilled with that twitchy energy.

Twil was just completely lost for words, but to my incredible surprise, Praem had turned to watch as well. She’d bowed her head every so slightly in response to Lozzie’s gesture. I don’t think anybody else noticed, and I only saw it because I was so numb.

“We’ll kill your uncle too,” Evelyn said.

“Please don’t get hurt. I couldn’t bear it if he hurt any of you. Please, please.”

“I’m the one that does the hurting round here,” Raine said. She shot Lozzie a wink. “We’ll be fine. You change your mind in five minutes, tomorrow, next week, you know where to find us.”

Spirit life climbed back onto Lozzie’s shoulders, crowded around her legs, touching her with two dozen pseudopods and feelers and claws and muzzles. She waved to us.

“Bye bye for now. See you later.”

“See you,” I managed.

And then, she simply wasn’t there. The spirits vanished with her. Outside.

All she left was footprints.

I was too numb to cry.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

“Zheng!”

It was the tone in Lozzie’s voice that stopped me.

Not fear or warning, but relief. Lozzie broke into a huge beaming smile at the giant zombie woman.

She hadn’t noticed or understood what I was doing, spinning up my reality-breaking mathematics, setting fire to my mind. As far as she knew, I’d sagged and stumbled against her in pure shock at Zheng’s arrival.

Perhaps we weren’t so similar after all.

One heartbeat of hesitation; hyperdimensional mathematics stalled, stuttered, guttered out, blinking and flickering across the surface of my consciousness. My eyelids spasmed and my jaw locked up. I shuddered, snorted down a tide of nausea. Curled up around my belly, almost fell over, but Lozzie held me up.

It felt like holding back a sneeze – or an orgasm.

I’d worked for weeks to smooth the flow of the impossible equations as much as possible, an inevitable sequence from first principle to the end result, to spare me the pain. Now I strangled  an equation at the last moment, fought it back down into memory and brain-stem.

“Heather? It’s okay, she’s fine if I’m here, I can tell her to do whatever I want.” Lozzie beamed at me, then back at the impassive, staring zombie. “What happened to your arm?” A silent pause, except for my whining. “ … Zheng?”

“That was me,” I croaked out. I hung off Lozzie’s shoulder, my knees shaking. At least I wasn’t bleeding, yet.

“What? Heather?”

“The arm,” I said.

“Ahh? No, they wouldn’t send Zheng, that- oh.” Lozzie’s face fell and she looked back at Zheng with a sudden shake to her smile. She rattled out something in a language I’d never heard before. “Ta bidniig dagaj baisan uu? Zheng? Has he … oh, oh no. Namaig sonsooch!”

Whatever she’d said, Zheng wasn’t listening. The zombie raised her right hand and pointed with one long finger, over our heads, up.

“That looks like an order,” I managed.

“Zheng? Come on, please, listen to me. It’s me!”

“Walk,” Zheng rumbled. Dead lips barely moved. Voice like granite.

Lozzie swallowed and wiped filthy hair away from her face. “I think my brother’s got her. Like, fully. He’s not supposed to, no! Zheng, you’re not supposed to listen to him!”

“Walk,” Zheng repeated. She took a step forward and we both stumbled back, still clinging to each other.

“I think your brother wants to see us,” I said.

“Yeah. Yeah,” Lozzie whispered.

Zheng took another step.

Lozzie tried to back away again, a tight animal whimper caught in her throat – but I held onto her and held my ground. My stomach hurt, my head throbbed, my lungs ached. I stared Zheng right in the eyes, watching those dead, glassy orbs for any reaction.

“Heather!” Lozzie hissed. She tugged on my arm.

Zheng stared back at me.

“You don’t frighten me. Not right now.”

Took me a moment to realise I’d spoken, those were my words – and they were true. Goodness, I’d actually said those words to this hulking seven foot demon-host monster-thing.

The calm in my own voice surprised me, but this wasn’t courage. I didn’t feel brave or defiant. This calm grew from somewhere else, a cold, slow, numb place. Perhaps I’d feel the raw terror later, like a bruise. I let my eyes drift over to the cages once more, and the dessicated, bound corpses inside.

Back to Zheng, back to those eyes. May as well be empty sockets.

She took another step forward, loomed over us, body language as empty and mute as the rest of her. Lozzie dug her fingers into my arm and shoulder, breathing in panicked jerks.

“Why don’t you just grab us?” I asked the zombie.

No answer.

“You’re strong enough and fast enough. We’re two, but we’re both small. And apparently I didn’t wound you that badly.”

Zheng lowered her right arm, the one she’d been pointing with, but that could have meant anything. I wasn’t sure if my words were getting through, but then she twitched the fingers of her reattached left arm. Once, twice, three times. Her mangled shoulder spasmed.

“That’s right.” I nodded slowly. “That was me. You remember, don’t you?”

Twitch, twitch. She managed to bend her thumb inward.

Beneath the coating of drying blood, Zheng’s exposed left arm was covered in the most detailed and complex tattoos I’d ever seen. Looping, whirling, spiralling lines in a jumbled thicket upon the corded muscle, each line formed from thousands of tiny letters, overlapping so many times that her skin was like re-used parchment, each layer of inscription faded or improperly erased. I didn’t want to get close enough to find out, but I suspected the pattern covered her whole torso.

“I might not be able to zap you Outside from here,” I continued, low and quiet. “But I can hurt you again. You understand that, don’t you?”

“What?” Lozzie murmured. I glanced sidelong at her, found her eyes as alarmed as they could be under those permanently droopy lids. The bruise on her face was so livid up close.

“You can’t do that? With your mind? With the math?”

Lozzie shook her head. “Please don’t. Heather, please. She’s … sort of my friend.”

I shook my head too, still numb inside. “Not right now she isn’t.”

“She is,” Lozzie hissed. “She is. She’s still in there. Zheng?” Lozzie tried again, voice weak.

The zombie just stared.

“I hope you’re thinking what I’m thinking, whatever you are,” I said to Zheng. “Can you even give me a reply?”

I wasn’t thinking about those dead children in cages. I wasn’t angry about them or motivated by them, nothing so clean and clear; that came later, a retroactive justification. A good one, yes, the right thing to do, but it wasn’t why I made the decision in that moment, numb and shaking from the suppressed brainmath, in silent, unspoken negotiation with a demon inside a barely human shell.

Zheng looked up, the way she’d been pointing. A good enough reply for me.

“Okay. Lozzie, I think it’s time we went to see your brother,” I said. Lozzie stared at me for a moment as if I was the mad one. Perhaps I was.

==

My resolve didn’t hold.

The zombie herded us along the metal walkways, down the route we’d have taken anyway. Or perhaps she was merely following us now, though I found I didn’t care. I didn’t care if my impulsive, half-formed idea had worked or not. I had no real plan, just a drive.

Zheng wouldn’t have needed to tackle us or grab us anyway, there was only one path and she was too large, too strong, too fast to dodge around or outrun, even if I hadn’t been clenched up tight around the echo of pain in my guts and head.

“Don’t you wanna get out of here too, Zheng?” said Lozzie. “Zozz! Tuniig khaya!”

Lozzie was being a very good sport, arm under my shoulders as we hurried ahead of the zombie’s advance. She didn’t complain when I stumbled and clutched at her for support.

Zheng didn’t even really watch us, as she forced us away from the metal platform and back among the spars and spears of green-gold rock. She stared at a point above my head, expression empty. I felt a guilty relief in getting away from those cages, those corpses, that evidence of cruelty, when the platform finally vanished out of sight behind too many twists and turns. But I knew it was still there, unrecorded and unmarked, and in some ways that was worse.

“You don’t have to listen to my brother,” Lozzie whined to Zheng, voice returning distant echoes from the vault above and below. “Remember all the things we said to each other, when I took you to Lemuria, in the dream? Weren’t we supposed to be … you know … you and me, right?” She tapped her ribs, just over her heart, face torn back and forth between fear and betrayed sorrow. “Use your own willpower. Come on … please … ”

“I don’t think she’s listening,” I croaked.

“But- she-” Lozzie shook her head, almost in tears.

“It’ll be okay,” I said. “Everything will be okay.”

I was terrible at reassurance. I was no Raine, all smiles and confidence and heroic gestures. I knew I sounded cold and hollow, but as I spoke I realised I was talking to myself, shoring myself up. My numb conviction was beginning to ebb.

What on earth was I thinking? I had no real plan, no idea where my friends were, no idea if I had the resolve to see this impulse to the end. The journey through the cave gave me too much time to think, to second-guess myself, to realise what I’d done.

In a moment of shock and fear I’d gone straight for the hyperdimensional mathematics. A reflex, self-defence.

My certainty hollowed itself out as we tracked through the cave, less in touch with that moment of instinctive mathematics, that tension held tight on the edge of the possible, ready to break physics in a dozen ugly ways, with no care for consequences. Could I really do it – pulverise Zheng into steaming meat? Maybe, yes, and I’d pay for it with vomiting and pain and unconsciousness, but that wasn’t the question.

Could I do it in cold blood?

“No, no it won’t be okay. Oh, Heather, she was so close.” Lozzie sniffed and wiped at her nose. “We’d gotten her so close to ignoring him. I don’t know how to break it, but I had her so close. She was going to strangle my brother for me, if you couldn’t, you know.”

“Mm,” I grunted.

Zheng forced us around a final right-hand turn. A monolithic wall of green-gold towered above us, wounded by an entrance to another cult-cut tunnel, rough steps vanishing upward through the glowing rock.

The way up was far less regular than the first tunnel. I guessed this one had been dug as exploration rather than access, with long straight stretches, tight hairpin bends, a snaking progress upward out of the green depths. The walls slowly lost their brilliant light, faded into the dead grey of the castle-corpse, until the tunnel finally burst through the floor into open air.

Lozzie and I stumbled to a halt together; my legs burned with the effort of climbing, knees trembling and stomach clenched.

She’d had to almost drag me the last few dozen steps, her twitchy energy holding out where mine was spent. I hung onto her shoulders for support. At least keeping me standing seemed to take her mind off her own fear.

We’d emerged into a long gallery with a high ceiling, the walls more open window than grey jade – though without any glass or glass-analogue to fill the openings. Tendrils of fog lapped at the windows. We were high up above the copied mile of Sharrowford, sunk in the mist far below.

Vast planetary shapes stirred in the shrouded firmament above, and I realised with tentative relief that the cosmic whale song noise had stopped.

Lights, bedrolls, a bucket of tools, a closed laptop on an overturned crate; this part of the castle was obviously inhabited. Another gallery marched off on the other side of a connecting doorway. Muffled sounds of soft conversation floated through from beyond.

A cultist scrambled up from his vantage point at one of the windows, where he’d been bent over a cheap telescope.

“You!” He said at us. “Oh, oh hell, uh.”

He looked more like a student teacher than an evil cultist, a young man with mousy hair and a baby face, his cream robes open on a shirt and trousers, as if he’d come straight from work. A distant part of me wondered if Alexander imposed a dress code on his underlings.

The cultist slapped at his robes, then at his trouser pockets. I couldn’t help but notice he had a bloody bandage around one hand.

I gave him the best stink-eye I could.

“Don’t try it. I’ll kill you. You know I can,” I said, heaving for breath.

He stared at me in utter confusion.

“Yeah, fuck off, Lucas, ‘less you want me to bite you again!” Lozzie screeched at him.

We never had to find out what Lucas was not going to try, because he sighed with sudden relief; Zheng emerged behind us. She stopped as soon as she stood free of the wound in the floor, a robot waiting for further input.

“Oh thank the gods beyond, you found her,” he said to Zheng. “Wait, down there? Bloody hell … ” He rubbed his hands together, then thumbed over his shoulder. “Go on, he’s through there, he’ll want to … I don’t know … oi, can you hear me, or what?”

Zheng made no response.

Was this my moment?

Flagging resolve fumbled against years of habitual conflict-avoidance, against the timid, reclusive Heather, against the me that wanted to sit in comfortable libraries with beautiful books and forget about the rest of the world, against the me curled up in bed waiting for Raine to get home. I tried to focus, numb and cold and slow – but this wasn’t Alexander, this was not the head of the snake. Not yet. That was my excuse.

The young cultist – Lucas – glanced over his shoulder at the doorway, and Lozzie took the opening. She let go of me, no warning, and I almost tumbled to the floor as she flew at him, one hand raised to claw out his eyes or throat.

She was half his size, but she was ready to bite his face off.

Zheng moved like quicksilver. She lashed out and caught Lozzie by the wrist. Lozzie yelped, like a dog on the end of a choking leash. Her feet left the ground with her momentum and she scrambled for purchase. Zheng held her struggling at arm’s length.

“Zheng! Zheng no! Come on! Argh! Let me go, let me-”

Zheng shook her, rattled her brains, Lozzie’s feet skittering against the floor and head whipping around. I flinched at the violence. Lozzie yelped and spluttered, then stared at Zheng, panting in quiet panic.

The cultist let out a sharp sigh. “Crazy little bitch,” he said, then glanced at me. “Are you going to give us trouble too?”

I shook my head.

“Good. Now, we’re all going to go talk to Mister Lilburne. Nice and slow, and nobody does anything stupid. Got that? Right?” I nodded. He pointed at the doorway to the adjoining gallery. “Good. You go first.”

I tried to catch Lozzie’s eyes, but she’d shut down. She hung limp from Zheng’s grip like her strings had been cut, hidden by a curtain of hair. I murmured her name.

“She’s faking it,” the cultist said. “Come along now. You first.”

Alone, alone, even Lozzie had left me behind, in a way. Alone – except for the Eye, always in the back of my head. I had nothing else to hold onto.

The next gallery had fewer windows, corners lost to the shadows unfilled by weak electric light. At the far end, carved into the grey surface of the wall, surrounded by expanding concentric rings of white-paint magic circle and layers of jumbled, mad inscription, stood a gateway.

Just like the one Evelyn had built to bring us here. It was closed right now, deactivated, showing only blank stone in the wide door-shaped middle.

“Where does that lead?” I asked out loud. No idea how I found the courage.

“What? That’s none of your business, is it? Turn right, through the door there. Go on.”

I did as I was told, hobbled along, half crouched for support, wanting so desperately to sit down. Zheng dragged Lozzie along behind me. I stepped through a wide doorway, pulled myself up a short flight of stairs, and emerged into the Sharrowford Cult’s true inner sanctum.

“Ahhhhhh, Lavinia, there you are.”

A sigh, deep and satisfied, made my skin crawl.

It was a throne room, or maybe an audience chamber, with a raised area toward the rear, flanked by tall ceiling-height empty windows. Grey light flooded through the windows, lit everything with a half-dead look.

Magical workings dominated one side of the room. A series of interlocking magic circles and looping Sanskrit words had colonised the floor and part of a wall, as if projected at an angle. Glancing at it made my head swim far worse than before, like I was standing on a wall and looking down at the floor.

Several large chunks of the green-gold stone formed fulcrum points or anchors for the pattern. A mess of partially dismantled medical machines lay in a pile nearby, stolen from a hospital or some disused dental office, pieces of their mechanical guts added to the magical design – radioactive sources, bits of laser lens? Somehow I doubted even Evelyn could make sense of this one.

A pair of folding tables stood at the rear of the room, littered with hypodermic needles and bags of drugs, bits of hand-drawn map and bottles of unspeakable fluid, a ceremonial knife and a human skull, a closed book and an open first aid kit.

Two cultists looked up as I entered, as Zheng pulled Lozzie up alongside me. A small, wiry gentleman with glasses and brilliant ginger hair was bent over the tables. The heavyset man with the squashed nose, the one who’d been on the battlements with Alexander, had been speaking softly. He wore medical gloves, hands full of gauze, bloody towel over one shoulder, as he tended to his master in the middle of the room.

Alexander Lilburne himself sat on a stool, stripped to the waist, digging around inside his own chest with a pair of pliers.

“It’s me, it’s me,” our cultist guide, Lucas, said as he trotted past us. “She just came up from the core with them, but no sign of the rest. Boss?”

My mind clung hard to those last few words – no sign of the rest!

“Oh, my wayward sister, how you always return to me,” Alexander said.

His mouth curled into a smile as he regarded us, as if delighted to see old friends. His cheek twitched as he pulled the pliers from the hole in his chest with a sucking sound. “And Lavinia, I see you have decided to join us. Yes, very good, very good indeed. I think it’s high time we turned this unpleasantness to our mutual advantage.” He turned to the young cultist. “Thank you, Lucas. How are the god spawn?”

“Calmed, I think. They’ve stopped wailing, at least.”

“I can hear that part for myself. Or – not hear it, as it were.” Alexander smiled at his own terrible joke.

“ … bullets won’t kill you, right,” I said, very quietly.

No calm voice now. That numb illusionary courage did not survive the sight of him.

Alexander was covered in his own blood, smeared across his soft, flabby chest and down his belly, all over his hands and hairy forearms, in fingerprints and palm-marks. Some sensible soul had spread towels underneath him, but they were soaked through by now. He’d widened the bullet-hole Raine had put in his chest, peeled back his own skin and strips of muscle, exposed the white of his rib bones and the bellows-fluttering of a lung, just visible through the ragged wound. Fragments of shattered rib lay discarded at his feet, dug out from the bullet’s path.

He showed no pain at all.

With exaggerated care, he placed the pliers on the table next to him and raised his eyebrows at me.

“I’m sorry, what was that? I didn’t quite catch your words. Do speak up, Lavinia, please, I am not feeling my best at present, and I am understandably a little distracted with concern for my poor sister here.” In the corner of my eye, I saw Lozzie shiver and try to make herself smaller.

“I said … ” my voice shook. I clamped down hard on that tremor and forced myself to straighten up, to look him in the eye.

‘No sign of the rest’, which meant Raine and Evee and Twil were still free, unaccounted for.

Stand up straight, Heather.

“Bullets won’t kill you, will they?” I repeated.

Alexander’s trio of cultist underlings found this rather amusing. They laughed silently, shook their heads, shared sidelong glances. Alexander went through a laborious performance, looking down at himself and acting surprised at the gaping fist-sized rent in his chest.

“Oh, this?” He asked, then laughed, that horrible blubbery baby-laugh. “No, no, far from it, indeed. Don’t you worry about my health, Lavinia. I will still be up and walking around when the bones of all these fine fellows here have fallen to dust.”

The wiry cultist and Lucas both looked uncomfortable, but the stocky one tending to Alexander’s exit wound merely rolled his eyes, as if he’d heard that one a hundred times before.

“Still, rather irritating,” Alexander continued. “I already know everything there is to know about the workings of my own body, self-repair is such a bore.”

“I hope it is as irritating as possible,” I said. I tried to feel that anger, cold and slow, but it wouldn’t come. “I hope you get shot many more times.”

“Regardless.” Alexander waved a hand. “That is all beside the point right now. Shouldn’t get too far off topic, should we?”

I was not vulnerable; that’s what I told myself, that’s what kept me on my feet and my spine at least vaguely straight. I could kill everyone in this room with a thought, I could, I told myself I could, I knew I could.

Couldn’t I?

“First off, I think some congratulations are in order. Well done, Zheng.” Alexander reached over to the table and picked up a small metal cylinder, covered with occult runes. A stopper of black wax at the top showed a hole in the middle. He waggled it in her general direction, an amused smile playing across his lips. “I’ll just get rid of this, shall I? We won’t be needing it, will we? Or perhaps … I’ll hold onto it for now. We’ll see what happens next.”

If Zheng felt anything she didn’t show it. The zombie stared at a point on the far wall. Every now and again, Lozzie twitched or struggled in her grip, eyes glazed over, breathing hard and ragged.

“Now, sister?” Alexander clicked his fingers twice. “Pay attention now. Lauren,” he snapped, and Lozzie’s head whipped up as if slapped. She blinked and panted, staring at her brother. He sighed and shook his head, gave her one of those sickly-warm smiles that turned my stomach. “I am very unimpressed with you. I’m sure you know that already, as I am certain you anticipate punishment. You do deserve punishment, for bringing these people here. You know that too, I hope?”

Lozzie’s teeth chattered. She tried to shrink back, but Zheng held her fast.

“Now, Zheng, if you would bring her here, I-”

“I’m going to kill you,” I blurted out.

I didn’t just want to hurt him, I wanted him to know I wanted to. I told myself I wanted to.

Alexander glanced at me, blinking several times in mock surprise.

“Why isn’t she restrained?” The wiry copper-haired cultist asked. “I thought this one was meant to be dangerous?”

“Not here, she ain’t,” the big one grunted. “Can’t do zip, can you, dear?”

“Try it,” I managed to squeak.

“Ah ah ah ah.” Alexander raised his hands. “As we have already discovered, Lavinia does not respond well to physical encouragement. In fact, it gives her the courage to defend herself. Isn’t that right, Lavinia?”

“Stop calling me that.”

“You can’t kill me,” he said, raising a finger. “In here you can’t send me – or anyone – to the beyond. You are powerless, exactly as you would be in the real world against somebody of my place and standing and wealth. You must learn to listen, Lavinia, to negotiate, even from a position of weakness. Threats will get you nowhere.”

They didn’t know.

Lozzie hadn’t known I could do anything except teleporting, dimension-hopping. They must have remembered I could turn away a bullet, but I had a wrecking ball in my mind and they didn’t know.

Was that an advantage, or not? I had no idea what to do with this secret. I needed to use it, somehow.

Alexander must have taken my quiet hesitation as acquiescence.

“Now, Lauren, sister,” his voice gentled but never lost that smug undertone. “Despite the things you do, despite the things you have done to our family, I am still, as always, your loving brother.”

Lozzie whined, sniffed, hanging from Zheng’s arm.

“I forgive you,” he continued. “I forgive you for letting these people in here, for betraying me, for getting me shot by one of them, for causing me problems. As I have always forgiven you, for our parents, for … yourself. For you and I are all we have, aren’t we? Aren’t we, Lauren?”

That worm in the brain, that catch in his words. I suppressed a wince and glanced over at Lozzie. She gulped and bit her lip, small and dirty and cringing. She jerked her head up and down, once, twice. A nod.

“Lozzie, you don’t have to listen to him,” I hissed. She shook her head and looked at me sidelong, guilty and afraid. I could almost see the lump in her throat.

“If Zheng lets you go,” Alexander said. “Will you be good and come here, come to your brother?”

Nod.

“Zheng, if you please.”

The zombie did as she was told. Lozzie crumpled the moment she was free, fell to her knees, sobbing gently. I moved to catch her shoulders, to put my arms around her before she could give in and go to her brother, but Alexander twitched a finger in command and Zheng’s arm shot out like a snake to bar my way, so quick I flinched back in surprise.

“Come here,” Alexander repeated.

“Lozzie, don’t,” I hissed.

“It’s nothing compared to family, Lavinia. Nothing at all,” he said.

Lozzie nodded, wiped her nose on her sleeve, then picked herself up and slunk over to her brother, head down like a whipped dog. Now it was my turn to feel a lump in my throat. I couldn’t bear the sight of this.

“Now, now, there was no need for any of your earlier behaviour, was there?” Alexander said to her. “No need for all that tantrum and nastiness. You’re such a sweet girl when you simply relax and allow yourself to be.” He reached out and cupped her bruised cheek – the bruise he’d left on her. His bloody hand left a crimson smear on her skin. Lozzie shivered, her eyes down. I’d never felt such indignant disgust. “I know what you really want, what you really crave, and I will give it to you. You will have as many playmates as you desire – in time. Now, sit at my side. No, not on the blood, no need to get messy. Just there, there we go.”

Lozzie folded herself cross-legged on the floor by his side, hunched over with arms folded to protect her belly, eyes lowered in shadow.

In the last moment as she sat down, in the split-second that Alexander’s eyes left her and began to move back to me, her hand darted out and palmed something glinting and sharp out of the open first-aid kit on the table. She slid it up her sleeve.

I froze, inside and out, expecting one of the trio of cultists to raise a voice, or tackle her, or Alexander to notice what she’d done.

None did. They’d been looking away, embarrassed by the exchange of sickly-sweet false sibling affection. I’d seen, Zheng must have too, but the zombie didn’t react. I let relief flood me.

We were still on.

Equal parts disgust and hope – pretend courage. I forced my trembling fingers to pull the brainmath notebook from my hoodie’s front pocket. I felt the glow stick in there too, but what use could that be?

“Ahh? What is this?” Alexander asked. “Are you going to take minutes?” He reached down and stroked Lozzie’s hair, without taking his eyes from me, leaving another bloody streak on her.

“This is what I’m going to use to kill you,” I said, and forced my chin up.

Defiant, confident, unafraid. I was none of those things, but I pretended.

He sighed. “And I supposed that’s how you managed to do serious damage to Zheng? You hit her with a book?”

“Yes, I hit her with a book.” Completely straight faced.

Alexander’s amusement dimmed. “You understand it is very important to me that I learn how you and your … associates, managed to inflict real damage to a mature revenant. I assume the same method was used to kill the two men I sent with her? You can answer me now or I can find out in other ways, but I will know, all in good time. I will know everything, all details, relevant or otherwise. Nothing can hide from me, not for long.”

“I did it,” I said, flush for one wonderful moment with power over this man.

Very quickly, I wished I hadn’t spoken. Alexander stared for a moment – then a shrewd fascination lit up his features, staring at me with something akin to awe. I felt a terrible shiver.

“You are telling the truth,” he breathed. “Tell me.”

I swallowed, tried to hold onto that moment of confidence. “I can kill everyone in this room with a thought.” A bluff? I didn’t know. As I glanced at the other three cultists, they certainly seemed to share their master’s belief, faces clouded with concern. “That’s how I hurt your zombie.”

“Then do it, please, show me,” Alexander leaned forward, dripping gore from his chest wound, deep desire written on his face. “Show me! I have waited so long for my sister to show the slightest ability of true control, of manipulation, of understanding. Show me!”

I stared back at him.

“ … no? Lavinia, I know you are not lying, but … ahhh.” He frowned. “I see. You can’t.”

“I can.”

“No no.” He raised a finger. “You can, that is the truth – but you can’t. How odd. You do perplex me, Lavinia.”

“Good.”

“You tell impossible truths, at least ones that you yourself believe, and then lo and behold I discover that some of them are rooted in fact.” Alexander raised his chin, that shrewd, questioning exterior crust over a barely-concealed ocean of self-assurance.

“Is this conversation going how you imagined it would?” I managed to say. “Why do your whole megalomania act? Because you get off on it? Does it make you feel big and powerful? Why not just take what you want from me?”

He didn’t take my bait – it was weak, I was scrambling for time, playing catch-up. Hoping my friends would turn up, that Raine would rescue me. The more this went on, that clean, clear impulse felt further and further away.

I had a plan, I just couldn’t do it, not without the protection of that soul-numbness I’d felt earlier. Not without the need for self-defence. I wasn’t Raine.

“You see, it is entirely my fault we are at this unfortunate loggerheads with each other,” he continued. “I misunderstood you. Your desires, your drives – your personal history. If I had known, I would have taken a very different approach to you, Lavinia. And now I know you have gained some measure of real control, well, I would have told you what we are doing here, the importance of our work, what it means.”

“You mean the importance of dead children in cages?” I asked, and finally felt a good clean anger – that was better. “I saw your dirty secret down there.”

“The ends justifies the means, Lavinia. I’m sure you, of all people, will agree, once you understand those ends.”

“I don’t want to know what this place is for.” A lie. “I can guess.”

“Ahh?” Alexander still seemed genuinely fascinated. “And what is your guess?”

“You’ve forced people to talk with that thing you have underground.”

“Thing? Thing. A very precise word, Lavinia. That thing is a yoked god. Caught, drawn here by my – our,” he gestured at the trio of cultists, “trap, twenty years ago now. To learn from it, to take all that outside knowledge for our own. But, I am getting ahead of myself.”

“It’s a scab,” Lozzie muttered.

“Yes, yes, a favourite word of our little Lauren’s. More like an impact crater than a scab. All this, this place, this dimensional pocket is like … mis-aimed camouflage. A wounded chameleon with misfiring neurons, trying to hide itself.”

“I don’t want to know,” I repeated.

“It is important you understand. You see, I have done a little more research into you, Lavinia.” A sickening smile crested. A triumph, a trump card flourished from a rhetorical sleeve. He paused, savouring the moment.

I stared. Said nothing. Didn’t give him the satisfaction. Considered spitting on the floor, but nineteen years of being a good girl sort of ruled that out, even here.

“You see, I have asked relevant questions of those entities correctly placed to know,” he continued. “I assumed – ah, so wrongly, such arrogance on my part – that you were mentally ill, or misled, or had constructed an elaborate interior life that never really was. But then I discovered.”

“Discovered what?” I hissed, to cover the pounding of my heart.

“You do have a twin sister. Or, did.”

Violation.

Maisie’s space in my heart, my greatest source of strength, the one thing this horrible man hadn’t known about me, hadn’t torn bleeding from my past, lay open for all to hear.

My head felt hot, tight, a pinching pain in the back of my mind.

The other three cultists, they knew as well now, they’d heard those words, and it meant nothing to them. The big man was too busy fussing over the exit wound on Alexander’s back. Violation, my most secret thing casually exposed without so much as a fanfare.

“What was her name, Lavinia?” Alexander asked.

I blinked, swallowed, forced myself to focus through the impotent anger. I wanted to punch him, but that wasn’t enough.

“Her reality,” I said, haltingly, then swallowed and forced myself onward. “Should burst your eardrums, make you bleed from the eyes, kill you. Where we went, where she still is, I can send you there, you know? If you want to learn her name.”

“Not from here, you can’t. Her name, if you please?”

I had no more comebacks. I’d never felt so angry, but that wasn’t enough – my fingers opened the brainmath notebook, but I couldn’t look down at the pages. He had me hooked; in the back of my mind, in a quiet, selfish place that I would never admit, I knew where he was going with this.

“I know what happened to you and your twin,” Alexander said. He took a deep breath and leaned back, then winced, the first sign of pain I’d seen on his face. The cultist tending to his wound grumbled, tore off a piece of gauze and set to his work again.

I hoped it hurt.

“No you don’t,” I said. “Or you’d go mad.”

He laughed, bubbly and disgusting. Lozzie sniffed behind her curtain of hair. She started to speak, a half-word.

A crash, distant and very loud, somewhere below us in the castle. Like stone on stone, and a muffled shout.

Alexander frowned. The cultists all glanced at one another.

“Lucas, Adam,” Alexander said with a flick of his fingers toward the doors. Lucas and the wiry cultist hurried out of the room together, footsteps vanishing into the passageway beyond.

“My friends are coming to kill you,” I said.

“No, I will have Zheng kill them all,” he said. “And yes, I do have some vague, sketched general idea of what happened to you. And it doesn’t take a psychologist to understand what it’s done to you.”

“Shut up. Stop talking.”

“You have experienced first hand how vulnerable we really are – we human beings, all of us – when exposed to that outside our limited sphere, the reality of the universe, the wolves that lurk just outside the door, a door that ninety-nine percent of the human race cannot even see. We’re so short-sighted, so wrapped up in our animal concerns, we barely see fifty years into the future, or to the country next door, let alone into the spheres beyond our own fragile little globe.”

He loved the sound of his own voice – but he was right, about that part. Wasn’t he?

“Get to the point.”

Alexander nodded. There was something serious about him now, a glint in his eye.

“What happened to you can happen to anybody. Wouldn’t you want to stop it ever happening again? To all humanity? Because that is what we are doing here. We are growing strong, we are stealing secrets from the gods, we are making difficult sacrifices for the greater good. We do not have to bow to these outside principles as gods, we do not have to accept a future as ants. Imagine, if you will, that the things you have experienced, one day, come to our reality en masse. What would that look like? What would our future look like, Lavinia?”

He raised an eyebrow when I didn’t answer, gestured for me to speak. I shrugged.

“I am serious,” he continued. “It is a serious question. I don’t know, yet, exactly what you experienced beyond the boundary of our reality, as a child, and I would like you to tell me, in time. But we are all children here. Imagine, all of us, all the people you know, exposed to the same thing. What would our future look like? Please.”

“ … there wouldn’t be one. Where are you going with this?”

“You are a vision of a different future, a glimpse into the potential future of the species.” He leaned forward, earnest, face brimming with zeal. “Do you understand what I am saying? Our future, human future, is a choice between eventual destruction and madness, or change, evolution, into … ” An open hand, a smile. “Something very much like what you are becoming, what my sister is halfway toward. Do you understand? Answer, please. I am trying, so very hard, to make you understand.”

I wanted to say ‘and I am trying to kill you’, or spit at him, or tell him he was wrong.

He was wrong. Wasn’t he?

The anger, the relief, all of it was flagging now, gnawed by a scared part of myself, a part that wanted more than anything to feel safe and strong. My greatest unsolved problem was how to combat the Eye, how to actually rescue my sister. I was weak, small, fragile.

What if there were a dozen of me, or a hundred? What if I knew how to make this dripping-black mathematical hell work for me? What if I could be strong?

Would the end justify the means?

He saw it on my face, and smiled. “I’m not going to treat you like some stupid, petty little follower, to be expended for a temporary advantage. I’ll even let your friends live – Saye may prove difficult, she won’t agree with this, but I promise. I will make it work. Join me in this effort, try to understand, and I won’t kill them. Do you understand what I am offering you?”

I shook my head, numb, trying not to answer. Trying to focus.

“I am offering you a chance to make sure that what happened to you and your sister never happens again.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

The next few panicked, scrambling minutes, fleeing further and further from safety and my friends, into the bowels of this hideous place, ranked among one of the worst experiences of my life.

Not because I was alone and scared in a unnatural place outside reality; that old fear was all too familiar. And not because of the mounting pain either, the echoes from brainmath not three hours ago, the dull ache in my diaphragm and my weak unsteady legs, no borrowed crutch for support now. Not the pervasive gloom, the way my eyes stung from squinting into the dimly-lit corridors of the ugly castle-thing, as I scurried and stumbled away from the sounds of zombies shuffling through the passageways behind me.

None of those things. The cringing void where my heart should be, that was because I didn’t know what had happened to the others.

My subconscious had convinced itself that Raine was unstoppable – if I called for her, she’d always come for me. My retreat had stalled at first, halfway down the corridor as I’d stared at the buckling door, thinking at any moment Raine would smash the zombies apart, dash their brains out, rescue me. Any moment I’d hear her calling my name, because she always comes for me.

 But the zombies burst through the door and shuffled into the tight grey passages of the castle. I had to hide behind the next corner, hurry to the next turn, through the next cramped room. Raine’s name was strangled in my throat for fear of being overheard by the things pursuing me.

The last glimpses of my friends haunted my imagination, fed by the darkness and echoes. Evelyn had looked terrified, pale and panicky, eyes wide, and Twil had been buried under a pile of zombies, invincible werewolf or no. Why hadn’t Raine come for me after we’d been separated? Please, please God – I hadn’t prayed since I was a child, since before Wonderland – please let her be okay.

I couldn’t bear the thought of her injured, because to stop Raine you’d have to hurt her so very badly.

And now I was all alone. Like every Slip over the last decade of my cursed life. This hurt so much more, because I’d been with the others and now I wasn’t. I reeled and hid in the darkness, struggling to quiet my breath, trying to stay silent when I cracked a shin against a stone door frame.

I was never meant to be alone.

Not just here, in this insane misadventure, but at all, ever. I was born a twin, with another half, a mirror-image, I wasn’t made to be alone. As I was cut off from my friends and companions and my lover in this contorted trap, all I could think is that I should be dead.

Maybe it’s not like this for other twins; perhaps they don’t feel this strongly, perhaps they have separate lives and identities, instead of this gaping hole inside. I should have died without Maisie, we should have withered when apart. I wasn’t meant to be alone, I couldn’t function. I was a ghost, a phantom of half a person, and I’d spent a decade learning how to pretend I was still alive.

A few weeks, a couple of months of support and friendship, had filled the gap in my soul. And now I was alone again, and dead.

Abusive self-negation must have been some kind of survival mechanism, because eventually it cut through the panic.

I realised I hadn’t heard the zombies in a while. A minute or two maybe, I’d lost all sense of time. I stopped and sagged against the wall of a passageway, just beyond another castle room. Shaking and panting, tears drying on my face, I forced down a deep breath and pressed a hand over my heart.

I couldn’t do this. I could not do this alone. No following footsteps, but plenty of distant echoes, warped by the winding interior of the castle-thing, sinus passageways in a fleshless skull. I was inside a corpse, alone. Panic pressed in like a vice on my head and lungs. I clenched my teeth as a full-body shaking fit passed through me.

Hunkered down against the wall, I gathered a handful of the hoodie I was wearing – Raine’s hoodie, black and borrowed – shoved my nose into it and sniffed. Closed my eyes. Raine’s scent, familiar sweat. Breathed out slowly, my own breath a warm pocket under my clothes.

“Okay,” I whispered to myself, swallowed and tried again, voice shaking. “Okay, Heather. You can sit here and wait to die, or you can get back to Raine. The others too,” I added, a little guilty. “But mostly Raine.”

What would Raine do?

I wiped the tears off my face and pricked up my ears, tried to tune out the thudding of my own heart. No footsteps, nothing following me – at least, not close enough for me to hear. Had the puppet zombies retreated, or had my friends killed them all? Was Raine even now ricocheting down the corridors, calling my name, searching for me? No, I’d hear that, even twisted and distorted, even above the ever-present planetary whale song still pounding through the walls of the castle, filtered through two dozen feet of dead jade.

“Phone!” I hissed, fingers trembling in a burst of hope. Of course, Raine had her mobile phone! She’d taken it out earlier, when we’d arrived in the fog, showed it was still connected to the network, we were still in Sharrowford, technically.

Hope turned to ashes with a stabbing pang in my chest. My pockets were empty except for my notebook full of brainmath. Evelyn had handed me that before we’d left. My own phone was still sat next to my side of the bed, a million miles away in the real Sharrowford.

I resisted the impulse to curse myself and call myself an idiot, I could do that later. Instead I wet my lips and opened my mouth, Raine’s name in my throat as I stood up straight as I could – and touched the wall with my bare hand.

I flinched back, flesh crawling, biting down on the instinct to scream.

I’d thought of it as jade, as stone, even if gone grey and strangely rotten, but one brush of my hand on the material of the castle, the material of this entire pocket dimension, and I found it impossible to consider it as stone anymore.

Ossified tissue, dried insect husk, shrivelled cartilage.

I tore my eyes and my mind away from the rough surface of the wall and the dark veins inside, back to the stretch of dimly lit passageway. I wet my lips again and took a calculated risk.

“Raine!” I called, cupping a hand to my mouth. “Raine! I’m over here!”

My own voice returned a riot of echoes.

And a reply.

A howling, from a dead throat, garbled un-words from Outside, one of the demons riding along inside those zombies letting me know that it heard me. Saying hello.

“No no no no,” I whispered to myself, feet already backing away. “Raine, Raine where are you? Where are you? I can’t- I can’t-”

Another howl, a little closer.

I turned and plunged deeper into the gloom.

==

In retrospect, the chance of our group getting split up in the exact manner we were was infinitesimally small. What if I’d not fallen down, not slipped from Raine’s grip? What if I’d ducked left or right instead of retreating into that hallway? What if I’d risked self-defence via brainmath, or tried to dodge around the zombies and back toward Raine? What if I’d not thrown the bolt, not thought to run away?

When I found the tunnel leading down, I began to suspect all was not as it seemed.

I’d stumbled into the wide room half-blinded by sudden light. This room in the corpse-castle was properly lit, with tall freestanding lamps pointed at the walls, like some kind of archaeological dig site. I glanced about, heart in my throat, but the place was empty of life. Mess lay about the room – some lengths of rope and tarpaulin, a pair of jackhammers and circular blades for cutting concrete, a few power tools on a box, a discarded half-eaten sandwich in a plastic bag. That last detail made me stare in dislocated confusion; a supermarket carrier bag, in this place.

A hole dominated the centre of the floor.

Not a natural orifice in the flowing, disgusting structure of the place, but a wound, cut and pulled wide. The cultists had cut shallow stairs leading down, reinforced their tunnel with metal poles, lit it with lamps and emergency chemical glow-sticks taped to the walls.

That tunnel drew my attention like a sound on the edge of hearing, like a flicker in peripheral vision. I stared down into the open wound of dead jade.

The slow academic Heather in the back of my mind posed uncomfortable questions to the panicked exterior. What was the chance of me stumbling upon this? Of taking every correct turn in the winding passageways, like through porous bone? I could have ended up anywhere, been caught, or lost, or wandered forever.

I hadn’t been thinking on the Eye’s lessons, mapping this place with impossible mathematics. I was far too weak and exhausted for that.

Weak, exhausted, alone and scared. A vulnerable, suggestible mind.

The Sharrowford Cult had harassed and stalked me for weeks, tried to kidnap me – but I doubted they wanted me in here unsupervised, discovering their secrets alone, on my own terms. They didn’t want me to find this.

Had I been led here?

No. I swallowed and forced a deep breath, screwed my eyes shut and tried to clear my mind. That was paranoia speaking, and that way lies insanity. I was alone and needed to find my friends, we needed to beat these people, I needed to help Raine find me, and the best way to do all those things was not by lingering in a maze of twisty little passages, but by finding something important – like whatever was down this hole – and breaking it, loudly, with lots of fireworks.

That’s what Raine would do.

Pity I wasn’t good at breaking things, except myself. The discarded power tools wouldn’t offer much help, and there was no way I could carry one of the jackhammers. In the end I scurried over and found a small hand chisel among the tools. Blunt, short, pointless, barely enough to make me feel safer, but at least I had something to hand other than my notebook full of painful equations.

At the mouth of the tunnel I ripped one of the glow-sticks off the wall and hurled it down the stairs. It bounced maybe fifty feet then illuminated a sharp turn. I pulled off another and held onto it, clutched the chisel tight in my other hand, and took the first step down.

Didn’t even question the urge to descend. Should have listened to the paranoia.

The cultists’ tunnel led down in a broad spiral, low ceiling comfortable enough for me. Flakes and chips of dead grey littered the steps, little piles from drilling or sawing into the substrate to mount lamps or insert the metal bracework. It sounds so simple, walking down a set of stairs, but I had to keep a firm hand on my own barely suppressed terror, tell myself that this was the right thing to do, that my friends were not dead or in pain and I’d see them again soon. I trod as quietly as I could, every sense straining for the sounds of anybody ahead of me, so absorbed in alertness that I didn’t notice the slow change in the light until it became obvious.

After somewhere between three and five right-hand turns, the grey walls weren’t so grey anymore. The jade green began to return, as if the tunnel descended through dead outer layers to penetrate living flesh beneath.

At first a few scraps of distant green crept like buried creepers of mold. Then whole sheets flowed in frozen waves up through the dead rock, shot through with deeper, darker branching structures of viridian.

No more grey. Green, green everywhere, laced with capillaries somehow dark green and dark gold at the same time.

Inside the walls, green-gold light pulsed and flowed in bright veins.

The light stung. Any attempt to reconcile the two clashing colours together made my head hurt. I blinked and hiccuped, tried to concentrate on my feet. The light contaminated my eyes – or my brain – with after-images, ghostly alien nerve systems impressed on my sight.

At the bottom of the tunnel was a cave.

At least, that’s what I called it in my head; perhaps a biological term would be more apt. I called it a cave, so I didn’t have to think about it.

The cult’s tunnel emerged onto a sort of ridge of the jade stone-flesh, upon which they’d laid metal walkways, anchored with heavy bolts, walled off with waist-high railing and ropes and stretched tarpaulin and sacking, and lit with hooded lamps at irregular intervals. My heart juddered. I felt so very small as I crept into that vast space, cowed by the impression of great gnarled columns and spires of living jade looming in the darkness. The metal walkway snaked off between them. The walls of the cave were lost in the darkness, except for the faint pulsing of that impossible green-gold light in deep veins.

Immediately I wanted to go back, wanted to leave, wanted so very badly to not be here. Whatever was down here, I could no more break it than I could break the Eye. I was shivering all over, barely daring to breathe lest the place itself heard me.

Out of the corner of my eyes, I peeked over the railing – another mistake. The darkness went down forever. Bottomless pits are impossible, I reminded myself, but I saw impossible things with tiresome regularity.

A split-second later I squinted in confusion and realised I was wrong, the pit wasn’t bottomless. A single point of light winked down in the void, almost like a star in the night sky, the same impossible green and gold as the pulsing light in the walls.

The more I stared, the brighter it seemed, yet it stayed set in a void. How could it be so bright yet cast no illumination?

An unwelcome revelation pressed in on my mind. An uncontrollable shaking started in my lungs, spread to my hands, my breath.

“Heather!”

I jumped out of my skin – the whisper saved my sanity.

I bit down on a yelp and spun in surprise, chisel and glow-stick thrust out, as if they could protect me from anything that might lurk down here. And there she was, a little way down the metal walkway, peering around a column of dark jade.

“It’s me!” Lozzie hissed. “It’s me!”

“Lozzie!”

She scrambled toward me and launched herself into a half-tackle half-hug, heedless of the sharp object in my hands. She needn’t have worried, I’d already let the chisel fall from my numb fingers. I caught her and hung on tight, too shocked to say anything as she clung to me, too overwhelmed by the sudden shared body heat, the squirming limbs, the scent of another person. She whined low in her throat like an animal, and buried her face in my shoulder. The relief, the unbelievable relief of not being alone in this unnatural place, of finding one friend, at least.

I’d never have been able to hug her so uninhibited under any other circumstances. Right now I was so glad to see anybody I could have cried.

After a moment we both pulled apart, as if by mutual agreement. Lozzie held onto my hands and swung our arms together from side-to-side, like we were a pair of schoolgirls standing in a playground. She lit up in a huge smile.

“I found you! I really found you! Are you okay, did you get hurt? You didn’t get hurt, did you? Where are all- all your friends? You’re alone now, okay, that’s not good, but we can work with it, we can fix that.” She vomited up a torrent of words, breath shaking as she spoke, nodding and rocking, then caught herself and almost giggled, lowered her tone to a whisper. “You really shouldn’t be down here, Heather. It’s super super not safe. I’m actually really scared right now even if I don’t seem it, you know?” Her smile quivered as she bit her lower lip.

The real Lozzie was not as perfect as her projected dream-self.

She was greasy and unwashed, though I didn’t give a damn about that right now. I probably still smelled of sweat and vomit myself. Her nails and cuticles were chewed to ragged stubs, dotted with little scabs. She wore two long sleeved tshirts one over the other, and a pair of old pajama bottoms, her feet bare, toes curled against the cold of the metal walkway. Her endless wispy hair was a matted mess and a livid bruise marked her face where her brother had hit her earlier. She looked borderline malnourished, too thin and pale, a half-starved teenager held together with manic twitchy energy.

She had something wrong with her eyes – her lazy, heavy-lidded look from our shared dreams was held in reserve behind panic and fear, but it was still present, a slackness in her extraocular muscles.

Guess I hadn’t been entirely myself in the dreams either.

“You’re … ” I trailed off, overwhelmed by the solidity and physicality of her. I squeezed her hands, stopped her swinging our joined arms. “You’re real. You are real. Okay.”

“Ahh? Heather?” She blinked at me and tilted her head rapidly from side to side. “Of course I’m real? What are you talking about? Don’t be silly, not now, we’re in a seriously scary place!”

It was her. No doubt about it. The same fey, elfin little face, underneath the fear and the abuse. I could worry about dreams later, Lozzie was here and now, with me, in this, together. I needed to deal with it.

She had blood in her teeth.

“Lozzie, are you bleeding?”

“What? Oh.” She suppressed a mad giggle, a glint in her eyes. “Had to bite somebody to get away.”

“You- okay.”

“Don’t look so surprised! I had to! Oh, don’t judge me, please, I had to. Not you, Heather, not-”

“I’m not, I’m not,” I stammered out in a whisper. “There’s just- there’s a lot to deal with right now. I thought you’d been hurt, that’s all.”

“I have been,” she said with a strange gulp, then her expression crumpled into tears, cringing, small. “I thought you’d been hurt too! Oh, Heather, I’m so sorry, I had to do it, I couldn’t- couldn’t say no- but I gave you that back door, and- and- nobody got hurt, right? Please don’t hate me, please.”

“I don’t, I don’t,” I said, and I meant it. We hugged again, by shared impulse. “It worked, I came to find you. It worked.”

She sniffed, wiped her face on her sleeve. We parted again and she smiled once more, a little more broken than before.

“What did you mean, I’m real?”

I couldn’t stop myself from giving her a bit of a look, despite the circumstances. “You didn’t exactly make it easy to believe that at first. Why the dreams? Why not … I don’t know, call me or come visit or … ” I trailed off as I realised my own idiocy, and began to stammer an apology. Lozzie just shook her head, a sad smile on her face.

“They don’t let me out very often. I learned about you from the messenger your sister sent – all about you! I knew we were the same, we could be friends, I knew you might, you know, be able to help me.”

“My … my sister … a- has- had a message? Yes, right.”

Even now, in the middle of a crisis, outside reality in the core of some unspeakable corpse-nest, whispering to avoid the attentions of that blinking star in the deep, those words needled my heart.

“Yeah!” Lozzie hissed. “For you. Like, it wasn’t words but it wasn’t hard to figure out. Don’t you remember-”

“Why didn’t you tell me?!” I hissed at her. Lozzie blinked and recoiled, a startled fox. “It was- from Maisie, I-”

“I did! I did!” Her hands went up. “You don’t remember? It was the first thing we ever talked about in the dream. I told you. She needs help. She was asking for help. Like me.”

“Like- … ” I opened my mouth, closed it again, gently took her hands. She let me. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Lozzie. When you- with the Messenger, in that underground car park- I … I thought you were stealing the message from me. It hurts to think about my sister. I can’t talk about this now, not here. It’s not the time to talk about this.” I risked a glance up and around, at the cave. “Is it?”

Lozzie shook her head, then nodded – I found the dual gesture so endearing that in any other time and place it would have made me laugh. “Leaving is a very good plan, yes!” she hissed. “Make like a tree and split!”

“Of course. Absolutely. So how do we get out? Brainmath teleport doesn’t work from in here, right?”

“Brainmath?” Lozzie hitched an eyebrow. I tapped the side of my head.

“The thinking magic. Sorry, that’s what I’ve been calling it. The math.”

Lozzie stared, sniffed and rubbed her nose, winced at the bruise on her face. “It’s not maths for me. But yes, yes, no happy jumping from inside the scab. That’s why they keep me here. I ran away from home once and when I came back – click click, wheee.” She made a locking gesture and threw away an imaginary key. “They had me on a leash when I saw your twin’s messenger, you know?”

“Scab?” I echoed.

“This place, yeah. It’s a scab. Long story. A proper long story that you tell at night with hot chocolate and a nice view of the stars – not here. Not where it can hear.” She nodded over the side of the railing, into the depths.

I glanced down without thinking, at the star in the void. Lozzie put her hand up to my face, blocked my view.

“Best not to,” she said, a manic shaky smile on her face. “It won’t feel very good if you pay too much attention to it.”

I swallowed, throat dry, took Lozzie’s hand and lowered it from my face. “Okay. Thank you. Okay. So … what do we do? We have to get back to my friends.”

“Did you kill my brother?”

“Um, not yet.”

Lozzie bit her lower lip, hard, eyes creasing with worry.

“Raine might,” I said.

“She’s the one who said I should jump, yeah? I liked that. Clever!”

“She is. And brave. And-” I swallowed. “Oh God, I hope she’s okay.”

Lozzie squeezed my hand. “She’ll be fine, I’m sure she will. She’s like, chief arse-kicker, isn’t she?”

I nodded. “She’s got a gun, too. It-”

“Didn’t work on him!”

“Yes, we discovered that. Evee’s here too, she’s a magician. And Twil, she’s a werewolf. They must be able to do something to him.”

Lozzie blinked at me. “Werewolves are real?”

“I know. Stupid, isn’t it?”

“Are you kidding? That’s so cool. I love it!”

I swallowed, unable to share her amusement. “I’m so worried about them. We got cut off, I- I’m no good on my own. I don’t know what to do.” I looked over my shoulder, at the way I’d come. “The way back is full of zombies, I couldn’t get back to Raine.”

Lozzie peered over my shoulder too, then bit her lip and looked up at the distant ceiling, lost in the darkness.

“What does your brother – the cult – what is it they want with me?” I asked, unable to bear the silence.

“Hmm?” Lozzie met my eyes, seemingly distracted. “Because you’re like me. All he’s done for years is try to make more of me.” She glanced back the way she’d came, half turning on the spot and chewing on the stub of a fingernail. “We could go back through the underground, but … don’t look down at it, okay? And try not to listen. Stay close, okay? It’s really good at getting inside your head and making you think you want to listen.” Lozzie shot me another shaky smile, then tugged on my hand to lead us deeper into the cave.

“Don’t listen? To what?” I whispered.

“My brother already hurt it earlier,” Lozzie muttered, a sad pinch in her voice. “When he set it on you and your friends outside the castle. It’s hurting a lot now, it needs somebody to listen, but we really, really shouldn’t. Try not to, okay? Try not to.”

==

Perhaps it seems strange that I would so readily trust a person I’d met in a dream. A vestigial part of myself, cradled in my heart, asked again and again if this wasn’t a symptom of insanity. Wasn’t this the exact behaviour I was supposed to watch myself for? That I’d spent years punishing myself for, terrified that at any moment I might slip over the edge, talk to people who weren’t there, scream at invisible monsters, retreat into a world of my own imagination?

That part of me was obsolete now, proved wrong, but I didn’t shout it down or bottle it up; I soothed that terrified, battered part of myself. It was okay, her watch was over, and now I had to be brave in a very different manner.

Being brave wasn’t easy in this place.

I’d never been in a cave before. Not exactly a good family day out for a girl with schizophrenia and night terrors. I clung hard to my initial sense of this place as a cave, a natural formation in rock. Geology – not biology, no matter the impression of organic structure in all the looming shapes in the darkness.

Lozzie and I held hands as she led us creeping back along the metal walkways. The pulsing green-gold light lent her face a sickly, contagious pallor, turning her into a half-starved plague ghost. I must have looked terrible too, twitchy and frightened and doing a bad job of hiding my fear. We made quite the horror-movie couple, a pair of scrawny, unhealthy apparitions one might encounter in a dark, forbidden place.

Lozzie paused before each turn, each corner around another projecting spar of living jade. She held her finger to her lips, craning up on tiptoes and peering around rock outcrops.

The first time she did this, I whispered as quietly as I could, “Is anyone down here?”

“Doubt it,” she hissed, and shot me a mad smile over her shoulder, half-hidden behind the sleeve of her filthy tshirt. “Lost them all upstairs, but a zombie might wander down. Nobody else would be stupid enough – not like us!”

I trusted her completely, not in spite of her obvious mental illness – I could recognise that now, with the clarity of my waking mind – but because of it.

We’d been together in far worse, far weirder places than this, by choice and for the sheer joy of fascination, but always cushioned by the dream logic. Always with the knowledge that if anything really went wrong, we could simply join hands and leave, go somewhere else. Now we were in it for real, truly together.

The cult’s pathway branched several times, vanishing into unlit dead-ends or unfinished drops onto the jade substrate itself. We passed a gigantic branching stalagmite of green-gold glowing rock, a monolithic tree in the heart of the cave, and I spotted a wide metal platform far ahead of us.

Wedged underneath a convenient overhang of rock, on the platform stood structures I couldn’t quite make out at this distance – a few tables perhaps, bundles of rags, tools and debris and-

“Lozzie,” I murmured, squinting. “Up ahead, are those … cages?”

“Yeah!” she hissed. She must have caught my expression in the corner of her eye, because she turned to me and smiled that shaking smile again. “Oh, it’s totally okay, you don’t have to look at them. Just concentrate on your feet when we pass by, yeah? Or look at me.”

“What?” I said in an empty whisper.

“It’s fine, it’s fine, I’m our eyes right now. Okay? I’ll navigate.”

No courage to push the question, but neither could I look away from the cages up ahead. Six foot cubes of steel mesh. Dog cages?

Lozzie tugged on my hand. “You don’t have to look!”

Don’t look up, don’t look down, don’t look at what was right in front of me; I began to feel a little like Perseus in the Gorgon’s lair.

The act of thinking about it – the core of this place – drew my eyes over the side of the railing, to glance at the shining star-thing in the void below.

We seemed closer to it somehow. No longer a point of light, I saw – or imagined I saw – a faint impression of roiling energy through a gap in a cracked shell. I still held the glow-stick in my free hand, and suddenly felt the most bizarre urge to toss it over the railing, so the falling light might reveal the smallest fraction of the true shape below.

“Heather, Heather? Hey, no no, here here!” Lozzie touched my face, brought me back up and around. I drew in a sudden deep breath and blinked at her frowning face.

“Oh, that was weird. I was-”

“You mustn’t let it distract you. It’s really good at that. I don’t blame it, it’s lonely and mad and in pain, but you mustn’t listen – you’re too good, Heather. You’re too good a person, too kind, too nice. Don’t let it talk.”

“O-okay, okay.” I took another deep breath and shoved the glow-stick into my pocket. “I’m really … it’s hard to think clearly right now, that’s all.”

“Talk to me then! We’ll drown it out together.”

Lozzie beamed at me as she dragged me onward. The metal platform lay only a few hundred meters ahead now. I struggled for the words to distract myself.

“Um, well, why the goat skull mask? What was that all about? When I first saw you, I mean.”

“It’s a skull!” Lozzie almost giggled. “It looked super cool. Plus nobody can tell where I’m looking when I have it on. I like masks.”

“You- oh!” I lit up inside, a genuine moment breaking through. “You sent Tenny, didn’t you? That was you. You sent her to help me.”

“Tenny?”

“The spirit with the tentacles. Thank you. I never thanked you for that, in the dreams or anything. She used your name once, even. I get the feeling she wasn’t supposed to give that away, but thank you. She saved me, weeks ago, it’s kind of a long story.”

Lozzie paused and blinked at me. “Oh, that.” She frowned softly. “I made that from spare parts, I totally didn’t think it would find you. Wow!”

“I’m sorry, you made it? You can do that?”

“Yeah. Can’t you?” Lozzie looked at me with a mystified expression, tilting her head to one side, as if we were talking about baking a cake rather than constructing a spirit monster.

“I don’t think so … ” I trailed off and swallowed. This wasn’t the time. I had to focus on getting back to Raine, getting out of here. I had to focus on the here and now.

On the platform ahead of us the cages were clustered at the rear, against the jade rockface.

Too late to take Lozzie’s advice now. By the time we stepped onto the platform, I was already staring. Couldn’t look away, a far stronger pull than the thing in the void under our feet. The cages, the bundles of rags within, the table, all sharpened into too-perfect clarity on the surface of my mind. My insides went numb.

“You don’t have to look, Heather! Come on!” Lozzie’s raised voice warped into distorted echo. My feet stuttered to a halt. She pulled on my arm, both hands around my wrist, tugging on my sleeve. “Look at me, focus on me!”

“Lozzie, stop!” I snapped, and winced at the echo of my own shout, shaking off her grip. I glanced at her stricken expression and back at the cages, my breath tight in my chest. “What is this?”

“They’re dead. They can’t feel anything anymore. We can! Don’t worry about them, okay?”

“Worry?” I almost spat, shaking my head. “I- … ”

“Don’t think about it, okay? Off, off!” Lozzie waved her arm in the air, as if trying to shoo away a flock of birds. She screwed her eyes shut. “Out of sight, out of mind!”

I ignored her, only half by choice, and tried to comprehend what I was looking at.

The platform in the depths was not a big place. Not grand, except for the surroundings of the vast cave. At one end of the platform a stout metal table faced the void, complete with restraints to hold a person and channels to collect spilt blood. It was covered in dark stains. A helmet made of copper was anchored to the head of the table, and inside I could see little patches of scalp and burned hair. A thick cable of bare copper and woven rope descended from the helmet, led off the side of the platform, into the void below. A triple-layered magic circle in stark clean white ringed the table, surrounded by the ghost images of dozens upon dozens of old, partially erased circles.

A shrivelled twist of cooked gristle lay atop the table, like a piece of meat left too long over a fire, no larger than a cat.

The cages were full of corpses.

Perhaps a dozen, if I could have counted. Dried, dessicated, preserved from rot by some quality in the air. Some were bound and gagged in death, others curled up and shrunken. One had gnawed off his own fingers – I doubted rats were responsible, down here. Several had their eyes bandaged as if blind, the dressings caked with dried blood, the faintest green-gold glow showing through the fabric. All were lumpy and misshapen under their filthy clothes, as if changed in hidden ways. None could have been older than twenty. Several were small children.

Lozzie spoke, waved her arms about, grabbed my hand, but I didn’t really hear her.

I wasn’t surprised. I’d seen the prelude to this discovery, the zombies made from kidnapped homeless people, the ape demon impaled outside the castle as a warning. The fruit of cruelty.

I’d never seen evil before. The Eye wasn’t evil – it was alien. Despite everything it had done to me, to my sister, despite the torture of having my mind altered, my reality bent and broken, the Eye was not evil. The star in the void wasn’t evil either, nor were the nightmare spirits I saw every day of my life, nor the inhabitants of the hundred Outside places I’d been to.

This little space, this thing done by people, this was evil.

This filthy secret, this felt like the centre of what the Sharrowford Cult was doing.

I didn’t need to be a genius to connect the dots; the corpses to the table, the helmet, the cable dropping into the depths, down to that thing in the void.

Forced communion.

“- and if you dwell on it, it’ll eat you up, it’ll take every piece of-”

“Can we destroy this?” I interrupted Lozzie’s rambling, swallowed, forced myself to feel and move again. I looked right into her heavy-lidded eyes. She juddered to a halt and blinked at me, then sketched a shaky smile and nodded sideways into the pit.

“We’d have to kill that down there,” she said. “This stuff’s just stuff.”

“How? How?” I glanced down into the void, then pulled my eyes back to Lozzie. It was easier, with this coldness inside me. “How?”

She shrugged. A laugh jerked out of her mouth. “I don’t know. A nuclear bomb? A- a- a god? Drop god on it. Right. That’ll work.”

“Point taken.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” She swallowed and sniffed, eyes twitching and flickering over all the evidence she’d tried so hard to get me to ignore.

“Maybe Evelyn can stop it. She’s a magician,” I muttered, more to myself than Lozzie. “I have to tell her. Lozzie, what is this, what’s it for? How do we break it?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know! I’m the only one it ever worked on.”

“W-what? You mean-”

“You can’t just rape it and expect it to give you a piece of its mind. They can’t make another me, because they just wanna take and take and take and there’s nothing left down there, it gave me all it had.” She screwed a finger against the side of her skull. “It was a present, a gift, a- a- all it had. You get it, right?”

I stared at her, horror building on horror. But I nodded. “Yes. Yes, I think so.”

“I wish we could kill it.” She sniffed, tears in her eyes. “Put it out of it’s misery.”

“Maybe there’s a way. Maybe Evelyn knows a way. Maybe we can-”

A silent blur launched itself up and over the side of the platform railing.

Lozzie and I both screamed and jumped, grabbing at each other like small frightened animals about to clamber over themselves to get away. A heavy hand twisted against the railing, a long coat whipped through the air. Boots hit the metal in front of us.

Zheng landed on the platform with all the grace of a drunken elephant.

Her left side was still soaked with crimson, half-dried into a sticky layer down her coat and trousers and all over her boots. Her left arm – the one I’d torn off – had completed the disgusting reattachment process we’d witnessed earlier in the fog labyrinth. It hung slack at her side, naked and covered in a winding mass of occult tattoos so dense they turned her pale flesh to almost solid black. Her shoulder wound formed an angry jagged expanse of pulped, re-knitting flesh.

Seven feet of zombie muscle straightened up, cracked her neck, and turned dead eyes on Lozzie and I.

She was all there.

For the first time ever, I reached for the hyperdimensional mathematics without even thinking.

Maybe it was the memory of her grabbing my face and holding me immobile, maybe the shock of her dramatic entrance, or maybe I was finally turning into something beyond human. I grabbed at the impossible equations held so gingerly in the back of my mind, broke the seals, clenched my teeth as I spun the numbers into place, each lever of reality tar-slick and burning white-hot inside my brain. Knock her clean off the platform, burst her skull, blast her into steaming meat – could I do any of that?

I could. In that moment of panic, I knew I could.

Might kill me, but I could.

I sagged in Lozzie’s grip, my head and guts on fire, half a second away from an equation to rip reality asunder.

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