A Murder of Crones

S.W.FAIRBROTHER

Copyright 2014 SW Fairbrother.

All rights reserved. Except as permitted, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system without the prior permission of the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

To Mandy, without whom this book would be one page shorter.

And to Andy, because that was his line...

1

One of my most vivid childhood memories is of the dark and the damp, accompanied by the scent of wet fur. Then my mother’s voice told us to hush, and the door above shut with a snick. Her footsteps receded, and the only sounds left were our breathing and the dub-dub-dub of my sister Sigrid’s heart as she held my head tight against her chest. Cold water trickled down the wall behind me and soaked into the back of my shirt.

On the other side, Harriet—the source of the wet fur—said, ‘Where’s the light switch?’

‘Ssh.’ Sigrid’s grip on me tightened.

‘Come now, girls. It’s not like there are any windows. No one can see in.’

‘Ssh!’

In the complete darkness, I couldn’t see the weasel-woman smile, but I could hear it in her voice when she said, ‘And no one can hear us. We’re completely underground.’

‘Those are the rules,’ I said, ‘until Mum says it’s safe.’

‘Come now, little hag. You can’t tell me you two just sit quietly in the dark every single time.’

Neither of us answered. We did just sit silently in the dark. It was what we had always done. I’d even grown to like it—the damp, earthy scent, the rare quiet, nothing but the sound of us breathing. I usually fell asleep.

‘Huh-uh, little hag. Look. This’—Harriet rapped on the wall; it made a hollow sound—‘was built so light couldn’t escape. All these old bomb shelters are sealed like that.’ Her clothing rustled as she stood. Her fingers whispered along the walls. ‘Your mother doesn’t understand. She is how old? A zillion? And she can’t die. Or, rather, she can come back if she does. She doesn’t know what it’s like to be truly afraid, or what it’s like to be a child and scared of the dark…bloody hell, where is the damned switch?’

There was more rustling, then a scraped click. A small flame flickered to life at the top of Harriet’s cigarette lighter, and I had my first opportunity to get a good look at her up close.

Harriet had been camping in the garden under the oak tree out back, where her dome tent was in the process of ruining Stanley’s lawn. She wasn’t usually allowed in the house—none of the weasels who camped out during the summer ever were. My mother included them in her delusions. When they were here, they had to go into the shelter too. Sure, Harriet had been around, and even argued with our mother a few times when we were close by, but we weren’t allowed to talk to them. We were hardly allowed to look at them.

Keep away from them, girls. They’re bad as rats… or worse. They’re dirty.

Harriet didn’t look dirty. She kept the short fur that covered her lanky figure clean and neat. I thought that if I were to stroke her cheek, it would feel as silky soft as a kitten’s. Only the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands were completely hairless, but they looked soft too—pink and smooth like those of the hamster someone had once brought to school. Her black eyes flashed in the flickering light, and frustration showed on her triangle-shaped weasel face.

She didn’t smell too good, though. Not unwashed, but musky—an almost-sulphuric scent that wasn’t completely pleasant.

Harriet’s mouth curled into a smile, displaying inhumanly sharp canines. Her black eyes flicked towards us, then up at the ceiling, and its lack of light bulbs. ‘No electrics, huh? Ow!’

The flame disappeared, the lighter clicked, and it reappeared.

Harriet stared around at the shelter with undisguised curiosity. It was one of the old Andersen ones left over from the war—not much more than some corrugated steel panels bent into a half tube, half-buried then covered with earth to make a space just big enough for six adults to huddle inside. Red stains made V shapes on the walls, and earth bulged through in pockets where the steel had rusted away. New tin sheets covered some of the rust at intervals around the shelter. Pine beams propped up a reinforced roof.

Shelves of dust-covered mystery jars—my stepfather’s attempts at pickling—stood against the far wall. Sprigs of lavender were nailed to the curved sides: an attempt by Stanley to make the place smell a little better. A thick layer of pine needles covered the floor, as did a generous sprinkling of rock salt. The rest of the space was bare.

‘How long do you normally have to stay down here?’ Harriet asked.

‘Depends,’ I whispered. ‘Maybe a few hours.’

‘Ssh,’ Sigrid said. Two years older, she was less intrigued by the weasel-woman than I was.

‘Maybe a few days,’ I said.

‘Why doesn’t she just rough in an electric cable? Stanley’s pretty handy. He could do it in a couple of hours.’

Because she thinks electricity is the devil. I kept quiet. I’d said too much to the weasel already. I’d be in enough trouble if Desma found out about those. I didn’t even want to think about what would happen if I started jabbering. The weasels always wanted to talk.

What was out there? What was so dangerous that an ancient creature like my mother was scared of it? Why did it want weasels?

I was done speculating. The respective answers were: nothing, nothing and it didn’t, because there was nothing there but my mother’s contagious paranoia.

My sister shifted against me, and changed position. Her knees clicked as she stretched them out in front of her. She’d grown six inches in a year, and her bones creaked with the strain. I still hoped for my own huge growth spurt, even if I knew it wasn’t going to come. Sigrid was tall and slim and blonde and already starting to fill out. She hadn’t received our mother’s hag genes.

I had. I was going to be sharp-faced and bony. I’d only pass for human if someone weren’t paying attention. Sigrid would never have to worry about that.

‘I can’t stay down here for days,’ Harriet said. ‘I’ve got a job, which I’m already at risk of losing.’ She peered at her watch and grimaced. ‘You know what, girls? Treasure these days—the ones before you have to go out and work. Trust me on this.’

Sigrid and I both nodded as if we agreed. We didn’t. I’d spent hours with Sigrid in bed at night, huddled together under the covers while we made our plans. Sigrid was going to join the police and be a detective. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I thought it would involve animals. We were going to share a flat and we would each have our own TV in our bedrooms.

Harriet shifted from foot to foot then peered at her watch again. ‘Okay, I can’t do this. I have to go.’

‘Mum says you have to stay here.’ I said.

‘Yeah, well, she’s not my mother, and I have to get to work,’ and then she added, ‘If I see anything nasty, I promise to run for it.’

And with that, Harriet took two steps towards the door and shifted her weight into it. Light spilled in, followed by a gust of cool air that smelled like rain, and then she shut the door behind her, leaving us in darkness.

Sigrid stretched her legs again. Her knees clicked. She smelt like warm shampoo and the spoonful of mustard our mother made us eat every morning to stop our souls escaping. In our flat, there would never be any mustard. Not even for guests.

‘Did you hear that?’ Sigrid whispered.

‘What?’ I cocked my head to one side, listening, and heard nothing but the soft sounds of the rain. And then I caught it—a hiss, followed by a succession of sharp barks and shrieks. ‘Is that a fox?’

There were plenty around. They came into the house sometimes through the cat flap, after the cat’s food bowl. Once we’d had a pair of them come in, and they’d mated in the kitchen, screaming until Stanley chased them out with his cane.

The shrieking increased, became a long screech, and then stopped. ‘I’m sure it’s a fox.’ I said, but my voice wavered.

We sat in silence, our ears pricked, but we heard nothing further, beyond the gentle drumming of the rain against the door.

After a while, I fell asleep, and when the door finally opened, it was to a clear sky filled with brilliant, tiny stars.

I stretched and shivered as I followed Sigrid and Desma out into the fresh air. The rain had stopped, but the downpour had turned the grass sodden, and our feet made slushing sounds as they met the mud below. The white light of the moon highlighted the garden, neat and tidy, except for the space where Harriet’s tent and camping equipment spilled untidily onto the grass.

‘Where’s Harriet?’ Sigrid asked.

Desma stopped. Black was in that year, and she had dressed head to toe in black silk. Along with the sharp boniness of her nose and chin, it made her look like a predatory bird. ‘Gone.’

‘Gone where?’ Sigrid asked.

Desma shook her head, her green eyes hard and a little too intense. ‘It got her, of course. Stupid creature. Should have stayed where it was safe.’

Sigrid and I exchanged glances. We were old enough that we weren’t quite sure if we believed her. Desma’s brow furrowed. She grabbed my shoulder with one hand and Sigrid’s with the other. Her grip tightened painfully, and her long fingernails dug into my skin. ‘Just you remember what happens when you don’t listen to me.’

She herded us into the kitchen then turned her back. As she walked out, she said, ‘Eat something, then straight to bed. I don’t want to see you anywhere other than the kitchen or your bedroom. The rest of the house is off-limits until I tell you otherwise.’

Sigrid grimaced. ‘Do you think she meant the bathroom too? I really need to wee.’

‘No. That would be silly,’ I said, but Desma didn’t trust the toilet. It’s not natural to crap where you live, girls. Go outside. She always used the ancient outhouse at the end of the garden. ‘It’s just a wee. Go outside on the grass. Just in case.’

‘Ugh, that’s so gross.’

‘Then go to the bathroom.’

Sigrid looked from me to the door to the rest of the house, then evidently decided not to risk it because she disappeared out into the garden and came back looking miserable. ‘When we have our own place, we’re not even going to have grass.’

‘Yes, we will, and we’ll grow it extra long so that if Stanley ever comes past, he’ll automatically go into a rage,’ I opened the kitchen cabinet. ‘What do you want to eat?’

We settled on tinned spaghetti with toast. Stanley came in while we were eating, and went straight out back. We watched him dismantle Harriet’s tent while we ate. All her belongings went into paper bags, which he carried around to the front for the bin men to take away.

In the morning, if it weren’t for the yellowed circle of grass under the old oak, there would have been nothing to indicate she had ever been. Stanley watered and fed the grass, and after a few weeks even that was gone. I asked Desma about her again, but all my mother would say on the subject was a repeated, ‘Just you remember what happens when you don’t listen to me.’

2

In the underworld, the night sky churned with yellow smoke. It had been perfectly black under a thick layer of cloud: moonless and starless, on a street with every window blacked out and every street lamp dead and still.

Then the wail of air raid sirens filled the air, punctuated with the thump thump of incendiary bombs. Golden light from dozens of fires brightened the night. The smoke stank of burning fabric, wood, and a horrible meaty smell my mind shied away from.

In the living world, the scars of the Blitz were mostly gone, with just a scrape on a building or a neat plaque remaining to remind the world of what had been. In the underworld, it was different. No matter how much Londoners might have put on a jolly face against death and destruction during the Blitz, their souls still knew and hadn’t forgotten.

Scenes like this were familiar. I’d spent much of my childhood and most of my adolescence exploring the underworld, and everywhere a bomb hit, everywhere someone died, a scar was left on the world of the dead. The underworld was shaped by the psyche of the dead, and the Blitz had left a scar on the underworld’s version of London as thick and permanent as any of the battles and wars that had come before it.

Harpies cluttered the pavement and the tops of the houses, their tongues extended from disturbingly humanlike faces as they sucked in the pain and anguish from the air. Water lapped at the end of the street as the tarmac became the Styx.

This part of the underworld had been Eighteen Cooper Street, when a bomb had seared a snapshot of time onto the underworld. In the living world, the entire row of houses was now gone, demolished and replaced by an anonymous office block. The houses still stood here in the world of the dead, leaning morbidly against each other.

I tried to summon the courage to step off of the pavement and up the stone steps. The last time I had stood in this same spot I’d been a child. I’d never expected to go back.

But then I’d never expected to be bitten by a zombie, either. I couldn’t go back to the land of the living. My body had turned, and the moment I returned I would no longer be myself. I’d be just another rotting and ravenous automaton.

Time flowed differently in the underworld, and I had no idea how long had passed in the world of the living, but it had been too long. I wanted back. Being dead wasn’t new. I’d been doing it all my life. Staying dead, however, was a complete pain in the rear.

The answer was in front of me. In 1942, five hags died in this house when it was hit by a German bomb, slicing a population already teetering on the brink of extinction down to two—my mother Desma, and her daughter Ana.

The hags who died were all refugees from the Continent who had fled to the relative safety of England only to die while they slept. Hags may have been creatures capable of dying at will and returning to life, but they hadn't. The damage to their bodies was too much. They were dead dead. For women who were technically immortal, we died easily enough.

By the time I was born, the house had become a magnet for long-dead hags. They had flocked to it from all over the underworld to join their sisters, where they spent their time drinking tea, gossiping, and peeping out of the net curtains to spy on the unaware dead.

The hags inside had died multiple times over their long lifetimes. One of them had to know how I could get back.

I shifted from foot to foot. Somehow just willing myself up the steps wasn’t enough to make my overly heavy feet take that single step forward. Stop being such a wuss, Vivia. They’re only hags. They’ll know how to do it. Just ask nicely.

Whether I would have chickened out again I’ll never know, because the decision was made for me. The front door flung open, and a small figure scuttled out. ‘Vivia! It’s Vivia, ladies.’

And just like that, I was surrounded by crones pinching at my skin and clothing. Mouths that had never known a toothbrush kissed my mouth, my cheeks. I kept my mouth closed, but put a smile on it.

A posse of old ladies swept me inside and into a Victorian-style parlour the size of a small ballroom. The edges of my vision shimmered as the underworld shifted to accommodate its inhabitants. My behind hit a hard chair with a painful thump.

‘Tea?’

I couldn’t see who had asked. Yeeargh. No, thanks. ‘Yes, please.’

I had been deposited in the central chair—guest of honour, so to speak—with the hags spread out in front of me in a half-moon shape. There were around fifty: all olive skinned with beak-like noses. Hags weren’t identical, but we were all very similar. Only just past thirty, I didn’t have as many warts or as much facial hair, but it was only a matter of time. I did have the hag nose.

I scanned their faces, but the one I was looking for wasn’t there. Wherever my mother had disappeared to, she wasn’t there. I allowed myself a sliver of hope that maybe she had passed over to whatever came next.

The squeak of the tea trolley announced its arrival, pushed by a sallow-skinned hag I knew as Auntie Tilde.

Tilde had been one of those who had died in the house when the bomb hit. Her name was seared into my brain, along with the four others who had died, because sometime after their deaths—and after Desma had moved to the house I’d grown up in—Ana had carved their names onto the doorframe of what was to be my bedroom door. I’d traced their names with my fingers a thousand times over the course of my childhood.

Tilde had been more than six hundred years old when she’d died, and had worked for most of her long life as a midwife. While she’d always been pleased to see me and took an interest whenever Desma and I visited, it was a morbid interest that gave me nightmares.

‘Still alive?’ she’d say. ‘Oh, I am so pleased. You’re…what…five now? That’s good. Five’s a good age to get to. What about your sister? She still alive? Good, good. The humans die so fast, especially the littles. Now, you just need to make it to ten. You’ll have a good chance once you get there. All the nasty stuff—consumption, the scarlet fever, the poxes—they carry off the little ones like you quick-quick. You grow up. Make it to ten, you hear? Tell your sister, too. Ten’s the magic number.’

I half expected her to say it again now. ‘You made it to how old before you got zombie-bit? Good, good. You made it past ten. And your sister? Really? All the way to fourteen? Well done.’

But Tilde didn’t. Instead, she lifted the teapot with a saggy arm and trickled hot liquid into doll-sized china cups. The discoloured copper teapot gave off a sour aroma. I swallowed back the urge to gag and took the proffered cup with a smile.

When every hag had her cup, drinking was allowed. Despite their near identical looks, each drank differently. Auntie Tilde threw hers back like a shot of hot tequila. I touched the rim of the teacup to my lips, careful not to let the liquid touch my skin, then set the cup, still full, back on the tea trolley. Auntie Tilde glanced at it, and then at me.

The tea ritual was important, but I knew the story of Persephone and the pomegranate seeds. I wasn’t going to get stuck in the underworld for the price of a rank cup of tea.

‘You think we’d trick you like that, girl?’ The corners of Auntie Tilde’s mouth turned up in a smirk.

I shrugged. The room had turned quiet, all eyes on me. ‘Perhaps.’ I don’t trust a single one of you.

Auntie Tilde’s eyes narrowed. ‘Drink the tea.’

‘No.’

‘You are the youngest. Do as you are told.’

‘Times have moved on, Auntie,’ I said. The rest of the hags might have come from a time when junior members of the family were expected to show absolute obedience. I hadn’t.

‘Desma was too soft with you.’

I let out an involuntary bark of laughter. ‘Not quite.’

‘You won’t drink the tea. You sit there like Little Miss Priss looking as though the sight of us makes you sick. What do you want?’

‘I don’t want to be dead anymore.’ The words came out sounding more plaintive than I’d intended. ‘I’m not properly dead. It was a zombie bite. I want to go back.’

To my surprise, she roared with laughter. ‘Who doesn’t? Being dead not good enough for you?’

‘No.’

‘You have tried going back to the living world? That should rewind your clock. Or did you just get bit and come crying to us?’

‘I died and went back. I was still a zombie. It didn’t work. ’ I had. The irony was that I’d died so many times while I’d been alive. The hag part of me made returning to life easy. Somehow it had never occurred to me to worry about the day when death would be permanent.

She gave me an up-down look. ‘Must be because you’re too young. Power comes with age. You’re still a tadpole.’

‘I’m not going to get any older if I stay dead.’

She grinned, displaying a mouth of rotten teeth. ‘All right, then. I may be able to help, but first, come with me. I want to show you something.’

The other hags melted away.

We were back on the street in front of the house. The air raid siren still wailed in that peculiar up-and-down manner that meant no matter where I was in the underworld, I could never mistake it for anything else.

A dead man, his face blackened with smoke, scuttled past me. A dead woman—some kind of shifter, to judge by the way the fire flashed yellow in her eyes—ran past him towards the public bomb shelter at the end of the street, a not-real child in her arms. Another small not-real child trotted behind her, holding the edge of the dead woman’s nightgown with one hand, thumb of the other firmly stuck in its mouth. My eyes followed the woman. Over the half century that had passed since she’d died, how many times had her spirit run down this road to safety, playing the same old scene over and over again? I deliberately put her out of my mind. There was nothing I could do to help her. She had to work through it on her own.

The whump whump of the landing bombs couldn’t be heard over the siren, but the ground jolted with each impact.

Tilde took my hand in her gnarled one, and mouthed something at me. ‘Come.’

The unlocked front door opened onto an unfamiliar hallway, and the sound of the siren diminished. The house stank—the death stink of the hag I’d been so sensitive about while alive, but multiplied by seven, along with the distinctive odour of a group of people who’d been born in a time when bathing was considered optional. I held my nose.

Tilde led me up stairs littered with the detritus of the living—shoes, bags, coats.

She turned left at the landing and pushed open a door. The room was filled with not-real hags, but only one dead one. Hags came in two shapes—tall, skinny, and ugly (my mother and I), or short, squat, and ugly (Ana and Tilde). The hag lying on her back on the bed was one of the latter. Hair sprouted from the warts on her chin and quivered as she snored. I didn’t recognise her.

I gave Tilde a quizzical look.

‘Her name’s Ingeborg.’

Ingeborg. The fourth name on the list carved onto my bedroom door.

‘What is she doing here?’ There were plenty of negatives to being a hag: the warts, the excess hair, the anti-hag prejudice that seemed to infect so many humans; but death wasn’t one of them. Hags knew when they were dead. They weren’t supposed to spend a half century living out their deaths like the humans did.

Tilde’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘Silly cow hasn’t realised she’s dead yet. Me and the others, we knew we were dead straight away. Daft creature’s been asleep ever since. At least we don’t have to relive being blown to bits. Four against one, our reality overrules hers, but it means we all have to stay here until she wakes up. I’m not leaving her to die over and over, but we just can’t seem to snap her out of it.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. She always was a little simple. Could be that.’

There was an unspoken or. I voiced it. ‘Or?’

‘Or she’s boiling mad about the same thing I’m boiling about. She just doesn’t want to move on yet. She has to come to terms with her death.’

‘It’s been more than seventy years,’ I said. ‘She’s a hag. She should have come to terms with it in minutes.’

‘Unless there is something unresolved.’

‘What’s to resolve? The house got hit by a bomb. Sure, it’s bad luck, but it’s not complicated.’ I said. The hag in the bed hitched her breath, snorted twice then turned over.

Tilde glanced at her then gave a snort of her own.

‘You’re a hag. You tell me.’

I closed my eyes and concentrated. The room felt like death. The hag on the bed felt like death, as did Tilde beside me. It made me all too aware of the spark within me—the spark that said it wasn’t too late. There was still something inside me that was capable of crossing back. I reached out with the hag part of me and sent a tendril of hag magic towards the sleeping woman.

Information flooded into me. She was dead. Her mind was firmly stuck in the death dream. Her body had been buried and was now nothing more than dry bones. She—

The tendril jolted back.

‘She was murdered.’

‘Ten points for you, cleverclogs. And she wasn’t the only one. Son of a bitch got all of us. Damned humans. They’re always coming for us. Burning us alive. At the stake. In ovens. In our own homes.’

‘I think the oven one was just a fairy tale,’ I said.

‘Hah! There’s a lot more to fairy tales than meets the eye.’

I was only half-listening. My brain whirred furiously. The house had been hit by a bomb. It was technically possible some sneaky person could have wandered in, knifed everyone while they slept and then run away minutes before the bomb hit, but the likelihood of such a scenario felt astronomically small.

A more-obvious explanation presented itself. What was war, but murder on a grand scale? ‘It was a bomb, Auntie. Whoever the bomber was, he couldn’t have known who was in this particular house.’

‘You may have our blood, but you certainly don’t have the brains of a hag. You think I don’t know how I died? How any of us died? We know. We were murdered. That bomb was meant for us.’

‘Okay,’ I said. And just like that we moved from a mildly bonkers conspiracy theory to completely box-of-frogs crazy. German bombers had deliberately targeted a lot of things during the Blitz, but I doubted a single house full of crotchety old ladies was on their hit list.

From what I remembered from history class, the Luftwaffe’s general bombing strategy was to aim somewhere near the docks and factories and hope for the best. Even if they had wanted to kill the hags, the chances of a bomber deliberately targeting a particular house and then actually hitting it were minimal at best, if not close to impossible. I was sorry she was dead, but for hags, paranoia with a side order of dementia was practically mandatory.

‘A cowardly way to do it, too. None of us even woke up. One minute we’re alive, the next we’re dead. Didn’t even give us a chance to fight back.’

‘I’m sorry you’re dead, Auntie.’ I added, and I was.

She rolled her eyes. ‘You don’t have to believe me. You want a way back? This is it.’

The room began to fade around us, and slowly the parlour reappeared. The hags hadn’t moved. Tilde gave me a sly smile. ‘How about this? I’ll send you back. You find out who killed us, and you bring me their heads in a bag.’

The hags looked at each other. There was muttering. Crazy old baggage. I was the youngest, but I wasn’t the stupidest. Whose heads? Some mystery German pilots? Even if someone had murdered them, it had been seventy years ago. The bombers were likely long dead.

But it was the only option I had. ‘Deal.’

‘And you’re going to keep to your side, are you? Or are you going to go back and get on with your life, sniggering about how you pulled a fast one on an old woman?’

‘I’ll look into it,’ I said. ‘I can’t promise more than that.’

Tilde laughed suddenly, a death cackle that made me realise why wicked witches are such a stereotype. She reached out suddenly with a gnarled hand and pulled my hair. Hard. A bunch of strands came away in her fingers.

‘Ow! What was that for?’

‘Collateral, you uppity little whippet. This is a deal, not a gift. You act like you’re superior just because your skin’s still young and smooth as a baby.’ She twisted my stolen hair around her fingers, sniffed at it, then blew on it. The strands turned white. ‘You don’t trust me? I don’t trust you. You’re on the clock, chicken. You’ve got until every strand of your hair turns white.’

‘How long will that be?’

She shrugged and turned up her thin lips in another sly smile. ‘Until the moon begins to wane. A few weeks. If that.’ She grinned, showing her rotten teeth again. ‘There may be some side effects.’

Laughter erupted from the audience. Mad as March hares, the lot of them.

‘Just send me back.’ One thing at a time. I couldn’t do anything while I was dead.

She reached out her hand. Her long fingernails scratched my chest. ‘Then it is a bargain.’

My soul began to fade, but I could still feel her talons on my skin and the rest of her words echoed in my ear. ‘Until your hair goes white.’

3

I woke to darkness. Gunk glued my eyes shut. I reached up to rub it away and something sludgy sloughed off. My hand knocked against something cold and slimy - the glass lid of my coffin.

I tried to take a deep breath, but fluid had filled my lungs. I retched. Sludge rose out of my lungs and filled my mouth. I turned onto my stomach, and coughed up gunk until my lungs cleared. I twisted again, my body slipping in the slimy mess, reached tentatively to the glass lid and pushed upwards. It shifted.

Idiot. I’d told Stanley to put me in wood, and he hadn’t done that. I’d told him to seal it too, and he hadn’t done that either.

The glass lid crashed to the floor. I gripped the sides of the coffin with sticky fingers and sat up. Nausea rose at the movement, seemingly from my feet, and shivered all the way up my body to my aching head. I threw up, adding more stinky gunk to the soup in the glass coffin.

I sat still, hunched over and head hanging down. Tiny points of pain pricked my skin—pins and needles, but like nothing I’d ever felt before. Reverse decomposition had always been a bitch, but this was the longest I’d ever spent dead. I drew in a deep breath, and it was all I could do to stop myself vomiting again. At least when I was dead, I couldn’t feel myself decompose. The reverse process always hurt like hell.

Slowly, the nausea passed and the tiny swords piercing my body disappeared one by one.

I tightened my grip on the sides of the glass coffin and pushed myself to my feet. I climbed out of the sludge carefully, one leg then the other over the side of the coffin. My bare feet landed on the wood floor. I stretched as I stood, and moved my head from side to side. My neck and spine clicked.

The other glass coffin lay to the right of mine. Unlike mine, flowers surrounded it, and it had been polished. I kept my eyes averted.

My mother had been dead for years. It wasn’t the first time. When she found Stanley in the underworld in 1917, she’d been dead for centuries, or so she said. There was no reason she’d be back yet. She was gone, and yet her coffin was still there. It was bad enough knowing your demented and ancient mother could come back from the dead at any minute, but it was just made that much worse by having to live in the same house as her corpse.

The attic door banged open. I clapped my hands to my ears.

‘Desma…Oh, it’s only you.’

Whatever my mother had done when she brought my stepfather back from the dead had made him, if not immortal, then long lived. Stanley wasn’t far off being able to celebrate his hundredth birthday, but the man standing in front of me hadn’t changed in twenty years—not his moustache, the slight paunch, nor the slump of his shoulders. He was a welcome sight, despite the greeting.

‘Hi, Stan,’ I slurred, and coughed again. ‘You were supposed to lock the door. What if I came back a zombie?’

He snorted. ‘Not you. Much too responsible,’

‘How long have I been dead?’ My swollen tongue filled my mouth uncomfortably.

‘Not even a year. It’s August.’

No wonder I felt awful. My body had been decomposing for eight months. ‘Where’s Sigrid?’

My sister had died when she was fourteen. I’d tried to bring her back, but I’d done it wrong, and she’d ended up with her living body in this world while her spirit wandered the afterlife. Just after I’d zombified, she’d grabbed onto me in the underworld and come back as the angel she’d been playing dress-up as in the afterlife, great pair of wings and all.

‘Dunno. She moved out a couple of months ago. Didn’t tell me where. The girl has about as much respect for me as you do.’

‘Has she been okay?’

‘Has she been okay? What about me? Not even a ‘Hello, Stanley. How are you?’’

‘You’re standing right in front of me, I can see you’re fine. Besides, you’re a tough old nut. Sigrid must have had a lot of adjustments to make.’

‘She’s fine,’ Stanley said. His eyes swivelled to the glass coffin that lay beside my own, and stared longingly at the horror within. His voice softened. ‘I really thought it was her this time.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and only after the words came out did I think: Apologising for living. That just about sums up our relationship.

Stanley gave me a sharp look. ‘No, you’re not. You don’t want her back.’ He grimaced. ‘You stink. Go clean yourself.’

His footsteps sounded down the stairs as he left.

I did stink. The jeans and silk shirt I’d died in were covered in black mould and lay cold and slimy against my skin.

I took the stairs slowly on stiff limbs, leaving gooey footprints on the wood. I went left at the landing and pushed the door to the bathroom open. I flipped the lock behind me.

Nothing had changed. It felt as if it should have. This was the bathroom where Sigrid had died. This was the place where I had held her under the water. Sigrid had had bone cancer and I thought I was saving her. Instead I’d condemned her to a living hell. Every day for years, every time I’d showered or bathed or used the toilet, I’d thought of how she’d died.

She was alive now and somehow I thought it should be different, but it wasn’t. There was the same clawed bath tub, rusty at the edges with missing enamel. The same shower curtain. The same ancient toilet with chain. I’d been dead for months, and nothing changed.

I stripped off the grimy clothes and stuffed them into a plastic bag from the cabinet, which I then left on top of the bin for disposal. The key I kept on a chain around my neck somehow managed to feel both slimy and crusty under my fingertips. I binned the chain, but I needed the key. Other than via Tilde or her sisters, it was the only way I had to get back from the underworld. I rinsed it under the tap until it looked clean at least, then used some bathroom cleaner from under the sink to take care of the germs I couldn’t see. Finally, I reached into the tub and turned on the shower.

I took stock while I waited for the water to warm up. Warts covered my face and neck, and my features had sharpened even more while I’d been dead. My nose jutted out farther, as did my chin. The older I grew, the more I died, and the more I turned into a caricature of a wicked witch.

I ran my fingers through my hair and peered at it in the mirror. It was the same glossy black it had always been, but near my temple, I found a single white hair that hadn’t been there before. I pulled it out.

I washed my hair and scrubbed every inch of skin at least three times before I felt clean. I stepped out, wrapped myself in a clean towel, and tiptoed across the landing to my bedroom. I stopped and ran my fingers over the carved list of names, stopping briefly at Ingeborg before running down the rest. This wasn’t the house they’d died in. That one had been demolished. After the bomb, my mother had moved south of the river, and when Stanley had come back from the war, he’d moved in too. Ana, the only other surviving hag, had stayed in Stepney. I hadn’t spoken to her in a long time, but that would have to change.

My stomach grumbled. I hadn’t eaten in over half a year. Clothing and food first. Questions later. I took my hand from the doorframe and surveyed my bedroom.

A layer of dust covered the furniture, but everything remained untouched. The clock radio next to the bed told me it was ten in the morning.

I crossed the room and pulled the blind cord. Sunlight flooded in, highlighting the thick dust. My stiff fingers fumbled with the window, but when it did creak open, a delicious gust of fresh summer wind rushed inside.

I chose a shirt from the cupboard and sniffed at it. A bit musty, but otherwise clean. The rest of my clothes smelled the same. I’d have to find some time to do laundry: another thing to add to the ‘Later’ list. I dug in the bottom of my bedside drawer and found another chain for the key. I clipped it around my neck with a sense of relief. I was so used to the feel of it against my skin that I felt naked without it.

I found Stanley making tea in the kitchen. He gave a grunt when he saw me. ‘You smell better.’

I hid a smile. ‘Thanks.’ I popped bread into the toaster. There were no clean plates and no clean cutlery, so I washed then rinsed a knife and plate under the tap while I waited for the bread to toast. It seemed Stanley’s housekeeping skills hadn’t improved while I’d been gone.

Dirt and crumbs covered the floor tiles, as did bits of old food and a handful of discarded food packets. My cat’s food and water bowls were missing.

‘Where’s Vinegar?’

Stanley squeezed the tea bag against the side of the mug and deposited the bag in the sink, where it sat with a mound of others. ‘Your sister took him with her. Dunno why. She had the hump about it. Suppose it saves me having to feed the thing.’

‘Anything else I should know?’

‘Dunno. Oh, that neighbour friend of yours moved—the nosy one. Her daughter had a baby, so she’s helping out. Let out her house to some family with about six kids. They make a right ruddy noise.’

‘Has Sigrid got a phone?’ I asked.

‘She’s using yours. Not like you needed it.’

‘Right.’

Stan didn’t look at me as he took his tea back upstairs.

Nothing has ever tasted as delicious as that first bite of toast did. I made another couple of slices, and then some more, and then a cup of tea.

I ate hunched over the kitchen table with a two-day-old newspaper and caught up on the world, which had just plodded along without me. Eight months into the future, and nothing had changed. No new prime minister or president. No major news stories. A handful of celebrities had gone to rehab. Some minor politicians had resigned over various scandals.

I felt guilty about being disappointed. If I’d woken to the zompocalypse, all I would have wanted would be for the world to be this mundane.

Finally I pushed my plate and mug away and sat back. My stomach was full and I felt a little sleepy, but there’d be time for that later.

I made my way into the sitting room to the landline and dialled my mobile number. It rang then went to voicemail. Sigrid hadn’t changed the message.

‘Sig, it’s Vivia. I’m back and not hungry.’ I thought of the mountain of toast. ‘At least not that way. Call me back on the landline when you get this.’

I was halfway across the room when the phone rang.

‘Sig?’

‘God, Vivia, I can’t believe it! Are you okay?’

‘Yes, fine. How soon can you get home?’

‘Oh, Vivvie. I’m sorry. I can’t. I’m tied up with something really important right now…’ She broke off and I heard muffled voices. ‘I really have to go. I’ll call you later. I’m glad you’re back, though.’ The phone went dead.

I stood on the sunlit carpet with the phone cradled against my shoulder, confused. I’d been to hell and back. Sigrid and I were finally both alive at the same time. I was finally home. What could be more important than a sister coming back from the dead?

4

I spent years looking after Sigrid’s body while her mind wandered. Years of dressing her, wiping her rear, and feeding her porridge. Years of scraping together just enough for carers and earning just enough to feed us both. Every day of those years I’d wanted her back. Every day I felt guilty about what I had done to her. Every day I racked my brain for a way to fix her.

And when I brought her back, admittedly in a slightly different shape than the one in which she’d started, I’d had only a few hours before zombification would have turned me insane and ravenous. Finally, we were both alive and healthy, but somehow she had something better to do than see me.

Something loud began beeping in my ear, and I realised I still had the phone tucked under my jaw. I replaced the receiver gently.

One way or another, I only had a few weeks to find out enough to satisfy Tilde. Whatever was going on with Sigrid paled beside the knowledge that I’d be dead in a few weeks if I didn’t come up with a quick solution.

Stanley had spent most of the Second World War working logistics somewhere near Dover, so he hadn’t been in the house when the bomb hit, but he had been around at the time. He was also the closest thing my mother had to a confidant.

I went out to the back garden via the kitchen and stepped into a riot of colour. August was Stanley’s month. Stanley had separated the long narrow garden into sections—decking with pot plants, then a gravel-covered square with a Koi-filled pond and tiny bridge. From there a pergola led through to a lawn bordered by brilliant summer flowers. The lawn ended at a low brick wall with an iron gate. Beyond that was the vegetable garden, and further beyond, almost at the end of the garden, surrounded by trees, was Stanley’s greenhouse, and just behind that, the bomb shelter.

The first time my mother brought Stanley back from the dead, he was a seventeen-year-old soldier who’d died in a flooded tunnel under a French battlefield. The second time, he’d been an old man and had returned with an affinity for gardening. He gave the flowers more care than he ever gave Sigrid or me, and it showed. The back of the house could have been pulled from a photo in Gardener’s World. Whatever it was that made him ignore the mess in the house didn’t transfer to his garden. There wasn’t a leaf out of place.

Bees buzzed among the lavender pots on the decking, and a lawnmower whirred somewhere nearby. It had been winter when I’d died—cold, dark and miserable. I raised my face to the sun, revelling in the warmth on my skin.

I wanted to run inside and grab a book, come back out, and do nothing more for the rest of the day than lie on warm grass and read under a blue sky. I stifled the urge. There’d be time for that when my future was secure. My flip-flops clipped over the decking, then crunched over the gravel. Stanley’s stooped form was visible around the back of the greenhouse as he bent over the compost heap.

He straightened when he saw me and stretched, using one hand to rub his lower back.

‘What can I do for you, missy? I don’t usually see you out this end of the garden.’

Well, I have been dead for eight months. I bit back the retort. ‘I wanted to talk to you about the hags.’

‘What about them?’

‘Tilde got it into her head that she was murdered.’ I leaned back against the greenhouse and shaded my eyes against the sun. ‘Seems to think it was some kind of human conspiracy.’

He stopped mid-fork, then dropped it back into the wheelbarrow. He turned, and for the first time since I’d come back, he really looked at me. His eyes flickered away just for an instant, and I knew that the next words to come out of his mouth would be a lie. ‘Where’d she get a notion like that?’

‘It was seventy years ago. I know you weren’t here when they died, but if you know something about it, now’s the time to tell me.’

He turned his back on me and began forking green waste from a wheelbarrow into the compost. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

His loyalty to my mother would have been enviable if it weren’t so stupid. ‘Stan, Mum is dead, and it was a long time ago. You’re not betraying anything by telling me now.’

Stanley stuck the fork hard into the ground and leaned on the handle. ‘Vivia, all that stuff… it’s hag business. Not mine. Your mother never discussed it with me. For what it’s worth, I always assumed the person who bombed the house was the same one you had to hide from in the shelter.’

I sighed. It came out heavier than I intended. ‘The Germans bombed the house, Stanley.’

He tapped his nose. ‘Are you sure about that? Your mother always knew he’d come for her. Almost burned her as a witch back in the fifteenth century. Did you know that? She only escaped by playing dead.’

‘Uh-huh.’ I’d heard more about witch burning from my mother than I had ever cared to.

‘That’s why she’s dead now. She said he was coming for her. He couldn’t kill her if she was already dead.’

It sounded as if the paranoia that was half-baked when I was a child had become fully cooked by the time she died. Had she spent her last days in the shelter, huddling in the dark, hiding from the invisible monster coming to get her? Or had it been a real one all along? I’d never been sure.

I turned the thought over in my mind, and shivered. It was cooler here under the trees at the end of the garden, but the goose bumps on my skin had a different origin. Someone who killed hags had tracked my mother down to this house. That meant that if this was real, he knew who I was and where I lived. ‘You never thought to tell me?’

Stanley shrugged, ‘Like I said, hag business, not mine.’

I suppressed rising fury, a long-practised instinct in Stanley’s presence. ‘What can you tell me about him? Who is he?’

Despite my effort, I hadn’t managed to keep the irritation out of my voice. Stanley’s eyes widened. ‘I told you. I don’t know. It’s hag business. Your mother was always very clear I was to stay out of it.’

My hands balled into fists. ‘Damn it. You really can’t tell me anything?’

‘No, it’s—’

I resisted the urge to clench my teeth. ‘I know. Hag business.’

‘Well, yes,’ he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Thanks for nothing. The beautiful day felt as if it had suddenly turned darker, although the sun shone as brightly as ever.

Now what? The only consolation was that Stanley was probably just as insane as my mother, who was even more insane than Tilde. If it weren’t for the fact that my clock was ticking, I would have ignored the lot of them the same way I always had and assumed the shelter monster was just another of my mother’s insane fixations.

I leaned against the frame of the greenhouse and crossed my arms. The air smelled of freshly cut grass and disturbed soil. No matter how real the underworld was, it never felt alive.

The entrance to the shelter lay just beyond the greenhouse. It hadn’t been used in years, but Stanley had kept it neat. He’d planted tomatoes on the soil-covered roof, and sunlit fruit in varying stages of ripeness overhung the curved edges of the shelter. A stone path trimmed with pansies led down to the galvanised steel door. My brain told me it was a pretty scene, but I’d spent too many hours hiding in the dank dark inside. My stomach flipped queasily at the sight of it. I suppressed a shudder. So many years and the place still gave me the heebies.

I trotted back to the house, reached up to the top of the kitchen cabinet, located a torch then flicked it on and off to check the batteries still worked. A faint but visible light appeared then disappeared at the opposite end.

The shelter door didn’t move when I turned the handle. I shoved at it with my shoulder. It gave, and I stood in the doorway, panting a little.

The dark smelled like old potatoes and fetid water. I shone the torch around the tiny room. Other than a table that took up most of the floor and a single light bulb directly above it, nothing had changed. Who would have thought Desma would have overcome her fear of electricity?

Maybe it was different when she was the one huddling in the dark.  The thought came accompanied by a good dose of bitterness. I looked around for the switch, then reached to my left and flicked on the light.

A book lay in the middle of the table, the light directly above illuminating it as if it were the Holy Grail. My mother always had an overinflated sense of her own importance.

My foot squelched with my first step into the shelter, and something cold trickled between my toes. Sometime during the last few weeks the shelter must have flooded, and the packed earth floor had turned to thick mud. Tide marks on the walls indicated flooding had been a regular occurrence over the years. Despite this, pine needles were still visible in the sludge. They should have long since rotted away. Desma must have been almost swimming in them.

I squelched through the mud and grabbed the leather-bound book. It was thick and uneven in a way that made me think extra pages had been added over the years. It felt damp and slimy under my fingertips. I took it back into the house, stopping only to rinse my feet under the outside tap. Stanley kept his back turned, ostensibly absorbed in his compost heap, but his neck was stiff and his head held up high in a way that made me think I had somehow hurt his feelings.

Back in the house, I sat on my bed and opened the book to the first page. Desma’s cramped hand filled every spare inch of paper. Each letter had been squashed up against its neighbour, and they curved around the page edges where she’d struggled to fit them in.

I frowned then began carefully peeling the damp pages apart. Each was filled with names. There was nothing else—no sentences, no descriptions, no pictures, nothing that might have been a code. Nothing but names, one after another, written in different inks and pencils, as if she’d added them one at a time.

Gilbert Ostwald. John Brankovich. Graham Duke. Alois Hopkins. Andreas Hartwig. Koenrad Wahner. Arthur Ashley. Gilbert Schuhart. Ekkehard Jameson. Nicholas Wilson. John Lynwood. Mary Hopkins. Doris Reed. Richard Holme. Royce Abramson. Charlie Seabrooke. Hannah Jonker. Harriet Wahner.

Harriet? I hadn’t thought of her in years. Could it be the same one? If I’d ever known her surname, I’d long ago forgotten it. I ran my finger over the page. The ink on her name was darker than most of its fellows—written more recently than the others.

Stanley leaned against the doorway, ‘Your mother didn’t want that in the house. She wanted it hidden in case he found it and destroyed it.’

‘What does it mean? Whose are these names?’

‘I don’t know. It’s—’

‘Hag business, sure.’ A sense of inevitability settled into my bones and weighted them down. What hope did I have? I had only weeks to make sense of the crazy, and even then, how was I supposed to argue with it?

Someone banged on the front door. Stanley and I both jumped. A second later, a male voice shouted through the letterbox. ‘I know you’re in there.’

‘Don’t answer it,’ Stanley whispered, his shoulders slumped, and I got the impression he wasn’t too surprised by our aggressive caller.

The banging sounded again.

‘Who is it?’ I whispered back.

‘Bailiff.’

‘What?’

‘Well, you haven’t exactly been paying your bills, have you?’

‘I’ve been dead, Stan.’

‘They don’t know that.’

The man outside banged again, and shouted louder. ‘I’m just going to keep coming back.’

‘Why didn’t you pay them?’ I hissed.

‘I did. Well, I paid some, but I don’t have a lot of money. You know that.’

Of course he didn’t. Stanley made a bit of pocket money selling flowers, but I’d always been the earner. A softer knock sounded as something was shoved through the letterbox, and hit the floor.

‘What about Sigrid? Has she got a job?’

Stan gave me a look as though he thought I was an idiot. ‘She was a vegetable for how many years? Her CV’s a little patchy. Besides…’

‘Besides what?’

‘Nothing. Hold on…’ He held up a finger and cocked his head, listening. ‘I think he’s gone.’ His shoulders relaxed.

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘About a month. It was just letters at first. The debt collectors have only started in the last few weeks. I’m glad you’re back, Vivia.’

And so he said it. Glad to have me back. Glad to have someone to pay the bills.

My credit record was going to be shot, and my dream of ever buying my own place and escaping had diminished even further. At least I had my savings account. It would take a beating, but first things first.

‘Who do I owe?

‘Council, water, electrics, gas. Oh, and I used your credit card to buy groceries and to put petrol in the van, so that too.’

‘Bloody hell, Stan.’

‘What? You couldn’t expect me to starve.’

‘What were you going to do if I didn’t come back?’

He stared at me. The thought hadn’t occurred to him. ‘I’ll get you the letters.’

He disappeared and returned moments later with a pile of envelopes. None had been opened. All were in my name.

I was used to being angry with Stanley, with my life, but this was different. A cold fury rose within. I didn’t know what I’d expected him to do, but I hadn’t expected him to bankrupt me when I was dead. I’d spent years scraping together every penny I could to build an escape fund. I had no idea how bad my financial situation had become, but it was a good bet that all those years of penny-pinching had been wasted in eight months of Stanley not giving a shit.

He stood in the doorway and watched me, his wrinkled face impassive. All these years, and he still didn’t care when I was angry. Just as quickly as it had arisen, the fury dissipated. It was pointless shouting at him. I couldn’t waste time being angry. All my energy and attention had to go into one thing: figuring out a way to stay alive. And after that? I didn’t know what my future held. It was more uncertain than ever, but I knew one thing: with Sigrid properly alive, I was free to do whatever I wanted for the first time in my adult life. Things were going to change for the better, and Stanley would have to grow up and start looking after himself for the first time in his hundred-plus years.

5

After Desma’s return to the living in 1917 on a French battlefield, she spent the first year and a half in a prisoner-of-war camp. On the day of her release, she found Stanley waiting. She returned with him to Bow, where the Spanish flu had simultaneously wiped out his family and made the bottom two rooms of their damp tenement available for rent. Desma liked the locals, even if they didn’t like her.

When Desma became pregnant, Stanley married her ‘to keep her reputation’ as he put it. From what I understood, her reputation was long gone by that point, but Ana was born in 1921, and a human sister was born six years later. I never knew the girl’s name, but she died in the Princess Elizabeth Hospital for Children in Stepney before her fifth birthday.

‘They took her off in the fever cart,’ Ana once said when I was still small enough to be scared, ‘and you always knew that meant they weren’t coming back.’

Technically, Ana may have been my sister, but she’d never felt like one. It was hard to use the term for someone generations older than me who had always acted like a bossy maiden aunt.

I never knew if Ana got her morbid fascination with child mortality from Tilde or if it was just a hag thing, but it just added to the sense of inevitability I felt when Sigrid finally did get ill, as if I’d known it was coming all along. In some ways I even felt relieved, like the other shoe had finally dropped and now I didn’t have to worry about what was coming. Finally, I knew.

It was Ana’s old boots that I wore to school when I was ten, the ones stamped ‘County Borough of West Ham’ so that they couldn’t be pawned, and I lost them a day later so I could ask for the new trainers with go-faster stripes that all the other children were wearing.

Instead I got another pair of stamped boots, this time two sizes too big with newspaper stuffed into the toes. And when I lost those I got a caning with another heirloom—the same one Stanley’s father had used, and which had survived the bomb. I did get the sneakers, though, and on balance considered it a win.

I wore the trainers on the annual pilgrimage to Stepney. Rain or shine, Desma, Stanley, and I got on the Tube once a year and met Ana at the ancient St Dunstan’s churchyard, where we laid flowers in front of a headstone with five names. Then the adults would get drunk while I waited in the corner of the pub and hoped they’d forget about me. I was never so lucky.

That year, we had a table in the corner. With smoking in pubs still legal, a yellow haze filled the small space, and every table was filled even though it wasn’t much past noon. I had an orange juice in front of me, which I hadn’t touched. Condensation ran down the side of the glass onto the stained wood of the table. I swirled the water with my finger, making patterns on the table’s surface. Anything to avoid looking up.

I always made myself as small as I could, tried to take up as little space as I could, but the conversation always came back to me.

‘She lost your boots.’ The mascara under Desma’s eyes was smudged—not from crying, never that—but because she suffered from hay fever and had been rubbing at them dementedly under the cemetery trees.

‘What boots?’ Ana’s voice slurred. They were both on their eighth pint, and fourth shot. I’d been counting.

‘You know. Your council boots.’ Desma said.

Ana drained the last of her pint. ‘Ingeborg wore those boots. She always had such small feet. Not like the rest of us.’

‘Ungrateful.’

And so the whinging began. I ate food that wasn’t just bread and margarine, and tea with condensed milk. I had no idea how lucky I was. I’d only had nits once, and those I’d caught from school. I’d never been at risk of the poorhouse. And so it went on, until the three of them were too drunk to do it anymore, and I’d have to ask the barman to order us an overly priced cab to take us back over the river, having stolen the fare from the box under Stanley’s bed before we went out.

Sigrid was never invited on these annual excursions. Neither of us asked why for fear they might bring her the next time. As it was, she got the day off and I got a ton of sympathy and the ability to be granted favours from her for at least a week after.

That year, she was particularly grateful to be left alone. She’d begun to get an ache just below her knee. She thought it was a bruise at first: one of those mysterious ones that comes from a knock against a table or the corner of something, dismissed and forgotten at the time, but instead of getting better, it grew steadily worse. At night I heard her whimpering when she thought no one was listening.

‘Growing pains,’ Stanley had said.

‘The child whinges too much,’ my mother had said.

Later Sigrid told me she’d stood at the living room window and watched us make our way down the road, and the moment we turned the corner, she ran into the kitchen and switched the boiler on.

She’d also stolen two aspirin tablets from Stanley’s medicine box, but they didn’t help as much as she’d hoped. Heat from a bath almost hot enough to scald was the only thing that stopped the pain. She lay in the bath for hours, emptying out the cold water every now and then, and topping up with the hot. Her skin wrinkled, and her hair grew slick with sweat. Finally, her leg painless for the first time in days, she fell asleep.

She woke with a start at the sound of something at the front door, the bath water cold. She had no idea how long she’d been asleep, but she knew Desma wouldn’t be happy to come home and find Sigrid had put the boiler on.

She climbed out of the bath too quickly and slipped, falling onto the tiled floor.

Her knee gave way, the bone snapping. She hadn’t hit the floor that hard, but the bone had been slowly weakening, scooped and hollowed out by the tumour growing within.

If it had been painful before, now it was overwhelming. She screamed, but there was no one to hear. The noise at the door had been nothing more than a pizza delivery pamphlet pushed through the letterbox, the pamphleteer already six houses up the road.

When we arrived home four hours later, she was still on the bathroom floor, although she’d managed to grab a towel and pull it over her. I found her shuddering on the wet floor, her leg stuck out in front of her, the knee an odd shape that made it clear there was something very, very wrong.

Stanley leaned drunkenly in the doorway. ‘I can set it.’ He’d had some medic training during the war.

‘No.’ I said. I wouldn’t have let him, even if he’d been sober. Later, I’d remember the moment clearly. It was the first time I’d dared tell either of them no.

Desma half-fell into the bathroom beside him. ‘Well, that’s torn it, then,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m going to bed.’

Stanley raised his eyebrows slowly. ‘Huh. Well, I’ll go find something for a splint.’

‘No. I’m calling an ambulance.’

‘Aw, don’t do that, Vivvie,’ Stanley said. ‘You know what they’re like. You want that bloody social worker here again, sticking her nose in? Your mum’s not in a state to do much now, but she’ll be bloody pissed off in the morning.’

I didn’t want her pissed off in the morning. I didn’t want the social worker round again. She’d been useless anyway, but what other option did I have? I couldn’t leave Sigrid with a broken leg, and I sure as hell wasn’t willing to let a drunk Stanley start fiddling with it.

‘Don’t touch her.’ I ran to the living room to the phone. I picked up the receiver, but before I could dial nine nine nine, my gaze fell outside the house to the cab still at the pavement outside. I didn’t know why he was still there. Usually they drove off immediately, but I didn’t care.

I ran out into the road and asked the driver to wait. When I told him why, he followed me in and helped me pick Sigrid up off the bathroom floor. He averted his eyes politely while I wrapped her in a bathrobe. Then we half-dragged, half-carried her into the backseat of the cab.

Desma didn’t make much of an objection, but I did get a murmured, ‘For goodness’s sake, Vivia, you’re such a drama queen. Stanley could’ve fixed that.’

I’ll never forget the look the cab driver gave her—an incredible mix of disbelief and disgust—but to my relief he didn’t say anything until we were all in the cab. We set Sigrid on the backseat, where she lay white-faced and shivering.

‘Them’s your parents? Disgusting, getting into that sort of state. They should be ashamed.’ He put the car into gear and it pulled away from the pavement. He glanced over at me. ‘How old are you, anyway?’

‘Ten,’ I said. The magic number.

‘You look younger. And the other girl?’

‘She’s twelve. And she’s my sister.’

‘You don’t say.’ His eyes flickered to the rear view mirror. ‘Do you have anyone you’d like me to call?’

I knew what he was getting at. Was there another adult around, a responsible one? ‘That’s okay,’ I said. I’d never been a good liar, and I certainly couldn’t think of a good one without prior notice.

He was silent for the rest of the ride, but I could see the gears in his brain working as he tried to decide what to do. The drive didn’t take long—around twenty minutes. He pulled up outside the north entrance of the Queen Adelaide Hospital, outside what had once been the ‘Humans Only’ side. The big metal letters had been taken down from above the door, but the spaces where they had been were still clearly visible as darker green patches on the sun-scorched paint.

The driver went in first. He came out with a couple of orderlies and a wheeled stretcher. ‘I’ve got to get the car back for the end of my shift. You going to be alright, sweetheart?’

I nodded, and he turned his attention to the orderlies. ‘You make sure you call Social Services for these two.’ He wandered off, muttering under his breath about feckless parents.

I was worried they’d make me stay in the waiting room, but no one seemed to blink twice when I accompanied Sigrid on the stretcher, other than to ask every couple of minutes where our parents were.

Because the break was obvious, we were sent straight to x-ray, where I stood next to Sigrid, wearing a thick lead apron and holding her hand as she lay on the bed. I can still recall very clearly the moment I realised something was very wrong, because the x-ray man’s tone suddenly changed from a genuinely cheerful ‘let’s get you fixed up’ to a forced smile with a sideways glance, and the encouragement in his eyes turned to pity.

Desma and Stanley turned up two hours later, still drunk. She nodded at everything the doctor told her, and signed consent forms without looking at them.

Then they went back home, and I sat in the waiting room while Sigrid was in surgery. Many years later, I requested Sigrid’s medical records, and found that the admitting physician had flagged the incident for Social Services. Flagging was standard practice for any child admitted to the emergency room with broken bones, but the case worker assigned to review it had taken a single cursory look at the file and taken the flag down with a single note: ‘Break due to osteosarcoma.’

Maybe if I’d been a more self-aware child, or a brighter one, I’d have called Social Services myself, but I’d been living with Stanley and Desma all my life. They were my family. Looking back with an adult eye, I could easily see all the paths I could have taken, the things I should have done, the adults I could have asked for help, but none of them occurred to me at the time. They were just my family, and even if I was aware that what was normal for us wasn’t normal for everyone else, that didn’t stop it from feeling normal for me.

Whatever the reason, it meant that no one was interested in us, and six months later when Desma told the school that Sigrid had gone to spend time with family up north to recover and I’d gone along with her, neither of us were a blip on anyone’s radar.

6

The last time I saw Ana was four days before Sigrid died. She and Desma had spent the visit whispering to each other about whatever bug they had up their rears that day. The whispers were wasted on me. I was twelve and beyond caring at that point. Instead I spent the time browsing Ana’s enormous book collection and helping myself to chocolates from the bowls she kept dotted about.

After my mother died, I made no effort to contact Ana. She hadn’t wondered where I was, or tried to help. Like Stanley, her loyalties lay elsewhere, but unlike Stanley, she was a hag, and she might have had an idea of what Stanley and my mother had meant by ‘hag business.’

I left the house just after noon, still fuming at Stanley’s ability to get me into debt when I hadn’t even been there and running unspoken arguments through my head. I took the Tube north, and by the time I stepped off at Stepney Green, sweat had soaked through the back of my shirt, leaving me wishing I’d dressed in something lighter than jeans. I exited the station into full sunshine that beat down on the back of my neck as I walked.

Not much had changed. I turned off Mile End, down Stepney Green road. If I hadn’t been thinking about bombs before, it was hard to miss the reminder here. I stopped for a minute at the corner of Garden Street and took in the remains of the Unitarian College Chapel. which had been almost completely destroyed by an air raid in 1940. Like most of London, this part was rich in history. The number of historical bigwigs who had once walked these streets was phenomenal. I wondered what they would have made of the London buses and the mothers pushing buggies. The ones I’d seen in the underworld mostly ignored the signs of the more modern dead, but the occasional more-aware spirit stood and gawked.

I passed St Dunstan’s Church and deliberately kept my eyes averted from the churchyard. Memories were beginning to push at the edges of my mind and leak into my stomach, which tightened.

I stopped and leaned against a stone wall. I closed my eyes and breathed in once, twice, a third time. Funny how the person who terrified the child could still have so much power over the adult. Ana hadn’t even been the worst, but somehow seeing her felt as bad as seeing my mother. I didn’t want anything to with the hags. I hadn’t for years. Perhaps it was a foolish notion, considering I was one. I’d always known I’d have to face up to them sooner or later. I’d just always hoped later would never come.

When I’d got my breathing under control and told myself not to be such a ninny, I kept going. Ten minutes later I turned onto Ana’s street and walked along the row of terrace houses. Each house was still painted the same neutral beige. The front gardens differed, but all were Stepford neat, with pretty lace curtains in the front room to stop nosy passersby peeking in. Cars filled the parking spaces outside, mostly belonging to employees of the factory opposite. I couldn’t help but wonder if any of them ever noticed that nothing in this street ever changed, or that none of the residents ever complained about not being able to park outside their own homes. Probably not. I suspected they were just grateful to have got a spot.

There were no other pedestrians. A six-foot-high concrete wall, hiding a set of office blocks, turned the road into a dead end. Only residents or warehouse employees would have any reason to come down here, and as far as I was aware the number of residents was still firmly set at a grand total of one.

A garden gnome with what was meant to be a humorously large hat sunk down over its nose held the gate open at the house at the end. The gnome held a faux-handwritten sign reading: Bless this hat home.

I followed the path and rang the bell, then looked up toward the same hanging plant that had been there the last time I visited, and smiled at the security camera next to it.

The door buzzed then clicked open. I entered an ordinary hallway filled with family photos, a cheerful rug on the stained oak floor. A staircase directly in front led upstairs. There were two doors—one straight ahead beside the stairs, and the other to my left.

I stayed where I was. I remembered the path well enough from my childhood, but I didn’t know what improvements Ana might have made over the years.

A disembodied but familiar voice said, ‘Door to the left, Vivia.’

At the sound of her voice, my stomach calmed. I’d thought of her and my mother so many times over the years, always in a way that made my heart beat faster and my palms begin to sweat. Somehow, her voice brought me back to reality, to what actually was rather than what I remembered and what I’d hated. She was just a woman, after all.

I followed her instructions and entered a tiny room, small enough that I couldn’t move forward enough to close the door behind me. Birdcages filled it from floor to ceiling, each with a decaying bird at its base. A set of concrete steps at my feet led into the dark below.

‘Down the steps.’

I followed the instructions again, and again, and again. I went left then right, into rooms filled with old newspapers, books, headless teddy bears, anonymous plastic bags of rubbish, then down farther, occasionally having to wait while Ana switched off something in the room ahead.

As I went deeper, the square painted rooms became inexpertly bricked-up underground grottos. My sense of direction was somewhat screwed after taking about-turn after about-turn, but I was sure I’d gone a lot deeper than I had with my mother. Little Miss Paranoid has been burrowing.

A single row of hollowed out terraces wasn’t enough for her. I thought of all the families living in the street over from Ana, unaware that a crazy mole lady was burrowing beneath their homes.

Electrical cables snaked along the walls, and in the distance I made out the sound of dripping water, both familiar from my earlier visits. It was only as an adult that it occurred to me to worry whether electrocution or being buried alive was the bigger risk. I filed the thought away as not helpful. Right now the biggest risk was in not satisfying Tilde’s crazy quest in time.

Finally, yet another door clicked open and I found myself in what could almost have been an ordinary living room, if that living room had no windows, no natural light, a horde of skeletons, and an insane hag.

The skeletons were arranged on every spare space—at a dining table on the far end, sitting on each others’ laps, on the sofas and armchairs and stacked one on top of the other on the west-side wall, against a pretty mauve wallpapered backdrop.

Ana didn’t look up when I came in. She was ensconced on a leather sofa, skeleton on either side, PS3 controller in her hands.

On the screen, someone’s head exploded. ‘Got you, you son of a bitch,’ she muttered.

While Desma and I were both vain enough to burn off the warts as they appeared, Ana didn’t bother. Her dark hair fell across her shoulders in greasy strips. Even though she was the round, squat version of hag, we looked more like sisters than Sigrid and I did. Ana had my nose, or rather I had hers, and we both had the mole-ridden, wart-covered faces unique to our kind. Unlike me, Ana gave off a rank, unwashed smell. She had slid so far down the sofa that she was almost horizontal, but even her usual rotundness wasn’t enough to disguise the fact that she was heavily pregnant.

‘Congrats, Auntie,’ I said.

She snorted, still staring at the screen, fingers waggling. Gunfire sounded. ‘Let’s wait and see what it is, first. I don’t know how Desma did it. I’ve never managed to have a hag. All I get are more and more squalling humans, and it’s not as easy to get rid of them as it once was. Do you know how many forms you have fill out to give a baby away these days? As if giving birth isn’t nuisance enough. Now I know why Desma was always complaining about that sister of yours. The authorities get really weird if you don’t get emotional about getting rid of the things.’

‘Well, you’re looking healthy anyway,’ I lied.

She renewed her efforts on the controller. Something exploded on screen. ‘No, I don’t. I look like a pregnant hag. Don’t lie to me, girl. What do you want anyway? You haven’t been down here in years. You’re obviously after something.’

I looked around for somewhere to sit, but the skeletons took all the space. They hadn’t been here the last time. ‘What’s with all the bones?’

Ana shrugged, still staring at the screen. ‘Found ’em. All stuck together while I was excavating. It seemed rude to leave them all tangled up together, and I could do with some company. Took me days to get them cleaned and put back together right, even with the right glue.’

I couldn’t think of one good reason so many people had been buried in a mass grave, but I could think of a bad one. ‘You know it was probably a plague pit?’

‘Probably. What’s your point?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. Any contagion was likely long since gone, but I lifted my shirt up to cover my mouth anyway. Ana rolled her eyes.

I leaned back up against the door I’d come in, ‘Auntie, do you know anything about the house in Stepney? The hags seemed to think the bomb that killed them was targeted.’

‘And so?’ But she didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘Oh, I get it. Is that the deal you made with them to come back?’ And at my expression, ‘Oh, I heard you were dead. Desma was always the one to keep track of our numbers. Now it’s my job. It’s not like you ever showed any interest in the imminent extinction of our species, but you think I wouldn’t notice when the ticker dropped from two to one?’

‘And now it’s back to two, and I want to keep it that way,’ I said firmly.

She paused her game, and dropped the controller onto the lap of the skeleton next to her. ‘I don’t want to keep it that way. Two, Vivia. There are only two of us left. And two’s not enough.’ She pointed to her stomach. ‘Hopefully in a couple of weeks, it’ll be three. But I don’t want three either. I want a hundred.’

‘You want a hundred hag babies?’

‘No, you silly girl. I want a hundred hags. I don’t care if they’re my daughters, sisters, or’—she gave me a sly look—‘nieces.’

‘You might have to wait for that.’

‘Why?’

‘Hell, Auntie. I don’t even have a boyfriend. I haven’t in some time.’ I hadn’t had much luck with relationships. I’d found the people I’d dated had come in two categories: those turned on by the dying thing, and those turned off. I didn’t want the former, and the latter didn’t want me.

She rolled her eyes. I continued, ‘And I’ve only just got back from the dead. I’m a long way from being ready to be a mother.’

‘Pooh.’ She waved my objections away with a hand tipped with gnarled nails. ‘You don’t need a boyfriend. It’s one of the great things about the twenty-first century. You can order sperm off the internet. It comes in a tube.’

‘Ugh, no thank you,’ I said. That was a mental image I could have done without. ‘I wanted to ask you about the hags who died in Stepney.’

For the first time, she looked at me instead of the screen. ‘Lydia. Catherine. Ruth. Ingeborg—’ My mother’s litany, and the names carved on my bedroom door.

‘I know who,’ I interrupted. ‘You were here then. You survived. You and Desma. Why?’

Ana pushed herself off the sofa with a hefty sigh and made her way to the desk on the opposite side of the room where she tugged open a giant plastic jar of Haribo and grabbed a handful. She tipped the jar toward me.

‘No thanks.’

‘It’s because we weren’t foreigners. We were part of the war effort. The others, they weren’t trusted enough. Couldn’t go anywhere, do anything. I hardly saw Desma during the war. She had some top secret job somewhere in Westminster. Wasn’t allowed to talk about it. You think she was a pain in the rear? Just imagine what she was like with some big secret government badge.’

‘And you?’

‘I’d got my letter. Right pleased about it, I was, too. Any excuse to get out of the East End, even if I had to hang out with a bunch of weasels.’ She rolled her eyes again, then popped a sweet into her mouth and chewed with her mouth open.

She’d lost me. ‘What letter?’

‘My hopping letter. I got my hopping letter. I was down in Kent making an extra few bob. Couldn’t get onto the fancy human farms, but the non-human ones paid well enough, especially with the war on. They were desperate too. Take almost anyone, even the rats and the weasels. Wouldn’t take the other hags. No history, you see. They’d only take the same ‘uns they’d had in previous years. Even with the shortages, they’d take weasels over Germans and the French. The others had no chance of getting in.’

A memory ticked in: Desma and Ana reminiscing about their hops-picking days. ‘So you don’t know.’

She gave me a sharp look, ‘Oh, I know all right. They were murdered. Every one of them. I don’t know how, but they were murdered.’

‘But you don’t have any evidence?’

‘I have plenty of evidence. Hags have always died. But we’re technically immortal, and now there are only two of us left. That’s not a bit suspicious to you?’

Maybe if you were paranoid. I was talking to a woman who’d had human child after human child and apparently had never considered that maybe that a low hag birth rate and some natural, if unlucky, attrition was all that was to blame for the decline of the hags. A deliberately targeted bomb did not make sense, but I was starting to feel like the last sceptic in a bodysnatchers movie—the one who was obviously going to be next on the hit list for refusing to see what everyone else saw.

‘You think I choose to live like this?’ Ana went on. ‘Really? Never seeing the sunlight? No, it’s because I do what I have to do to survive this. No one can get down here without me knowing about it. You might as well paint a target on your back, running around in public like you do. So if you get killed, don’t come crying to me. As long as there is at least one of us left, we’ll survive.’

‘You sound like a conspiracy freak.’

‘Of course I do. Someone’s conspiring. That’s what a conspiracy is.’

‘Who? Do you have any idea who it was? Any evidence? Anything at all I can take back to Tilde?’

‘Him. The one who was always after us. Come on, Desma must have told you about him.’

‘You mean the one who was always mysteriously after us whenever she had a boyfriend round.’

‘Don’t be disrespectful to your mother.’

‘Who is it, then?’

‘Probably a human.’

‘Which one? Anyone trying to kill you in the forties would be getting on a bit now.’

‘Does it matter? They all hate us.’

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. ‘There are a few billion humans on this planet. I don’t think they’re all trying to kill us.’

‘Oh, they would if they could. They definitely would. If I had any other option, do you think I’d be living here like a mole?’

Probably. ‘Well, thanks anyway,’ I said. I’d have to try something else. I had no idea what, but Ana was clearly a dead end. ‘Can I just go back out the way I came?’

Ana picked up the controller and put her game back on. ‘Yup.’

I’d reached the door when she said, ‘Vivia?’

‘Yes?’ I turned back to see an expression I’d never seen on her face before. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but for minute I thought it might be fear.

‘I’ve got no proof, mind you.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

‘There were a lot of street weasels hanging about that year. A lot.’

‘You think it was one of them?’

‘I don’t know, but I do know I never met a weasel I could trust. You watch out for them.’

‘I will do,’ I said.

I negotiated the twists and turns of Ana’s underground maze, deep in thought. The mention of weasels along with the name in Desma’s book of names was enough to warrant looking at a long-forgotten part of my childhood a little closer. Something had happened to Harriet. Finding out what would be a good next step.

7

I stood in the sunshine on the road outside Ana’s warren. The closest cemetery was St Dunstan’s, once known as the Church of the High Seas due to the large number of sailors interred there. It was also home to Ingeborg and Tilde’s graves, and a lot of bad memories. I took a walk towards Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park instead. The Park was once Bow Cemetery, and along with the more famous Highgate Cemetery, was one of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ laid out in the mid-nineteenth century to deal with London’s burgeoning population. More than three hundred fifty thousand people were buried there by the time it was closed for burials, which made it one of the biggest ghost magnets in East London.

I never met a ghost who understood the concept of personal space. A strong streak of pure contrariness differentiated those who chose to stay on this earth and those who passed over. Add in extreme boredom, and, what with their invisibility and the power to walk through walls, most ghosts turned Peeping Tom within a year or two of death.

They sneaked into houses and peeked at secrets that they sold to the highest bidder—not for cash, but rather for entertainment. Promise a ghost a few hours with an audiobook of his or her choice, or their pick of the movie at the Graveyard Theatre, and I could find out almost anything.

I entered by the south entrance. The scent of moist soil and earthly decay hit my nostrils. Old gravestones leaned drunkenly towards the soil, their dedications weathered beyond legibility.  Ivy and knotweed almost swallowed them whole, leaving only hints of grey among the green.

I’d come here with Sigrid once after she’d come back wrong, and the ghosts of the place had immediately swarmed towards us, sliding and rubbing up against her like phantom-cats. She’d always attracted the things, as if they recognised she was a body without anyone home, and they were hoping the residence was available for the taking. A hag alone wasn’t worth that level of fuss. I got no such welcome.

The path wound deeper into the trees. Now and then a dog walker strolled past. I kept going, aware of the dead beneath my feet and the occasional forgotten plague pit dotted here and there.

Once deep into the green, I stopped and took a deep breath. Birds called in the trees above, and small creatures scurried in the undergrowth. A train rattled away somewhere in the distance, but this place felt like an oasis from city life—one of the reasons the ghosts liked it. Like my mother, they came from a time when a bit of greenery was only a few miles away. The constant exhaust and fumes of the city tended to annoy them.

I closed my eyes, reached for my hag magic, and opened them again. A small naked ghost crouched a couple of feet ahead on the path, all her attention focused on a row of ants making their way over a fallen headstone. Aged about nine, she was painfully thin and covered in the tell-tale marks that told me she had died of the pox.

‘Hello.’

She startled. ‘Hello.’ Her voice was small and rough, as if the pustules had reached her throat.

‘Where is everyone?’ I asked. I’d expected at least a handful more.

‘Some old wally got himself mugged on the north side,’ she said. ‘There’s an ambulance and a cop car.’

Rare entertainment. ‘Why aren’t you there?’

‘Feel sorry for the old sod.’ She straightened and looked at me with interest. ‘What do you want?’

‘Usual. Entertainment for information. You choose. Choice of movie at the Graveyard Theatre, audio book. Whatever.’

‘All right. What do you need?’

‘A few things,’ I said. I detailed what I knew about the bombing of the house in Cooper Street, and described Harriet for her. ‘Any information on what happened to any of them would be helpful.’

She blinked out of sight. I carried on down the path, finding another six ghosts on the way and then a crowd at the edge of the cemetery, even though the ambulance and police were long gone. I offered the same deal to all of them. If I were lucky, I’d get something useful by sundown.

I stopped off on the way home and emptied out my savings account by withdrawing my last fifty quid from a cash machine, then picked up a refurbished pay-as-you-go phone from a mobile repair shop. It was ancient and scratched, but worked well enough. On the pavement outside the shop, I entered my old number into it, typed ‘Sigrid’ in the contact details, then dialled. It went to voicemail. I left a brief message then took the underground back home.

Night had fallen by the time I reached my front door, but it hadn’t added a degree of coolness. A film of sweat coated the back of my neck.

The stench of decomposition hit me the instant I entered the house. So many years of blaming my mother for the stink in the house, and now at least some of it was down to me. I’d have to do something with that coffin. Clean it up and disinfect the attic. The thought did not appeal. Maybe I could just close the door and pretend it wasn’t there.

‘Stanley?’

No answer. I found him out at the end of the garden, deadheading daisies in the dark. ‘Stan, do you remember Harriet?’

‘Who?’

‘That street weasel who was staying here. The one who disappeared.’

‘Oh, her. She ruined my lawn.’

‘Right. Do you remember where she worked?’

‘What?’

‘She had a job. I remember her saying that. Do you remember where it was?’

‘God, Vivia. I don’t know. Uh, it was something service-based. Waitressing? No. That can’t be right. No one would want one of them handling food.’ He rubbed at his moustache, his eyes staring upwards, thinking. He blinked. ‘Oh, I know. It was the cab place down on Perry Street. I think she did dispatch. Something like that.’

Perry Street was only a few roads down, and the cab place was likely to be open until the wee hours. I pocketed my keys and took a walk. I’d used their cabs a couple of times, and the office had the stark and overly bright look of every cab office I’d ever been in. I’d always thought it was done on purpose—a sneaky way to try and sober up the drunks before they puked in the car.

The dispatcher, a broad-faced woman in her sixties, acknowledged me with a nod of the head without looking up.

‘Where to?’ She had the rough voice of someone who had smoked too many cigarettes and didn’t intend to stop.

‘Nowhere. I wanted to find out about someone who used to work here. A weasel named Harriet. This must have been twenty years ago. I don’t know her last name.’

She raised her eyes, then shook her head. ‘Sorry, love. Doesn’t ring any bells, but I’ve only been here a year or two.’

‘Is there anyone who was around then that I could ask?’

‘Uh, I don’t know. We have quite a high turnover of drivers, but the boss’ll be in in the morning. If you leave your number, I’ll ask him to call you.’

‘Yes. Please. I’d really appreciate it.’ I scribbled my new number down on the back of one of her cab cards and slipped it under the glass.

I went home and switched on my laptop. I made myself a big mug of coffee and a sandwich while it booted up then sat at the kitchen table and ate with one hand and surfed with the other. I found plenty of detail on the bombing of Stepney, mostly eyewitness accounts, but couldn’t find anything on the particular bomb that had hit Eighteen Cooper Street.

I entered a few names from my mother’s journal just in case, but nothing interesting came up. I stared down at the book. It would take all night to look them all up, and they might not mean anything. I had better things to do. Like go to sleep.

It had been a long day. Recovery from decomposition followed by the emotional toll of the trip to Ana’s meant I should have conked out within minutes, but instead I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling while my mind whirred.

Part of my mother’s paranoia was justified. She had been persecuted. The ugly woman was always the villain in any old fairy tale. Add advanced age, and she’d likely be a cannibal, too. Mix in a sprinkle of witch burnings and some Grand Inquisitors, and you had a perfect recipe for paranoia. Maybe Desma was wrong about someone coming to get her. Maybe Tilde was wrong about some vast human conspiracy, but she shouldn’t have been wrong about how she died.

I fell asleep finally, but spent most of the night in a kind of half-assed insomnia: part-awake and part confused dozing. I gave up on proper sleep at just past five, got up, and showered.

Sometime in the night, another handful of hairs had turned white—too many to pluck out. I plaited my hair back and applied a little make-up, hoping it would make me look a little less haggy. It didn’t. I just looked like a hag in make-up, like my mother.

I dressed then took Desma’s journal into the kitchen and paged through it while I ate cornflakes one-handed. It didn’t make for a very exciting read, and by the time I swallowed the last spoonful, I’d grown convinced it was nothing more than the written equivalent of Desma’s daily mustard fetish. I closed the book with a snap.

I stopped off at the cab place on Perry Street on the way to the station, but the man on the desk had no idea what I was talking about or when the boss would be in. I left my number and the same message again. While I was at it, I stood outside the cab place and dialled my old number again, and got voice mail once more. I left another message. What on earth was Sigrid doing?

I firmly pushed her out of my head. Whatever was eating her would have to wait. If I managed to survive the next three weeks, I’d have a lifetime to talk to her about it.

There was only one more place I could think to find out more information about the Cooper Street bomb: the London Metropolitan Archives in Clerkenwell.

It was the wrong time of day for the Tube, and I spent the journey squashed up nose to armpit against commuters in the early summer heat. It was muggy and warm when I left, but the twin scents of exhaust and rain were an improvement on a stranger’s lack of deodorant.

I’d never visited the Archives, and had expected something cramped and airless that smelled of old books, but it turned out to be an airy brick building with clean white-and-red tables and new-smelling carpets.

I explained to one of the staff what I was looking for, and after a few questions, she retrieved two old record books then pointed out the World War Two section in case I needed more general information.

I thanked her then took both the record books and the pair of proffered white gloves. I settled down at a table and began searching through entries. After a bit of skimming, I found an entry for 11 May 1941 that read:

3.21am/IB/18 Cooper Street, Stepney, E1, London, UK/One private house, severely damaged by fire. Gas and water mains fractured. 5 Females (non-human) killed.

I kept paging, but there wasn’t much more than two further reports, one that listed names of the dead, which I already knew, and another detailing the clean-up operation on the damaged gas main.

The attack that began on the tenth of May and carried over to the wee hours of the eleventh had been one of the worst of the Blitz, even if was to be the last major attack. Any other time, an explosion would have warranted a detailed investigation, but on that night in early May, everyone was just too busy trying to put the fires out.

A little further digging and I learned that IB stood for Incendiary Bomb rather than Explosive Bomb. I wondered how they could tell the difference once the damage had been done. A little more investigation gave me the answer. The incendiaries were little aluminium tubes about a foot long, specialising in lighting fires. The EBs on the other hand ranged upwards from fifty kilograms in weight, and caused greater devastation.

The book began to detail the reasons the East End was particularly badly hit (its proximity to the docks), then turned to the bombers’ other targets: ports, industrial centres, munitions factories. When I started reading about employment conditions at the munitions factories, I gave up. Interesting for the history buff, but not to me.

Something was nagging at me, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I went back and reread everything, but nothing jumped out.

I sat back in the chair, frustrated, and tapped my fingers against the wooden table. I’d only been investigating for a day and a half and was already approaching a dead end. What had I expected here? A neat note mentioning that this bomb had been different? It wasn’t. It was the same as every other that had rained down on the East End.

The remainder of the afternoon was spent going through faded newspaper articles and skimming research papers. By the time I emerged blinking and dry-eyed into the summer evening, I was exhausted but also empty-handed.

I stretched then reached for my new phone in my bag. I’d switched it off while I was inside. I stepped into a coffee shop and picked up a sandwich and an espresso while I waited for it to reboot.

I was just considering whether to order more coffee when the phone buzzed, and a message came up on the screen telling me I had a missed call from my old number. My errant elder sister had finally called me back. I wanted to be understanding. She’d been dead for so long. It must have been hard. Blah blah blah. All I really wanted to do was tell her off for being so damned rude.

8

Angels didn’t exist, or at least they hadn’t until I’d brought one back from the dead. Sigrid had spent her adulthood as a sweaty, flabby shell, and then suddenly she wasn’t. I’d been used to her playing dress-up in the underworld. The angel outfit, complete with great bloody sword, hadn’t been much of a surprise. She’d come back with me, beautiful, strong, and winged, chock-full of belief in justice, and determined to see me right.

And now? Was it an angel thing? I’d only had a few hours with her before I’d had to go into the underworld, but it had been a good few hours. It had been wonderful having her back, but adjusting to the living world after years dead had to have been hard. She’d had eight months on her own. And it was on her own. Stanley didn’t count. I dialled, and she answered almost immediately.

‘Hi,’ I didn’t intend to let anything into my voice, but something in my tone must have come through, because when Sigrid answered there was an apologetic lilt to her voice.

‘Sorry for being so abrupt, Viv. It really wasn’t a good time.’

‘That’s okay.’

‘You want to come over?’

She gave me an address, and it took me a moment to remember why I recognised it.

‘You’re staying with Per Ogunwale?’ Per had been a help in the few weeks before I’d been bitten and died. He was a cyber-surgeon specialising in what I considered non-essential surgery—the replacement of healthy limbs with cyber ones. Not a bad guy, but not quite a sane one.

My incredulity must have been clear, because her response had a defensive ring to it. ‘He’s helping me with some stuff.’

‘Okay, fine. It’ll take me at least an hour to get there.’

‘I’ll see you later, then.’ She hung up.

Per lived in a grubby high-rise just outside Whitechapel, on the edge of a restricted zone that gave off a stunningly beautiful borealis and reflected a rainbow of colour onto the otherwise dingy buildings in the area. According to the authorities, all areas still giving off thaumaturgical radiation were fenced off, but the cheap-as-chips housing directly around the marked-off zone indicated how many Londoners had faith in their elected representatives to tell them the truth when it really mattered. When Sigrid had still been a soulless body and I’d been saving every last penny to get out of the house, this was where I’d intended to move. It was the only place in the city I would have been able to afford.

I went out the tube station and trotted down the high street, where the street traders were enjoying a good summer day’s trade. I passed stalls selling cheap imported clothing, fresh but stinky fish, household cleaning products that might have been knock-offs, and I was blocked three times by people hawking pirated DVDs.

Street weasels called inappropriate comments after me twice, but I ignored them, and they moved on to their next target without blinking. There were three of them—youngsters, all male, and wearing what I assumed was the latest youth fashion, because no one else would choose to wear those items in such a combination otherwise. Their fur was browner than Harriet’s red, and they were all shorter than she had been. They had the same triangular faces, sharp teeth, and black, darting eyes.

There were a lot of street weasels hanging about that year. They were always hanging about. That’s why they were called street weasels, but still I couldn’t help but wonder what I was missing.

‘Whatchu looking at?’ My appraisal had been noted.

‘Nothing.’ I turned my back and kept going until I found Per’s block.

Digmore Rise hadn’t changed either, but I’d have been surprised if it had. The tangled knot of wires and plastic that had once been the buzzers was still there, as was the entrance door wedged open with a brick. The same stench of urine and rotting rubbish assaulted my nostrils as I entered. Surprise, surprise: the lift was still broken. I took the stairs.

I found Per’s reinforced door with its multitude of locks and banged on it. It opened almost immediately and I came face to face with the cybergiant.

Almost every newspaper article I’d read about him took pains to mention his mixed heritage, as if it were relevant. Per’s father was Nigerian—a lovely man who had been murdered—and his mother was Swedish. He had his father’s dark skin and what I imagined were his mother’s green eyes. It made for an attractive mix. I didn’t know what side the height came from, but with the replacement cyberlegs, the man was almost seven feet tall. I looked up. He’d had more upgrades. The wires that had protruded from his forehead were missing, replaced by a metal strip. Silver streaked down his forearms towards his fingertips, which shone.

He raised his eyebrows at me. The metal plate on his head rose. ‘Every time you see me you stare.’

Of course I stared. He was a stare-worthy man. He was also right. I was being rude. ‘Sorry.’

He stood aside to let me in. The front door opened straight onto the living room, which was decorated plainly with white sofas, wooden floors, and a balcony showing a view of the devastated magic site beyond. The contamination made the summer sky shimmer in an admittedly pretty array of colour. The place appeared spotless, but it stank, as if the toilet had backed up.

I breathed in sharply. Sigrid sat on the sofa opposite the balcony. The fluffy white wings she had brought back from the dead were almost bare. Only a few scraggly grey feathers remained on a bony cartilage frame. The skin hung slack and loose around her face, and her eyes were dark pits, as if someone had smeared charcoal underneath them. Patches of pink scalp were visible where the hair that had come back from the dead as blond and glossy had partially fallen out.

She’d looked healthier when she’d been dead. The bottom dropped out of my stomach. Oh, no. Something had gone wrong. Again. My chest tightened.

Despite the muggy heat, she sat huddled in a blanket. The way the blanket fell didn’t look right. I took four steps and lifted it up. Both her legs were gone.

The fear turned to fury. I turned on my heel. ‘Did you do this?’

‘No—’ Per said.

I didn’t believe him. The man had a well-documented habit of cutting limbs off. ‘Are you insane?’

I’d been looking at Per when I said it, but Sigrid answered. ‘I can speak for myself, you know. I’m right here.’

Her words slurred, and it took a moment for my brain to interpret them.

‘What happened? What’s wrong with you?’

She rolled her head towards me, ‘Hello to you too.’

The penny dropped. Amputations didn’t make your hair fall out. ‘You’re sick again.’

When Sigrid had first been diagnosed, the tumour had already spread beyond her knee, and into her lungs. Amputation had been a pointless option, and chemo not much more than a token hope. Her missing legs gave me a ridiculous sense of hope.

‘How bad is it?’

Per closed the door, and took the armchair on the other side of her. He reached over and took her hand in his. ‘Better than it looks. She’s due for a check-up at the hospital tomorrow, but we think the amputations stopped it. She’s undergoing chemo to catch any stray cells, but it looks good so far.’

He squeezed her hand, and the look he gave her was unexpectedly intimate.

‘Oh my God, are you two a couple?’ I tried to keep the surprise out of my voice, but didn’t come close to succeeding.

Despite Sigrid’s apparent grogginess, she managed to give me a sharp look. She’d been dead so long, I’d forgotten how snippy she got when she wasn’t feeling well. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’

‘It’s just unexpected,’ I lied.

I did have a problem with it. A big problem. Sigrid had died when she was fourteen, she’d spent years dead, and only eight months alive as an adult. Jumping straight into a relationship was definitely a problem, but it had definitely been a ‘pick your battle’ couple of days.

I took the seat on the sofa next to her. Close up, she had a sour odour.

We were interrupted by the pitter-patter of fat little feet. Sigrid’s cat Vinegar turned the corner and trotted up to me, rubbing his head against my calves. I scratched the top of his head and ran my hand along his flank, only to feel his fur had turned matted and rough. He’d also lost weight, and I finally recognised the smell I’d had noticed when I’d walked in. Not a backed-up toilet, but rather an incontinent cat.

Per said, ‘She couldn’t leave him with Stanley. He kept forgetting to feed him, but he’s really not an indoor cat. Can you take him back? Please?’

‘Uh, sure,’ I said. And if I was dead in three weeks? I stuck the thought to the back of my head. One problem at a time. Instead I took in my sister. I’d seen her in so many guises. I remembered the dying young girl, and the shell. And then there were the many versions she had been in the underworld. This was another version entirely.

A horrible realisation was dawning on me. I’d spent years with Sigrid’s body, cleaning and looking after her, but the girl I had known had died at fourteen. Occasionally meeting up with her confused and sometimes angry spirit in the underworld wasn’t the same thing. I didn’t know the frustrated woman sitting next to me. She may have resembled Sigrid physically, but she was very little like the sister I’d been expecting.

All these years with so much catching up to do, and suddenly I realised I had no idea what to say to her. ‘Um, how are you doing, otherwise?’

‘Crappy.’

Per stood awkwardly. ‘I think I’ll go put some tea on. Vivia, would you like a cup?’

Outside, something banged and a shower of sparks flew up from the contaminated area. I stared out the window to give myself something other than Sigrid to look at.

Sigrid mumbled something then shook her head. The confusion in her eyes cleared a little. ‘Sorry, Viv. I’m just so tired.’

Per came back holding three mugs in one hand by the handles. He set them down on the coffee table in front of us. ‘The medication is giving her some whacked-out dreams,’ he said. ‘She’s sleepwalking.’

My eyes flickered to the unnaturally flattened blanket.

‘Or she was. She’s still restless. Keeps trying to get out of bed.’ He returned to the kitchen for a blister pack and a glass of water. He popped two white tablets out of the pack and passed them to her, then the water. I picked up the tea and inspected it so I didn’t have to look at her.

I changed the subject. ‘I saw the hags.’ I told her the story of what had happened in the underworld and the deal I’d struck with them.

Per listened open-mouthed. ‘Head in a bag? That sounds—’ He paused while he searched for the right words. ‘I don’t know. Illegal?’

I hid a smile. That was a delicate way to describe it. ‘It buys me time. And any murderer would likely be dead by now anyway. I’m not planning on decapitating anyone. Sig, do you remember Mum saying anything about it?’

Her thin shoulders lifted as she shrugged. ‘I don’t know. There was a lot of crazy. Have you asked Stanley?’

‘Yes, of course, but you know what he’s like. I spent the whole morning at the Archives, but I’ve got nothing.’

I didn’t know what was in the tablets, but she seemed a little sharper than she had a minute ago. ‘Well, maybe that’s for the best, then.’

‘What? What’s for the best?’

She let out a long breath. ‘Viv, coming back from the dead isn’t natural.’

‘Are you saying I’m better off dead?’ That couldn’t be what she meant.

‘You’re messing with the natural order of things. You died.’

Oh my God, it was. ‘So? So did you. And “natural order”? You sound like the Human Preservation Front.’

‘Well, you sound like Mum.’

Her words were a punch to the gut. ‘I’m nothing like her. I just don’t want to die.’

‘Everyone dies. Maybe you just need to accept it. This stuff that you do, this magic, it’s not right. Can’t you see how much damage it does?’

‘It helped you. You’d be long dead if I hadn’t brought you back.’

‘That doesn’t mean it’s right. This whole thing, it’s not natural. Someone always loses. I did. Yes, I’m alive, but I lost years, and I’m still not right. I forget what’s real sometimes. I tried to step off the balcony yesterday. I forgot I couldn’t fly. If Per hadn’t been there to pull me back…’

I smoothed my hair back, feeling the need to do something with my hands. ‘I’m sorry.’ I said, then mentally kicked myself. I was getting tired of apologising. Yes, I’d brought her back from the dead. Twice. But it had been her idea both times.

‘I’ve been going to a support group. It’s helped me see things a little more clearly,’ Sigrid said.

‘A support group of what? People who’ve come back from the dead? You, Ben, and Stanley sitting in a circle?’

‘Humans who’ve been affected by the metanatural.’

I grimaced. ‘That doesn’t sound like a good idea.’

‘Why not? It’s just to talk it out. You’ve been like this your whole life. You don’t know what it’s like to be ordinary.’

‘I am ordinary.’ Sort of.

‘No, you’re not. Not even close. It’s not normal to die as much as you do. Hell, it’s not normal to die at all. At least, not more than once. It’s not human.’

‘So? You’re not human either. Your mother was a hag. You might look human, but you’re not.’

‘I’m more human than you are.’

Low blow. Before I could even think of a response, she continued, ‘You can pretend it’s all normal as much as you want, but all this magic and people acting like animals, it’s damaging. And no one’s looking out for humans. Non-humans have the Lipscombe Trust to help them. Humans get nothing. Non-humans cause all the damage, but they only help themselves. I certainly got no support from you...’

Where on earth was all this coming from? ‘That’s because I was dead,’ I said sharply. ‘I would have supported you if I could.’

‘By doing what? Killing me until you got it right?’

The shock on my face must have shown, because her voice softened. ‘Okay, that wasn’t fair, but you act like every non-human is just some cuddly misunderstood puppy. They’re not.’

‘Of course they’re not. They’re just people. You get the same proportion of angels and assholes. Just like anyone else.’

‘Except when humans go bad, they don’t eat people. Vampires? Zombies? Werewolves? They eat people.’

‘So do some humans,’ I said stubbornly. Okay, not that often, and mostly in Germany for some reason, but I wasn’t willing to let her have the point. The occasional werewolf might go for human prey, but so what? Humans murdered other humans all the time. Bad behaviour wasn’t confined to wolves, but they all got tarred with the same brush when one went bad.

Sigrid rolled her eyes, ‘Seriously?’

‘They’re people, Sig. We’re people!’

‘Don’t shout at me.’

I realised my heart was racing. I glanced over at Per. The cybergiant had shrunk back in his chair and was staring straight past me out the window. He had ‘I’m not getting involved’ written all over him.

I stood up. ‘I need to go.’ Before I say something I really regret. ‘Thanks for the tea.’

I let myself out, stomach churning and heart racing. I made my way down the urine-scented stairs with my hands clenched into fists.

She was being ridiculous, but she was ill. People were allowed leeway when they were ill. The thought didn’t help. It just made it worse. It was only when I got to the bottom of the stairs that I realised I’d forgotten the cat.

9

Even after a forty-five minute commute, I struggled to get my key into the lock because my fingers shook so badly. As barneys went, I’d had worse, but not with Sigrid. We had rarely fought. Desma and Stanley were our enemies; we weren’t each other’s.

I stabbed at the lock again, and the key finally turned. I shoved the sticky door open with my shoulder, then slammed it shut behind me. I stood shaking in the dark, hands clenched into fists.

You sound like Mum. How dare she? Desma would never have spent over a decade spoon-feeding Sigrid or wiping her arse. Hell, she’d hardly cared when Sigrid was dying. Even then, I’d been the one to look after her. I’d been the one to help her to the bathroom. I’d fed her. I’d been the one to clean out the vomit bucket after her chemo treatments. Me. I was nothing like my mother. Ungrateful…

Oh, God. My anger deflated as fast as a punctured balloon. ‘Ungrateful’ had been Desma’s favourite word. I took in a deep, shuddering breath, and with it came hot, muggy air, thick with the stench of putrefaction. My putrefaction.

I couldn’t blame it all on Desma this time. She’d been dead for years; the worst of her stink had passed. Mine was still fresh and horrible and all too familiar from childhood—the same constant malodour that had stuck to a woman who had no interest in washing, even after she had been dead for a week.

Sigrid was right. Not about everything, but she was sick. I also got bitchy when I was feeling rotten. I was more like Desma than I cared to admit. I had made the house stink. I’d spent the day trying to make facts fit conspiracy theories. I even lived with Stanley, for Pete’s sake. The question wasn’t how was I like her, but how was I different?

The stench was suffocating, the house suddenly airless. I wrenched the front door back open and threw myself out, slamming it closed behind me.

My knees buckled, and I crumpled to the bottom step. I am not my mother. My brain knew it,—I wasn’t a psychopath like her—but my heart wasn’t so sure. Hags were insane. All of them. I’d never met one with a full box of pencils. I’d always suspected it was only a matter of time before I, too, began tunnelling under the house and started muttering about someone out to get me.

I ran my fingers through my hair and breathed deep. A sliver of moon shone brightly above, and all the stars were out. A night bus rumbled somewhere in the distance. I breathed in deeply and out again, slowly. The little pool of rage at the bottom of my stomach that had boiled over slowed and calmed.

‘No,’ I said out loud. Things were different now. I had choices. Some of them weren’t great, but I had them nonetheless. First choice: no more dead things in the house.

My knees popped as I stood. I stopped off in the kitchen to grab a torch so I could see what I was doing then headed straight out to the back of the garden.

The shed door was unlocked, and I had to move piles of plastic pots, fertiliser boxes and cotton wadding out of the way before pulling out Stanley’s wheelbarrow. I grabbed his spade, a roll of black plastic bags and his gardening gloves.

I pushed the whole lot back into the house, muttering all the while like a maniac, or maybe just a crone.

The wheelbarrow bump-bumped all the way up the stairs to the attic, and the spade kept falling out. The stink rose the higher I went.

I wheeled the barrow over to the two glass coffins, one empty and one not. Mine was disgusting—covered in decomposition gunk and scraps of yuck that I didn’t want to look at too closely. Desma’s wasn’t as bad. She’d been dead longer. Her flesh had desiccated and shrunk onto her bones. Most of the stench had come from me, this time. No wonder Sigrid had moved out.

The gardening gloves fit snugly over my fingers, and it took only minutes to get Desma out of the coffin and into the wheelbarrow. Then I used the spade to scoop up as much of the gunk from both coffins as I could, and dumped it on top.

Then I took the wheelbarrow back down the stairs, out the back of the garden past the greenhouse, and dumped its contents into the middle of the floor of the bomb shelter.

The coffins were trickier. They dismantled without too much difficulty, but their length made transporting them downstairs a little hard. The first fell down with a crash, leaving shards of filthy glass all over the bottom of the stairs.

I gave up at that point, and just smashed the remainder into pieces small enough to fit in the wheelbarrow. It was only then, on the third trip down the stairs, that Stanley poked his head out of his bedroom. His white hair stuck straight up, and both sides of his moustache had unfurled.

‘What on earth is going on?’

I pointed at the contents of the wheelbarrow. ‘I’ve put Mum in the bomb shelter. Now I’m just cleaning up.’

He shook his head, ‘Nuh-uh, Vivvie. I like having her in the house.’

‘There is something wrong with your brain, you know that?’

He rolled his eyes like a teenager. ‘Sure. Whatever.’

I wasn’t stupid. I knew what his lack of argument meant. ‘Don’t try bringing her back in. It’s no longer an option. Bomb shelter, or I have her cremated. Your choice.’

‘Aw, come on. That’s not fair.’

I ignored him, and kept going with the wheelbarrow. At the bottom of the stairs, I hesitated. Strictly speaking, the glass should go in the recycling, but the stink and tufts of hair might raise questions. I put it into the shelter with everything else then, back inside, I knelt down by the cupboard under the kitchen sink and grabbed every cleaning product that Stanley hadn’t touched in eight months.

I had to pop out to the all-night corner shop for some extra bleach, but by three a.m. the attic floor had been scrubbed clean, and every window in the house was wide open to let in the cool night air.

My world was going to change. Getting Desma out of the attic was just the start, but there was nothing more to be done tonight. I showered quickly then blow-dried my hair.

I slept dreamlessly, and by morning, more white had appeared: a long thin stream on the left of my hairline. Tick tock, I thought. Heat rose up through my stomach. Tick bloody tock. Tilde can wait too.

Something inside had reached breaking point. Today was going to be about me. Me getting my life back. I still had choices. I was going to live longer than three weeks, and that meant planning for the future. I wanted my old job back.

I ate a quick breakfast of cornflakes then headed out the door the second I was done brushing my teeth. The day had turned brilliant: bright blue sky and warm sunlight, and I caught myself humming as I made my way to the station.

My job had been the only thing that had kept me going when everything else was dark. The Lipscombe Trust was one of the oldest charities in London, and every time I’d helped someone keep their home or their job or get back on the right track, it had helped me. It had made me feel useful. I was helping the world be a better place, one client at a time. I had had a purpose. I imagined what my mother would say if I’d said anything like that to her.

You think getting more ticks in the nice column than the naughty one will win you a prize? The world doesn’t work that way, Vivia. No one is watching. No one is keeping tally. You are such a brownnoser.

Unusually, the thought of what Desma would say made me smile. I wasn’t the one rotting in the mud at the bottom of a bomb shelter.

Half an hour later, I rounded the corner onto the road on which we had our offices and almost ran into a small crowd of protesters dawdling outside on the pavement. Their number had increased in just over half a year. We’d had a handful most weeks, but there were a couple of dozen angry humans with placards outside my old office.

On the other side of the protesters, a queue of non-humans, including a few familiar faces, snaked its way almost all the way to the other end of the street. Front of the queue was a female street weasel with two kits clinging to her jeans. I didn’t recognise her, but she had the same red fur as Harriet had had. I’d arrived on clinic day, and it was only with that thought that I realised that I’d had no idea of what day of the week it was. The queue narrowed it down to a Tuesday or a Thursday.

‘Psst. Hey, hag!’ I didn’t know the ghost beckoning to me from the other side of the street, but she was an old one—bewigged and big skirted. ‘You the one looking for information?’

I crossed the road and leaned against the building beside her. I pulled out my phone and held it to my ear. Thank God for mobile phones. Before them, I’d have been just another weirdo holding a conversation with someone who wasn’t there. Or a weirdo who saw ghosts.

‘Yes. That’s me. Have you got something?’

‘Maybe. What do I get for it?’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want all three Lord of the Ring movies in a row.’

I shook my head. ‘Graveyard Theatre only does one at a time. You know that.’

‘So do me a private viewing. You got a DVD player at home?’

Stanley hadn’t been born able to see ghosts, but he’d acquired the ability when my mother brought him back from the dead. He would wet himself with fury if I let a ghost watch movies in the house. I grinned, thinking of the envelopes. ‘Deal. What have you got?’

The ghost leaned over conspiratorially, and whispered as if someone else could actually hear her. ‘That wasn’t the first time.’

‘What wasn’t?’

‘Group of hags dying at once. It’s happened at least three times before. I know about one personally, and I’ve got the others on good authority.’

‘If you’re talking about the witch burnings in the Middle Ages, I know about those,’ I said.

‘Yes, well, that’s one of the times. What about in France? 1792? Eight of them. Guillotined. And then burned. I was there for that one. They don’t do entertainment like that anymore.’

‘And the third time?’

‘Dark Ages. I don’t know when. I hadn’t been born yet. Some old monk told me. His ghost passed over to the underworld a couple of years back, but he said it was twenty hags. Killed for being witches. They intended to drown the lot of them. Did burn the bodies after, though.’

One word stuck out. ‘“Intended”? Why “intended”?’

‘The monks couldn’t drown them, of course. The hags played the same trick they always did.’

‘What trick?’

‘Playing dead. It’s a clever one, I grant you, but it’s not always going to work. Not if they know you’re going to just spring back up the moment no one’s looking. I remember the French one because it was so disappointing. The live ones were much better. Who wants to see a dead body have its head cut off?’

‘Not me,’ I said.

‘Exactly.’

My mind raced. The ghost was right. It was a good trick, but a pointless one if everyone knew it was only temporary. ‘They were definitely all dead?’

‘Oh yes. All goggle-eyed, veins popping out all over, blood coming out of their ears. It was disgusting. You lot are disgusting. No idea why you’d choose to do that to yourself if you have any choice.’

‘We wouldn’t.’ I murmured, but the ghost didn’t seem to notice.

‘Now where d’you live? It is hallowed ground, right?’

‘It is,’ I said and rattled off the address.

‘I’m going to be there eight p.m. sharp. All three movies, right?’

‘That’s what we agreed.’

She blinked out. I lowered my phone. I’d seen my mother die again and again. I’d seen Ana die. I had a good idea of what I looked like while I was dead. It wasn’t pretty, but we didn’t go goggle-eyed. There was no blood. It was as close to a bloodless, damage-free death as it was possible to get. I considered the ghost’s words. She could have been lying for dramatic effect—a far-too-regular habit among both humans and non-humans, but ghosts rarely lied. Information was their currency. One lie, and they’d lose whatever credit they had. No one paid for made-up information.

The hags had died, really died, before they were due to be killed, but it made no sense. They couldn’t have done it themselves, but why kill a group of women shortly before they were due to die, anyway?

10

The hag population had always been tiny—only a few dozen women at any one time. If we weren’t long-lived, the species would have gone extinct a long time ago. If the ghost was right, and I suspected she was, then each massacre would have come close to destroying us. And through it all, my mother danced like a witch through the raindrops, never getting wet. She was a survivor. She’d survived each of the four massacres, and I couldn’t help wondering how much or how little it had to do with salt and pine and mustard. Whatever was going on, it looked as if it had been happening for a long time. Desma was ancient. I didn’t know how old, but her age could be counted in millennia. She’d been around when mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers walked the earth. There weren’t a lot of people who could say the same, but there were some, and I had a good idea where to find them.

I returned the phone to my bag. In the lee of the building, with the phone attached, the protesters hadn’t paid much attention to me, but that would change when I got closer. I tried to give them a wide berth as much as I could, but there wasn’t much space on the pavement. A short man with a red scarf and cropped black hair that made him look like a Lego man shrank back at the sight of me. He bumped into the man standing next to him, a regular everyone at the Lipscombe had referred to as Manky Mike. I had no idea what his real name was, but the first bit suited him perfectly. I could smell him from six feet away.

‘Ding dong. Exodus 22:18. Thou—’

It was one I’d heard enough times. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. I shoved past him, a little of my earlier anger returning. ‘Oh, eff off. I’m not in the mood.’

Once through the glass door to reception, I shut the door firmly behind me, and the jeers muffled. The security guard behind the reception desk was new, and I had to sign in and show my driver’s licence before he let me through the barriers to the lifts.

The lift doors deposited me onto an institutional green carpet, in front of a single wood door with a glass panel that had ‘Lipscombe Trust’ painted in black letters. Sometime while I’d been dead, someone had put a doormat over where the carpet was worn away. I felt a jolt of nostalgia so strong it took my breath away.

I half-expected Malcolm to come up in the lift behind me, late again. He’s dead, Vivia. Murdered by his nephew. It was because of him you got zombie-bit. But it didn’t feel real. The memory of Malcolm’s laugh seemed to echo in the air.

I swallowed back my thoughts, and rapped on the door before I opened it. Habi, the receptionist, sat behind the desk putting double folds into printed, A4-sized pieces of paper, turning them to pamphlets.

She spoke without looking up. ‘Clinic’s on the ground floor, not in here, and it’s only open in half an hour. You’ll need to go back down the stairs and take a left.’

‘Hi, Habi.’

She looked up and broke into a grin, ‘Vivia! You’re back.’ She scooted round the side of the reception desk and enveloped me in a hug that was just a little too tight. She let go and held me at arm’s length and looked me up and down. Her eyes noticed, then skimmed over the new warts. She reached a hand up to my forehead, and ran her fingers over the white streak. ‘My gosh, what have you done to your hair? I’d have picked something with a bit of colour myself, but the white works for you.’

I hid a smile. Very diplomatic. ‘Thank you.’

‘How was your holiday? No, that’s not right. It was a sabbatical, right? So you were working? What were you doing? You left so suddenly, and Obe was so close-lipped about the whole thing.’

‘It was just some hag stuff,’ I said. Hag business. ‘How is Obe? Is he here?’

She laughed suddenly, ‘Like old grumpypants would ever leave. He’s fine, just cross because we’ve lost yet another manager, and the trustees have put him in charge again.’ She waved at the corridor. ‘Go through. He’ll be thrilled to see you.’

I made my way down the corridor, past the closed door to my old office, past Malcolm’s old office door, also closed, and past the kitchen to the door at the end.

I tapped on it.

‘Come in.’

My former boss sat behind his desk, eyes glued to one of the three screens on his desk. Both windows were closed, the curtains drawn. Underneath the smell of cheap fried chicken, the room gave off a musty odour. The little hairball hadn’t changed. Obe was still as bristly as a hedgehog, if substantially grubbier.

His eyes flicked up. They widened at the sight of me, and his pasty skin paled even further. ‘Vivia! Are you…?’

‘Not hungry. Alive and human,’ I answered, to save him.

Obe, never the best with words, said, ‘Oh, good.’

We both fell silent. Then he said, ‘Tea?’

‘I’ll get it.’

I went to the tiny kitchen and made for both of us. Everything was in the same place, but the biscuit stash was sadly depleted. I had to make do with snaffling a couple of plain digestives from the tail end of a packet hidden behind some chamomile tea.

Obe’s eyes lit up at the sight of them. ‘Ooh, where did you get those?’ He dipped the digestive in his tea, then sucked on the soggy bit with relish. I looked away.

‘Hidden at the back of the cupboard. I was hoping you still kept a stash of the chocolate ones in your desk drawer.’

‘I do, but your replacement’s got a bit of an appetite. They don’t last long.’

I took a sip of my tea, then set the mug on his desk. I gave him a good once-over. The last eight months couldn’t have been easy on him, either. He’d lost two of his top staff, and at a time when money and replacements weren’t easy to come by. Obe had a history of depression. It didn’t take much to throw him back in.

He’d never been the cleanest man, but he didn’t seem more unwashed than usual, and he appeared to have taken my return in his stride. His eyes were clear, but I was aware that the outer veneer was paper-thin and easily torn. I wondered if he was back on medication but couldn’t think of a polite way to ask.

I leaned back in the chair, and brought up the main reason I was there. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could get my job back. Turns out being dead is expensive.’

Obe’s mouth twisted down, or at least the beard that covered it did. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. We had to replace you, and I don’t have the budget for any new staff. I’m so sorry. I tried to keep your job open, but I had no idea when you’d be back.’

Or that I would be back. I’d only been hoping there was a vacancy. It hadn’t occurred to me he might try to keep it open. The Lipscombe was a progressive employer—it offered Maternity Leave, Paternity Leave, Compassionate Leave, a good sick-pay package, but there was nothing in the contract about Dead Leave.

‘It’s fine. I know you couldn’t keep it open. Couldn’t hurt to ask.’

‘You could apply for the management position. Deadline’s the end of next week. I know you wanted it before you…left.’

That actually sounded like a good idea. I’d been in with a good chance, too. The only other applicant had zombified. I still wanted it. I could do the job with my eyes closed, and I’d be damned good at it, too. I grinned. ‘I might just do that.’

‘I’ll e-mail you the link.’

We fell silent. It would be good to be back in the saddle, and if the management position came with the increment I thought it did, I’d be able to afford to move out of my mother’s house even earlier than I’d hoped.

For the first time in years, I imagined what it would be like to live on my own. I wouldn’t come home to find cigarette butts in the sink. If I kept to my usual bathing routine, the place could smell good—coffee and furniture polish. No reek of decomposition at all, and, of course, the only bottom I’d be wiping would be my own. It was an image of a little piece of heaven.

‘Actually, there was another favour I wanted to ask,’ I said. ‘Uh, I was wondering…I know I’m not exactly an employee any more, but any chance I could still use the Lipscombe systems or have a look at the archives? I’ve got some research I need to do.’

Until the latter half of the twentieth century, no one had cared much about metanaturals, and research into the ‘lesser races’ had only become fashionable in the Seventies. By contrast, the Lipscombe had been dealing with and recording its dealings with non-humans for centuries. Our archives were a treasure trove of forgotten information. Of course, it would take a lifetime to go through all of it. And not a lifetime lasting a few weeks, either.

‘Uh, I don’t know, Vivia. All your logins have been disabled. We got hauled over the coals for having them active in the audit last month. Yours and Malcolm’s. We almost failed the whole thing.’

‘Please.’

‘Uh…’ His eyes widened as a solution occurred. ‘How about you volunteer? I can’t pay you anything, but if you want to do some hours in the clinic, I can justify putting you back in the system. We’re going to be even shorter staffed than usual, what with everyone wanting to take holidays in August.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. It was yet another long shot, but if anything significantly weird for the metanatural had happened in the Forties, the chances were someone in the Lipscombe would have written it down somewhere. Of course, that ‘somewhere’ was going to be paper in a box buried at the bottom of a hundred boxes, but I wasn’t in a position to get fussy.

‘If you want the paper archives though, they’re gone.’

‘What? Where?’ The bottom dropped out my stomach. After so many years of our paperwork rotting away in the basement, they’d decided to get rid of it now?

‘We’ve still got everything for the last twenty years because of data protection, but everything before that went up to the University of East London for some research project they’ve got going.’ The disappointment must have shown on my face, because Obe said, ‘I thought you’d be pleased. You were always on at us about getting those boxes out of the damp. You can still access them. Probably. I’ll give them a call. We gave them up for nothing more than goodwill. They owe us a favour.’

‘I’d appreciate that.’

A tap sounded at the door. Habi poked her head in. ‘Sorry to break up the big reunion, but it’s packed downstairs.’

Obe’s eyes met mine. ‘You up for starting now?’

I wanted to say no. I wanted to get rid of the sword hanging over my head, but I had promised. ‘Yes, of course.’

Habi’s eyes lit up. ‘You coming back?’

‘Just volunteering.’

The clinic was held in a double-sized conference room on the ground floor. Desks at the end of the room had folding screens between each to give the illusion of privacy, and rows of folding chairs were set up in the remainder of the space.

I helped carry down a couple of boxes of some of the most commonly used forms. Habi laid out tea and coffee in thermo flasks and made sure there were cups for the water cooler.

Despite the queue, the first clients toppled in in a rush, eager to be the first to get a number from the machine. The small room filled up rapidly, and within a couple of minutes, every chair was taken with more people standing.

The first client took the seat in front of me, gripping our explanatory pamphlet so tightly that the CONF from CONFIDENTIAL ASSISTANCE was smudged into one big inky blob. The paper had been folded so many times that the back page was missing.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Obe trotting over to the tea table to grab a cup of cheap coffee for his client, a spotted dragon lady, leaving her alone at his desk. I wouldn’t have done that. Dragons were the devil for stealing your pens.

I picked up my pen, and gave my client a smile. ‘What can I do for you?’

It felt good to be back. Technically, the clinic was only supposed to be open for three hours, but that was just when Obe closed the door and didn’t let anyone else in. Today, it was another two after that before the last client left. I crossed the room and helped myself to a cup of lukewarm coffee. I moved my neck from side to side, trying to get the kinks out. I was exhausted, but in a good way.

‘Don’t forget to send me that link,’ I said.

Obe looked up from his desk, where he was filing papers into separate folders for later action. ‘I won’t. Thanks for helping, Viv.’

I helped clean up. Habi vacuumed while Obe and I shunted the screens and chairs to the edges of the room. It was a familiar ritual, one I’d performed hundreds of times over the years. Even Malcolm’s absence felt familiar—he’d always made an excuse and ducked out early. Habi switched off the vacuum cleaner and dragged it out of the room. I stacked the last of the chairs and looked around. Not everything was the same. The archive boxes were finally gone, there was a new guy eating all the chocolate biscuits. There’d been a new manager who’d been hired, resigned, and left already. It couldn’t help but make me wonder what else I had missed. Malcolm might be dead and at rest, but his family had been disrupted beyond repair. The sense of satisfaction I felt was replaced with worry.

‘What happened after I was… gone?’

We sat on the edge of the desk, and he caught me up. A few things were expected: Malcolm Brannick’s wife was currently awaiting trial for murder, as was her brother as an accessory. Malcolm’s brother, Neil, who had killed his own wife, hadn’t even been arrested.

‘There just wasn’t any evidence. You weren’t around, and the only other people who could claim it were a weresnake and a winged boy, both still teenagers and based on a claim from Adam Brannick who disappeared at the same time you did.’

I’d half-expected it, but the knowledge made my fists clench. I’d watched Neil Brannick’s wife relive her death in the underworld, and it was excruciating. He didn’t deserve to be free.

‘What about Malcolm’s boys? Are they okay?’

‘Yeah. Really. Finn’s found it hard, but he’s adjusted. He’s in foster care, but I know the family. They’re good people. He’s going to start school next month and I think that’s going to be good for him—give him a bit more structure. And Alister’s at UEL. He’s studying Social Work.’

My phone interrupted us.

‘Hello?’

A male voice said, ‘Vivia, it’s Per. You need to get to the hospital now.’

11

The hospital was the same one the cab driver had dropped us off at the day Sigrid had broken her leg. The faded letters above the front door had been painted over, and the signage had been replaced, but otherwise it seemed to be unchanged despite years having passed.

A lot of people hate hospitals—the antiseptic smell of them, the sick people all around that were reminders of both personal mortality and of loved ones lost. Not me. I’d always liked them. Maybe it was because I knew what came next, but I didn’t think so. The antiseptic scent said: we’re clean, we’re professional. Hospitals were the places people went to be fixed. Every cog in the medical machinery was a testament to the power and willingness of people to fight illness and death to the end.

So when I stepped through the sliding doors and clicked the hand sanitiser, a little of the worry that had settled into my stomach dissipated when I smelled antiseptic and heard that first impersonal PA announcement. I followed Per’s instructions up to the fourth floor and made a couple of wrong turns before finding the Oncology Department.

Per sat in the waiting room, his head between his metallic knees as if he’d fainted and someone had propped him up. The other patients—a woman in a cat jumper and an elderly man with a salt-and-pepper beard—stared at him with undisguised curiosity.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Where’s Sigrid?’

He looked up and gave me a half-hearted smile. ‘They took her down to the general ward.’

‘Why? I thought this was just a check-up.’

His eyes drifted from me to the other patients who were unashamedly eavesdropping. The machine man stood and gestured for me to follow. We went down the corridor until he found an open examination room. He closed the door behind us.

‘God, what is it?’ I said, but I knew. The cancer had spread. What other reason could there be for the oh-so-serious face, and for them to have kept her in the ward instead of sending her home? ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’

Per’s green eyes narrowed, but I thought he seemed more confused than frustrated. ‘I don’t know.’ He sat heavily on the bed. ‘Yes. Here, look at this.’

He waved a large brown envelope at me, then slid an array of X-rays out and spread them out on the paper bed cover. He pointed. ‘It’s spread. Everywhere. Her arms, her lungs, her heart—everywhere.’

I looked. There were white splodges wherever he pointed. Some were small, others were huge. If they’d grown this fast…

‘How much time does she have?’

‘Days, if that.’

‘Oh, God.’ Then I remembered the first thing he’d said when we came in. ‘What did you mean, “I don’t know”?’

‘What do you know about metastasis?’ At my blank look, he added, ‘How cancer spreads?’

‘Single cells get into the blood stream, then they stick somewhere and grow.’

He nodded. ‘It’s called the ‘seed and soil’ concept. The cancer cells are like seeds, but they need soil to grow—they stick in places that can support their growth. Places with good blood flow, like the lungs. That’s the most common place, then the liver.’

‘Okay,’ I said, waiting for him to make sense.

He leaned in towards me. ‘Vivia, this isn’t right, this illness of hers. Cancer can be incredibly aggressive. It can take someone out in days, but not like this. These weren’t here two weeks ago. Again, if it was lungs and liver, this fast would be very unusual, but it could happen.’ He stabbed at white splodges. ‘But it’s everywhere and in places it cannot grow this fast. Her oncologist is a mate of mine from med school. He’s one of the best in the country, but the way it’s spreading is like nothing he’s ever seen. This illness isn’t normal. I don’t think it’s natural. And with your and Sigrid’s history…’

‘You think it’s something to do with me being a hag.’

‘Or her coming back from the dead. Or spending so much time dead. Or her coming back with those wings. I don’t know. I just know it doesn’t feel right. You might not agree with my philosophy, but I am damned good at what I do. I know the human body. This whole thing doesn’t feel right.’

I didn’t want to disagree with him, but it was like the hags thinking some German bomber had deliberately targeted a house full of grumpy old ladies. I’d seen it at the Lipscombe, over and over again. When something bad happened, it was easier to believe some sort of magic or metanatural occurrence was at work. It wasn’t. It was just rotten luck.

‘I’m sorry—’

‘Vivia, please listen to me. I know you think I’m a butcher, but I am a damned good doctor and so is her oncologist. This is not natural.’

‘If it was something I did, I don’t know what I did wrong. I can’t bring her back again. I don’t know how to do it right. I’ll just make it worse. Again.’

He clenched and unclenched his fists, and blew out a frustrated breath through his mouth. ‘You aren’t listening. If this is something magical, then it can be stopped.’

I ran my fingers over the X-rays. They were cool and smooth under my fingertips. ‘Even if you are right, and I manage to find someone to halt it, it would just be halted. If this is magical, then the type of juice needed to reverse it would be more than anything I have, or anyone I’ve heard of has. She won’t be able to keep breathing with her lungs like that.’ I wanted to believe she had a way out, but this was just grasping at straws.

‘I can fix that. I can buy us some time.’

Oh God. What did that mean? ‘What do you mean, “fix it”?’

‘I can replace the bits that are bad.’

‘You can’t replace all of them,’ I said. Per might have been one of the topmost cybersurgeons, but I was willing to bet medical science hadn’t advanced that far in eight months.

‘I can. In theory.’

‘In theory?’

‘I’m pretty confident I can replace everything. I’ve had schematics for pretty much every part of the body for years. We’ve replaced all of them at one point or another. All I need to do is build them.’

Why did this not fill me with confidence? ‘If it’s that easy why haven’t I come back to headlines telling me all about your “wonder schematics”?’

He shifted on the seat. ‘Because I’ve only ever done one organ at a time. Because it’s been under the radar. Because the General Medical Council is still living in the nineteenth century. I haven’t been able to get approval for any sort of experimental surgery. Not even on animals.’

‘And you want to use my sister as a guinea pig? Just because she’s dying doesn’t mean she shouldn’t have some dignity in her last days. You can’t just cut bits off because you want to prove something to the GMC. Is this just so you can put Tin Man on the list of things you’ve created?’

Every interaction I’d had with Per previously had made me slot him into the ‘cool dude’ stereotype slot. He’d rarely raised his voice or looked bothered. He did now. His lips tightened and his eyes narrowed. ‘She’ll be dead without it, and if I wanted to do it for my career, this would be the last thing I should do. This sort of human experimentation? I can’t hide this. I’ll get struck off. I’m going to lose everything I’ve worked for. Everything. Just for a chance to keep her alive. You keep that in mind before you start pointing fingers. Besides, the Tin Man is a bad example. I can make her a heart. In fact, it’s second on the list, right after the lungs.’

‘I want to see her.’

He led me downstairs and into a general ward where her bed was separated from a dozen others by a pale green curtain.

She was asleep, but her frail frame hardly made a bump under the sheets, even with the wings. Her face had grown thinner, making her nose sharp and her jaw angular.

I saw you yesterday, I thought. It wasn’t this bad yesterday.

Per hovered near the edges of the bed as if he were a student waiting for an exam grade.

I reached inside me for that place that senses the dead, and where all my hag witchery lived, and sent out a tendril of it towards the bed.

I felt nothing. She was alive. No deathly alarm bells went off. I was about to shut it down when something else caught my attention: a scent. It wasn’t death related. The haggery bit gave me some mild magical senses. The scent was faint, almost not there. I breathed in deeply through my nostrils and realised what it was: the worst possible scent it could be.

Camphor. The scent of the soul. Whatever was wrong with her wasn’t just wrong with her body. It was wrong with her soul.

12

There was no way the scent of camphor could have followed me home all the way from the hospital, but somehow it seemed to permeate everything. The train wasn’t crowded, but it was hot and almost steamy, and when I held onto the guardrail, it was sticky under my fingers.

I let myself into the house, and nothing but the scent of bleach and cleaning products met my nose. I smiled despite myself. I’d take the small victories where I could find them. My eyes hurt and my attention kept wandering, but sleep wasn’t an option, so I made myself a double-strength mug of coffee and logged onto my laptop to research mystical illnesses.

I found both an overwhelming amount of information, and very little. People all over the world wanted to believe that the sickness killing their loved ones wasn’t biological, that it could be cured with the right spell or by breaking a curse. Actual evidence of metanatural origins of cancer was a lot slimmer.

The previous year I’d met a soul magic expert named Ruth Hedger when she’d moonlighted as a police consultant, but I’d known of her for much longer. She wasn’t widely known outside of academic circles, but within it, she was something of a phenomenon.

I put her name into the search engine and was pleasantly surprised to find she was now based in London, having taken up a research post at the University of East London. It was just past seven p.m. No one would be in, but I could leave a message.

I found the number for her department and dialled. To my surprise, someone actually answered. I gave her my name and told her why I was calling.

‘Oh yes, of course. I’m her assistant, and you’re the hag. Thanks for calling back.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You are calling about the message I left with the Lipscombe?’

‘No. It was something else actually. What message?’

‘The professor’s being trying to get hold of you for months. She’s intrigued by your ability to die and live again. She was wondering if you’d be willing to come into the lab and submit to some tests.’

Well, that was easier than I’d expected. ‘Yes, I’d be happy to. I wasn’t expecting to catch anyone this late.’

She laughed. ‘I’m off on holiday tomorrow. Doing a late one to make sure all the paperwork is caught up.’

‘I know it’s an imposition, but is there any chance you could give me the professor’s home number? I need to speak to her urgently.’

‘I’m sorry, but if you give me your number, I can ask her to call you first thing in the morning.’

It had been a long shot anyway. ‘Please tell her it’s urgent.’

‘Will do.’

I found myself jittery and unable to sit still. Per had scheduled Sigrid’s surgery for nine the next morning. There was nothing more to be done, except wait and somehow force myself to relax.

At eight p.m. on the dot, the ghost turned up and demanded her payment. I logged into an on-demand service and bought all three movies, then scheduled them to start one after the other. She sighed happily and settled in to watch.

I took my laptop into the bedroom and checked my e-mail to see if Obe had set up the login details he’d promised. He hadn’t, but he had sent me an e-mail with a short list of local gods and immortals, people who had been alive as long as my mother. There were no phone numbers, only addresses. Other than that, I had nothing in my inbox but eight months of spam.

I opened my mother’s journal and began paging through it again. She’d been crazy, but there was always a reason behind the things she did, even if they wouldn’t make sense to a sane person. The names in the journal had to be real people.

I pulled my laptop back onto my lap and began putting names into the search engine one by one. There were too many to investigate each in depth, so I just scanned the first page of results for each. Most had hits, but nothing stood out—a spattering of social media sites, a handful of obituaries, a few marathon results, a couple of mainstream media hits, local newspapers nattering about people turning up at local events. No mention of hags, or mysterious deaths, or anything weird.

I began putting the names in in combination, four or five at a time where it looked like she had written them at the same time. I typed and skimmed, typed and skimmed. The tight ball in my stomach that said I wasn’t going to be able to sleep was the only thing that kept me going.

About half an hour in, just as I was about to give up, I got a hit: all four names in a row, and in the same order as the journal.

The website it belonged to looked like it had been set up by a child—all primary colours and Comic Sans. Or, I corrected myself, set up by an older adult—I suspected most kids were a lot more savvy about web design than I was.

The four names were part of a much longer list. I checked the list against Desma’s journal, and almost all the names matched.

The tab at the top of the page read: Electronic Harassment. I gave an inward sigh. More conspiracy theories.

The writer believed that the government was using sound waves to send thoughts into people’s heads and influence their thoughts and actions. I hadn’t heard that particular one before, but it sounded like something my mother would have loved.

The government uses this technique to target innocent citizens. Ordinary people are influenced every day by constant loyalty-inducing waves—most don’t even notice, but this has had a particularly devastating effect on the wereweasel population. The wereweasel’s Independent Nature makes his brain resist the control waves, but this comes with a Dire Consequence: Death!

Whenever the government increases the beam, wereweasels DIE. Our brains resist and cannot cope. Controlled doctors sign off on the deaths as ordinary accidents and aneurysms, but why do weasels have a four hundred percent increased chance of dying this way? This researcher has found over a hundred unexplained deaths since 1851, when the beams were first discovered and implemented by the Masons. Over a hundred dead wereweasels. But no Media reports this…

The rest continued in much the same vein. I snapped the laptop shut. A year ago I wouldn’t even have read that far. Was that it—the reason for all the weasels in the back garden over the years? She’d believed they were being targeted, same as the hags. But by what? Surely not government loyalty waves.

I opened up the laptop again, and forced myself to read through the rest of the website. I found nothing more interesting, and no information or contact details for the site owner, which didn’t surprise me. Someone that paranoid wouldn’t publish private information on the internet. It was surprising the author was online at all. Maybe the site was written while wearing a tin-foil hat.

I glanced at the corner of the screen. It was just past midnight. I wasn’t tired, but I was hungry.

Stanley was out in the garden, the roving light from his torch visible from the kitchen window. The light moved slowly over the neatly trimmed grass and shrubbery—his nightly slug and snail patrol, a never-ending battle between two opposing forces. No matter how many he took out, they just kept coming. His eyes roamed the lawn, searching for enemies whose sole intent was the demolition of his carefully tended seedlings.

I made myself a sandwich and ate it at the kitchen table. The combination of caffeine and stress meant I couldn’t sit still, and my thoughts skittered all over the place.

Stanley stuck his head around the doorway a few minutes after I’d finished eating. His forehead furrowed in a frown. ‘What happened to your hair?’

‘Can’t tell you. It’s hag business.’

‘Oh, very funny.’

He disappeared, and the distinctive scent of cigarette smoke drifted in. One more thing I wouldn’t miss when I had my own place.

Sigrid’s surgery was going to take hours, but I wanted to be there, refreshed and ready for anything when she woke up. If I couldn’t sleep, I should at least lie quietly for a while.

I made myself hot chocolate and took an old novel to bed with me while I drank. Despite my conviction that I wouldn’t be able to sleep, the words began sliding off the page within minutes, and I reached over to switch the light off without finishing my drink.

I dreamed of dead hags and dead weasels, limbs all tangled together, bloody, goggle-eyed, and staring. Harriet lay in the middle of them in the same clothes I’d seen her in last, and through it all my mother said over and over again, ‘This is what happens when you don’t listen to me.’

13

Sigrid was always bigger than I was, and not just because she was older. Her hand-me-downs always made me look like a child dressing up in her mother’s clothing. Most of the time I didn’t worry about it. I liked getting Siggie’s clothes—she always looked so pretty in them, and it was many years before I realised that the pink dress or the red twirly skirt or the sparkly shirt just didn’t have the same effect on me that it did on her.

The school uniform was a different matter. In the year I turned ten, I started the summer half-term in Sigrid’s old school dress. I had to use safety pins to do up the top button, and the waist of the dress was down between my waist and my knees.

A summer storm shook the house the night before school started. Rain lashed at the windows, punctuated by thunder that hardly seemed to penetrate through the muggy heat. Murmured voices from the living room punctuated the spaces between the thunder. Not even Desma would leave weasels out in this sort of weather. Sigrid and I had watched with fascination as their tent was first tugged out of the soft ground by the wind, then blown against the bushes at the back of the garden.

My mother was in the attic, which was then acting as her study. I took the stairs with trepidation. It took me a full minute before I had the courage to tap on the attic door and attract her attention.

She kept her eyebrows raised the whole time while I was talking, then she closed her eyes and breathed out heavily as if trying to find the patience with a particularly slow individual. ‘Good Lord, Vivia. You’ll grow into it. I am not buying you a brand-new dress you’re only going to wear for a few months just because you don’t like the hemline. Grow up.’

By the following morning, the storm had diminished, although the rain still fell steadily. Sigrid and I walked to school huddled under a single umbrella, stopping only at the first bus stop we came to in order to remove the bulbs of garlic Desma insisted we wear around our necks to ward off evil spirits. We hid them in Sigrid’s schoolbag.

Despite the rain, a pack of adults was clustered at the school gates. The arriving children slowed and peered closer, then sped up as they were admonished for rubbernecking.

I craned my neck to get a better look as we approached, but there was nothing interesting to see—just a small lump covered in a blanket that had once been a quilted ‘Planets of Our Solar System’ display.

I hung my coat on its hook then took my usual seat at the front of the class and set out my pencil case with its pack of new coloured pencils. The ridiculous skirt hung over the back of the wooden seat, so long that it almost drifted onto the floor. The teacher was missing, presumably dealing with whatever the gate emergency had been.

The class filled with giggling children. I sat still and counted my pencils. Twelve of them, in an array of perfect, potential-filled colours.

From behind me, someone sniffed ostentatiously, then a boy’s voice said, ‘Does anyone smell something?’

More voices. ‘Yes, eeuw, what is that?’

‘Yuck. That’s stinky.’

I ignored them, and rolled the pencils under my fingers. Then I sniffed, too. I did smell something. It wasn’t me. I’d been careful to scrub all over the night before and had washed my hair in rose-scented shampoo. This didn’t smell like rose. It was a sharp scent, and it was growing stronger.

The giggles behind me reached an almost hysterical pitch, and then died as the teacher walked into the class, a mug of tea in one hand. She stopped and sniffed the air.

‘Is something burning?’

That’s when my burning skirt finally reached my skin. I jumped out of my seat, whacking at my rear in a panic. The teacher gasped then threw her tea all over my bottom.

I turned, trying to see. The skirt had burned upwards in an inverted V, and my yellow pants were visible to everyone in the class.

‘Vivia, what on earth were you doing? Go get something from Lost Property, and then go to Miss Holfat’s office so she can call your mother.’

‘I—’

‘Just go. No arguing. I am not going to have you disrupt my class this term.’ She pointed to the door. ‘Miss Holfat. Now.’

I gathered up the remains of the burnt and tea-wet skirt and tried to bunch it to hide my underwear.

Behind me in the glass someone giggled. I turned back and saw the boy who’d first spoken staring at me—Mike Tuvey. His father was head of the local Human Preservation Front chapter. He grinned at me. I didn’t know what to do. I’d tried ignoring him, but it never worked.

‘Miss—’

‘Now, Vivia.’

I had to go past Sigrid’s classroom on the way to Lost Property, and she saw me scurrying past, my skirt all bunched up. She ran out into the corridor and grabbed my arm.

‘Sigrid Brisk, where do you think you are going?’ An authoritative voice followed her from the classroom.

Sig ignored it. She twisted me round to look at the skirt. ‘Who was it? Was it that little jerk who was giving you a hard time last year?’

The one who’d spent the last term telling everyone that witches should be burned? Yes. ‘It doesn’t matter, Sig. Don’t do anything. It’ll just make it worse.’

Her face twisted in fury. She left me standing in the corridor and raced back down to the younger classrooms. I heard my teacher say, ‘What—’

And then there was a meaty thumping sound and then a scream and then scuffling.

Fifteen minutes later we were both sitting outside Miss Holfat’s office while we waited for her to finish with whoever she had in with her.

We leaned back against the wall and shamelessly eavesdropped. ‘I don’t care,’ Miss Holfat said. ‘Just stop them from doing it.’

A male voice replied, ‘It’s not that easy.’

‘Put up a closed-circuit camera.’

‘We’ve tried that with other schools. They just move to a different gate. Or a different school. You must understand we don’t have the money to completely cover every school in the country.’

‘No, you don’t understand. I can’t have my pupils arriving at school to find a pile of dead rats at the gate. Do you know how big the wererat population is in this area? I’ve had four calls from parents already, and I’ll have even more after the children get home. This is supposed to be a safe environment.’

A sigh, then the male voice again: ‘All right, I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t make any promises. Officially, there hasn’t even been a threat. There’s nothing illegal about killing rats, as long as you’re in no doubt they’re ordinary rats. I hardly even have enough to open a case.’ His voice raised as if expecting an interruption. ‘I’ll raise it with the boss. I’ll do what I can.’

The door opened and a bulky man appeared. He held two clear plastic packages in one hand. The first contained a red scarf. The other contained a plastic-coated placard. The black paint had run slightly from the rain, but the words were clear enough: The only good rat is a dead rat.

Miss Holfat was a step behind him, her brow set in a frown. It furrowed deeper at the sight of us. ‘Now what?’

I handed her a slip. She ran an eye over it. ‘Really? It’s only the first day of school, girls.’

An hour later, Sigrid and I were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table while Desma shouted loud enough that I had to resist the urge to cover my ears. Sigrid sat gingerly on the edge of her seat, and the left half of her face was bright red where Desma had slapped her.

‘What’s going on?’ The female street weasel stood in the doorway. Her fur was still damp from the bath, and combed back neatly over her face. She smelled like my rose shampoo. I hoped she hadn’t used all of it.

‘None of your business, Harriet.’

‘Well, it wouldn’t be my business except you’re shouting loud enough that I can hear every word, even with the door closed.’ She came further into the kitchen, and I noticed that her hands were completely hairless. I’d never seen that on a weasel before. ‘I’ve had a call. Just so you know, I hear the Human Preservation Front paid a visit to the girls’ school this morning. Something like that is going to have all the children rattled.’

‘I know. This is a different matter.’

Harriet’s eyes slid towards me and down to my ruined skirt. ‘Desma, can I talk to you for a minute?’

Mum went out into the corridor, and Harriet followed. They shut the door behind them, and Sigrid and I eavesdropped for the second time that day. Their voices were low, not much more than a murmur, but each spat out her words precisely, as if trying to hold herself back from shouting.

‘Desma, you never had the integrated school experience. I did. The girls—’

‘—Are my girls. Not yours, and I’m going to say it again: it’s none of your business.’

‘While I’m living here—’

‘While you are living here, you are under my roof and under my protection. You do not get to interfere with my family. I will discipline my daughters as I see fit. If you don’t like that, you can leave. How long do you think you will stay alive out there? A couple of weeks? I don’t want you talking to my girls. I don’t even want you looking at them. The storm’s finished, and the rain’s almost let up. I want you back outside, and next time you can stay outside.’

The kitchen door opened, and Sigrid and I sat and tried to look innocent, as if we hadn’t been listening.

I didn’t see much of Harriet after that. The next time I spoke to her was when we were hiding in the bomb shelter, and then she was just gone.

14

On the day before Sigrid died, I came home from school to find my mother slaughtering piglets in the back garden—eight pink, wriggly little things, too small to be taken from their mother, although I didn’t know that at the time.

She stood beside Stanley’s bare rosebushes on the frost-covered lawn, hung them upside down, then slit their throats, one by one. The blood squirted down their tiny bodies and pooled in a bucket at her feet.

It was cold enough that frost still covered the garden, even though it was past three in the afternoon. The newspapers were promising snow, although the sky was completely clear and blue.

If I’d had any sense, I would have turned tail and gone in the house the moment I saw what she was doing, but despite my familiarity with her insanity, this was something new and I stood stock-still in shock.

‘Oh, there you are, Vivia. Come give me a hand.’

I shook my head.

‘For Pete’s sake, child. Don’t be ridiculous. Where do you think your bacon comes from?’

‘I don’t want to get my school uniform dirty,’ I whispered.

‘Well then, go inside and get changed.’

I ran into the house and changed my clothes, but I didn’t go back out. Instead, I got into bed with Sigrid. She hadn’t been to school for weeks and wasn’t expected to go back. We hadn’t spoken about it. Any time I tried, she’d ignore me.

She had medication for the pain, but it was becoming less and less effective. Sigrid had always hidden herself away in books and stories, and now she was doing nothing but reading, as if attempting to forget her own life no longer existed. She’d even stopped singing, something she had once done without thinking, no matter how much Desma shouted at her.

Unwilling to leave the room and face Desma’s questions as to why I hadn’t come back, I skipped dinner and stayed with Sigrid.

I woke to find Desma had covered the house in salt. It came as a gradual awareness of a crunchiness to the bed that hadn’t been there when I’d gone to sleep. My left arm and leg overhung the mattress, stiff with cold. Nights were bad for Sigrid, and getting worse. The whimpers that had begun to come nightly were turning to cries, and the medication that dimmed the pain also dimmed her mind. It stopped her from waking fully.

I’d taken my own blanket with me into the bed and had tucked it around myself when I went to sleep, but Sigrid had grown painfully thin and was cold all the time now. By the time morning came around, I found she had commandeered it sometime during the night and slept curled up in a nest of duvet, blankets and pillow.

I blinked awake slowly, reached a tentative hand up to my scalp, and felt lumps of something crusty in my hair. I ran my fingers through it and breathed deep. I smelt nothing, and the stuff under my fingers was hard and dry. It was just salt.

I breathed deep again, this time in relief, and lay back against the pillow. The salt thing happened a couple of times a month, and if we were unlucky, the salt thing was also a garlic thing. Desma called it ‘scorodon,’ which I later learned was the Greek word for garlic. She believed it warded off evil spirits, prevented us being cursed by the evil eye, and somehow prevented some other terrible otherworldly disaster from befalling the family. This was also the function of the salt, although I wasn’t clear on the difference between the two.

Still asleep, Sigrid’s breathing was deep and even. I snuggled up to her warmth. Snow had fallen sometime during the night and lay piled up on the windowsill, where it blocked the gap in the warped frame, making the room a couple of degrees warmer than it had been for the last few days. I reached out an arm to the radiator, which remained stubbornly cold. Stanley had the tools and the expertise to fix it, but Desma had recently fixated on the boiler as a thing of modern evil and was insisting it remained switched off.

Bright red letters on the salt-crusted clock-radio next to the bed told me it was just past seven-thirty. I was going to be late for school if I wanted to wash all the salt out my hair before I left. I swung my legs out of the bed. My bare feet crunched on the cool oak floors. She bought the salt in huge sacks meant for road clearing during the snow, which she kept in the bomb shelter until whatever it was that triggered her insanity prompted her to use it.

I showered in a rush, both because of my lateness and the freezing water. I scrubbed hard. No salt. No garlic. No death-witch smell, just soap and shampoo.

I towelled myself dry and dressed quickly in an extra jumper and woolly stockings under my school trousers, but I couldn’t stop shivering. The wet hair didn’t help. I usually showered in the evenings in winter to give it time to dry. If the boiler was evil, electricity was far worse—an unnatural entrapment of lightning and not to be trusted. Matching hair dryers had been one of the first things Sigrid and I had intended to buy in our flat. It was something we no longer talked about.

She was still asleep when I tiptoed into the room, crunching across the salty floor with a cup of tea and a slice of toast. I left them on the bedside table, along with her medication for the day, and made sure the novel she was almost finished reading was within reach. After a second’s consideration, I selected another from the salt-covered bookshelf and put it under the first.

I wrapped my own toast in a piece of kitchen roll and tucked it into my jacket pocket to eat on the way. Soft light spilled from the living room door. I poked my head in, making sure the garlic bulb around my neck was visible.

‘I’m off. I’ll see you later… What’s that for?’

Salt coated the carpet, the sofa and the armchairs, but so did something else—a large white cheesecloth spread out on the cheap coffee table. Stanley and Desma sat cross-legged at opposite ends of the table, both naked and covered in blood. The piglet bucket sat at Stanley’s side. My mother held a plastic teaspoon and was in the process of scooping a dark substance from an old biscuit tin into the middle of the cheesecloth. It smelled like cloves.

Stanley didn’t look up. ‘None of your business.’

That was more than enough for me. The moment I was out the front door I removed the garlic from my neck. The school day was uneventful, with the possible exception of Mike Tuvey, who was called to the headmistress’s office halfway through the day and didn’t come back.

When I got home at half past three, my mother and Stanley weren’t home, and Sigrid and I were alone at home for the first time in weeks.

I found her in bed, grimacing with pain, the tablets I’d left out for her still on her bedside table. ‘Why haven’t you taken your pills?’

‘I need to be awake for this, Vivvie.’

My stomach did a little flip. ‘We don’t need to do it now. We can wait. You’ve still got time.’

‘No, I don’t.’

I cast around desperately for a reason to delay, but she was right. She didn’t have much time left, and Stanley and Desma hardly ever left us alone anymore. Another opportunity might not have come along, and so the plan Sigrid had been talking about for months was suddenly expected to become a reality.

And of course, it all went wrong.

15

Sunlight streamed in the window. I sat at the kitchen table and absently circled the lip of my coffee mug with a single finger. Sigrid had just gone into surgery. I’d called her the moment I’d woken up. She had seemed fairly upbeat, and neither of us had mentioned our argument.

I tried to be the same, but the word ‘experimental’ kept flashing in my head in big neon letters. I had no medical training, but I knew enough to know that in Sigrid’s weakened state, there was a very good chance she wasn’t coming out of the operating theatre. Steam swirled up from the coffee cup. Somewhere out there, my sister was being cut open and all her organs were being removed.

I poured myself another cup of coffee then made my way to the shelter, looking for distraction. The stink, which had not been apparent in the fresh air of the garden, grew stronger with each step closer.

A macabre, if strangely pretty, display lay in the middle of the muddy floor where the table had been. Sunflower heads surrounded Desma’s desiccated body, tucked under the sides of her head and torso then trailing down to her feet. Hundreds of candles, set out in increasing concentric circles, gave the scene a soft yellow glow. She had been dead now for more of my life than she had been alive.

If Sigrid has the same sickness she had had before, Desma must have known. She would have smelt the camphor. Blood roared in my ears, blocking out the world. She must have known. And she had done nothing. Why?

She’s out there somewhere in the world of the dead. Just ask her. Even as the thought formed in my brain, the child inside knocked it away in a panic. I can’t do it now. What if something goes wrong with Sigrid’s surgery? I couldn’t answer the phone if I was dead. That was good enough reason to put it off, and nothing to do with the way my heart had skipped a beat at the mere thought of seeing her again.

High-pitched electronic beeping interrupted the internal argument. The mobile in my pocket lit up and buzzed. I took the stairs out into the garden and squinted at the screen, but light reflected off of it, hiding the number.

‘Hello?’

‘Is that Vivia? This is Ruth Hedger. I’ve been trying to get hold of you for months.’

‘I’ve been dead,’ I said. No reason to mention why.

There was a moment’s silence on the other end of the line, then, ‘I see. How much did my assistant tell you about the project I’m working on?’

‘Not a lot,’ I admitted. ‘But I’d be happy to help. I am looking for a favour from you though.’

I briefly outlined Sigrid’s illness and the soul component to it and asked Ruth if she’d be willing to take a look at her. She agreed and we set a time—the hospital at five—and a date for me to come into her lab—a week on Friday.

I hung up with a sense of relief. If anyone could figure out what was wrong with my sister, it would be Ruth, and I gave a brief prayer of thanks that I’d been lucky enough to cross paths with her.

I had at least four hours before Sigrid would be out of surgery. I might as well use them to do something productive. I had the names of three immortals who could have known my mother, and of them, only Ares and Adonis were within a reasonable commute.

It was a toss-up between who might have the more useful information. Ares was in Denmark Hill, so I decided to try him first simply because it would be a slightly shorter train ride.

I checked the map on my phone when leaving the station, and strode quickly in the direction it indicated. There wasn’t a set time for Sigrid to be out of surgery, but I didn’t want to take any chances that I wouldn’t be there when she woke. I found the address after a couple of minutes. It belonged to an L-shaped block of flats three storeys high and badly constructed sometime within the last fifteen years—condensation ran down the insides of the windows, and the plasticky window sills sagged.

Calf-high green grass ran around the building, separating it from the low brick wall at the edge of the pavement. The iron gate creaked as I pushed it open. I made my way along the weed-infested brick path to the entrance hall door. I rang the buzzer for number five and waited. No one answered. I rang again. I stood back and surveyed the building. It didn’t look much like a god’s residence to me, but then I’d never met any. My mother didn’t count.

One way or the other, no one was home. I kicked at the weeds, frustrated. It was a long way to come for nothing, but then it had been a long shot, anyway. I scribbled a note on a scrap of paper and pushed it under the door.

The address I had for Adonis was in a part of Kensington I’d never visited. I took a delayed District line to South Ken then walked, dodging prams, buggies and running toddlers in the tunnel as families took their children to the museums.

It occurred to me that if it was an immortal behind this (and that narrowed down the list of suspects substantially) then it might not be such a good idea to go up to his house and ring the doorbell. But then, it couldn’t hurt to peek in his window and take a gander at him to see if he looked like a hag-murdering monster with the power to divert German bombs.

I couldn’t help thinking of all the gods I’d heard of: Zeus, Neptune, Hera, dozens of others, and those were just the major ones. There had to be hundreds of minor deities wandering the planet. Narrowing down suspects to the immortal mightn’t make the list as short as I’d hoped.

Sizeable Georgian mansions filled the road, and well-established oak trees dotted the pavement. Unlike those in the poorer parts of the city, these were homes all on their own, not partitioned into flats. I wondered what it would be like to live in one of these enormous houses all by myself with enough money for the upkeep. I sighed. That wasn’t going to happen any time soon. At least I’d got Desma out of the attic.

I wouldn’t fit in here, anyway. More than one local looked askance at me as I made my way down the leafy streets, away from the touristy thoroughfares. I guessed that if a god had to live somewhere in London, it would look something like this. They couldn’t all be hanging out on Mount Olympus eating grapes.

I stood outside number eight and double-checked the address. Curtains covered the windows, removing any opportunity to play peeping tom.

On impulse, I stepped onto the doorstep and rang the buzzer. After a minute, the curtains moved slightly. I rang the buzzer again, then looked at my watch. I’d made good time on the Tube. I had at least an hour before I had to head back to the hospital.

A speaker crackled to life. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want to talk to you.’

‘Since when?’

‘Um, since yesterday? Ten minutes, that’s all. I’ve just got a couple of questions.’

I heard a loud clunk as the receiver at the other end of the speaker was put down, and the crackling stopped.

The front door opened, and the most beautiful man I’d ever seen poked his head out. He looked as if he had walked out of an American soap opera: blond, blue-eyed, and coiffed, with a perfectly symmetrical face and neat white teeth. If I’d met him without knowing who he was, I’d have guessed he would have been named after some sort of geology: Rock, Cliff, Clay. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Adonis had been the male god of beauty and desire, and no one could be prettier than this guy.

He looked golden. Suddenly I felt grubby.

His blue eyes narrowed, then just as suddenly the confusion cleared, and he smiled, showing a mouth of perfectly white teeth. The smile filled his face. Brilliant blue eyes crinkled at the corners. It was like the sun coming out.

‘You’re not Desma.’

Ten points for observation. ‘No, I’m Vivia. Her daughter.’

‘What do you want?’ It was only when he framed the question that I realised I had no idea what I was going to say.

My ancient dead aunts think someone murdered them seventy years ago. Any idea who?

My sister is dying of mystery cancer. Know anything about that?

What about street weasels? Anything funny going on there?

‘Can I come in?’

‘No.’ For such pretty blue eyes, they could be remarkably hard.

‘I wanted to ask about my mother. I’m in a spot of trouble, and I think it might relate to when you knew her. Just a few questions. It won’t take long.’

He laughed suddenly. Like the rest of him, it was attractive. No weird snort or cackle like I might have done, just a deep throaty chuckle. ‘Oh no. Absolutely not. I have an idea of the sort of trouble you’re in, and I don’t care. I heard about the glass coffin, Snow White. You can spin me whatever kind of tale you like, but how do I know you’re not going to try to take a bite out of me?’

‘I’m not. How did you know about that?’ I’d thought no one knew. Okay, maybe not no one, but no one who would tell a strange god.

‘Oh, I make it my business to know what the hags are up to. That way I can make sure I’m always at the other end of the city. Of course, if you’re going to make a habit of turning up on my doorstep, I might have to make it the other end of the world.’

‘It’s just a few questions—’

‘No. I’m not getting involved with your family again. Much too grim.’

I leapt on a single word. ‘Again? What do you mean, again? What happened?’

The merriness disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. ‘Uh-uh, I know Desma. She is insane and nasty and vindictive, and I have better things to do with my long life than cross her.’ He began to close the door.

I stuck my foot in it. ‘I just want to know what’s going on. I’m not asking you to cross anyone.’

He turned back. ‘That’s what you think. Tell me, why aren’t you asking your mother all these questions?’

‘She’s dead.’

‘Like that makes a difference to you.’

I opened my mouth, and later I’d think of a snappy comeback, but the only thing I could think of at the time was that I didn’t want to get involved with my family, either.

He snorted. ‘That’s what I thought.’

The door slammed shut. So much for that.

16

As soon as the train came out from underground, my phone beeped with a text from Per: All went well. In recovery. Not awake yet. I breathed out an audible sigh of relief. Sigrid was far from out of danger. There was still the risk of infection and that she might reject all her new organs, but she’d survived the first step and that was cause enough for celebration.

I had another forty minutes at least before I’d get to the hospital. I took my mother’s journal out of my bag and began paging through again. I hadn’t noticed it before the conspiracy website, but once I knew what I was looking for, I saw it everywhere.

All communities have common names. Meet someone with a surname of King, and there’s a good chance they’ve got Caribbean ancestry. Jones? Patel? MacDonald? You could take a good guess where their ancestors had come from. But Wahner? Ostwald? Those were weasel names, as was Gilbert. I must have met fifty weasels named Gilbert while I’d been working at the Lipscombe.

I reached the last page and was about to close it when I realised something didn’t feel right. I ran my fingers over the inside of the back cover. The journal itself was a cheap one pretending to be more expensive, with the type of faux leather that hides cheap cardboard. There was a long but definite ridge inside the back.

I picked at it with my fingernails until it came loose in a cardboardy mess, then slipped my fingers underneath and pulled out a single folded piece of A4 paper. It unfolded to reveal a black and white photocopy from what appeared to be a textbook. The text looked like part of an old origin myth and was difficult to make out because Desma had scribbled all over it in black ink. Most was just scribbles, but she had written a single word in block letters deep enough that it broke the page: HOGWASH.

And on the final day, the Father of Weasels was made. Like his animal counterpart, he was quick and clever, known for his vigilance and willingness to protect his pack. Soon his children numbered in the thousands, and he loved every one. The Great Father protects them all from the evils of the world, and every time one of his children dies, he mourns with a passion powerful enough to make the heavens cry and shudder.

Whatever it was about, my mother hadn’t believed it. Was that it? Was that who she thought was trying to kill her—some old weasel god with a grudge?

I read it through over and over until I reached the hospital, but it didn’t make much sense to me on any of the repeated rounds.

Armed with flowers and chocolates from the overpriced shop on the ground floor, I took the lift to the second floor where Sigrid was ensconced in a single room tucked in the depths of the hospital. She didn’t have the money for that sort of treatment. Per must have wangled it somehow. Just like he’d wangled her surgery. I wondered who the attending nurses and anaesthetist were. Cyber-supporters? Sympathisers? I doubted the hospital administration knew what he was doing.

I tapped gently on the door. Sigrid was alone in the room. She lay on her back on the bed with her eyes closed, a blanket up to her waist. From the shapes under the blanket, she was now sporting a new pair of legs to match the arms that lay flat on top of the blanket. They were metallic but perfectly shaped. Metal plates had been attached at either side of her temples, and where there should have been skin at the top of her hospital gown, there was nothing but metallic sheen. She looked like Cyborg Barbie. I repressed a sigh. Just another version of Sigrid: Angel Barbie, Shell Barbie, Cyborg Barbie. All were toys, and none was the real girl.

She opened her eyes, and I started. They were gone too, replaced by metal orbs with engravings that simulated where her pupils would have been.

It looked damned creepy. I smiled to try to hide my discomfort. ‘Hey, how are you feeling?’

‘Weird.’ Even her voice had changed. It was still human, but the register wasn’t quite right.

‘Can you see me?’

‘Yes, but differently. It’s hard to explain.’

I patted at her hand. It was cool and smooth. ‘Uh, I brought you chocolates.’ I held them up as if to prove my claim. If you still eat them. Maybe I should have brought some motor oil. ‘So when do you find out if they got all of it?’

‘I—’ she broke off, and those disconcerting metal orbs slid in their sockets towards the doorway. I followed her gaze to see Per in a white doctor’s coat.

He gave her the sweetest smile. ‘I think we got it all, but we’re going to need to do some more tests to be sure. And then we have to discuss the next action. Possibly radiotherapy, but you need to rest now and make sure your new organs have time to assimilate. Are you in any pain?’ He crossed the room and sat on the bed next to her. He reached a hand out to her forehead.

‘No, not at all.’

I frowned. ‘Shouldn’t she be?’ He’d just cut half her body off. It should hurt.

He shook his head. ‘I put in a neural transmitter. It’s dampening her nerve endings. Looks like it’s working properly.’ At my expression, he continued, ‘Don’t look at me like that. It’s just another form of pain relief. A much more effective one, I might add. She can turn the pain back on any time she likes. Although, of course, I wouldn’t recommend it.’

He bent and kissed her forehead. ‘Get some sleep. I’ll come back and check on you in a little while.’

‘I don’t feel tired.’

‘That’s because your body has all the pain and exhaustion switched off. Have a look for sleep mode. You should be able to turn it on with a thought.’

Sigrid’s lips curved in a smile. ‘Thanks. There it is.’ Her lids closed, and her face relaxed almost instantly.

I turned on Per. ‘What the fuck? You didn’t say you were going to turn her into a robot!’

‘That’s a pretty offensive term, you know.’

‘What? Robot? Really?’

‘We prefer Cybernetically Advanced Person. CAPs, if you must.’

‘Oh, good grief, CAP then. What on earth? That’s not what you told me. You didn’t tell me you were going to replace her eyes.’

‘They were infected,’ he said, rubbing at his own. His shoulders slumped, and for the first time I noticed how tired he appeared.

‘So how come you don’t turn on the energy switch?’

‘I’m not that advanced. Like I told you, the tech is still experimental.’

‘But you’ll test it out on my sister?’

‘You don’t understand. It was everywhere. I took away everything I could, but—’

‘But?’

‘But it’s still spreading. I know you think I’m a butcher, but I really can’t keep cutting bits off.’

‘I’ve got someone coming to look at her later. A soul expert.’ I told him about Ruth and how I knew her, and his face lit up with hope. He’d had eight months with Sigrid that I hadn’t had, and most of those had been healthy ones. I realised that these last few days must have been as weird for him as they had for me. Neither of us were seeing the Sigrid we wanted. I’d known the anger I felt at him was misplaced, but seeing that hopeful expression on his face made it dissipate completely.

‘So what side effects can she expect? Other than her looking like a ro—cybernetically advanced person?’

‘She should be stronger, less prone to aches and pains. The neural implants will be the biggest change. She can adjust her emotions, switch herself on or off, like sleeping. There’s also some filing capacity. She’ll have a photographic memory. All her memories will be better—like an organised filing system of HD movies, instead of the foggy stuff everyone else gets. Upgrades are always tricky, but it’s only going to be good.’

‘How can you know that? It’s all new.’

‘No, it’s not. We’ve done them all before. All under the radar, of course. Every piece of tech has been done before. I just haven’t done them all in one go.’

That made me feel a little better about it. ‘How long is she going to be out?’

‘Should be a few hours at least. She has a lot of healing to do.’

‘I’ll wait,’ I said. Ruth would be arriving before long, and I didn’t have time to go home and come back.

Unsurprisingly, the hospital room didn’t have Wi-Fi, but the cafeteria on the ground floor did. I took my backpack and my laptop downstairs.

I wasn’t as hopeful as Per. I didn’t know what Ruth would find, but it had to be something to do with her being a hag’s daughter or a hag’s sister. Souls didn’t just go wrong. She might not have had the magical abilities and hag looks, but Sigrid was still my mother’s daughter. She wasn’t human.

Desma had always been quite honest about the fact that she rarely kept her human children. You should be grateful. Ana felt the same way, with no sense of shame about it. The children weren’t hags, therefore they were nothing. Sigrid had been the only human my mother had given birth to this century, but Ana had had human children, most of whom were likely still alive. I’d never thought much about them other than to think they were better off for being adopted. They’d get to have a nice normal life away from the hags. I found myself wondering about the state of their health. Had any of them suffered from mysterious illnesses? Adoptions were sealed until the child was eighteen, and then contact had to be initiated by the child, not the mother.

I made a mental note to ask Ana if any of them had contacted her. I’d be surprised if she had returned the contact, but she’d have kept their information somewhere within that warren of hers.

I’d never really questioned being a hag. I knew plenty of metanatural people who wished they were human. I never had. What was the point? I was who I was, but now it was weighing on me. How much easier would my life have been if I’d had ordinary parents, an ordinary life? I wouldn’t have become involved with any of the crap that had made my life so hard. I wouldn’t have been stuck looking after my sister’s empty shell. I wouldn’t have been bitten by a zombie. I wouldn’t have to deal with a bunch of grumpy, smelly dead hags. No Stanley. No Desma—dead or alive.

Maybe I’d have been an accountant or worked in a call centre. Maybe I’d have a nice normal husband with a middle-aged spread and a couple of bratty kids who didn’t appreciate me.

It sounded boring, sure, but I wouldn’t have to worry about becoming a damned zombie. I wouldn’t be wondering if something I had done was destroying my sister’s soul.

I only realised how much I was scowling when the man serving me at the hospital coffee shop did a double take at the sight of my face, and dropped a stack of plastic lids on the floor.

‘Sorry, it’s been a bad morning.’ Bad week. Bad year. Bad life. God, I really needed some caffeine.

Like all hospital coffee, it was truly disgusting, but sip after sip of blisteringly hot yuck helped focus my thoughts away from the increasingly ridiculous self-pity.

I switched on my laptop and began researching the Father of Weasels. Either he didn’t exist or he kept a very low profile, because I didn’t find any definitive proof of such a creature outside the mythological. He was said to be taller than the average, thin and grey-furred rather than the usual red. Within the canon of were-creature deities, he was given a protective role, which matched the information on the scrap of paper in my mother’s journal. According to the myth, he had been human once and had been drowned in a salt marsh on his wedding night. Instead of dying, he emerged as the first wereweasel and took revenge on his tormentors. I looked further, but couldn’t find any reference to who those tormentors might have been.

I checked the time on the corner of the screen. Ruth was arriving in half an hour, and I wanted to be there when Sigrid woke up. I ordered another coffee, this time to take away and carried it up to her room.

I nudged open the door. In the chair next to her bed, with his pink-palmed hand resting against Sigrid’s cheek, was a tall, grey-furred weasel.

17

I stopped dead. I had made no effort to be silent, but I had the impression he might not have noticed me if I’d run up to him and shouted in his ear. The fingers stroking Sigrid’s cheek seemed tender. His intelligent black eyes, lined with thick eyelashes, were fixed on her face.

If this is what we were hiding from in the bomb shelter all those years, then someone had made a major misjudgement. The weasel in the chair didn’t look like a killer; he looked like an oversized toy a child would win at a fair.

‘She’s not a woman anymore. She’s a machine.’ He spoke suddenly, without taking his eyes away from her face.

‘She’s still the same person,’ I said, although which person I meant I wasn’t sure.

‘You shouldn’t have done this to her,’ he said.

‘I didn’t have a choice. And I didn’t. She did. She was the one who made the decision.’ I stepped into the room, and his body tensed. ‘You’re the Father of Weasels.’

He let out a burst of laughter.

‘What?’

‘Everybody gets it wrong. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by now.’

He stood, and crossed the room towards me. Close up, he smelled like musky, warm fur. His teeth were very sharp when he smiled—needle-like canines very unlike the human kind.

I stood my ground and blocked the door, but he picked me up and moved me out of the way like I was made of air.

By the time I turned and went out into the corridor, he was gone. ‘Speedy,’ I muttered under my breath.

I took the chair beside Sigrid’s bed. What had he seen when he’d looked at her? And why? Seeing the tenderness with which he had touched her, it was as if he knew her, but there was no way that he could. Sigrid and I been inseparable as children. It was possible he’d met her in the last eight months, but that wasn’t the impression I’d received. His concern seemed deeply felt and long lasting.

It didn’t help that deep down, I knew he was right. She no longer was a woman. She was a machine. The woman in the bed resembled my sister, but when I found myself questioning what she was supposed to look like, I realised I had no idea. The angel who’d come back from the dead had looked like I’d imagined she should, but I was aware that was an idealised version. And this? This cyborg?

‘This her?’

I turned to see Ruth in the doorway. Either she was wearing contacts or had had laser eye surgery, because the giant spectacles that had magnified her brown eyes were gone. It wasn’t the only change. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been in the process of undergoing gender reassignment surgery, and I guessed that it was either now complete or nearing completion. I couldn’t quite put my finger on the actual difference, other than that somehow she looked more like herself, and it suited her.

I nodded and gave her a smile. ‘Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it.’

‘Pleasure.’ She returned my smile. ‘But it’s not entirely selfless. I really do want to run some tests on you.’

‘I’d have done them anyway.’

She nodded, and took the chair on the other side of Sigrid’s bed. ‘And all the hardware?’

I gave her an abridged version of how Sigrid had become ill as a child and that her soul had crossed to the underworld and then come back. There were some obvious gaps, but Ruth just listened and didn’t interrupt. I explained how the cancer was spreading, and Per’s reasoning behind the surgery.

I fell silent, then Ruth said, ‘I’ve never heard of the soul being affected through illness, no matter what you might have read online. It’s unlikely I’d be able to help.’ She scrutinised Sigrid as if checking for cracks. ‘It’s probably better if she’s awake.’

I gently shook Sigrid’s shoulder, and felt hard metal under the hospital gown. Those disconcerting metal eyes blinked open, and I felt rather than saw Ruth’s quickly stifled reaction. I introduced them. Sigrid looked at Ruth with suspicion, but didn’t argue. ‘Should I get her doctor?’ I asked.

‘No, this should be fairly simple.’ Ruth turned to Sigrid. ‘I’ll need to touch you.’

Sigrid nodded.

The soulcraft expert ran her hands up my sister’s body from Sigrid’s feet to the top of her head, resting her fingers at the side of Sigrid’s forehead on the bare skin at the edges of the metal plating. The scent of camphor rose.

Sigrid gasped. Her mouth flapped open and closed multiple times like a fish. I grabbed her metal hand. It was freezing. The air solidified and the scent of camphor grew even stronger.

Sigrid’s hand grew colder in mine. I gagged, and a streak of pain raced up my arm. I looked down to see my hand covered in frost.

I glanced up at Ruth. Her eyes were glazed over, and she began panting. Both her hands were covered in ice.

‘Ruth?’

She didn’t answer. I said her name again, louder, but there was no reaction, nothing to indicate she had even heard. The ice began spreading—along Ruth’s arms, up Sigrid’s. Sigrid let out a high-pitched sound between her teeth.

‘Ruth, I think you better stop.’

The soulcrafter didn’t move. Her eyes focused on some spot above Sigrid’s head. I pulled at her hands, but they were slippery with ice. Sigrid’s squeal grew softer. That worried me more than if it had become louder.

I grabbed Ruth’s wrists tightly and pulled. The ice cracked, and she fell backward. Sigrid let out a gasp, and the metal circles in her eyes contracted and focused.

Ruth had fallen awkwardly, one leg under her on the floor with the heel of the other poking up into her back. Eyes still glazed, she shook her head slowly, looking for all the world like a drunk who’d fallen and couldn’t figure out how to get up. I offered her my hand, and she stared at it for a few seconds as if trying to figure out what it was doing there before taking it. I helped her over to one of the chairs, and she fell into it heavily.

The door slammed open, and Per appeared. He took in the three of us, and the melting ice on the floor and the bed. ‘What on earth is going on?’

‘I told you I’d ask Professor Hedger to take a look at Sigrid,’ I said.

‘And do what exactly? Your sister’s just been through major surgery. This…I don’t even know what this is, but it’s not a good idea.’

Sigrid spoke suddenly. ‘I was someone else.’

‘Who?’ Per and I both shot our attention to her, and spoke at the same time.

‘I don’t know. We were in a forest, the thickest, darkest forest you’d ever imagine. Mum was there, but she wasn’t herself, either. She was the most beautiful girl.’ Sigrid frowned, and the wrinkle on her forehead bumped against the metal plate. ‘It was weird.’

‘Weird’ didn’t cover half of it. Ruth had her eyes closed and was still breathing heavily. I touched her forearm. ‘Are you okay?’

She nodded without speaking.

‘Both of you have to go,’ Per said. ‘I’m sorry, Professor, but my patient has to rest.’

Ruth nodded again. She opened her eyes and pushed herself heavily to her feet.

I made my way to the door, but before I reached it, Per took my arm. ‘Let me know what she says. I’m sorry to kick you out, but—’

But Sigrid was his priority. I got it. Just as I closed the door, I saw him bend and give her a gentle kiss on the forehead. The corners of her mouth turned up in a smile. And that, more than anything else, broke my heart. Sigrid didn’t deserve this. Neither of them did.

I took Ruth back to the same hospital coffee shop where I’d frightened the barista and ordered us both tea, which turned out to be as bad as the coffee.

We sat at a Formica table in the corner. I waited with forced patience while she sipped her tea, and her hands stopped shaking. Finally, she looked up. Her brown eyes were sad. ‘Vivia, how much do you know about how gods are made?’

‘Are they? I thought they sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus. Or got made out of each other’s bodily fluids. Something like that.’

She sighed. ‘Uh, no. Everyone gets one soul, and one lifetime. That’s the way the universe works. It’s very fair like that. Anyone wanting to live beyond their allotted three score and ten has to steal it from somewhere else. So the vamps steal it in the form of blood, zombies eat flesh, and the gods? The only way to make a god is by blood sacrifice. They get to be immortal because they reprogramme their clocks with someone else’s time.’

‘Well, that’s just nasty.’

‘Yes.’ Ruth’s brown eyes were intense. The penny dropped.

‘You mean someone’s sacrificing Sigrid’s life to live longer. Who? Who is it?’

All the people I knew, the people Sigrid knew, flashed through my head. If my mother had been alive, I would have thought it was she. The weasel guy? He didn’t seem the type. Ana? She’d hardly ever noticed Sigrid. I couldn’t think of anyone else. A cold fury rose within me. I’d kill them.

Ruth took my hand in hers. It was still ice-cold. ‘You, Vivia. It’s you.’

18

A shudder passed through my body, and I broke out in a cold sweat. I’d known there was a good chance it had something to do with me, but this was something else.

‘How? Is it because she came back?’

‘No. I don’t think so. You said she first got sick at fourteen? And you were twelve?’

‘She died at fourteen,’ I said. ‘The symptoms started showing a little earlier.’ I cupped the tea in my hands. The smell drifting up made me feel nauseated.

‘Around the time you entered puberty,’ Ruth said. ‘I know hags are incredibly rare, but what do you know about the others’ childhoods? Did they have sisters?’

Ana had had a sister who’d died, a younger one. I didn’t know about the others. They’d already been ancient when they had died. I said as much to Ruth. She nodded as if she’d already known.

‘I’m sorry, Vivia. It’s rare in human-based life forms, but it happens. It’s common in animals. The stronger offspring consume the weaker.’

I’m not the stronger.

A bolt of realisation hit me. My mother knew. She knew that’s why Sigrid was dying. And so did Stanley. He’d been around when Ana and her sister were born. Maybe he’d ignored it, had let my mother explain it all as hag business, but he must have suspected something. He hadn’t said a word.

‘Well, stop it. I don’t want her to die for me.’

‘I can’t. Her soul is tied to yours. It’s part of what you both are.’

‘And her soul is being destroyed for me.’

Ruth’s eyes widened. She took my hand again. ‘No. Oh God, no! Is that what you thought? No, it’s not a soul sacrifice. It’s a life one. Her soul isn’t being eaten, not in the same way the usual soul magic works. It’s just being forced into the underworld before its time.’

‘There must be something we can do to stop it.’

‘I’d help if I could, I really, really would, but this is intrinsically part of you. I can’t break it without breaking both of your souls. This thing with the two of you, it’s ancient and primitive, and it’s woven together in a way that’s impossible to untangle.’

I still wasn’t ready to accept it. ‘No, it can’t be right. I’m not a god.’

‘Not yet. You will be when… I’m sorry.’

I rubbed my face with my hands, trying to think. There had to be a way out. ‘Why? What caused it?’

She gave me a sad smile. ‘Now you’re asking me why you exist? Why hags exist? I don’t know. I deal with the hard facts around souls, not the big metaphysical questions. You’d be better off asking a philosopher, or a minister.’

She drained the last of her tea then reached into her pocket and produced a business card. ‘I have to go. I’ve got to give a lecture in an hour. This is my personal number. Call me if you have any questions, or if you just need to talk about it. I really am sorry, Vivia.’

I watched her leave, turning the card over in my fingers. She was right. Whatever we did about this, it wasn’t my choice. It was Sigrid’s soul. Her soul. Her choice.

A surge of anger took me by surprise. I should have known about this. If it was a hag thing, then it had happened to Desma. It had happened to Ana, and Tilde, and Beatrice. Not one of them had said a word to me.

I got out my mobile and dialled Ana’s number.

‘Ana, your sister who died—’

She laughed suddenly. ‘Oh, you’ve figured it out, have you?’

My hand tightened around the phone. I resisted the urge to throw it at the wall. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about it?’

‘Why would I? You’d only get all pouty.’

I gritted my teeth. ‘It’s something I should have known.’

‘Yes, it’s something you should have known, but it’s not my job to educate you. Hags have sisters who die. It’s how we work.’

‘But it’s not right.’

‘So? Might as well complain about being a vampire and wanting to drink blood, or being all furry because you’re a weasel, or—’

‘Okay, okay. I get it. Is there anything I can do about it?’

‘You mean to stop her dying?’

‘Yes!’

‘No, of course not. You’re a hag. She’s the sacrifice. It’s what you are. Might as well ask the world to stop turning.’

‘I don’t know how you can be so blasé about this. Your sister died too. Didn’t that bother you?’

‘Of course it did. I was upset, but it was a long time ago and there was nothing I could do about it. I’m more upset about the fact that I can’t make any hags myself. Something in me just isn’t getting the recipe right. I just get one random human after another. All sisters and no hags. It’s really starting to piss me—’

I hung up. Not another self-absorbed word. I sat at the table, trying to will my body to relax and my mind to calm. When I no longer had the urge to lash out at inanimate objects, I left the table. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the barista pulling a face at one of his colleagues. I ignored him, and strode towards the elevators to tell my sister that everything bad that was happening to her was because of me.

I sat in the chair beside the bed and took her cool hand in mine. ‘You awake?’ I whispered.

Her eyelids rolled up. Steel-grey eyeballs swivelled towards me. My fault. If it weren’t for me, they’d still be cornflower blue.

At the thought, I just lost it. Great ugly sobs rose up out of my throat. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’ The same words bubbled out, over and over again, hardly comprehensible through the tears.

Strong, metal arms pulled me, and I lay there, head on her chest, soaking her hospital gown, until I’d gained enough control to tell her why I was sorry. Even then, I couldn’t tell her to her face. I confessed all to the wet patch of hospital gown in front of my nose.

Sigrid lay still and quiet beneath me, and for one terrifying moment after I’d finished, I thought she’d switched off, and I’d have to find the courage to tell her all over again. But then, that horrible unnatural voice spoke up. ‘It’s okay. It’s not your fault.’

I breathed out in one big shudder, and raised my eyes to hers, but that just started the sobs over again. I hadn’t known metal eyes could cry.

19

On the day my sister started school for the first time, my mother sewed us up for winter. An arctic wind had blown in from the north the previous day, bringing icy mornings and bone-piercing gusts of freezing air. The scent of goose fat permeated my sinuses as she rubbed it into my chest and stomach. Her hands were rough, and the fat slid thick and greasy on my skin. Sigrid had already been done. My sister stood next to me, naked and shivering in the cold air. I had vague memories of it from the previous year, of an odd-but-not-unpleasant odour that grew stronger and less pleasant as the weeks went on.

Sigrid’s school uniform lay on her bed, new and still clean: grey trousers, a white shirt and olive-green jumper. Desma picked up the trousers between her thumb and forefinger, an expression of disdain on her face.

‘Look at this! Completely impractical. These modern clothes…’ She grabbed the scissors from the other side of the bed, and snipped until she was satisfied.

She snapped her fingers at Sig. ‘Come. Come.’ Sigrid did, stepping into the trousers and then the shirt and jumper. ‘Now, stand still.’ Desma instructed, as if Sigrid had been jumping around, instead of standing as still as she possibly could.

It took her half an hour to sew Sigrid into her clothes by sewing the shirt and jumper to the trousers, and then tightening the cuffs. Finally she sewed buttons to the flaps she had created on the trousers, so Sig could answer the call of nature.

Stanley stuck his head round the door then. He was younger then, of course, but still wrinkled and grey haired with the same artificial teeth he’d had since the originals were destroyed in the war.

He nodded with approval. ‘That’s the way my mam did it. It’ll keep you two snug enough.’

He walked Sigrid to her new school while Desma did me. It didn’t take as long to sew me in. I was in Sig’s hand-me-downs, and all that was required was a re-sew around the waist, and a little around the ankle line.

She finished off the last stitch then went out into the garden to have a cigarette and chat to the family of weasels who were camping in the garden that summer.

I was left alone in the house without my big sister’s company for the first time in my short life. I remember the feeling of being alone, but not what I did next. The next thing I remember was being in the sitting room and hearing the doorbell go. I peered out from behind the curtains to see a large woman covered in floral standing on the doorstep, one hand up ready to ring again if no one answered, the other hand tucked behind her where she held Sigrid’s smaller one in her own. Sig’s blue eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. Her blond hair was as neat as it had been. I’d helped braid it, using some of the goose fat to smooth down the sticky-up bits, and a frisson of pride surged through me.

I opened my mouth to call out, but Desma was already passing the sitting room door. There was a short delay while she checked her make-up in the hallway mirror, during which time the floral lady rang again, before Desma answered the door.

I couldn’t make out the initial words, but they were cheerful on both sides, both of them doing their best to out-friendly the other.

All five of us—Desma, the floral lady whose name I have forgotten, Stanley, Sigrid and me—all sat in the living room, the adults with mugs of tea. Sigrid and I huddled together in a single armchair—aware that something was happening, but too young to understand what or why. That came later.

The floral lady didn’t stop smiling—not when she spoke, or even when she took a sip of tea, then it just diminished into a lip smile as the mug reached her mouth.

‘I think I see the problem here.’ She reached into her voluminous handbag and produced a couple of pamphlets, which she handed over. ‘It happens all the time with non-humans starting school. Not this exactly, but things like this. Here.’ She reached over and tapped the top pamphlet, big toothy grin, head nodding. ‘This is a basic explanation of modern sanitary standards and what we expect from Sigrid at school. It’s not onerous. You should get the hang of it in a couple of weeks.’

Desma returned the smile. Her freshly applied lipstick was very red, and some of it had smeared onto her teeth. ‘Of course, you understand this is new to me. I come from a time when…’

Floral lady waved away her explanation with a wafty hand. ‘It’s okay. Like I said, we see this sort of thing all the time. Not the actual sewing up. I believe that hasn’t been done in decades, but you should see some of the children when they start. Your little girl is actually a lot healthier than most of the children we see. And, of course, when your other starts school…’

She broke off, as if she were really seeing me for the first time. I knew the thoughts going through her head as well as if she’d said them aloud. I’d heard others whisper them often enough. I’d been aware of the pitying looks I received when people found out I was Sigrid’s sister. I heard the whispers that weren’t meant for my ears, but made it to them just the same.

Sisters? Really?

They must have different fathers.

That ugly little thing? Oh, that is a shame.

‘They’re both yours?’

‘Yes,’ Desma said. The smile was as wide, but it no longer reached her eyes.

‘Okay then. How about I check on you in a week and see how you’re getting on?’

And then the part I remember best: being roughly cut out of my clothing, dunked into a hot water bath, and scrubbed and scoured until every part of me was pink and tingly. There was the sudden lack of the itching that had always been a part of existence, and my hair that became oh-so-soft and fluffy when it dried. Then came new clothes that smelt of cotton, not sweat, and were soft but not greasy against my skin.

Later the stink of anti-nit shampoo appealed a little less, but Sigrid and I were hooked. We’d spend hours in the bath after school, splashing and throwing bubbles all over and generally making an almighty mess. Desma didn’t notice—she rarely used the bathroom, preferring to answer the call of nature in the privy that stood at the end of the garden. It’s dirty to crap inside the house, girls.

Of course, children being what they are, the Smelly Siggie epithet followed my sister throughout her schooling until the day she died at fourteen.

The last social worker we saw was a sour-faced old prune whose name I forgot. She sat in our living room one bright August afternoon, not even pretending to hide her distaste at the stink of my mother. She perched at the end of the armchair, as far away as was physically possible without actually falling off, as though the thought of contact with anything in our home horrified her. She had a tick-list and was racing through the questions.

‘Physical health of the girls?’

‘Fine,’ my mother said.

‘My leg hurts,’ said Sigrid.

Sour-face frowned as if annoyed by the complication. ‘Has she been to the doctor?’

‘Yes,’ my mother lied. ‘It’s nothing. Growing pains. Maybe a sprain.’

Tick.

‘Anything else?’

‘No.’

Tick.

‘My leg really does hurt,’ Sigrid said.

Sour-face put down her pen, and to her credit gave Sigrid a good once-over. She turned her head to stare at me.

Sour-face frowned. ‘She’s human?’

My mother laughed. ‘Of course not. Sigrid might not look like a hag, but she comes from hag stock.’

Whatever interest Sour-face had in my sister immediately dissipated. ‘Well, I don’t think we need to keep monitoring this situation.’

She saw herself out, and the moment she was out the door, she reached into her handbag for a little container of antiseptic which she squirted onto her hands with her nose wrinkled and her mouth a tight line. We never saw her again.

I might have been the uglier, the skinnier, the ‘oh, that is a shame’ child, but I was also the hag. I was the one with the power over death. I was the one who had inherited immortality. I was the one who was going to live forever, a fact I loved until Sigrid got sick and a twelve-year-old me finally understood what immortality meant.

I killed my sister, then I brought her back wrong. I resurrected her body, an empty shell that lived while her soul stayed in the underworld, and I was punished for it.

I spent my teens locked in a single room with a cat flap on the door that Stanley pushed food through that just ended up going mouldy, because staying in one room was nothing at all, not to a girl who could die. A girl who had the whole underworld to wander, an underworld that contained the soul of the sister she had killed.

I owed Sigrid entirely too much, and this was just one terrible thing more.

20

I usually died in my bedroom with a plastic cover over the bed, but when I spread it out over the blankets, I stopped.

No. No more death in this house.

I felt a sudden pain and realised my hands were clenched into fists so tightly that my fingernails were digging into the palms. Little crescent moons turned bloody on each palm.

I grabbed a vial of river water from my backpack, stomped out to the shelter behind the greenhouse and stepped down into the evil-smelling dark.

I stripped off my clothes and sat cross-legged in the mud next to my mother’s body. The only thing I still wore was the key on the chain around my neck.

Dying was easy. I’d been doing it all my life. But I could still do it wrong. I unscrewed the vial and touched a drop of water to my lip. I never used to need all these little rituals—the vial, the key—when I was a child, but now they were essential.

I lay down and stared up at the rust on the ceiling, the floor cool and squelchy under my bare skin. Purposely, an inch at a time, I relaxed my body from toes to hair follicles.

Then I closed my eyes and died.

I woke to heaviness and the taste of soil in my mouth, and then it was gone as the bomb shelter flickered into existence.

My house flickered, changed colour, changed curtains then disappeared as it was swallowed by the river.

The dead crowded the banks. Most were naked. A good proportion wore hospital gowns. Buses, cars, and carriages choked the river-road, travelling just on the surface of the water and splashing the passersby on either side. An enormous ship sailed around the end of the road, bending reality so it could fit down the narrow London street. The recently dead stood at the railings, gawping at the underworld as it slid past. A slim figure at the helm—Charon the Boatman—waved at me. I beckoned, and the ship slowed to a stop.

A rope ladder descended and I grabbed hold of it. The size of the ship should have made it quite a climb, but I jumped onto the deck after four rungs.

The Boatman tipped his hat at me. ‘Back already?’

I returned his smile. ‘Not permanently. I’m looking for my mother. Have you seen her?’

He gave me a quizzical look. ‘You want to know where she is so you can find her? Or because you’re avoiding her as usual?’

‘The first. Unfortunately.’

‘I haven’t seen her in years, but I know her usual haunts. I can make a few detours as I do the rounds.’

‘I’d appreciate that. Thank you.’

I found a seat on the deck between an elderly woman with a not-real Maltese poodle on her lap and a skeletally-thin young man in a hospital gown.

The first of my mother’s regular haunts was a Limehouse pub called Charlie Brown’s. I knew it—one of those landmarks that even without its dead owner behind the bar would have been scarred into the underworld. It had been demolished in the late Eighties. I’d never visited in the living world, but Desma and Ana had talked about it often in their reminiscing. I ducked around its famous curiosities, including a smelly stuffed bear and a number of not-real live monkeys, but recognised no one, and had to sit on the step and wait for Charon to come round again.

It was only one stop, but I felt discouraged. I knew the underworld well, but not as well as someone who’d been a regular visitor for thousands of years. I had the suspicion that the real reason I hadn’t seen my mother in the last decade was because—unusually for her—she didn’t want to be seen.

Charon deposited me at six other locations—two more pubs, the original Globe, a brothel, and a bear-baiting pit that I had to search with my eyes half-closed, and my fingers in my ears because of the squeals and whimpers. I left it with a sick feeling in my stomach and an overwhelming feeling of gratefulness that I’d been born in the twentieth century.

I climbed up the rope ladder and sank onto a chair on the deck. I looked around. None of the dead who’d begun the journey with me were still there, but there were plenty more where they’d come from.

I didn’t have high hopes for the last stop, even when the ship deposited me in the depths of a dark forest. It was night, and although there was a full moon, only the tiniest slivers of it were visible through the mass of foliage. It left the world so dark I could only just make out my hands in front of my face.

A cold wind bit at my clothing and I shivered and hugged my arms around myself. Despite my apparent isolation, it wasn’t quiet. The wind whistled through the trees overhead, and small invisible creatures rustled somewhere near my feet. An owl hooted. The forest smelt loamy and rich. And of pine needles. I frowned, bent, and scooped up a handful of fallen leaves from my feet, and ran them through my fingers. The distinctive needle-like shape confirmed it: pine.

That was odd. Britain has a few native conifers, mostly the Scots Pine, but as far as I knew its only pine forest was in Scotland. I was sure the Boatman hadn’t taken me that far.

Unless he’d taken me a lot further back. I knew enough about British pre-history to know that our damp climate was only a blip on the British timescape. It had been everything from grasslands to full forest, and had spent thousands of years covered in ice. Numerous species—animal and plant—had come and gone. A pine forest mightn’t be such an oddity. I reached into myself for the part of myself that was at home in the underworld, and a sense of comfort flooded through me. I relaxed. I knew where I was: Tartarus, the deep dark depths of the underworld.

I turned slowly in the black and found a patch of murk that was a little lighter than the darkness around it.

I made slow progress. Brush caught at my legs. Roots and fallen branches made the ground uneven. Even stepping one careful foot at a time with my arms out I fell more than once, and the damp earth soaked into my clothing.

The bright patch grew brighter and began to flicker as I drew closer, until the flames of a small campfire became visible through the trees.

I stepped through into a small clearing. The firelight revealed a shelter of sorts, but of a type I’d never seen before.

It didn’t have a pretty round door or twee cross-bar windows, but otherwise it looked for all intents and purposes like a hobbit hole. That is, if that hobbit hole had been abandoned for a decade or more and was filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell.

Weeds and bracken sprouted from the hole-like door. I risked poking my head in. Furs covered the floor, and the inside smelled as nasty as it had looked from the outside. There was no one inside, but the place didn’t feel abandoned.

‘I know you’re here,’ I said.

I heard her before I saw her. Her laughter tinkled. I turned suddenly, and there she was, sitting on a log by the fire. She wore an outfit I’d never seen before, one I thought fitted into the whole forest and hole-in-the-ground vibe—a plain woven dress accessorised with furs and beads. She wore her dark hair up, with shell combs on each side. Feather earrings dangled from her ears, adding to the bird of prey look she’d always had.

‘You came to see me? I am surprised. To what do I owe the honour? Or did you just miss your mean old mother?’

‘I wanted to talk to you about Sigrid.’

She rolled her head back. ‘Ugh. What about her now?’

‘She’s dying, but I imagine you know that.’

Her body straightened, and her green eyes narrowed, ‘What do you mean, she’s dying?’

‘What do you think I mean? Dying. As in: she will soon be dead.’

She shifted her weight on the log then reached down and grabbed a handful of sticks which she threw on the fire. ‘Don’t get snarky with me.’

‘I’m not. I know you must have known what was happening to her. What is happening to her. I want to know how to fix it.’

‘Maybe you should ask nicely.’

Whatever pride I had left, I swallowed. I took a seat next to her on the log. ‘Please.’

She patted my knee, and I noticed that despite whatever the local-time dress code she was playing at, she’d kept her bright red nail polish. ‘Then you know that this is the way it works. All my daughters lose their sisters. Every single one, ever since this whole sorry mess began. They’ve all lost their Sigrids. There’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘Is there something you can do about it?’

She laughed again. ‘No.’

‘Is that can’t or won’t?’

‘Vivia, you’re still young. You don’t understand. You don’t want to keep her. She’s blond and whiney and selfish, and if she lived, she would turn on you. It’s what they do. All the humans, all the sisters. In fact, I’d bet she’s doing it already: pushing you away and blaming you for everything that’s gone wrong in her life. You are a hag, and she is a bitch. She dies. You live.’

My eyes jerked to hers. The corners of hers were crinkled with amusement. A sudden coldness filled my stomach. I looked away. Somehow, despite everything, I hadn’t expected her to be so blunt.

‘It doesn’t have to be an either-or situation,’ I said, struggling to keep my voice even. ‘I don’t want immortality if that’s the cost.’

‘Hah! Tell me that again one day when you’re old and ugly and desperate for just another five years of youth.’

‘I’m going to fix this. With or without you.’

She grabbed my jaw with her hands and forced me to face her. Her nails dug into my neck. Her face turned ugly. ‘Don’t poke the sleeping bear, Vivia. You were always such a contrary child. You’d argue that the sky was yellow, just because I said otherwise.’

I thought of the way the sky looked before snow, and what the clouds had looked like on the night of the bomb when the sky had churned with smoke. ‘It can, sometimes.’

She let go of my face, shaking her head. ‘That is exactly what I’m talking about, Vivia. You don’t need to argue every point.’

But I did, and I wasn’t done yet. ‘All right then, how about you tell me why the hags died? Why all of them died.’

She flapped her hands at me dismissively. ‘Oh, you don’t need to worry about that.’

‘Yes, I do. If someone’s targeting hags, I need to know about it. And what’s with all the weasels? What’s that about?’

‘I said you don’t need to worry about it.’

‘Someone’s been killing us, and that’s your reaction? Don’t worry about it? What happened to us having to hide in the shelter? You cared about it then. There are only two of us left. I don’t have long’–I pulled at my whitening hair–‘and then Ana’s the only one left. She can’t hide underground forever, or hope she gets a lucky break like last time.’

‘A lucky break? Is that what she told you?’

‘Yes.’

She snorted. ‘With that one, we got the bitch and lost the hag. Hah!’

I didn’t know why I’d bothered to find her. My mother was just as I’d remembered. At least I could tick it off the list of things I’d tried. Just to be thorough, I had one more question, something that had been nagging at me.

‘Do you know why Sigrid came back as an angel?’

‘Ha! See what I mean about her? Talk about an inflated sense of self-importance.’

‘I don’t think she did it on purpose.’

‘Sure she did. The minds of the dead are weird and wonderful, but they’re just an extension of the individual. Why do you think I chose Stanley out of the other men in that tunnel? He was the most stupid and the least imaginative. He came back with the ability to talk to daffodils. That tells you everything you need to know about how his brain works.’

‘Sigrid—’

‘Sigrid is different. Go home, Vivia.’

She shoved me hard. I fell off the log, and kept falling, deeper and deeper into darkness, until I sat up gasping in the damp and cold of the bomb shelter.

Nausea rolled through my body, and I turned and vomited onto Stanley’s pretty sunflowers. Then I lay back in the soft mud, heart racing and waited for the sickness to pass.

I ran her words over and over in my head. Coming back from the dead could be like waking from an unpleasant dream. Sometimes you just remembered the emotions, but not the specifics. I didn’t want to forget anything.

When I was sure I was going to recall everything I could and the threat of hurling had passed, I got up, wrapped myself in a blanket and went back out into the garden. I shut the door behind me as well as I could, and went back into the house.

You are a hag, and she is a bitch. She dies. You live.

The woman could lie there and rot for all eternity, for all I cared.

.

21

I sat on the train the next morning, on the way to do my volunteer hours at the clinic, and tried not to think of Sigrid lying in her hospital bed with her creepy metal eyes and smooth, cool limbs. Neither of us knew our fathers. It wasn’t a subject tolerated by our mother, and it wasn’t something I thought about much, but the past was reopening old wounds.

The only information I had about him was that Desma said she didn’t remember, that it was probably some guy she picked up in a pub.

The tender way the weasel had stroked Sigrid’s face returned to me. He’d looked like he loved her. He couldn’t be her father. That wasn’t possible. Whatever gene it was that caused the weasels’ furriness was always passed on to their offspring. Sigrid simply wasn’t that hairy, but only family would care so much for someone he barely knew.

I stepped off of the train into what felt like a sauna. The heatwave that had engulfed the city since I’d returned hadn’t let up for an instant. The day had dawned brilliant and clear with the kind of bright blue sky that said it was going to be a scorcher.

I wore not much more than sandals, a skirt, and a sleeveless cotton blouse, and even though it wasn’t yet nine a.m., sweat saturated my hairline within minutes. The back of my neck felt slick and slimy. The underwire of my bra was soaked, and even as I wished I still had a change of clothing at the office, a little voice in the back of my head reminded me that the air conditioning never worked. I’d be slimy and greasy again within the hour, anyway.

Once past George Street, I followed the route I’d done a thousand times, past the pound shops and fried chicken places, a route which deviated only on Monday mornings when the pavement was littered with cans and bottles and the occasional leftover drunk.

Ruth’s words skittered around my brain. How much do you know about how gods are made? I wasn’t a god. The mere thought was ridiculous, but no matter how ridiculous it was, my sister was still dying because of it. If Desma hadn’t been dead, I would have wanted to kill her.

I stopped dead in the street, and the pedestrian behind bumped into me with a rude word. Before, my life had been bad—having to look after Sigrid and put up with Stanley—but at least I knew where I stood. This? It was too much. But there was no way out. Either I found a way to fix it, or I didn’t. And not fixing it wasn’t an option.

The bright sun beat down on my head and onto the pavements, releasing the borough’s signature scent of stale urine and beer. A trickle of sweat ran down the side of my face.

I took a single step forward, then changed my mind. Hell, maybe it was all going wrong, but I wasn’t going to be hot and sweaty at the same time.

Instead of heading straight on like I always did, I went left towards the corner shop, intending to buy a bottle of water and a bag of ice to stuff into the tiny office fridge freezer.

Agony exploded in my skull—a bright red flash of pain that blocked out everything else.

I went down, and the next thing I knew, I was lying on the pavement in the middle of a circle of onlookers. A siren in the distance grew louder. There was something lumpy under my head and someone was kneeling next to me. He looked familiar and, it was a couple of seconds before I recognised him as the shop owner: a middle-aged Muslim man with a neat round beard and a little white cap. My befuddled brain wondered what they were called. I’d seen them all my life and I didn’t know what they were called. The thought struck me as incredible. Typical Vivia, I thought, walking around with your head in a cloud. You don’t know the name of an ordinary, everyday item of clothing.

From somewhere underwater someone said, ‘Does anyone know who she is?’

That struck me as odd too. Why couldn’t they just ask me directly? I tried to open my mouth to answer but it didn’t work.

Another voice, closer to my face—the shop owner—said, ‘I think she works for the Lipscombe Trust.’

The crowd rustled, then the first voice said, ‘Better not get too close, then.’

I stopped listening. My head was still wet with sweat. It trickled down my forehead and dripped red into my eyes. I wondered if I had enough time to go back home and have a shower, and still get to work on time.

I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, a beefy blond woman in a green uniform had her fingers wrapped too tightly around my wrist. Her skin was flushed pink in the morning heat and I found myself pleased that I wasn’t the only one wilting away in an unladylike manner. I’d bet she had a sweaty bra, too.

‘Let me through.’ My eyes flickered upwards to see another bearded man pushing his way through the crowd. So many, I thought, how nice that so many people are concerned.

This bearded man was white, heavy set, and dressed in brown corduroy trousers and a golf shirt with a yellow stain on it: Obe.

Green Uniform said, ‘Do you know her?’

‘Yes, her name’s Vivia Brisk. She works for me…used to work for me.’ Obe knelt down beside me, pale blue eyes wide.

Another green uniform, this one belonging to a skinny Asian man, said, ‘I can’t get any ICE numbers off of her phone. Is she married?’

‘No,’ Obe replied.

‘Boyfriend? Significant other?’

‘No.’

Oh, that sounded sad, I thought. No significant anyone. It made me sound a little pathetic. Somewhere in the back of my pounding brain, I was aware that that wasn’t what I should have been worrying about.

‘Family?’

Obe met my eyes. Yes, I wanted to say, Obe is family, but my mouth still wasn’t working.

And then I was loaded into the ambulance, Obe beside me. A few dozen eyes watched the process. The ambulance rattled to life. Obe sat beside me on a little pull-down seat. He took my hand in his. Physical contact wasn’t a thing for him, and I felt my eyes tearing up. They weren’t the only parts that were damp. My hair was still wet, and so were my clothes. My head really hurt. It occurred to me to ask for some paracetamol, but the thought scurried away before I could vocalise it.

I closed my eyes and heard Obe’s voice methodically answering questions and the scritch scritch of the pen. It felt familiar. Hadn’t this already happened?

When Obe told them I wasn’t human, they handcuffed me to the stretcher.

22

I woke to a migraine that felt as if it were threatening to burst my brain out of my skull. My hand hurt, too. I blinked through the pain in my head to see a drip stuck into the back of it. I closed my eyes against the light then reopened them slowly to find myself in the last bed of a ten-bed hospital ward. Too-bright sunlight streamed in through a window to my left.

Murmured voices sounded from within the pink floral curtains drawn halfway around the bed to my right. An air conditioner rumbled somewhere above my head, along with the competing sounds of at least three TVs.

I lay back in the bed and closed my eyes again. My brain thumped. I reached up with tentative fingers and felt the coarseness of a linen bandage where my hair should have been.

The bed curtains next to me drew back with a rattle to reveal a dark-haired doctor in a white coat. ‘Ah, you’re conscious. How are you feeling?’

‘My head feels like it’s about to fall off.’

She laughed. ‘That’s to be expected, but I think it’ll stay up there.’ She took my wrist in her hand, and watched the hands on her watch. ‘Well, that’s steady.’

She shone a light into one eye then the other. ‘Blink, please.’ I obeyed. She followed up with a bunch of questions I thought were intended to check my brain function. What’s your name? What month is it? Who’s the Prime Minister?

She did a couple of other tests, making me lift one arm then the other. She scribbled notes on a clipboard each time.

‘Great, thank you. That’s it for now. You’re in excellent shape, considering. Do you remember what happened?’

‘Not really.’

‘A blood vessel burst in your brain. I’m not going to say you were lucky, because you weren’t, but it was a near miss.’

‘What caused it?’

‘Could be anything, but it’s usually a combination. Stress. High blood pressure. Smoking. Genetic predisposition. Or sometimes these things just come out of nowhere. We’ll do a full assessment later. Unfortunately, once you’ve had one, you’re predisposed to another.’

‘How long do I have to stay in hospital?’

‘Until we’re confident you can be released safely.’ The way she worded it made me think I was some tame lion about to be released into the wild, and no one knew if I’d be able to hunt for myself or would just start scaring tourists by head-knocking them for kitty treats.

‘How long will that be?’

‘It depends. With this type of surgery, it’ll be anything from a few weeks to a few months. It all depends on how long it takes for you to recover. You’re doing remarkably well considering, but it’s not going to be for two or three weeks at least. You’re at most danger right after surgery. We’re going to be keeping a close eye on you. Don’t worry.’ She actually winked at me.

‘I can’t stay in hospital for two weeks,’ I said.

‘You don’t have a choice, I’m afraid. Not if you want to survive this.’

She left me with instructions to rest. I lay back in the bed and tried to tune out the hospital noises that kept sticking spikes into my already-tender brain. If I wanted to survive this. Yes, please. I wanted to survive this, but if I wanted to survive, I couldn’t stay in hospital. Not for two to three weeks, but my head hurt so badly even thinking seemed like hard work. I closed my eyes, but the world continued to swirl behind my eyelids. One thing was clear: I wasn’t capable of going anywhere right now.

I slept a little, or passed out. There didn’t feel like much of a difference.

Obe arrived at three with flowers, grapes, and my phone, which I grabbed with more eagerness than was polite.

‘I’m so sorry, Vivia.’

‘What? Why are you sorry?’

‘I asked you to come in. If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here.’

‘Don’t be bizarre. Not everything in the world is your fault.’

‘Still…’

‘Oh, just don’t. My head is killing me. I don’t want to argue with you.’ I shifted in the bed, sitting up a bit faster than I should have. For a second, the world spun. ‘Do you know what happened to my bag? It had my laptop in it. If I’m stuck here, I’m not spending it watching daytime telly.’

‘I’ve got it. And I stopped off at your house and got you some spare clothes. I didn’t know what you wanted, so I just grabbed at random. I hope that’s okay.’

Under the hair, he’d gone bright red, and I could just imagine Obe standing in my bedroom, wanting to help, and knowing I’d need spare underwear but feeling intensely uncomfortable at having to go through my pants drawer.

He kept talking. ‘I checked in with your sister. She’s recovering nicely and sends her regards. And I brought some biscuits.’ He produced a couple of packets of chocolate digestives. ‘I snaffled them from the snack cupboard at the office. They wouldn’t have lasted long there, anyway.’

Tears came to my eyes, suddenly and unexpectedly. ‘Thank you.’

‘Sure,’ he said, shifting in his seat. The awkwardness level in the room rose a notch. ‘Uh, I better get back to work.’

Once he was gone, I used the bed controller to get the bed into a properly upright position.

I’d never had high blood pressure. I didn’t smoke. I could put a tick in the box next to stress, but I didn’t think that was it. The genetic predisposition part drew my attention, not because I thought my hag genes had served me badly but because something had happened to the hags before they died. Something that made them bleed out their ears.

Why wasn’t I dead? If it was the same thing, I should be dead. The doctor had said I was lucky. If it was an assassination attempt, it hadn’t worked properly. It’s government loyalty waves. I laughed aloud, despite myself. It made my brain hurt.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in the bed with my eyes closed, waiting for the pain in my head to subside. A nurse came twice with painkillers, which moved the pain lever from Unbearable to merely Excruciating.

Obe had brought my mother’s journal along with some other books I’d had on my bedside table. I couldn’t face opening my laptop and staring at the screen. Sitting up straight and looking at a single page was hard enough.

I pulled out the photocopied sheet, but even with the painkillers and my brain beginning recovery mode, I couldn’t see anything other than that the Father of Weasels was meant to be a protective deity, and my mother hadn’t believed it. 

I spent the night feeling as if invisible fingers were pinching and squeezing my poor brain, and woke in the morning with a nausea-inducing headache so bad that I reached for the metal kidney dish beside the bed.

There are many wonderful things in life, things that produce a perfect moment: the first moment a mother sees her baby, falling in love, seeing a lover after being apart. None of those could come close to the overwhelming joy I felt when the morning nurse finally appeared with two exquisitely beautiful white pills.

Breakfast consisted of weak tea and soggy toast. The pills had kicked in by the time I finished, and for the first time in hours, I no longer had the urge to cut my own head off just to stop the pain.

I tiptoed over to the window and pulled the curtains open. A widget on the window meant I couldn’t open it more than a couple of inches, but it was enough to allow fresh air to drift in.

I did some more sleeping, and then some more, and when I woke it was to see Obe in the chair next to my bed, absorbed in his phone. I coughed.

He looked up. ‘Oh, hey, how are you feeling?’

‘Better.’ I shuffled into a sitting position.

‘Here. I brought you more supplies.’ He tossed another two packets of chocolate digestives onto the bed.

‘Cheers.’ I hadn’t opened the last ones, but I appreciated the gesture.

‘And’–he nodded at the side table–‘a decent cup of coffee. It’s probably cold though. You were really out.’

‘Yeah.’ I had an idea that I might not be allowed caffeine on a brain injury. I took a tentative sip anyway. It wasn’t cold. More like the coldish side of lukewarm, but technically still drinkable. I downed it before it could get any worse. ‘Bleurgh.’

Obe reached for one of the packets of biscuits and opened it without asking me. The top two were broken. He took both.

‘Obes?’

‘Hmm?’

‘I—’ I didn’t know what to say. There is the possibility the government tried to fry my brain with loyalty waves. Or it could have been a weasel god. Or just a god.

I’d sound like a loon, and if there was a Brain Damage Box on any of the forms on the clipboard, I’d get a big black X. ‘Nothing.’

We were interrupted by a nurse arriving to take me for a scan. She helped me into a wheelchair. I got back to my bed to find yet another nurse waiting to check my vitals. I patiently submitted to the temperature, pulse, and bandage check. She scribbled the results on a pre-printed page, which she attached to the chart at the end of my bed.

‘Any idea when I can go home?’

‘The doctor will be through later. You’ll have to check with her.’

She left me with another two pretty pills, which knocked me out enough that I slept the afternoon away—deep enough that the sounds of the ward didn’t even penetrate my dreams. If the doctor came, she didn’t disturb me.

I woke to the ever-present headache and the foggy feeling I got from sleeping during the day.

Dinner, consisting of unidentifiable soup and soggy pasta, was served shortly after. I ignored it and polished off the open packet of chocolate digestives instead.

The doctor turned up a minute after I’d finished the last of the packet. She looked at the untouched tray then frowned. ‘Your body needs to heal. You have to eat.’

‘I am eating.’ I waved the empty packet.

‘I hope you don’t usually eat like that.’

‘Of course not,’ I lied. ‘It’s just comfort food.’

‘I hope so.’ She took my wrist in her hand and watched the hands on her watch. ‘How’s the head?’

‘Better.’

She hid a smile. ‘Good.’

‘When can I go home?’

‘Well, your scan came back and it’s looking much better than expected, but it’s common for complications to develop. Not for a week at least.’ She frowned. Her eyes were fixed on my head, on the hair that, according to the compact mirror in my backpack, was now entirely too white.

‘What?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘Nothing. I could have sworn your hair was darker when you came in. Odd, huh?’

23

The next morning I walked out of the hospital and took the bus home. I was still feeling weak and would have preferred a lift, but Obe had clinic, Sigrid was still in recovery, and Stanley didn’t care.

I’d discharged myself, although not on the first try. They weren’t legally allowed to force me to stay without sectioning me, no matter what the dark-haired doctor may have insinuated. She’d finally promised to send discharge papers round after a substantial amount of argument, but unsurprisingly they didn’t materialise. It was only when she found me dressed and about to walk out of the ward that I got discharged, along with prescriptions for painkillers and antibiotics.

If one of my friends had done this, I would have told them off for being an idiot, but I couldn’t see any choice. Sigrid didn’t have much time left, and neither did I. If this was going to be my last few weeks in the land of the living, I had no intention of spending them in a hospital bed.

The bus stopped a hundred metres from my front door, and I waved at the driver as I alighted. My head had begun to thump again on the way home, and I was all too aware that I had another two hours to go before I could safely take my next dose of painkillers.

I didn’t have my keys, so I banged on the door a couple of times. No one answered. I hiked my laptop bag onto my shoulder and shoved the gate at the side of the house open and was rewarded with a fresh spike of head pain for my efforts.

I found Stanley on the back patio, filling plastic pots with soil.

‘Didn’t you hear me knocking?’

He didn’t look up. ‘Thought it was the bailiffs.’

‘I paid all the debts. We shouldn’t get any more.’ For now. If I didn’t find work soon, they’d be back quickly enough.

He shrugged.

I went inside to have a bath, having to rig a ridiculous-looking partial cap out of a plastic bag in order to wash what remained of my hair. I spent the rest of the day in bed, feeling sorry for myself and counting down the minutes between painkillers. I tried to get up a number of times, but the black spots that greeted me with every attempt persuaded me to stay in bed.

Just after five the next morning, I packed my mother’s journal into my bag, poured coffee into a travel mug, and set off to catch the first train out of Sydenham station towards Croydon. I’d covered the bandages on my head with a floppy-brimmed hat I’d bought years before for a seaside holiday. It was suited to sand and sea and not the concrete pavements of the capital. I caught a couple of odd glances as I made my way to the station. It was light already, but the moon was still up, and my eyes were drawn to it as I walked—a visible reminder that my time was running out. As the yellow moon grew, sliver by sliver, so did the number of white strands in my hair.

The streets were quiet when I got off at East Croydon, and most of the shops were still shuttered. A street cleaner puttered past.

There was nothing to indicate the place I had fallen—no blood or other sign, and it made me wonder how many places like this I had just walked past without knowing that it had been a place of significance for someone.

I rocked back on my heels and surveyed the area. I’d taken a single step forward and then one back when I’d decided to buy ice. The road was wide, with black rubbish bins on either side. Flyers advertising nightclubs and pop-up raves plastered the wall opposite, and discarded beer bottles and crisp packets filled a shrubless planter on the other side.

I crossed the road and took a pencil out my bag, which I used to move the beer bottles and other detritus out of the way. Underneath, the soil appeared disturbed. I dug around with the pencil. A flash of blue appeared. I gave up on the pencil, and used my finger to unearth a light-blue pocket handkerchief, which I pulled it out carefully and set on the side of the planter. I unwrapped it with care.

Inside were several small bones daubed in dried blood, a small figurine, and a handful of unidentifiable herbs. I wrapped it back up cautiously. Whatever magic it had held was gone, but it was still a powerful artefact, and I had no idea what might be needed to trigger it again. I tucked it into my pocket, where it made a reassuring weight—a welcome bit of evidence that despite all the crazy, there was something going on here.

A stab of pain pierced my head again, and I went weak at the knees. I leaned against the planter and looked at my watch. Too early for the next dose. I blinked and waited. The energy slowly returned to my legs.

I used it to find a coffee shop, where I ordered an espresso and gratefully snagged the corner sofa. I sank into it and hoped I’d be able to make it onto my feet again. For a minute, I wondered if I hadn’t been incredibly stupid checking out of the hospital even in these circumstances. I wasn’t going to get very far if I had to stop for a rest every ten minutes.

I laid the knotted handkerchief out on the table next to my espresso. We’d had at least one person every clinic day who’d turn up convinced that their run of bad luck was down to a hex. This was the first time I’d ever seen actual evidence of one. Hexes required serious firepower in the form of a natural affinity for magic, and some very rare ingredients. Few people had enough power to do anything much. There were easier ways to get back at someone without using magic:  crap through the letterbox, a tip to the taxman.

Something like a brain aneurysm? That sort of power? It’d have to be a rare individual—or a god—to carry it off.

I glanced around then discreetly tipped the contents of the handkerchief into my lap. I rolled one of the bones between my fingertips. It was small, smooth, and rounded. A knucklebone? Probably human, judging by the size and shape and the purpose for which it had been used. The same person whose blood coated it? Probably not, I decided. The bones were old and dry, the blood less so.

The figurine, too, appeared old. More than old. Ancient. It fitted perfectly in my hand, and was shaped like a woman—very much a woman, with a protruding stomach, enormous breasts, and an over-emphasised pubic area. With the exception of a triangle-sized chip off one breast, it was completely smooth. I’d seen fertility figurines like this online or in museums multiple times before, but never so close. Age and power radiated from it.

I placed it back on the handkerchief and pinched the dried herbs between my thumb and forefinger, and sniffed the sour aroma, but I didn’t recognise it.

I tucked the figurine carefully back in the handkerchief then used napkins to wrap the bones then the herbs separately. Whatever magic had been used to bind the hex together was long gone, but it couldn’t hurt to be careful.

Whoever had made it was more powerful than anyone I’d ever encountered. I should have been terrified, but all I could think was that the person who had tried to murder me might also be the only person out there with enough power to break the link between me and Sigrid.

24

Despite what my doctor might have thought, I wasn’t a complete idiot. My body had limitations, and I had to respect them. It was either that or pass out in the middle of Croydon High Street with my brain bleeding.

My hair was turning as white as an old woman’s. I was going to have to nap like one, too. I took my time going home, one slow step after another, and when the train pulled into the station just before I reached the barriers, I didn’t run for it as usual and had to wait twenty minutes for the next one. The enforced slowness was infuriating. I wanted to run. Do something. The clock in my head was almost audible, ticking my time away while I did nothing more than sit on a sunlit bench and watch a crisp packet blow around the rails.

I pulled out my phone and called Ana. She didn’t answer, which wasn’t surprising considering I’d hung up on her the last time I’d spoken to her. I thought of the baby growing in her belly. She’d never kept any of the children. Were they alive? And if Ana gave birth to a hag, which one of them would die for her?

A shudder racked my body at the thought of a child out there, destined to die for something so completely unfair, but Ana said she’d only managed to give birth to humans. There had to be a reason for that. Something had linked Sigrid to me. Somewhere in Ana’s lack of hag children, there could be a clue.

I got on the train when it came. I pushed open the window above a table, and sat. The window only allowed the tiniest sliver of wind through, but it was enough to be grateful for.

I took out my phone and was about to dial Ana again when it rang. The Lipscombe Trust’s number came up on the screen, and I recognised Obe’s extension.

‘Vivia? I went by the hospital to see you, and the doctor said you’d discharged yourself. What’s going on?’

An overhead announcement came over the speakers, telling all passengers the order of stops, and warning them to report any unattended bags to a member of staff.

I raised my voice. ‘I’ve got some things I really need to do. Please don’t worry. I’m being careful. I’m resting.’

‘You don’t sound like you’re resting. You sound like you’re on the train.’ His voice was high-pitched with worry.

‘I’m on my way home now. I’m going to tuck myself up in bed and rest the afternoon away. I promise.’ And I did. The little black spots that had begun to plague my vision the previous evening had returned. I blinked twice but they didn’t go away.

‘Is this something to do with your “sabbatical”?’ The quote marks around the word were as clear as if he’d been in front of me making little gestures with his fingers.

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t have to do this all on your own, you know. I can help.’

I smiled. Another reason I wanted my job back. It wasn’t just the money. All my friends were there, too. ‘I need to find the Father of Weasels. Can you put the word out?’

‘Is he real?’

‘I think so.’ I described the weasel I’d seen in Sigrid’s hospital room.

‘I’ll put it out there, but I’ve never heard of him outside of myth.’

A hot and cold shiver ran through me. I checked my watch. I was overdue for my antibiotic tablets, which I’d left at home on the kitchen table. Another half an hour and I’d be home.

‘You still there?’

‘Yes. Just a bit tired.’ If ‘a bit’ meant ‘overwhelmingly so’.

We chatted for a few minutes longer then I leaned back against the seat and closed my eyes. I could feel the weight of the little stone figurine in my pocket.

I wondered what his friends called the weasel, if he had a first name. Father of Weasels was something of a mouthful, but I couldn’t imagine him having an ordinary name: Joe, or Brian, or Derek. Big Daddy Weasel. I laughed out loud. It made my head hurt.

At my stop, I climbed off the train like the invalid I was and shuffled home for a nap and another round of pills.

Stanley was nowhere to be seen. He’d been making himself scarce, finally. Normally, my anger just rolled off him as if it hardly existed. Maybe he realised I finally had choices, and staying home to look after him was bottom of that list.

I slept for a couple of hours, and when I woke, the black spots were gone, but I was aware they could return. I forced myself to relax.

I had a bath and got into my pyjamas then made myself a simple dinner consisting of pasta with ready-made sauce out of a bottle so I didn’t have to stand in front of the stove for any amount of time. I settled in front of the TV and switched on to one of the comedy channels and tried to relax. When I found myself holding back from throwing my dinner plate at the television in pure irritation, I gave up, took off my pyjamas and got dressed.

The late summer sun was going down as I left the house, painting the clouds pink and orange over the tops of the houses. I headed over to Perry Street, hoping to catch the perennially absent boss of the cab company.

The first dispatcher was back on duty. She frowned when she saw me. Her eyes flickered to the bandages on my head. ‘Can I help?’

‘I wanted to speak to your boss about someone who used to work here. Did you get a chance to pass on the message?’

‘Oh God, I completely forgot. I’m sorry. He’s in the back.’ She turned around and screeched, ‘Shane! There’s someone here wants to talk to you about some old employee.’

The door beside the reception window opened to reveal an elderly potbellied man in a plaid shirt at least one size too small. In defiance of workplace regulations, he held a lit cigarette in one hand. He raised his eyebrows at me.

I repeated what I’d told the dispatcher before.

He scratched at his stomach. ‘Yeah, sure, I know Harriet. She worked here for years. What about her?’

Something about his tone felt wrong, but I didn’t know what. ‘I knew her when I was a girl, and when she disappeared… I just wanted to find out a bit more about her.’

Worry crinkled his already wrinkled face. ‘Harriet’s disappeared?’

‘Yes? About twenty years ago?’

His face lit up with relief. ‘Oh, no. You’ve got the wrong end of the stick. She moved out to west London. She didn’t disappear. I spoke to her just last week.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘You gave me quite the fright. Here…’ He pulled his phone from his pocket and began scrolling through numbers then wrote one down on the back of a business card that he then passed to me.

It was too late to phone someone I’d last seen over a decade ago. I did it anyway, tapping the numbers into my phone. It rang twice, then: ‘Hello?’

‘Is that Harriet?’

‘Speaking.’ Even after so many years, the voice was familiar. Warm and fuzzy, it made my stomach hurt with too many weird childhood memories.

‘It’s Vivia Brisk, Desma’s daughter.’

She laughed. That was familiar too. ‘Oh my goodness, the little witch. Well, you can’t be so little any more. How are you? How’s your bonkers old mum?’

‘Possibly less bonkers than I once thought,’ I said. ‘What happened to you? I thought you were dead.’

‘Where on earth did you get an idea like that? I just got fed up with your mother and moved out. Oh my goodness. That’s what Desma told you, didn’t she? I bet she used it to put the fear of God into you.’

I felt like an idiot. Of course she had. And I’d fallen for it.

‘I always wondered what happened to you girls,’ she continued. ‘How’s your sister? She was a sassy little thing.’

‘Uh, she’s not so well,’ I said. My stomach was still in a knot at the sound of her voice.

‘I’m sorry to hear it. What can I do for you? I’m assuming you’re not calling at this time of the night just to catch up.’

‘No. I had some questions for you, actually. About what my mother believed was coming for us.’

Her voice softened. ‘Vivia. You do know she was insane?’

‘I know.’

‘Well, you’re welcome to come over and ask whatever you’d like. I’d love to see you.’

‘Now?’

‘Sure. I always was a night owl. Desma was always running into the back garden to tell me to put my lamp out because he might see it. Don’t you remember that?’

I didn’t. I wrote down the address she gave me. ‘It’ll take me at least an hour to get there.’

‘No prob. See you later.’

She hung up. I sat for a couple of minutes before moving. Out of all the possible outcomes, Harriet being alive wasn’t one I had considered.

25

I’d never been to South Kensington at night. The tunnel from the station felt strangely empty without the usual crowds of families on their way to the museums. It felt odd. I’d just been here a few days previously to find Adonis, and I’d passed within yards of Harriet’s house on the way there.

I checked the address she had given me against the map on my phone and continued up the same road. The houses just got swankier and more expensive-looking, and no matter how speciesist it might have been, I couldn’t help thinking it didn’t look like a weasel area. Instead, I thought any weasels passing through here would risk having the police called on them.

I arrived at the address Harriet had provided and wasn’t surprised to see that three broken padlocks dangled from loops on the doorframe. A handful of notices, some encased in protective plastic, had been fixed to the front door. The top one was titled: Section 6 Notice. I knew that one by heart: squatter’s eviction notice. Cheerful-sounding pop music drifted from inside.

Faded red curtains just beyond double-fronted windows gave the house the look of a somewhat shabby bordello. I liked it.

The door was already open by half an inch. I tapped on the doorframe. ‘Hello? Harriet?’

There was no answer. I knocked again and waited. If it hadn’t been for the music, I would have thought she wasn’t home. After another minute, I pushed the door open onto a large hallway with staircases going up on either side. It was completely bare. A single floor lamp, its power cord snaking out of the hallway and through a door beyond, lit the space but left deep pockets of shadow.

‘Harriet?’

Other than the music, there were no sounds at all. Most of the squats I’d been in or dealt with at work had had multiple occupants. I guessed Harriet could be living here on her own, but it was unlikely. Where was everyone?

‘Hello?’

My footsteps echoed as I crossed the empty hallway. The door beyond opened onto another hallway, this one much smaller with doors leading off. All but the one directly in front of me were closed. I called out again, but still no one answered.

The open doorway led to a kitchen that looked like it was halfway through being remodelled. Huge cabinets had been screwed to the walls, but they had no doors. Those were covered in plastic and lined up against each other on the opposite wall. A green-painted Aga stood in one corner, also covered in plastic. The only signs of occupation were a pair of two-plated ring stoves plugged into a socket near the floor, and a grubby bar fridge with a fruit bowl on top of it. The music emanated from a small radio on top of one of the kitchen counters. I switched it off.

‘Hello?’

Silence. I backed out and returned to the corridor. I stood for a second, considering. Had she gone out? Had everyone gone out? I dug my phone out of my pocket and redialled the last number.

There was a pause of a couple of seconds, then an old-fashioned telephone ring tone sounded from somewhere above. I let it ring and ring until it went to voicemail. The phone above stopped.

The dread that had been building in the pit of my stomach intensified. I could see the open front door from where I stood. The sensible thing to do would be to head outside and call the police.

And tell them what? That I went to visit some squatters, and they weren’t home?

I tiptoed out into the hallway and made my way up the left side staircase. There was another huge hallway at the top of the stairs. Like the one downstairs, it was empty. Doors led off on either side. At the far end, French doors opened out onto a large wrought-iron balcony.

‘Hello?’

At that point, if someone had actually answered, I’d have jumped out of my skin. I took the first left, into a bedroom. There was little actual furniture, but someone had made it comfortable with a mattress on the floor, a spread-out sleeping bag, a couple of cheap Ikea mats, a single closed suitcase, and rows and rows of books all around the room against the siding. A fliptop phone lay on the sleeping bag, its screen lit up. It darkened the moment after I saw it.

The door to the right was also a bedroom, but much messier than the first. It too had a mattress on the floor, but with the bedding all bunched up in the middle. It gave off a whiff of the unwashed. Whoever lived here had the habit of crumpling up his or her old crisp packets and throwing them into the far corner, where they made a small, colourful mound.

Harriet lay flat on her back in the middle of the floor, eyes open and swollen. The fur around her temples was now streaked with grey, and the hands that had once been smooth were wrinkled. She wasn’t alone. The dead weasel next to her was younger, with the soft downy fur that indicated she was not long out of adolescence.

Blood matted the fur on their faces in long brown streaks from their eyes and ears. I might have been a hag, but my first instinct was a very human one: to run to Harriet, to shake her, even though it was obvious she was dead.

I’d seen dead bodies. I’d been one. I’d been to the underworld more times than I could count, but it never failed to affect me. Nausea rose up through my stomach. I ran out into the corridor, retching. I leaned against the wall and took one deep breath after another until my stomach had calmed enough so I didn’t think I was going to throw up.

Back in the room, the horror didn’t diminish just because I knew what I was going to see. She couldn’t have been dead long. I’d spoken to her on the phone less than two hours previously. I’d come within close range of the hex, but had changed direction right at the last minute. If I hadn’t, I’d likely look like the two dead women on the floor in front of me.

My head began to pound again, reminding me that I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was supposed to be in a hospital bed, taking my medication and sleeping the night away.

I went back downstairs into the kitchen. With the radio off and the knowledge of what was upstairs, the house felt eerily silent. I squatted down by the kitchen sink and opened the cupboard underneath. I was in luck. I helped myself to a pair of yellow dishwashing gloves and returned to the bedroom.

I scanned the clutter. If there was a curse talisman in here, I wanted to find it. There were plenty of places to hide it. If I’d been a murderer, I’d have hidden it in the bedroom I’d found Harriet in.

I found it after a couple of minutes, hidden in a rolled-up sock at the bottom of a pile of others in the corner of the room. It was another blue handkerchief, tied in a knot.

I took it downstairs. I couldn’t bear to spend another minute in the bedroom with Harriet and the younger weasel. She had been alive for years, and then dead within an hour of my call. It couldn’t be coincidence.

I rolled up the gloves and hid them in my bag, then laid the blue bundle on the kitchen counter, unknotted it and laid it flat. Laid out in the middle were a handful of dried herbs, some small, blood-daubed bones, and a stone figurine of an obese woman.

I rubbed at my mouth. It was what I’d been expecting, but somehow that made it worse. Whoever had targeted me had also killed Harriet and her friend. It struck me as a cowardly way to do it. No one could fight this, or see it coming. It was more yellow-bellied than a knife in the back. A wave of revulsion washed over me, and I shuddered. Was this how the hags had died in 1942—a blue handkerchief with a figurine and a handful of herbs, with the bomb nothing more than bad luck on an already bad night?

I tied the handkerchief and its contents back together and hid it at the bottom of my bag. Then I reached for my phone and dialled 999.

I fled outside, into the fresh air and away from the suffocating atmosphere within the house. I sat on the front step, my heartbeat slowly returning to normal, and listened to the sirens drawing nearer.

It has been said that the only thing faster than the speed of light is the time it takes between a police car turning into a street and the neighbour’s curtains beginning to twitch. It turned out this applied to ambulances too, because lights flickered on in windows all down the street the moment the yellow vehicle turned the corner, followed by an unmarked Vauxhall.

I’d been to a lot more crime scenes than I’d have liked. I’d done some consulting for the police while I’d been at the Lipscombe Trust, and I’d even been offered a permanent position. Anything I learned in the underworld wasn’t admissible in court, but the Met thought it would be useful having someone on their payroll who could interview murder victims.

I’d turned them down. Dying on a regular basis wasn’t good for my health, and I’d already had a job. I wasn’t clear on the procedure, but I got the impression on the 999 call that a single dead body with no suspicious injuries wouldn’t cause too much fuss, but two meant a whole other procedure was put in place.

Something that had always struck me at every murder scene or zombie call-out I’d ever been to was the banality of it all and the incredible amount of waiting-around involved. This was no exception. The ambulance staff had to wait for the police to clear the house. Then the police had to wait for the ambulance staff to confirm the bodies were actually dead. Once that was confirmed and marked down as suspicious, the coroner had to be called, and then someone higher up in the Met tree had to be assigned and called out of bed.

By the time they got round to taking my statement, the sky had begun to lighten and the remainder of Harriet’s squatmates—three more weasels—were huddled next to me on the doorstep. They’d come staggering around the corner at around one a.m., drunk and likely a little stoned. At the sight of the police cars parked outside the house, the tallest had flicked a glowing stub into one of the neighbour’s flowerbeds. He was barefoot and dressed in an orange waistcoat and blue checked short shorts that I suspected were meant to be worn as underwear rather than outerwear.

Neither of the two females with him wore shoes, either. I knew it was a habit of the weasels, but I didn’t know how anyone could do it in public—not in London, where people kept spitting in the streets.

The squatters’ notice on the door meant they were probably used to the occasional visit by the police. It was the ambulance that gave them pause.

‘Hey, what’s going on?’ That was the tallest one.

I told them.

The younger female’s face crinkled as she fought back tears. ‘Oh, that is bad luck. Poor old Harriet. Poor old Molly.’ Her hands shook as she lit a cigarette. The other female weasel sat down heavily next to me on the step. She began crying noisily. The younger weasel sat next to her and pulled her head to her chest, and held the elder in a kind of half hug as she shook.

The male weasel tucked his hands into his pockets, his mouth a straight line. He clenched his jaw so hard it had to hurt.

My chest tightened. While I’d been on my own, it had been easier to pretend this was just another crime scene. One where I knew no one involved besides the police inside doing their jobs, but the grief in the air had become palpable.

I couldn’t help but remember the day Harriet had stood up to my mother for me. Not a lot of people stood up to Desma, but Harriet had. Whatever had happened to her, she hadn’t deserved it. She had been a nice person. Unbidden, I felt my own tears welling up.

And it wasn’t just Harriet. The whole day had just been too much.

My eyes burned, and I found myself gasping. The three of us sat in a row on the step and bawled, while the male weasel stood next to us, his jaw clenching tighter and tighter, matching the balled up fists in his pockets.

One of the uniforms came out after a minute. I think he intended to ask us some questions, but he just stood awkwardly for a couple of seconds then went back inside.

I cried until there was nothing left, and afterwards, although my head felt a lot worse, overall I felt a lot better. Sometimes people just needed to get it all out.

The weasel to my left took out a cigarette packet. She offered me one, and I shook my head. She lit it and took a long drag.

‘Any idea what happened to them?’ I asked.

All three said no at exactly the same time in a manner that made it clear they actually had a very good idea.

‘Please tell me.’ I met each of their eyes in turn. ‘I need to know what it was.’

The tall weasel shrugged. The other two ignored the question. They looked anywhere but at me, as if they were trying to pretend I wasn’t there at all.

‘I’m not with the police. I’m just a friend of Harriet’s.’

‘It’s weasel business,’ he said.

It’s weasel business. It’s hag business. ‘People are dying. There are times to keep things within the community, and times you really shouldn’t,’ I said. ‘This is the second option.’

The weasel’s brown eyes surveyed me. They settled on the warts on my neck then took in my nose and chin. His expression changed. He didn’t say anything, but I’d seen that particular expression enough times to know what it meant: you’re not human.

For once, it worked in my favour. ‘It’s just what happens,’ he said.

‘People don’t just die,’ I said.

‘Sure they do. All the time. And it’s normal for weasels. Happens sometimes. It’s usually everyone in the house, so lucky for us we were out, huh?’

‘But why?’ His casual attitude was beginning to get to me.

His mouth turned down at the corners, and he shrugged. ‘I dunno.’

‘Someone must know something.’

The girl weasel with the cigarette took a last puff then flicked it away. ‘My granddad said it was to keep the weasels safe. That they were sacrifices to keep the race alive. But I read online that it’s nothing like that. It’s the government. They send out mind control waves, but we’ve got the wrong brains for it. Just makes our heads break.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Emmy,’ the tall weasel said.

She looked hurt. ‘It’s as good a theory as anything.’

I took the diplomatic option and remained silent. We were interrupted by a uniformed officer from within the house who took the weasels aside and began asking them questions.

I chatted to them again after they were done, but learned nothing new; just speculation, rumour and a handful more conspiracy theories from Emmy.

I took the first morning train out of South Kensington station with the early morning commuters. I let myself into the house and rubbed my eyes. They were dry and sore from being up all night. With the emotional toll of the last twenty-four hours, my limbs felt a strange combination of both heavy and drained.

I made my way to my bedroom with my eyes half closed, aware of nothing more than the overwhelming need for painkillers and sleep. The latter followed the former within a minute.

26

My headache wasn’t much better when I woke. I lay on the bed and tried to ignore the little flashes of light that were disturbing my vision. Not a good sign, Vivia, you utter numpty. An extra day at the hospital wouldn’t have hurt. Except that it would have, and I’d never been any good at being bored. I’d only been in the hospital a few days, and I’d been close to going round the bend.

I sat up and reached for my bag. I had the curse talisman that had targeted me in the front pocket and the other hidden right at the bottom. I sat cross-legged then laid out both talismans in front of me, one next to the other. The handkerchiefs were the same—same colour, same size: part of a set.

I unwrapped one then the other. The bones were a match. Six tiny bones in each, and each was one of a pair. The blood that I’d thought had been randomly splattered on each wasn’t random at all. Each dip and swirl was exactly duplicated on its counterpart.

I picked up one figurine with my left hand, the other with my right and held them together. They were identical. Completely identical, right down to the natural flow of the colour of the stone and the missing chip.

The level of attention and detail to make such exact duplicates was impressive. Whoever had tried to kill me, and had killed Harriet, had put a lot of time and effort into it.

I needed to talk to her, and I needed to be quick. The murdered dead hung about in the place they had died for a little time—sometimes they stayed, but mostly they moved on: they went home. Harriet might have been living in the squat when she died, but I doubted she considered it her permanent home. I had no idea where that would be.

If I wanted to speak to her spirit, now would be better than later.

My dying paraphernalia—the tarp, the river water—were all the way across the room in the cupboard. They might as well have been across the world.

I closed my eyes and let my body shut down bit by bit. It didn’t hurt, but it was uncomfortable, as if I were spiralling on some bizarre funfair ride.

It was raining in the world of the dead, which wasn’t unusual; it was London, after all. What was unusual was that it was raining through the ceiling. Thick droplets sailed through the paint as if it didn’t exist and splashed on the floor and my head. I sat up, shifting my body as I did so. The harpies covering me dropped to the floor with feathery squawks.

I stepped around them, ignoring their protests.

I made my way through the house following the same path I always had, no detours, no looking into other rooms—just straight out the door.

The top step was dry, but water lapped up against it. Not-real cars drove along the flooded street, their not-real passengers not concerned in the least about the water pouring in through open windows. The road flickered with the dead. Houses grew out of the water, became dilapidated, restored, repainted and demolished, replaced by forest then field, and grew again.

I blinked. It was enough to give a ghost a headache, and I’d had enough of those. As usual, I didn’t have to wait long. The ship sailed into sight within minutes.

I climbed the ladder. For some reason, Charon didn’t seem to be in much of a mood for chatting. His thin eyebrows frowned in a way that made me think he had something on his mind, but he denied it when I asked.

I went and found a seat among the dead. Not for the first time, it occurred to me that the recently dead appeared a lot more relaxed and happy than the average Tube commuter. There was a version of the Tube in the underworld, but it was one I wasn’t happy about taking. Even if it weren’t for the fact that it flickered in and out of reality a hundred feet underground, it just depressed me too much. It’s one thing to re-enact your life over and over again, and quite something else to do it over and over again in rush hour. I just wanted to shake every dead person I saw and shout at them: ‘You don’t have to do this.’

‘This is your stop, Viv.’

‘Thanks.’ The boat lowered enough for me to hop over the side and onto the pavement.

The houses here were mostly stable, although the usual green fields flickered in every now and then. I took the steps to Harriet’s front door with some trepidation. Unsurprisingly, the murdered tended to find the whole experience somewhat stressful. Most were confused, and many were angry. A small percentage got violent. Harriet had struck me as an easygoing soul, but being murdered was enough to enrage anyone.

I pushed open the door and stepped into the enormous foyer. A gigantic, brilliant chandelier hung from the ceiling, and oil paintings covered the walls. Just like that, it disappeared, and the empty room I remembered from the squat appeared. The walls changed colour twice, but the stairs remained stable as I took them upstairs.

The landing changed, too. Carpets, and then rugs, more paintings, oil lamps then electricity. One of the doors ahead opened, and a woman in a full length gown appeared, her hair coiled on top of her head in a complicated ‘do. She gave me a little nod as she passed.

I took a deep breath and pushed open the door to the room where I had found Harriet and her friend. They were both there, and they were both still dying. It was too early. The manner of their death hadn’t had time to imprint on their souls. They were dying over and over again, until their souls could accept it just a little more.

Harriet lay with her back arched. Her mouth flapped open and closed like a fish, and her eyes popped. She collapsed, still and staring, and then the whole process started over again.

In a few hours she’d become more aware, but for now, there was nothing but death on her mind.

I knelt next to her and shook her gently. ‘Harriet. It’s Vivia. You can pull yourself out of this.’ I reached a tendril of hag magic into her, and gasped at the suddenness and brutality of her death. It was still raw and overwhelmingly painful.

Her eyes focused on mine, then lost awareness again. I shook her harder. ‘Harriet!’

My hag magic could do a lot of things over here, but healing psychological soul damage wasn’t one of them. I kept trying, but she was too deep in the death dream.

I rocked back on my heels. I could try getting through to her friend, but my instinct told me I’d get the same result. I’d have to come back later.

Getting the timing right was always tricky. Too late and they’d have moved on. Too early, and they’d still be struggling. When I’d been doing zombie callouts, all the police had really wanted was a name and description so they could identify whatever scrap of flesh was left behind. They would usually have a good idea of who was guilty, and any information I gave them about that would have been a bonus. I straightened and sighed. Interrogating the dead was a lot harder than it looked.

I passed the gowned woman on the way back down the stairs, and she nodded again. I watched as she made her way up. The vagaries of the dead never ceased to fascinate me. This one appeared as if she were spending her afterlife going up and down stairs. Clearly, it had some significance for her, but it was still bizarre.

I stood on the doorstep and let the water lap at my feet. I swore under my breath. I hated wasted trips, and I really didn’t want to come back later.

It’s just what happens. I thought of the hundreds of names in Desma’s journal, all weasel names, if my guess was correct. Harriet’s housemates hadn’t been surprised. Sad, but not surprised. Someone had to know something. I couldn’t believe an entire species could know they were dying and write it off as something that ‘just happened’. The only mention I’d come across that even indicated there might be a problem before this was Captain Paranoid, whoever he was, and his ‘loyalty waves’ theory.

If there had been hundreds of dead weasels, then there should be hundreds of weasel souls who had moved on from the dying-over-and-over phase of their post-life existences. I didn’t know where the others had died, but I did know where they would be heading. For many weasels, home would be Stepney. I was tracing the same old footsteps again and again. Revisiting the same places, and getting nowhere: running on the spot.

And if I were there, it couldn’t hurt to run past the hag house and see if there was anything I’d missed the first time round. If nothing else, I could ask them about their sisters.

I flagged down the ship on its next round, and watched the dead from the railings as it did its turn about the underworld. Charon’s ship was everywhere and every time. Over one hundred and fifty-five thousand people died every day, approximately one or two every second, but somehow the boat sailed through it all calmly and without any sense of rush. I tried not to think about it too deeply. Time was different here, and the metaphysics of it made my head spin.

I disembarked a couple of streets up from the Cooper Street house. Narrow tenement rows leaned over narrower streets and alleys. Pre-electricity, and for the most part pre-flushing toilets, it felt like I’d stepped even further back in time. Be grateful, child. This is what it was for most of history—not like your fancy life.

Dead and not-real people crowded the streets, getting on with their non-lives. Few of the children wore shoes. Aproned women sat on doorsteps shelling peas and gossiping. A line of shovels leaned against the railings outside a pub while the coalies within drank up their wages. The world flickered a little, and modern scenes imposed themselves until they were washed away by the old one and the familiar sight of humans, weasels, and others all rubbing along in not-quite harmony.

A pair of aproned weasel women in long skirts, both painfully thin with the brown fur on their faces worn away, sat on a doorstep close by. As I approached they paid no attention, absorbed in their own little death world.

Most of the dead had no idea their lives were done. They certainly paid no attention to anyone else. I reached out a tendril of hagness. One had died from pneumonia, the other of tuberculosis. I moved on to a child in the street. That one was measles.

I kept going, reaching out to every weasel I passed. Cancer. More tuberculosis. Heart attack. Childbirth. An accident at the docks. Cancer again.

Night fell. I kept to the middle of the street and the light, avoiding the shadows where black beetles swarmed in the darkness. I got lost twice in the alleyways and narrow streets, finding myself in a road I’d already checked. The terraced houses paled and then darkened again as the coal and fog of history dirtied them over and over again.

I was just beginning to wonder whether I was wasting my time when I found one. His coat had turned white, for the winter that had hit his tiny section of the underworld. Swirling snow drifted past the windows of his house, a brilliant summer night sky on either side of it.

The weasel leaned in the doorway of his home and watched the snow drift down. Every couple of seconds he reached out a soft paw into the street and watched the snowflakes settle on his fur. He wore thick trousers held up with a pair of braces and a solid work shirt with cap. I guessed he’d died around the turn of the twentieth century.

‘Hello,’ I said.

He ignored me. Instead he reached out with his paw once again to catch the ever-falling snowflakes. I took his paw in my hand, and he visibly startled. He pulled his hand back. I was a reminder that his little world wasn’t real. He didn’t want to see me.

‘I’ve got a few questions for you,’ I said. ‘It won’t take long.’

‘You’re not allowed to talk to me,’ he said. ‘No one is.’

That seemed a little harsh, but the dead made their own rules, no matter how unfair that might seem.

‘That must be very lonely,’ I said.

He shrugged. The snow began falling faster, settling on the patch in front of the door—a castor sugar coating over dirty cobbles.

‘I want to know why weasels are dying, what it is that happens to you that makes you bleed out your ears.’

He smiled, a wide one that showed his needle-like teeth. I thought he looked satisfied. He reached out a paw again to the snow, and just like that I’d lost his attention once more.

I stepped up into the doorway beside him, and held his hand. I squeezed it. He startled once more.

‘You were telling me why weasels die with blood coming out their ears.’ I said.

Confusion showed on his face. ‘I was? I’m not supposed to talk about that to non-weasels.’

The dead have a ridiculously short attention span. ‘And me,’ I said. ‘I’ve got special permission, remember? Why do the weasels die?’

‘What weasels?’

‘The ones like you.’

‘I’m a stoat.’

What’s the difference? I bit back the question. There was no way it wouldn’t sound rude, and it wasn’t relevant to what I wanted to know. ‘Okay, why do you die?’

‘To keep everyone safe.’

‘Safe from what?’

‘From everything. From illness. From hunger. From humans.’

That made no sense. No one was keeping them safe, or if they were, they were making a particularly bad job of it. I’d worked at the Lipscombe Trust long enough to know the weasels had it bad. They’d always been scavengers, hiding around the edges of society. They were the first to lose their jobs when the recession hit. Their kids were the ones joining gangs. The weasels had always borne the brunt of the world’s anger. No one was protecting them.

Hogwash, my mother had written on the segment of origin myth in her journal. The Father of Weasels was meant to keep them safe, according to the weasel religion. If he was killing them instead, then that was hogwash indeed.

I was aware of the dead man’s eyes beginning to glaze over. I squeezed his hand again, harder this time. ‘The weasels don’t seem very protected to me,’ I said.

‘No. No. It would be worse. They keep us alive. The moment the sacrifices stop will be the end of the weasel race. They’re part of what we are. If the Father didn’t look after us, we’d all be dead.’

‘Sacrifice?’

‘Yes, sacrifice in exchange for life.’

Like I hadn’t heard that before. I left him the same way I’d found him: leaning in the doorway, watching the snow float down. I hoped it wouldn’t take long before Harriet and her friend were the same, and found a little heaven of their own.

All religions are true for a given value of true, and all have sacrifice at their core in one form or another. What would happen if the weasel sacrifices stopped? My natural instincts, which tended to veer towards the cynical, told me it was as much hogwash as my mother had thought it was. But it was a part of the world I knew little about. The origins of species, and the way their mystical energies were tied into this world, were a complicated matter. An academic could take the tiniest sliver of information about how a non-human species functioned and turn it into a lifelong study. I didn’t have that long.

There had to be an academic out there somewhere who had made a study of weasels. I could try to track them down, but my intuition told me it would be a waste of time. Any research into the deaths of weasels would be… well, academic. If anyone actually believed some weasel that fancied himself a god was going around killing his fellows, they’d have an obligation to say something to the authorities. No, any knowledge of this outside the weasel community was going to be put down to cultural myth.

I couldn’t help being drawn to the similarities between Sigrid and the weasels. Both were being sacrificed to keep a species alive. In my case, it was less to keep me alive than to keep me alive longer, but the theory was the same.

Harriet had died in the same way that someone had tried to kill me. The only connection I had was species sacrifice and a stone figurine. I felt like I was unravelling some horribly tangled skein of wool, and all I needed to do was find one of the end pieces and it would all fall straight. I wished it were that simple.

27

I woke from the dead, retching, and I couldn’t be sure how much of the pounding in my head was from dying and how much was from the hex.

I lay back, gasping, and closed my eyes until the pounding diminished to a single drumbeat rather than the previous cacophony. I opened my eyes, but my vision was blurred. I closed them again, and waited.

It didn’t get better. My head did, but the underlying current of nausea that had been there since I’d woken in the hospital remained, and the little spots at the edges of my vision looked like they were settling in for the long haul. I made a decision. As soon as this was done, as soon as it was settled one way or another, if I was still alive, I’d do nothing but rest for a week. I’d lie in bed and catch up on eight months’ worth of TV on my laptop.

After ten minutes, my vision hadn’t got any better, so I swung my legs over the side of the bed, stood up, and tested whether that simple movement was enough to make me lose my balance and fall over. It wasn’t.

I stumbled into the bathroom and switched on the shower to warm up. I flicked on the light and staggered to the mirror, betting there would be more white. There was, but that wasn’t what made my heart lurch. I’d aged. Crows’ feet that hadn’t been there yesterday sank deep into the corners of my eyes. My skin sagged. Even with my vision blurred, I could see that age spots covered my neck. With half my head shaved and the wild look in my eyes, I’d be lucky to walk down the street without someone calling mental health services.

Laughter burst from my lips with a hysterical tinge to it. Had I really been that stupid to think it was just going to be the hair? Tilde was a crone. So were the others. I was being made into a crone, and when there was no black left in my hair, the transformation would be complete. That’s when she’d drag me back. I had a vision of myself, just another skinny hag in the house on Cooper Street, squabbling and arguing over the tea ritual.

I gritted my teeth. That was never going to happen. I might be a hag, but I was going to be a hag my way, and the first thing I always did about that was make sure I never ever smelt like one. I grabbed my rigged shower cap and adjusted it over the side of my head. The bandages needed a change, but I’d do that after. I stepped into the hot water and washed until I felt human.

I got out, changed the bandages on my head, then went back to my bedroom. The two curse talismans on the bed caught my eye. I felt better now that I was clean, and although my vision was a little blurred, my head felt clearer. I couldn’t leave the talismans there. I wasn’t sure how they worked, but they were powerful objects. I looked around the room, considering hiding places. I decided on the bookcase that filled the whole of one wall. Pulling out three smaller novels, I placed the wrapped handkerchiefs behind them, and then replaced the books. The spines were a little further out than they would normally have been, but even Stanley would be unlikely to notice that.

I pulled a summery dress over my head, slipped my feet into flip-flops, covered the bandages on my head with my broad-rimmed sun hat and hoped I looked less like the crazy person who had looked back at me from the mirror earlier.

My stomach still hurt from being dead, and the thought of breakfast didn’t appeal. Nor even, for once, did a cup of tea or coffee. I hadn’t seen my sister in days. There was always the hospital canteen if I got desperate, and so I stalked straight out of the house, my mind absorbed in the problem of Sigrid and the weasels. I didn’t look into the kitchen or the living room.

I took the bus to the hospital again, saving myself a few quid on a travelcard, and sat at the top at the back like a naughty school girl.

I stared out the window idly, and it took me longer than it should have to notice the figure jumping in and out of existence at intervals along the bus route. When I did, I pressed the red buzzer to get off at the next stop. The figure was gone.

I reached into that bit of myself that understood the dead. About two hundred yards behind me, the dead bodies of two creatures, one large and one small, slumbered deep beneath the soil. Someone had once said a prayer over them, so I pegged them for human. Ahead of me, the soil was thick with the dead, about ten feet down. An old, forgotten graveyard, now paved over into a traffic circle. I chose to keep moving forward.

When I reached the graveyard, the figure I’d seen from the bus appeared, sitting cross-legged on the circle watching me. It was the Lord of the Rings fan-ghost.

‘I want to watch it again,’ she said.

‘Okay. What have you got for me?’

‘It’s a big one. I want it every night for a week, and then I want it at the Graveyard Theatre every Thursday for a month.’

If I’m alive in a week. ‘That seems like a lot.’

‘You’re going to want to know this. Although in theory I can’t tell you.’

I was used to argumentative dead. ‘Can’t, or won’t?’

‘Bit of both. There are some things the dead aren’t allowed to tell the living.’

I was tired of hearing that. They acted like being dead was some sort of secret club. Why all the secrecy? Everyone got to join sooner or later. ‘Bullshit.’

The ghost looked hurt. ‘It’s true. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. And all that.’

‘Uh-huh. What is it?’

The ghost looked around as if looking for eavesdroppers. Other than a few pedestrians staring at the crazy lady talking to herself in the middle of the traffic circle, there was no one about.

‘I’m not telling you until you promise I get what I want.’

I considered haggling, but I couldn’t be bothered. I could always ask Obe to let the ghost watch the box set at his house, if I couldn’t do it. He’d do me a favour. ‘Sure.’

A black cab hooted at me as it took the circle too narrowly. It passed close enough that I felt the air go past my ears.

‘And you tell no one where you got this information,’ the ghost said.

‘Good grief, just spit it out.’

‘When you cross over, you need to get on the boat.’

‘To the underworld, yes. I hope you’ve got something more for me than that.’

‘That’s how the dead cross over, but it’s a one-way deal. Charon comes round every now and then, and beckons with that bony finger of his, and us ghosts are just, “Nope. Not today.”’

I’d always wondered how the ghosts crossed over. It was interesting, but not helpful.

‘What’s this got to do with what I asked you for?’

‘I’m breaking a lot of rules here, you know.’

I bit back a groan. ‘I get it. I won’t tell anyone where I got the information. I promise.’

The ghost ducked her head and looked around again. I don’t know who she thought she was looking for. ‘It’s a one-way deal, the ship. You can’t come back.’

‘You already said that.’ I was beginning to lose patience.

‘Except for one person.’

‘I hope you’re not talking about me.’

The ghost gave me a ‘duh’ look. ‘No. I meant your sister.’

The hope that I’d had that the ghost was going to tell me something useful died. ‘I know about that. I’m the one who brought her back.’

‘I don’t think so. Not every time. I ran into someone—I can’t name names—but a very ancient someone who’s seen her on that ship a dozen times when it’s passed by.’

That didn’t make sense. ‘She’s only died once.’

The ghost shook her head. ‘Nuh-uh. My source tells me he first saw her back in the Roman days. I don’t know what she’s doing to get out, but she’s doing something. There’s no escape hatch, everyone knows that, but somehow she’s found one.’

‘No, that can’t be right. She was born in the twentieth century. There’s no way she could have…’

The ghost shrugged again. ‘Don’t ask me. Ask her. Now, you going to pay up or what?’

‘I’ll pay up,’ I said absently. ‘Come round the house later. Same time. I’ll call the theatre and get it set up.’

I needed to speak to Charon. I remembered the antsy look he’d given me, the way I’d thought he wanted to say something. I was in the middle of a traffic circle. I couldn’t die here. I didn’t want to go home, either.

I turned my head. There was a park across the road—a great expanse of green grass and oak trees with a handful of benches scattered about. At the end stood a children’s playground. That would do.

I crossed the road. A pair of mothers stood near the playground, chatting while watching their offspring on the monkey bars. A dog-walker with a St Bernard appeared to be doing a loop of the park. A smattering of sunbathers dotted the grass, about half with books.

I found a suitable spot, far enough from the paths that the dogs wouldn’t come close and far enough from the other sunbathers that they couldn’t take too good a look at me.

I lay down on my stomach and opened my mother’s journal on the grass in front of me. Then I tucked the hat down over my face, and folded my arms under my head, using my bag as a pillow. If I were lucky, I’d look like just another sunbather. I’d never died in public before, but it would only be a couple of minutes.

I closed my eyes.

Water lapped around my body, cold and evil-smelling. The park was flooded. I stood up. My sundress was soaked. I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself.

On cue, the boat wove into view and stopped. I climbed the rope ladder to the top.

‘Where to?’

‘I hear my sister is a regular of yours,’ I said.

‘Someone blabbed.’ Charon’s face darkened, and for a second there was a hint of skull behind his exquisite bone structure. ‘Who was it? Talking about my passengers is strictly forbidden for the dead.’

‘I’m dead,’ I said, thinking of my body lying in the grass in the world of the living.

‘Not properly dead,’ Charon said.

‘You think I’m going to tell you?’

‘You think I’m going to tell you? You want to know more, you need to tell me who it was.’

‘You know I can’t do that.’

‘Well, then we’re at an impasse.’

We stared at each other, neither wanting to give. I turned out to be less stubborn. ‘I could give you something else.’ The Boatman took payment for his rides in many ways. Traditionally, it was expected to be a single coin, and it could be, but whatever he took, it had to be something important: a photo, or a memory, or the feeling of your first love. I didn’t know what he did with them. I wasn’t dead yet, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have currency.

His face softened. ‘I’m not supposed to tell you, Vivia.’

‘Says who? There are all these damned arbitrary rules that no one wants to break. What is it about being dead? Does everyone suddenly lose every bit of backbone they ever had?’

‘I have backbone.’

‘Then tell me. Take a memory. A good one, if you like, but tell me.’

His slim hand reached over and touched my shoulder, and a shiver ran through me as he rifled through my memories for something he wanted. I felt him stop, and a memory filled my mind—of the day Obe and the Lipscombe found a care home for Sigrid, and I’d finally left home thinking I would never go back, and believing I would never see my mother or Stanley again. The care home had turned out to be a pit of neglect and abuse, but at the time I’d thought it the answer to my problems.

‘This one,’ Charon said.

‘Yes.’

Something light flashed through my mind and was gone. I frowned. He’d taken something. I didn’t remember what it was, but it made me feel hollowed out inside, like there was suddenly something missing. I knew I’d given permission, but I didn’t like it. Charon had been my protector as I was growing up dead, a confidant, but he’d kept the truth about my sister from me, and now he’d taken something that had made me feel good. The trust I’d had in him trickled away, as if a cloud had crossed the sun.

‘How can she be on your boat before she was even born? Is this something all the human sisters do?’

His eyes met mine, and there was sorrow in them. ‘I don’t see all the human sisters, Vivia. I only see one. I see Sigrid, every time.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘She doesn’t die once, Vivia. She always dies. She is reborn and then she dies, always before she turns fifteen. Over and over again.’

‘She reincarnates?’ I asked, but it wasn’t really a question. The one I wanted to ask was a lot more basic. ‘Why?’

‘It’s a hex.’

‘What kind of hex? How? Who put it on her?’

‘I don’t know, but it’s been happening for millennia. I’m sorry. I wish I could have told you earlier, but some things are not meant to be shared with the living.’

I thought furiously. If it was a hex, it could be broken. All hexes were tied to something physical—a stone figurine and scattered bones, a crystal, even a book.

‘Do you know what it’s tied to? If I can break that, I can break the hex.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘Not this one. It’s too powerful.’

‘I have to try.’

‘Vivia, it’s bound to the moon.’

I stared at him. My mouth fell open. I didn’t want to break that, even if I could.

28

I arrived at the hospital hot, sticky, and very aware that it was the first time I’d ever died and then deliberately not gone for a shower at the first opportunity. One small step on the path to true haghood.

I stopped off to get coffee for myself and for Sigrid. On the spur of the moment, I added some blueberry muffins, which the barista wrapped in a brown paper bag for me.

She always dies. She is reborn and then she dies, always before she turns fifteen. Over and over again. A hex tied to the moon. I’d never heard of such a thing, but I couldn’t think of anything more powerful, other than a hex tied to the Sun. The impossibility of breaking such a thing meant it made no difference. Sun, moon. Who cared? I couldn’t break either.

Sigrid had always been different from the other spirits in the underworld. She’d been confused, and vague, and annoying just like the rest of them, but she’d always had something extra to her—a kind of self-knowledge, an awareness that she was dead. How much did she remember when she was reborn? Babies weren’t known for their excellent memory retention.

Desma had said Sigrid would turn on me. Of course she would. Even if she didn’t remember, some instinct must have told her there was something wrong.

Voices drifted through the open door to Sigrid’s room. She had a visitor.

‘Well, I don’t like it, but I can understand why you did it. It’s just a real pity.’ I stopped in the entrance to see the speaker was a blue-eyed man in his early thirties, losing his hair a little at the dome, but making up for it by sprouting extra out his ears and the top of his shirt. Something about him felt familiar.

He sat on the chair next to Sigrid’s bed, one of her metal hands in his flesh one. He wore a red scarf. I grimaced. I’d have bet real money he was someone from her ‘support group’.

I stepped into the room. ‘Hello.’

He looked up with a smile that faded at the sight of me. ‘You’ve got a damned cheek.’

I gave him a bright smile. ‘Hi, I’m Vivia. I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.’

He couldn’t have given me a dirtier look if he’d been covered in mud. ‘I know who you are.’

‘Well, I don’t know who you are, but I can take a guess. And you can eff off.’

‘I’m not going to—’

Sigrid squeezed his hand, and maybe it was deliberate, or maybe she just hadn’t got the pressure settings right, but something cracked. Her weird robot—excuse me, cybernetically advanced—voice said, ‘It’s okay, Mike. I need to talk to her, anyway.’

Mike. The hair was mostly gone, and his face had broadened. Mike Tuvey. He glared at me as he left the room. I glared right back.

Then I took the seat by her bed and put down the coffee and muffins on the little side cabinet. ‘What the hell are you thinking? Do you remember what he was like at school?’

‘You don’t have to be so confrontational, you know,’ Sigrid said.

‘He started it.’

‘Actually, I believe you did. You know, when you killed me.’

‘Oh, don’t start with that. I don’t want to fight. I really don’t.’ I took the recently vacated seat. It was still warm. ‘Anyway, dying was your idea.’

That is exactly what I’m talking about, Vivia. You don’t need to argue every point.

I sighed, a little heavier than I intended. ‘I’m sorry, Siggie. I shouldn’t have said that. I really don’t want to fight.’

‘Okay. I’m sorry, too. Everything has just happened so fast. And I haven’t exactly been making the right decisions. I know that. I’m not cross with you. I’m just cross with the circumstances, I guess.’ She sighed, an outpouring of breath that sounded more like a bus wheezing to a stop than a human being. ‘I remember what happened as well as you do. We were children. My brain stopped at fourteen, and I think I haven’t quite caught up yet. I mean, coming back with angel wings? That’s not something any rational adult would do.’

I stared at my hands. They had grown gnarlier, like an old woman’s. She didn’t remember, not yet. If I jogged her memory? I had no idea where to start, so I picked another subject.

‘Where’s Per? I haven’t heard from him.’

‘You didn’t hear?’

‘I’ve kind of been out of the loop. It’s been a difficult week.’

Sigrid looked away. ‘They arrested him. Grievous bodily harm, which is just ridiculous. He’s out on bail, but he’s been banned from the hospital. They won’t even let him in to see me.’ Her metal eyes turned cold. ‘He’s going to sue.’

‘But it worked? Everything’s stabilised with you?’

‘No, Vivia. No, it hasn’t. This was only ever a stopgap. You do know that?’

I took my coffee from the side table and sipped at it so I didn’t have to look at her. ‘I’m trying to figure this out, Sig. I’m trying. I really am.’

Her lips turned up in a curve. ‘I know. It’s just that there’s this sense of inevitability about it. No one cheats death. Maybe I got a reprieve, but it was never meant to be permanent. Vivia?’

‘Yes?’

‘What on earth happened to you? Obe said you’d had some sort of accident, and my eyeballs aren’t what they were, but you’ve gotten old. What’s going on?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said truthfully. I was getting more and more puzzle pieces, but no matter how I rearranged them, I just couldn’t make them fit together to see the big picture. ‘It’s got something to do with weasels, although I’m not sure how or why.’

She laughed suddenly, a low robotic sound. ‘Don’t talk to me about weasels. I’ve managed to find myself a somewhat persistent suitor.’

‘A grey-furred one? Skinny, about so tall?’ I indicated with my hands.

‘Yeah, I think he’s a patient. Did you see him outside?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘I think he’s going a bit… You know. Up here. Dementia or something. Bit young, but I suppose it happens. He’s been wandering in here most days. He thinks I’m his wife. Not in a weird way. It’s kind of sweet.’

Wife? Add one more layer of weirdness. ‘What does he say?’

‘Oh, he just rambles on about the old days. Tells me he misses me. Poor thing. I wonder what happened to her.’

‘You sure he’s a patient?’

‘What else would he be?’

‘I don’t know,’ I lied. ‘Speaking of weasels, do you remember Harriet?’

‘Oh sure, but she was a stoat, not a weasel.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘I don’t know. Stoats are bigger? I called her a weasel once and she got really snippy about it.’

‘And your new boyfriend? Is he a stoat?’

‘How would I know?’

Harriet was a stoat. The white-furred snow-gazer had been a stoat. Perhaps the victims had more in common than just fur. One more puzzle piece, but it wasn’t a corner piece or even an edge, and I had no idea which way round it went.

‘Is it a hag thing?’ Sigrid continued. ‘Are you going full crone? I thought that wasn’t going to happen for a while. At least it didn’t for Ana or for Mum. You could ask Ana. She might be able to help.’

‘I did,’ I said. ‘I even asked Mum.’

Sigrid’s metallic eyes blinked twice. ‘Please tell me that’s some kind of metaphor, and she’s not back. I don’t think I could cope with her right now.’

‘In the underworld.’

Sigrid visibly relaxed. ‘Oh. How is the wicked witch?’

‘About the same. Sig? When Ruth was touching you, you said something about her being beautiful, and in a forest.’

‘Yeah, it was really weird, like a memory. But I’ve never been anywhere that damned creepy. It was like a nightmare hobbit-hole, and Mum certainly never looked like that.’

Desma hadn’t been beautiful in the forest. She’d been herself. ‘What did she look like?’ I asked.

‘God, stunning. Like her, but a gorgeous version. Like Snow White. Hair black as coal, skin white as snow, eyes like—I don’t know—emeralds or something. All that crap. She was like a fairy-tale version.’ Sigrid frowned, and the metal plate on her forehead shifted down. ‘I still didn’t like her, though. She wasn’t a nice version, just a pretty one.’

It was like a fairy tale. There was the deep, dark forest, and the wicked witch, and an evil spell. We even had a glass coffin.

Fairy tale. Someone else had said that to me, and recently: Adonis, the pretty-boy god who’d refused to get involved. Realisation dawned. He’d mentioned more than that: glass coffin. Snow White. Much too grim.

‘You son of a bitch,’ I muttered. ‘Siggie, I’ve got to go. I’ll check on you later, okay?’

I grabbed my coffee and the uneaten blueberry muffin and exited the hospital faster than I should have. I kept an eye out for the grey-furred weasel, or rather the grey-furred stoat as I now expected he was, but he was nowhere in sight.

I took the train, then the tube back to South Ken., thoughts tumbling through my head. I mumbled to myself on the train, aware of the looks I was getting, but not really caring. Well done, Vivia, I thought. You’ve almost reached full crone.

Which fairy tale? Snow White? A lot of the old stories were based on truth. I’d even met the inspiration for Red Riding Hood once in the underworld. I wrangled the story round my mind and tried to make it fit the facts. Who was my mother?

The evil queen? Could be.

Snow White? Surely not.

And the seven dwarves? I hadn’t come across anyone who might fit the bill. I also didn’t remember any weasels, or any stoats. The closest I could come up with were the forest animals who’d helped clean the cottage, and I was almost 100 percent sure those had only been in the Disney version.

Trying to find the truth in a fairy tale would be even worse than trying to get it out of a myth. It was as useless as trying to figure out the original sentence in a game of Telephone—one thousands of years old. I wasn’t going to waste my time working out some god’s riddle. It would save me far more time and trouble if I just went to the source.

29

In the bright sunlight, it was obvious that the increased gnarliness of my fingers that I’d noticed in Sig’s hospital room wasn’t my imagination. Liver spots had begun creeping from my fingers and up my forearms. I pulled my hair out from under the hat, pulled it over my shoulder and ran it through my fingers. It was almost nothing but white.

The ever-present headache had diminished to a dim throb after the last set of painkillers, but it was most definitely still there.

I stood on Adonis’s freshly painted front step between the flower baskets, and rang the bell.

This time the door opened almost immediately, and even though I was expecting it this time, I couldn’t help but be startled by the man’s beauty.

He gave me a startled look back. ‘Wow. What happened to you?’

‘I’m turning into a wicked witch, I believe. And you have a fairy tale to tell me.’

He smiled, and the sun came out. ‘That took you long enough. But no, I don’t. All I did was give you a hint. You work it out. Like I said, I’m not getting involved.’

I stuck my foot in the door. ‘Come on. I don’t have long left to figure this out. Please.’

‘I’m sorry. I told you I don’t want to get involved, and I meant it. I am impressed, though. You’re the first hag who’s cared at all. Although to be fair, I don’t think most of them knew there was anything wrong in the first place. You were the first stupid enough to try to bring your sister back from the dead.’

I waited, hoping he’d go on, but he didn’t. ‘I don’t think my mother kept the others. She was always on about how she never wanted the humans. The other hags didn’t know.’

‘Of course they did. I mean, come on! You steal someone’s life and you don’t even notice? That’s just rude.’

I got the impression he was enjoying arguing with me, and all I needed to do was keep on with it. ‘So whose life did you steal to become a god?’ I asked. ‘It had to be someone, right?’

‘No one’s. Like I said, rude.’

I looked him up and down. There were plenty of beautiful people in the world, but this was ridiculous. Too ridiculous. No one was born this pretty, and no one got immortality without stealing it from somewhere. With one exception. ‘Desma brought you back from the dead, didn’t she? Is that what this is? You owe her?’

‘Oh, no. I don’t owe her. She owes me. She owes me a lot more than you could ever imagine.’

‘Which is why you are hiding in here, not getting involved.’

‘Wow, you are really bossy. Just like your mother. Wait here.’

He disappeared into the house, leaving the door open. I peered past into a gleaming hallway. An enormous arrangement of flowers stood on a heavy antique side table. I sniffed. His home smelled like furniture polish and roses.

Another man brought back from the dead. Had he been her Stanley? Some dedicated Renfield who had done her dirty work for her? It didn’t feel right.

He returned with a small, leather-bound book. ‘Here. Never say I never gave you anything.’

I took it. Gold-embossed letters on the front read: Grimms Elfenmarchen. Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

‘I’ve read this.’

‘No. You’ve read the authorised version. This is the unexpurgated original. Fifth story in. Enjoy.’ With that, he gave me a gentle shove and closed the door.

I turned the book over in my hands. It was thick and heavy. I opened the front cover. The frontispiece was dated 1809.

I skimmed through the fifth story, but it was all in German. I’d spent a couple of months in Munich and had picked up a little of the language, but not a lot more than please, thank you, and where is the toilet?

I tucked the book into my backpack and went in search of a coffee shop with Wi-Fi. It didn’t take long. The combination of tourists and rich people meant I ended up with a lot of choices.

I entered the first I found with free tables and ordered coffee and another blueberry muffin, which I ate while I waited for my laptop to boot up.

According to the internet, which was never wrong, the first edition of Grimms’ Elfenmarchen was published in 1812, three years after the publication date of the leather-bound book on the table next to the laptop. Multiple editions had followed, mostly with an eye to making them more suitable for children—dialling down on the sexual violence and turning the evil mothers into evil stepmothers because somehow that made the abuse more acceptable.

I opened the book to the fifth story. It was long. Longer than I’d have expected for a standard Hansel and Gretel, or Rapunzel.

All around me in the coffee shop, tourists argued over what coffee they wanted and the best way to get to the Natural History Museum. If I shouted out, ‘Anyone speak German?’ I’d probably get a show of hands.

I’d also have to explain why I had the book, or at least come up with a reasonable story, and then have to spend time being social.

I ducked my head and found a free translation website instead. The unfamiliar language and a little confusion as to whether it would make a difference if I left out the umlauts meant it took longer than usual to type it all out, but I managed to get it all on the screen with only a minimum of swearing. I pressed the translate button and began to read.

30

Once upon a time, there was a handsome Prince with hair as golden as sunlight and eyes as blue as the summer sky. At the sight of him, his people would fall to their knees in the mud and consider themselves blessed. But while the Prince was handsome, he was also arrogant, and when the time came to take a wife he declared he could only marry a woman as beautiful as he was handsome.

The King sent his knights out across the land to find the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. They searched every manor, house, and hovel and soon returned with the ten most beautiful girls.

Each maiden was fairer than the last, but the golden-haired Prince curled his lip at all of them. ‘They are pretty, but none are as beautiful as I am handsome.’

And so the Prince set off to find his own wife. He searched far beyond the borders of his kingdom, through the darkest forests and the deepest woods. For years he wandered, tracking rumours of beautiful maidens, but every time he found the source of the tale, she could not match his beauty. He began to despair of ever finding a match.

Finally, he began to hear rumours of a great beauty whose arrogance led her to refuse every man her father brought for her to marry. As he grew closer and closer to the maiden’s kingdom, he heard more and more tales of the girl’s legendary beauty, and for the first time in a long time his hopes began to rise.

As he rode closer to the castle, he began to see people lying and crying in the mud. When the Prince questioned them, he found they had been struck down by their Princess’s beauty.

The Prince rode to the castle door and demanded an audience with the King. When the King saw the handsome Prince, his own hopes rose that his daughter would be married, and he would finally be rid of her, for while she was beautiful, she was also conceited and demanding.

He summoned the girl from her rooms, and the Prince fell to his knees in awe. Her hair was black as the darkest night, her skin like buttermilk, and her eyes were as bright as the stars.

And so it came to be that the two most beautiful and most arrogant people in the world met, fell in love, and were married.

In time the old Kings died, and the Prince and the Princess became King and Queen of their combined kingdoms. They had three children—a boy, then two girls—and each was more lovely than the others.

The boy had his father’s golden hair, and his mother’s bright star eyes, and when he was born, the angels wept for his beauty.

The eldest sister was as beautiful as the height of summer. She, too, had the golden hair of her father, but also his sky-blue eyes. Birds fell from the sky at the enormity of her beauty.

But even the Elder Sister’s beauty was surpassed by her Younger Sister, a girl as beautiful as the Moon. Her hair was woven from silver moonbeams, and her dark eyes reflected the stars at night.

The King and Queen watched their children grow more beautiful as they themselves aged, and while decent God-fearing parents would love their children and take pride in them, all the King and Queen could see was their own fading and aging beauty. The time came when the peasants no longer threw themselves in the mud at the sight of the King and Queen, and were instead awestruck by the young Prince and Princesses.

In a fit of jealousy, the King and Queen took the children into the deepest and darkest part of the forest, to a place the King had found on his travels that was known to no other living person. There the King raised a stone above his head to bash out their brains when the Queen stayed his hand.

‘Blood on your hands will bring bad luck upon the Kingdom.’

The King looked at his hands and saw that she was right. Instead they left the children in the deepest part of the forest to be devoured by wild animals.

The King and Queen returned to the kingdom, but they had misjudged the love of their subjects for the youngest royals. The people of the kingdom marched on the castle and demanded the return of their beloved Prince and Princesses.

The King and Queen refused. The love of the people belonged to them and not to their children, but the serfs would not return to work. Crops fell fallow in the fields. Pigs, cows, and chickens died in their pens, unfed and unwatered.

The people began to starve, but still they would not return to the fields and farms. Instead, they died, one by one, where they stood, falling in the mud outside the castle for the last time.

Without servants to care for them and protect their dwindling stores from rats, and without the knowledge to grow their own food, the King and Queen slowly succumbed to hunger until they too died.

And that was an end to them.

The children might too have perished if it were not for the fact that the elder children each had a special gift. The Brother had the gift of talking to animals and could argue the rabbits and wild pigs out of the brush and into their cooking fire.

The Eldest Sister sang so charmingly that the blackberry bushes would bloom and fruit even in the midst of winter, and so the children were always well fed even at the darkest times.

The Youngest Sister had no gift, and the knowledge sat like a stone in her breast. To cheer her, her siblings always made sure she had the choicest cuts of meat, and the juiciest blackberries.

They built a tower of stone and wood to shelter them from the worst of the winters, and used the stone their father the King would have slain them with as the cornerstone, and there they spent their days.

The day came that there were no more rabbits nor wild pigs near the tower; the children had eaten them all, so the Brother wrapped up a slice of dried rabbit meat in a white handkerchief and said, ‘Sisters, I must go deeper into the forest, but I will be back by sundown. Watch for me by the tallest window.’

The sisters spent the day singing and eating blackberries. The Youngest ate the most because she was the saddest.

Before night fell, the sisters climbed the tower all the way to the top and awaited the return of their brother. They waited all night, while the Moon rose and sank, and until the birds signalled the dawn, but their brother did not return.

In the morning, the Eldest Sister wrapped up a pocket of blackberries in a handkerchief, and said, ‘I will be back with our Brother by sundown. Watch for us by the tallest window.’

The Youngest Sister spent the day fretting and worrying by the window, but when night fell, neither her Sister nor Brother had returned.

In the morning, she wrapped up the last of the blackberries and the last of the dried rabbit meat. She turned to the tower and said, ‘I will be back by sundown.’ Then she dug at the cornerstone with her little knife until it came loose, and wrapped it into a blue handkerchief, which she carried on her back, and set off into the forest to find her Brother and the Eldest Sister.

She set off in the direction her siblings had gone, but there was no path and she soon became lost.

She sat down on a stone and cried.

Her sobs were so loud that she attracted the attention of a small stoat. Through her tears, she told him the story of how she had lost her brother and her sister. He barked at her, and ran a little way off. She followed, and when she had caught up, he barked again and ran further. And she knew that he had been sent to her by her Brother, who had a way with the animals.

She followed the stoat to a river, and they walked alongside it for a while. After she had been walking for a time, she sat on a rock and opened her handkerchief to eat up the blackberries. When they were all gone, she rested for a while. It was then that something blue half-buried at the corner of her seat caught her eye. It was her brother’s blue handkerchief, and so she knew that she was on the right path.

She continued on her way with the stoat, following the bending passage of the river. When night came, weary after the day’s journey, she climbed a tree and fell asleep.

She woke in the night to a scrabbling sound. The little stoat was gone, without even a warm space next to her to remind her he had been there. The Youngest Sister peeped through the branches and saw an old woman, bent and twisted, gathering firewood.

Just as she was about to call out, she noticed the woman’s hands were twisted claws, with nails like thorns. The old woman looked upward suddenly into the tree, and her eyes were crimson, her nose sharpened to a beak, her lips non-existent above a blood-stained chin. The Youngest Sister shrank back.

The creature grinned, showing a black-gummed mouth. ‘Hello, sweetling. Don’t mind Old Mother. Your brother and sister are safe at my cottage. Come down out of that tree and we’ll see about something to eat.’

Just as Old Mother said it, the Youngest Sister’s stomach rumbled. She didn’t want to go with the hideous creature, but neither did she want to stay in the tree. She looked for the stoat in case he had any advice, but he was nowhere to be seen.

She climbed down from the tree and followed the Old Mother through the moonlit forest back to an old, crumbling cottage. If the Youngest Sister had come across it on her own, she would have thought it abandoned but for the smoke puffing from the chimney.

‘Go on, go in,’ said the Old Mother.

Everything was set out neatly inside the little cottage. There were two little beds, and two little chairs beside a merrily burning fire on which a black pot bubbled. Fresh straw covered the floor, and on the table lay two little plates on which lay two little cakes, and two pots of fresh buttermilk.

‘Where are my brother and sister?’

‘They are close. When you are rested and have eaten, I will take you to them.’

The Youngest Sister sat on the smaller of the two chairs. The fire warmed her weary feet.

The Old Mother pushed one of the plates closer to her.

The Youngest Sister lifted the cake to her mouth. It was golden and perfectly formed. As she brought it up to her mouth, she became aware that it gave off an unpleasant, decaying odour. The Youngest Sister’s stomach rumbled again. The Old Mother had probably not washed out her cook pot properly, she decided. She took a bite of the cake. It was sweet and delicious.

‘Have more.’ The Old Mother turned to the fire.

The Youngest Sister brought the cake up to her mouth once again, but before she could take a bite, she felt a sharp pain at her foot. Underneath the table, the little stoat shook its head.

The Youngest Sister spat the remains of the cake into the white handkerchief. It was full of worms, and she was pleased she had listened to the stoat despite her hunger.

The old woman gave her cake after cake. Each time the youngest pretended to eat it, but instead hid them in her brother’s handkerchief, until the wriggling of the worms in her pocket became all too much to bear and she pretended she was full.

She felt her eyelids drooping, and did not need to feign the tiredness in her bones. Soon she was tucked up into the smaller bed, pretending to sleep while she watched the Old Mother with lidded eyes.

The Old Mother did not eat the cake. Instead, while the younger sister pretended to sleep, she helped herself to a stew from the pot bubbling on the fire. When she had eaten her fill, she climbed into the other bed and began to snore.

The Youngest Sister slipped out of the bed and went looking for her brother and sister. Outside the cottage, the night air was still and cold. Streams of silver moonlight from the full Moon high above made stripes of the forest floor.

‘Little stoat,’ she sang. ‘Come and help me find my brother and sister.’

The little stoat slunk out from under the cottage door. It ran deeper into the forest, where not even the moonlight went. The Youngest Sister followed.

Deeper and deeper into the forest they went. The ground grew soggy and wet, and a great stink began to fill the air. The Youngest Sister held her nose.

Finally, the winding path turned to a salt marsh and the stoat barked twice.

Human bones and flesh filled the soggy ground. Some were white and picked clean, gleaming under the silver moonlight, others still held human flesh—a blackened leg here, a leathery-faced skull with feathery hair there.

And there, bobbing against a half-submerged log, were the heads of her siblings, her brother and sister turned part to bone, frog-bitten eyes staring up at the full Moon.

The Youngest Sister trudged back to the cottage thoughtfully. Inside, the old witch snored fit to wake the dead.

The Youngest Sister sat on an upturned log and turned out her pockets. One held the worm-cakes, the other held the stone that would have dashed out their brains had their mother not stayed their father’s hand.

The Youngest Sister entered the cottage on soft feet, hardly breathing.

The stoat trotted into the cottage and leapt onto the witch’s chest. He looked the Youngest Sister in the eye. And with that the girl raised the stone above her head, and dashed the old witch’s brains out with it.

The stoat grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger still, until he was not a stoat at all, but a man with bright black eyes. He was the first man apart from her brother and father the Youngest Sister had ever seen, and she fell instantly in love.

‘Thank you. The witch put me under a spell,’ he said. ‘Now my life can begin again.’

The Youngest Sister began to cry. Her life had ended. Her only family were dead, and that was a spell the death of the wicked witch could not break.

The Woodcutter, for that was what he was before he had crossed paths with the wicked witch, took pity on the girl. He had been a stoat for many lifetimes and had seen many terrible things while waiting for a chance to break the spell.

‘The witch had the power of life and death. It’s how she still lived long after her bones should have been dust. You can absorb her power.’

‘How?’

‘The way she absorbed life from others.’

The younger sister’s eyes fell to the prone form of the witch on the bed. The idea did not disgust her as much as it should have. She was still hungry.

With the Woodcutter’s help, she prepared the witch for the pot, and soon, a fresh stew was bubbling on the little fire.

When it was ready, she offered a bowl to the Woodcutter first. He refused, so she ate it all up herself. When she had finished and the bowl was licked clean, she fell into a fitful sleep.

The Woodcutter watched over her as she slept. The pity for the girl had turned to concern, and he half-regretted suggesting she eat the witch. The witch’s magic had been powerful, and the girl was slight and small. Finally, lulled to sleep by the warmth and crackle of the fire, he nodded off in the chair beside her bed.

In the morning, the bed was empty, but sobbing came from outside. The Woodcutter stepped out into the weak morning sunlight to see the Youngest Sister bent over and hiding her face, weeping as if the devil himself were after her.

‘Your brother and sister are safe now in heaven,’ he said, thinking the magic hadn’t worked and she was mourning for what she would not see again on this earth.

She shook her head angrily, still hiding her face in her hands. He knelt next to her and took her hands in his, and saw her face for the first time that morning.

She had become hideous. The beauty that had propelled her parents to abandon her was gone, replaced by a beak-like nose and a chin like a broken root.

He fell back in horror and was about to turn and run when he heard her say one word. ‘Please.’

It was so sad that he knew the ugliness was only skin deep, and it was the same girl beneath the loathsome mask. The witch’s magic inside the girl was dark and greasy, but she had no choice but to use it if she wished for the return of her siblings.

She fell in a swoon at his feet, and when he picked her up to carry her inside and place her on the bed where she would not be cold, he found she had no heartbeat and no breath passed her lips.

The Woodcutter settled into the cottage, and waited for the girl to wake. The days passed. The Youngest Sister remained cold and dead.

To pass the time, the Woodcutter took the stone that was now stained in the blood of the old witch and carefully carved it into the shape of a woman to watch over the girl. It was an artefact of a life saved and a life destroyed, and he knew it would carry great power.

On the third day of the third week, the Woodcutter woke in the night to the sound of someone being sick. He opened his eyes. The Youngest Sister was bent over double. On either side of her were the two most beautiful people he had ever seen. While the Youngest Sister’s beauty had been silver and dark like the Moon, her brother and sister shone like the sun. While he had been in stoat form, he had not been able to distinguish between humans other than to tell whether they were male or female, but now he wondered how even so he could have missed something so lovely. The Elder Sister smiled at the Woodcutter and his heart began to beat as if fit to burst.

For a while, all were happy. But the witch’s magic had left an ugly seed within the Youngest Sister, and as the days passed the seed grew. The Youngest Sister became uglier, both outside and within. She saw the way the Woodcutter looked at her sister and the way the older girl blushed.

A dark and ugly jealousy blossomed in her mind.

The day came when the Woodcutter asked the Brother for his permission to marry the Eldest Sister and the Brother gave it.

On that day, whatever there was that was good within the Youngest Sister shrivelled and died, until there was nothing left but black jealousy and the witch’s greasy dark magic.

There was no one within the dark wood to marry the two lovers, and so the siblings and the Woodcutter set off together to find a priest who could bind the Eldest Sister and Woodcutter’s hands together.

They walked for a full cycle of the yellow Moon before they came to a town on the edges of the forest. Soon the wedding day was set.

On the night before the wedding, the Eldest Sister asked the Younger to give her blessing to the union. The Younger did not reply.

She stood behind the Elder and combed and tied the Elder’s long summer-coloured hair in preparation for the marriage.

With each tug and each braid, the Youngest Sister’s jealousy rose, until it could not be contained. The Youngest Sister gave a sharp tug to the Eldest’s hair and pulled her all the way back into the land of the dead.

‘I gave you life,’ she said. ‘But you did not deserve it.’

The Youngest Sister left the bride-to-be sobbing in the land of the dead.

In the morning, the Brother came to collect the sisters for the wedding, and the Youngest told him what she had done.

He fetched the Woodcutter who begged the Youngest Sister to bring his beloved back, but she refused.

The townsfolk demanded to burn her as a witch, but the Woodcutter stayed their hand.

‘She is the only person who can return my beloved to me,’ he said, for he still had hope that there was good within the Youngest Sister and that reason and love would prevail.

They returned to the cottage in the forest, where the Brother and the Woodcutter hoped that the happy memories within the cottage would sway the Youngest Sister.

Many moons passed. Every morning and every evening the Woodcutter begged, and every morning and every evening, he was refused. Finally, he understood that the Youngest Sister would never return his beloved.

The Woodcutter had watched the witch over many decades and knew how to do magic, even if he had no magic ability of his own. A magic powerful enough to raise the dead required sacrifice, love, and a binding so strong it could not be broken by death.

For many days, he thought it through and searched his knowledge of the witch’s black magic until the day came that he believed he had found a way to bring The Eldest Sister back.

When the Brother announced he was going hunting, the Woodcutter joined him. They went deep into the wood searching for wild pigs, and there, once far away from the cottage and the Youngest Sister, the Woodcutter told the Brother his plan. The Brother agreed, for he had grown tired of the Youngest Sister’s demands.

The Brother went deep into the forest and gathered the pigs to him—boars, sows, and piglets—more than a hundred creatures, which he instructed to be silent and follow him back to the cottage. There he used his influence to hide them within the salty marsh and compel them to be silent until they were needed.

The Woodcutter returned to the graves of the witch’s victims, and one by one he dug them up so he could use their smallest bones. As he dug, he apologised to each and begged their forgiveness, but like all the dead, they remained silent.

That night while the Youngest Sister lay sleeping, the Woodcutter and the Brother crept from their beds and performed a ritual while the Moon was at its highest and its fullest. The pigs came forward to be sacrificed, and this created a blood curse, for there is nothing so powerful as a sacrifice willingly given.

The Woodcutter dipped the bones in the blood of the pigs and called on the dead to help him in his quest, to find the Eldest Sister in the realms of the dead and bring her spirit forward. He bound the magic with the figurine of the woman he had carved from the stone that had both saved the sibling’s lives and killed the witch. He used it to call blood to blood and flesh to flesh. Finally, he tied the curse to the Moon so it could never be broken.

The Brother wrapped the talisman up in the Youngest Sister’s blue handkerchief and hid it in the cottage below her bed. Life sparked immediately in the Youngest Sister’s belly. She had refused to bring the Eldest Sister back by black magic, so they would use the Youngest’s own body to do so.

In the days that followed, the Youngest Sister became sick, but she blamed it on dirty water. By the time she realised what had been done, it was too late.

She flew into a rage, and would have poisoned the child within herself, but the child’s soul was tied to hers. As long as the Elder Sister was alive within this world, anything the Younger Sister did to her would be done to her in return.

The Youngest Sister raged and screamed, but the curse was fixed and she could not turn it back.

She grabbed the Woodcutter by his hair and pulled him into the salt marsh, where she drowned him under the stagnant water. When his body floated lifeless, she followed his soul into the land of the dead.

‘When I met you, you were a lowly creature, hairy and cunning. And so you shall be again.’ And with that, she pulled him back to life, but the Woodcutter had spent too long in the living world as a man, and when he came back, he returned half-stoat and half-man.

Horrified by his appearance and believing the Eldest Sister would never love such a hideous creature, he fled into the forest.

The Brother’s stomach turned with terror at the sight of his sister’s black and hideous rage.

He too ran from the cottage into the forest, never to be seen again. He swore an oath that he was now alone in the world, and his sister was a stranger to him.

And so the Youngest Sister was left alone. For days she raged, but she could not break the curse, because nothing could break the Moon.

Every morning she screamed at the Sun, until the day came that instead of screaming, she looked at it as if seeing it for the first time. The Moon could be broken, but there was one thing more powerful and that was the Sun. The curse could not be broken, but it could be corrupted.

The Youngest Sister tore the cottage to pieces searching for the talisman, and when she found it, she corrupted its essence and tied the life essence of the child inside her to the Sun, so that when the Sun began to wane in its yearly cycles, so too would the life of the Eldest Sister.

And so the Eldest Sister was born again, a squalling infant with no memory or knowledge of what had come before, destined to die over and over again until the Sun turned black.

31

History might be written by the victors, but fairy tales were assembled by generations of storytellers, each adding an extra pinch of spice in the retelling. Nothing in such stories could be trusted. My sister had always been the prettier one, but birds hadn’t been struck from the sky at the enormity of her beauty.

Destined to die over and over again until the sun turned black. It sounded like another exaggeration, but there was Sigrid, dying over and over again. The curse was thousands of years old and one that had been enacted over and over again throughout the centuries. The thought of my sister suffering from that accursed bone disease and dying again and again made me sick to my stomach. She didn’t even remember from one life to the next.

There had to be a way to break it. Just as there had to be a way to stop what was happening to me. The two were intimately connected. The hags had been victims of this as much as Sigrid was.

I shoved the book into my backpack and retraced my steps to Adonis’s door. I banged on the door, not bothering with the buzzer.

He opened it. ‘Now what?’

‘Is it all true?’

He shrugged. ‘Some of it. No one stood in the mud and starved. People were ignorant in those days and about as stupid as they are now, but no one’s that dumb. And we weren’t royalty. We were just three kids whose parents couldn’t feed us anymore. It happened more often than you might think. The whole thing was what I believe you modern humans would call a “fucked-up situation”.’

‘Why didn’t you just tell me outright?’

‘Because I don’t get involved. I must have told you that eight or nine times.’

‘You already are involved. You gave me the book. That’s getting involved.’

‘Not that involved. Look, they have been going at this forever. Century after bloody century, with all the bloody hags and weasels stuck in the middle, nothing but cannon fodder to their damned grudge. You’d think they’d be tired of it by now. I start sticking my nose in, and suddenly one of them decides to have a go at me. I might be thousands of years old, but I’m not ready to die yet. I like being alive.’

Desma’s journal came to mind. Name after name after name. It wasn’t a journal, or a paranoid woman’s fever dream. It was a scorecard: she’d killed his weasels. He’d killed her hags. Tit for tat.

Poor Harriet. Suddenly, it was all so clear. I could see my mother enjoying that — offering protection while all the while she was the one doing all the damage. She’d always enjoyed getting one over on someone.

‘Okay, how do I break the curse?’

His face softened. ‘You can’t. You’re just a baby. Not even a century old. In a couple of thousand years, maybe you’ll have absorbed enough of the residual magic to break it. You’ll have to wait. Assuming you live that long.’

‘I can’t wait two thousand years. I don’t think I have two days.’

He shrugged again. ‘Nothing I can do about that.’

‘If this is true, Sigrid isn’t just my sister. She’s yours too. You can’t leave her like that.’

‘It was a long time ago. I got over it. If Sigrid wants out, she needs to do it herself.’

‘How is she supposed to do that? All she does is die. She doesn’t even remember from one life to the next.’

‘I’m not getting involved. How many times do I have to say it?’

‘I’m going to try anyway,’ I said.

‘Oh, sweetheart, you are not your mother. You can’t take her on. You are like a new-born pup with its eyes closed, seeking a fight with a full-grown wolf. It doesn’t matter how much determination you have or how loud you yap. The wolf will rip your throat out.’

With that, he slammed the door in my face with a thunk that resonated in my head. I banged on it again and again, and pressed the buzzer over and over, but the door stayed resolutely shut. Each bizzzt of the buzzer felt like an electrode to my brain.

In a moment of pure fury, I kicked it, but that did nothing more than hurt my toes. The window of the house next to Adonis rolled up, and a neighbourly head poked out. ‘Hey, you! Stop that. I’m going to call the police.’

I half-raised a hand, intending to wave it, but somehow it felt as if it had gained ten pounds. I dropped it heavily against my thigh. ‘Fine. I’m going.’

The headache that had been building since I’d first fallen on the pavement dialled up to eleven. I unzipped my backpack as I walked, and swallowed two painkillers without water. They stuck in my throat.

I wasn’t going to be fodder in some grudge match between my mother and a weasel, and Sigrid didn’t deserve to be either. The weasel and Desma had started it. They could finish it.

I hadn’t forgotten the weasel had tried to murder me, but then if I wanted to keep my deal with the hags, I’d have to murder him, too. The weasel had to be powerful, but I suspected we wanted the same thing. He wanted Sigrid alive, and I was very sure neither of us wanted me to decapitate him. I was more and more aware of the tick-tock of my clock running out. A millennia-old creature might also have some ideas about how to survive accidental zombification. Maybe we could make a deal.

It was only after someone stopped to ask if I was okay that I realised I was weaving back and forth on the pavement, woozy and half-delirious with the pain in my head.

By the time I got home, my head felt like it was on fire. The general throbbing made it impossible to think, and I couldn’t stop shivering, even though I was so hot my cotton shirt felt like thick, rough linen against my skin. I collapsed onto the bed and lost consciousness.

I woke in the dark with an overwhelming thirst. I stumbled into the kitchen, my mind groggy. The floor felt rough under my bare feet. I swallowed two tablets with a glass of water, topped with a second glass of water, which I downed in one go. Then I stood in the dark kitchen, with my hands on the kitchen counter and my head bent, waiting for the pounding to diminish enough that I might make it back to the bed without collapsing.

The throbbing slowly subsided, and I became aware of a familiar scent.

Pine needles.

I bent my head farther, and squinted in the dark. Pine needles covered the tiles—I turned my head tentatively—all the way out the door.

The house was silent, and felt empty, but while I’d been out, someone had covered the floor in pine needles. Someone.

I lifted my head towards the window. A soft glow emanated from the open door of the shelter. I groaned.

I checked the sitting room first. Pine needles covered the carpet, sofa and telly table. I entered Sigrid’s bedroom next, then mine. Both were dark. Both smelt of pine.

I took the stairs carefully, one slow step at a time. Stanley wasn’t in his bedroom, although pine needles covered his bed. I closed my eyes and swallowed, then took another couple of steps back and checked behind his bedroom door. The red dress that had hung there for as long as I’d been an adult was missing.

I quickly checked the rest of the house, but it was empty. Finally, I slipped my feet into the pair of boots I kept by the back door and crept down the back steps. A full yellow moon shone overhead. I breathed deep. The fresh night air seemed to soothe my brain. I crept through dew-wet grass towards the shelter. It, too, was silent. Other than the flickering light, there was nothing to indicate anything unusual.

The light came from a hundred flickering candles set at intervals around the room, and the air smelled of flowers. The faint scent of decomposition underlay the floral aroma, but it was nothing more than an echo.

My mother’s body was—unsurprisingly—gone.

32

I had a bag packed under my bed for just this eventuality. I pulled it out from under the slats and wiped off the accumulated dust of over a decade. When I’d planned for my mother coming back, Sigrid’s body had just been a shell. Half the space in the suitcase was taken up with adult nappies, wipes, Vaseline, and Sigrid’s clothing. I dumped them on the floor and filled the remaining space with armfuls of clothes from my cupboard. I shoved my laptop into my backpack and retrieved the remaining packets of painkillers from where I’d left them in the kitchen. Finally, I packed my toothbrush and a handful of toiletries.

I was out the door and on the street within ten minutes of waking up. It wasn’t my house—never had been, and whatever reason I might have had for staying had just evaporated.

The suitcase was old enough that it didn’t have little wheels. I lugged it to the bus stop, and stood and stared at the bus map, considering my options. There weren’t many.

I couldn’t afford a hotel. Since I’d spent all my time working or looking after Sigrid, the only friends I had were at the Lipscombe, but Obe wouldn’t have much space for me in his tiny flat. Habi still lived with her parents, and they hated the fact she worked at the Lipscombe. A hag turning up on her doorstep in the middle of the night would not be made welcome.

Per? He might have been living with my sister, but I didn’t really know him. He’d probably take me in for a night or two while I worked out my options. I marked him down in my brain as the last choice.

That left Ana, and she owed me an explanation about the hopping. She also had plenty of space, even if it was filled with skeletons.

I had to change buses twice, but finally made it across the river unscathed. The suitcase grew heavier with each step. I was half tempted to just leave it, but if I didn’t have money for a hotel, I certainly didn’t have money for a whole new wardrobe.

By the time I stood on Ana’s doorstep and rang the bell, the row of terraces had begun to glow yellow under the rising sun.

Behind a handful of windows, lights had flickered on, and I could almost imagine parents nagging children out of bed and stumbling downstairs for the first coffee of the day. Even though I knew what was there, it was still hard to believe the houses were nothing more than a facade.

My hair itched with sweat, and my breath came in short puffy gasps. I reached up and touched the bandage on my head. I hadn’t brought clean bandages. Somewhere in Ana’s packrat rooms there had to be a first aid kit.

She buzzed me in, and I negotiated the winding corridors, steps, trapdoors, and piles of rubbish, dragging the suitcase behind me.

I found Ana in exactly the same position she’d been in the last time I’d visited—half lying on the sofa with a games controller in her hands, her stomach jutting out like an overinflated balloon.

She looked up and did a double take that would have been funny if I’d been in a better mood. ‘What the hell happened to you?’

‘Tilde. It was part of the agreement. My time’s running out. And then someone tried to kill me.’

Ana barked out a laugh. ‘Well, you look bloody awful.’ Her eyes slid to the suitcase. ‘Did you bring me a present?’

‘I need somewhere to stay. Just for a while.’

‘Finally got fed up with Stanley, huh?’

‘I was fed up with him a long time ago. Desma’s back.’

Ana straightened. The controller dropped from her hands. ‘Did you see her?’

‘No,’ I admitted, ‘but she’s definitely back. Her body’s gone and the house is covered in pine needles.’

‘God, she did have an obsession with them. What’s she doing back?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe I do.’ I told her about my visit to Adonis and the original fairy tale.

She rubbed at her belly. ‘Huh. So my sister Sigrid was your sister Sigrid.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘Your sister was named Sigrid too? You didn’t think that was odd?’

Ana shrugged. ‘I suppose it’s obvious when you think about it. I thought it just showed how screwed-up Desma was. Couldn’t even be bothered to give yours an original name. Turns out it was the original name. Poor bitch.’ She stared down at her stomach. ‘Oh, God, this one’s going to be human too. That’s why I could never have a hag. Damn it! What a complete waste of bloody time.’

I pushed the skeleton next to her out of the way. It made a clackety sound. I sat gratefully. ‘I don’t get why Desma bothered to have children at all. It’s not like she even cares about the other hags. Maybe she didn’t have much choice on the Sigrid front, but the rest of us?’

‘Come on. You know the answer to that.’ Ana picked up the controller and switched the game on the telly off. ‘Desma needs an audience. You get the occasional numpty like Stanley who’ll get off on someone like her bossing him around, but most adults will see through her. Children, on the other hand? Children love their mothers, no matter how crappy that mother might be. Once you started getting older she lost interest, but when you were little and thought the sun shone out her witchy arse? That’s when she was happiest.’

I supposed she had a point. I leaned back on the sofa and stretched my legs out. It probably didn’t matter, anyway. The bandage on my head was getting itchier by the minute. ‘Ana, do you have a first aid kit?’

‘In one of the bathrooms upstairs. Take the stairs behind the pile of traffic cones on the fourth room to the right. Water should be working.’

‘Thanks.’

Instead of following her directions, I veered off to the left and wandered around the warrens until I found the library. It smelt of damp and wet books. Little had changed since I’d last been inside, other than a fresh pile of paperwork by the door.

Three people had survived the bombing on Cooper Street: my mother, Ana and Stanley.

I’d had a nagging feeling I’d missed something at the Archives, and I thought I knew what it might have been. Ana being somewhere else when the bomb hit wasn’t enough, but a memory had stirred. I searched my memory then headed for a cabinet in the corner and began rifling through paper yellowed with age.

Is that what she told you? Of course anything Desma said you took with a pinch of salt, but the lie was obvious once I took the time to think about it.

I’d heard so many hopping stories while I’d been growing up. They came up almost every visit. Ana’d loved it—the chance to get out of the pea-soupy city into the fresh air and make a bit of spare cash. And with all the men gone and labour shortages at an all-time high, it would make sense that the hops farmers would be recruiting. I hadn’t questioned it.

But the house had been destroyed in mid-April. Hopping season was August. What reason would Ana have to lie to me? She could have just said she was out. She didn’t have to make up a story.

There were nine people living in the house, five of whom didn’t work. How often would seven of them be out at the same time, or not notice a strange weasel hiding something in the house? An inside job made sense.

I do what I have to do to survive this. That’s what Ana had said. As long as there is at least one of us left, we’ll survive.

I found what I was looking for in the third drawer down: a stack of black-and-white photos of Ana. The top photo showed Ana in a canvas-looking uniform. Unusually for the time, she didn’t wear her hair up, and even though the picture was black and white, something about the colour of her skin didn’t seem right. I flipped the picture over and read the faded blue ink. Canary at work. Ha ha. Royal Arsenal, Woolwich. 3 Jan 1942.

The ‘canaries’ had been mentioned in the employment conditions at the munitions factory—something that seemed irrelevant when I’d read about it at the archives. They were so called due to the tendency of their skin to turn yellow from exposure to sulphuric acid.

Access to explosives, a determination to live, a lie about where she’d been. It wasn’t a smoking gun, but it was good enough for me. What had Ana been offered in return for her life? Protection? Immunity?

It was enough for me to take to Tilde. But Ana’s head in a bag? The fury in Tilde’s eyes had made it perfectly clear that she meant it literally. It had never occurred to me that any perpetrator would still be alive or that it might have been one of our own.

When the explosives went off, all the hags were probably already dead in a goggle-eyed, ear-bleeding kind of way, but that didn’t make it okay.  Even in the middle of a war, someone would have noticed five dead women bleeding out their ears. All the weasel and Ana had needed was to wait for a yet another bad night of bombing to hide explosives in the house, and it would be just one more destroyed East End home out of thousands.

And every year Ana mourned and grieved and got drunk. Maybe it was guilt more than grief.

Fury bubbled up. The photo crumpled in my hands. I suppressed a grimace. Count to ten. One…two…

My first instinct—running down the stairs and shouting at Ana like a deranged hag—wasn’t going to help. Ana’s reaction to my anger had always been the same as Desma and Stanley’s—patronising with a side order of eye-rolls.

I backtracked then followed Ana’s earlier directions up the stairs all the way to the top of the warren, into the third house along, and then into a bathroom that actually had a window to the outside world.

As I peeled the bandage off my head, I imagined Ana sneaking through the darkened house at Cooper Street, putting out stolen explosives. Had she hidden them while her sisters were alive? Set the explosives out among their corpses? Had she been the one to press the trigger? And the hex bags? She’d have to have done those too.

My fingers fumbled with the catch to the first-aid kit. What the hell was she thinking? Was that what the obsession with having a hag child was about? Guilt?

My hands stilled as another realisation coursed through me. The hex had only hit me after I’d visited Ana’s. She could still be in cahoots with him.

I turned on the water in the sink with trembling fingers, and I didn’t know if it was fear, anger, or just pain making them shake. Water rushed through rattling pipes and spat out of the hot tap. I dipped a cloth under it and dabbed at my head.

I turned the tap off, but the pipes kept rattling. Ana’s makeshift pipework let out a sound that was more of a scream than a groan. My vision blurred suddenly, as if even the walls were shuddering.

I reached out to steady myself, but my hands slipped against the quivering tiles. I laid a hand flat. It wasn’t me. The wall really was moving.

What?

The tiled floor shifted. I slipped and fell hard onto my knees with a crack that reverberated up my spine. The shuddering intensified. A chunk of plaster dropped off the ceiling. It hit the shower door, which shattered, spilling glass splinters over the tiled floor.

I fell again twice on my way down the stairs as the building jolted and shook. A makeshift hardboard wall blocked off the front door for the third house, but as I reached the bottom of the stairs, it collapsed flat, missing my feet by inches. I scurried to the door and pulled the handle. Crashes and bangs hit my ears.

Locked.

An open interior door led to a faux living room to the left. I scrambled along the shifting carpet. The floorboards underneath bent and dipped. I raced to the window and pulled at the handle. Also locked.

The noise became overwhelming—banging, groaning, and screeching, as the room shook and rumbled, as if some giant were shaking it from the outside. A huge chunk of plaster and brick crashed onto the sofa, leaving a hole in the ceiling.

The floor shifted suddenly, and the floorboards shot up with a crack. I scrambled backwards, hitting an armchair. My leg twisted awkwardly, and pain shot through my foot. My eyes fell on an ironing board in the corner of the room, complete with an antique flatiron.

I grabbed it and ran around the giant hole in the floor back to the window. The iron hit the window lock three times before it gave. I scrambled out. Then I raced to the other side of the road as the house collapsed behind me.

I stood in the road, covered in dust and plaster, open mouthed, and watched as the row of houses crumpled into the warren underneath.

33

The factory people let me wash up in their toilets while we waited for the emergency services to arrive. I looked quite the spectacle, covered in plaster and with half my hair missing, but I did my best to clean up and look respectable. The floppy hat was lost somewhere beneath the ruins of the terraces, and I’d left one of my shoes behind in the scramble to get out.

The woman in the mirror was hardly recognisable as the woman I’d been eight months previously, or even the one that had come back from the dead a week and a half ago. My skin sagged, and liver spots had broken out on my cheeks. A couple of black hairs remained, but the rest was white. Even my posture had got worse. When I tried to straighten my stooped shoulders, I couldn’t.

Time’s running out.

I’d told the workers about Ana somewhere in the depths of the ruins, and the fact that she was heavily pregnant, and they’d passed it on to the operator on the 999 call. Sirens sounded in the distance, getting nearer. I couldn’t stay. The police would want to know all about the warrens under the houses. The medics would want to take me to hospital, especially after seeing my head. Any time I spent arguing was more time counting down on the clock. There wasn’t much more I could do for Ana.

I exited the bathrooms. The factory stood empty, all the machines shut down and silent. There was no one in sight. Everyone was outside gawping at the devastation.

I helped myself to a couple of blank pages from an office at the end of the factory floor, took a blue ballpoint from the desk, then wrote out a detailed explanation of where I’d last seen Ana and the route that had existed into her hidey-hole.

I approached the closest person outside the gate. ‘I just need to pop up the road to get something,’ I lied. ‘I should be back before the emergency services get here, but if I don’t, can you give them this?’ I pressed the paper into his hand.

He did a double take at the sight of me. Perhaps I looked a little less respectable than I’d thought. ‘Uh, sure. You okay?’

‘Just fine.’

A fire truck, followed by a police van, then an ambulance raced around the corner just as I reached it. It was only then that I realised I had no money, no Oyster Card for the bus or train, and no phone. Where the hell did I even think I was going?

I stood on the pavement in the early morning light, the air thick with dust and the scent of devastation, and debated going back. I usually didn’t come up this side of London this often, but there was one other person I knew who spent time up here: Ruth Hedger.

The campus was only about a mile. I could walk it. Maybe not the best plan in one socked  foot, but I couldn’t think of a better option.

By the time I reached the university, I was limping, and I’d had two people stop to ask if I needed help. Others noticed and shied away, the way people do when they think someone may be mentally ill and living on the streets.

I took the lift up to Ruth’s offices, grateful for the cool blast of the building’s air conditioning. I followed the corridor until I found a door with Prf. R. Hedger typewritten on a bit of paper slotted into the metal slidey thing. I knocked.

‘Come in.’ Ruth was sitting at her desk grading papers and looked up when I entered. A shadow flitted over her face at the sight of my head and feet, but just as suddenly it was gone, replaced with a polite smile. ‘Can I help?’

‘It’s Vivia.’

The polite smile stayed fixed a moment longer, then her mouth dropped. ‘Oh, my God.’ She stood quickly, then closed the door behind me. ‘What the hell happened to you? Where are your shoes? No, forget that. What happened to your head? What happened to… everything?’ She pulled the chair opposite her desk out and moved some books from it. ‘Sit.’

I sat.

‘Okay, tell me what happened.’

Every instinct I had told me to keep information to myself. Everything my mother had drilled into me. Every instinct told me telling people I could bring others back from the dead was not a good idea. My brain overruled it.

Hag business. Weasel business. Secrets only knowable to the dead. I’m not getting involved.

Maybe if everybody had stopped being so secretive, this whole thing could have been resolved centuries ago. I’d had enough of secrets.

I told Ruth the whole story, from the beginning to the end, without leaving anything out. It took a while, and I had to stop halfway so she could go get me a glass of water. When I was finished, she sat back in her chair and stared at me.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘That is just fascinating. I am so going to write a paper on you.’

That was her first reaction? She was an odd bean. Despite my feelings about secrets, there was one that would make my life a lot harder if it got out. ‘Oh no, I can’t have anyone know I can bring people back from the dead.’

‘Oh, I can leave that out,’ she said, her expression smug. Less ‘the cat who got the cream’ and more ‘the academic who knew where her next breakthrough was coming from’.

‘Look, I hate to ask, but any chance you could lend me fifty quid? I need to get a pair of shoes, and…’ I stopped.

I had no idea what I was going to do. I’d had my bankcards, my passport, my phone, everything in my backpack. I couldn’t get cash without a bankcard, couldn’t get a replacement without proving my identity. What was I going to do? Wander round the city homeless until I found the Father of Weasels and argue with him until he agreed to come to a truce with my mother?

I let out a laugh. What I needed was the Lipscombe Trust. We specialised in this kind of thing. ‘Actually, never mind that. Can I use your phone?’

‘Of course. Vivia, I’m happy to lend you some cash, but don’t worry about that for now.’ Then she actually grinned and hugged her arms around herself. ‘Ooh, this is so exciting.’

‘What?’

‘Vivia, you don’t understand. This power you have. It’s not about death. It’s got nothing to do with death.’

‘Um. Yes, it does,’ replied the woman who died on a regular basis and had spent the last eight months decomposing.

‘No. No. This thing with your mother and your sister, it just confirms it. You cross over and you die, but it’s not about the dying. It’s about life. You overcome death. Think about it. The hags were able to turn you from a shambling, rotting corpse to a living person. That’s not a death power. That’s a life power. Did you even wonder how Sigrid came back as an angel and what it means?’

‘Of course I wondered,’ I said, but out of everything, that had seemed the least important. It had just been dead Sigrid being weird as usual.

‘You didn’t bring her back wrong. You brought her back different.’

‘Same thing.’

‘And the Father of Weasels? Is he wrong? Are all weasels wrong?’

My head hurt. All I could think was that my painkillers were buried under a ton of rubble. I closed my eyes. ‘Ruth, just tell me what you’re getting at.’

‘Your mother made the weasels. You made an angel. Your mother is ancient. As old as humanity, you said. I’d be willing to bet she’s older than all the metanatural races—that you and the hags are the source of many of the metanatural races, if not all of them. This is very exciting.’

She may have been right, but a knot of irritation formed in my stomach at her enthusiasm. ‘Not to me. I’m going to be dead in a day or two, and so is my sister.’

Ruth looked hurt, and I sighed. She was trying to help. ‘Sorry. Look, just don’t tell the Human Preservation Front. I don’t need them to love me even more than they already do.’

Her face fell, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m being insensitive. Tell me about the ritual again.’

The fairy tale book was buried with everything else. I closed my eyes and told her what I remembered of it.

‘And you saw the figurine?’

‘Yes, but there were two of them. I don’t know which was the original, if either.’

Ruth came round the front of the desk and hitched herself up onto it. Her heels beat against the wood. She ticked items off on her fingers. ‘Pigs. Figurine. Bones. And from what you told me about your mother, I’d add pine and salt to the mix.’

The way her eyes shone gave me hope. ‘I thought you said there was nothing you could do.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. This is new information. The original ritual didn’t require natural ability, just powerful artefacts and sacrifice. The second one, the one that corrupted the first, that’s going to be a bit harder. That requires hag magic, which is completely alien to me. It’s going to be difficult to work it out. I can do the theory, but it’ll be a bit like a person who born deaf recreating a symphony based on a description.’

‘What do you need from me?’

‘I don’t know yet. Let me spend a little time thinking about it.’

I didn’t have a little time, but this was the most hope I’d had since I’d crawled out of the coffin.

‘You must be exhausted, and your body… well, it’s not exactly young anymore, is it? Let’s get you cleaned up, something to eat, and something to wear, and then we can decide what to do next.’

Ruth picked up the phone and told the person on the other end that she was cancelling her lectures for the day.

She took me home to a one-bedroom flat a five-minute walk away from the university. The moment she unlocked the door, a pair of cats hit her calves, winding and mewling.

‘Ssh. You’ve been fed. Bossy creatures.’ She turned to me. ‘They came with the flat. I did a swap with a guy who’s looking after mine in Toronto. I’ve only got a fish tank. I think he got the better deal.’

She dropped her keys into a bowl on a table by the front door. I followed her through a small sitting room and into her bedroom. She opened the wardrobe and grimaced.

‘Not sure we’ve got time to take you shopping. Your clothes are filthy. I’m sure I can find something to fit you, or at least something we can make fit.’

She pulled out a long floral dress. ‘Here. It’ll probably be too big, but it’ll do for now.’

It was, but what choice did I have?

‘Thanks, Ruth.’

I washed up then changed in the bathroom and came out to find her warming up tinned soup in a kitchen so tiny that we both couldn’t fit into it. I leaned in the doorway and watched her pour out equal-sized portions from a saucepan.

She switched on the TV and we sat side-by-side on the sofa. We watched the news as we ate.

The devastation surrounding Ana’s row of terraces filled the news. A helicopter flew overhead. It wasn’t just Ana’s houses affected. The collapse had had a domino effect, and the terraces on the road up from hers leaned against each other as if they might collapse at any moment.

The rolling ticker on the bottom of the screen advised: 300 local homes evacuated. Cause of collapse still unknown. No known casualties. Four injured, including a pregnant woman taken to hospital in critical condition. Concern is mounting for an elderly woman reported by witnesses to have escaped the collapse but now missing. Any information, please call the number above.

A police sketch followed. It could have illustrated Hansel and Gretel. I sat up straighter.

‘What’s the local hospital?’

Ruth put her hand on mine. ‘Vivia, I don’t think it’s a good idea that you go there.’

‘I need to see her.’

Ruth stared at my face for a minute as if to determine how serious I was, then said, ‘Okay. I’ll drive.’

Flat-swap guy had left the keys to a small white Fiesta that took a couple of tries before it started. Ruth lent me a woolly beanie with an apology. ‘It’s the only type of hat I have.’

I tucked my hair into it as Ruth negotiated the underground parking garage and drove out into the light. We inched along in back-to-back traffic: a combination of rush hour and backlog from all the emergency vehicles that had headed towards the hospital. Finally, Ruth paid over the odds for parking in the hospital lot, and pulled up the handbrake.

‘Wait here. I’ll find out where they took her.’

I waited. Sunlight streamed in through the windscreen. After a minute, I cracked the window down, but the air was thick and muggy, and it didn’t help. I didn’t want to think about what had happened back at Ana’s. Her rabbit warren was never going to win any safe building awards, but it had been stable for decades. I found it difficult to believe that its collapsing now was nothing more than coincidence. Not on the same day my mother was back.

Ruth was back within twenty minutes. ‘She’s supposed to be in ICU, but they’ve got her in a private room. Apparently she keeps dying and coming back, and that’s confusing everybody.’

‘She’s trying to prevent the real thing,’ I murmured. ‘What about the baby?’

‘Alive. Human. They gave her an emergency C-section.’

A flush of relief washed over me. ‘Okay. Thanks.’ I reached for the door handle. To my surprise, Ruth did the same.

‘Call it academic curiosity. I’d like to see the two of you in a room together. I want to get a feel for how similar your souls are. It sounds like you are effectively clones.’

‘I don’t think so.’

She made a non-committal noise. We entered the hospital to the familiar smell of anti-septic, and it occurred to me that I’d spent more time in hospitals in the last few weeks than I had in my entire life prior to that point.

I followed Ruth up to the third floor and along about a mile of corridor to a small room in the depths of the hospital.

Ana lay in the bed covered in bandages and tubes—in her nose, her wrist, and her hands. Monitors stood on either side of her, beeping. Her stomach was still rotund, but noticeably less so, and she seemed suddenly very small. She wasn’t dead, but she was minutes away from it.

I couldn’t explain to anyone who wasn’t a hag how I knew, but I did. I could feel the life seeping from her body. She was hanging on by a thread. Eyes closed, she breathed noisily through the tubes. Someone had made an attempt to clean her up, but her dark hair had turned almost white with dust and bits of plaster. I reached up to my own, the darkness there long gone. I could feel age trickling through my limbs, making them heavier and less responsive.

I sank into the chair beside her bed and took her hand. She had lied to me about the house in Cooper Street. There was a good chance she had been responsible for their deaths. I looked down at the fat, ugly creature in the bed and tried not to care about her, but I did. Whatever she might have done, I didn’t want her to die. I didn’t want to be the only hag left standing.

First Harriet, and now Ana. Sigrid was likely to be next. It felt as if everyone from my childhood was falling down.

I felt Ruth behind me in the doorway, her fascination almost palpable. I ignored her. I didn’t want to be ungrateful. She’d helped me when I needed it most, but her fascination felt almost ghoulish in the circumstances.

Ana’s gnarled hand was cold in my own. I tugged the white hospital sheet up and tucked it under her chin in a futile attempt to warm her up. The life within her ticked down another notch. She breathed out—a long, drawn-out gasp.

Ruth said, ‘Something’s happening.’

‘She’s dying.’

‘Not like other people do.’

Other than Sigrid, I’d never seen someone die. I’d seen plenty of dead bodies and plenty of spirits, but this moment, when someone moved from living to dead—I didn’t have much to compare it to.

On the bed, Ana’s ragged breathing slowed. I gripped her hand tighter. The thread of life keeping her alive stretched to an impossible thinness.

And snapped into me, sharp as an elastic band. Her life flowed into my veins and settled into my bones ice-cold and minty-fresh. I gave out an involuntary gasp. My age-heavy limbs lightened, and the pain in my head melted away.

I sat in the chair and panted until the freeze turned to warmth.

I became aware of Ruth staring at me. ‘I take it you weren’t expecting that to happen?’ she said.

No, it wasn’t supposed to happen. Or at least I didn’t think it was. I leapt to my feet and to the basin and mirror on the opposite side of the room. My hair was still white, although a few black strands had returned. My face remained wrinkled and saggy. I still looked like I was looking at sixty from the wrong side, but it was an improvement on the mid-eighties look I’d sported moments earlier.

The monitoring equipment began emitting a high-pitched squeal.

Ruth said, ‘We should probably go.’

I nodded. I still wasn’t sure what had just happened, but it had felt incredible, and that was disconcerting. We made our way back to Ruth’s car in silence.

I got into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut.

‘Did that happen when your sister died?’ Ruth said.

‘No.’

‘You sure? It must have been a traumatic moment, and you were very young. With everything else going on—’

‘No, definitely not.’ I wondered if I had enough to go back to the hags with. It wasn’t quite head in a bag, or a smoking gun, but maybe they’d be satisfied. Maybe I’d be able to buy some more time. ‘Uh, Ruth?’

‘Uh-huh?’

I’d never figured out the etiquette around asking someone whether I could die in their car, or their house, or whether it was polite to ask someone I barely knew to look after my dead body. If I survived this, I determined to sit down and spend half an hour thinking about wording so I didn’t have to feel so awkward every time it happened. ‘I need to visit the underworld.  Would you mind—?’

She leapt on it like an overexcited puppy, ‘God, yes. Come back to the lab with me. I’ll get you hooked up. I’ve been dying to see you die. Oh, God, that came out wrong.’

I couldn’t help but smile. It was a much more enthusiastic response than the one I usually got.

34

Ruth’s lab consisted of a square room with a large trestle table, a chair that looked like it had been cadged from a dentist’s office, and the kind of ancient lab equipment that could only belong to a university that had spent over a century with its eye on continuously shrinking purse strings.

Framed motivational posters that I imagined belonged to the previous inhabitant ringed the walls. Odd-looking machines stood against one wall, and the opposite one was taken up by shelves on which I recognised several common magical ingredients—rock salt, poppy and sunflower seeds, dried mint, cloves, dried rose petals. If it weren’t for the jars of pickled mice, none of it would have been out of place in any hipster kitchen.

Floor-to-ceiling rectangular window-panes filled the wall opposite the door. Brown tape and old newspaper covered around a quarter of the panes, which were cracked.

Ruth indicated the dentist’s chair. I sat uncomfortably, unsure if I should lie back. She pulled open a drawer and handed me something white and plastic. I turned it over in my fingers. It looked like someone had poked holes in a swimming cap. ‘What’s this?’

‘For your head.’ She motioned putting it on.

I complied then drummed my fingers on the seat. This was taking longer than I’d expected. She found a tangle of wires in a drawer and began unravelling them.

‘It didn’t all go to you,’ she said. Her eyes met mine briefly then returned to the task at hand. ‘Normally when someone dies, their life force just dissipates, but that—some of it went straight to you, and the rest headed straight out the door. Very weird. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I don’t say that a lot.’

‘Where did it go?’

‘I’d guess to your mother, if she’s back in the land of the living.’

‘But why? Did Ana do that on purpose? Could she do it on purpose?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I think it just happened. Have you ever been around when any of the other hags died?’

‘Not permanently,’ I said.

‘That’d be it, then. One of you dies, and whatever it is that keeps you immortal gets spread out among the others.’ I must have looked unconvinced, because her lips turned up in the amused expression she got when she thought I was being dim. ‘It’s not that unusual for a species’ life force to be connected. Think about the vamps—take down the big daddy, and his spawn fall too. And think about the shifters—the wolves, the lions, even the pigeons. Anything with a pecking order—ha!’ She laughed at her own joke. ‘You take down the top of the tree and everyone else gets moved up a branch.’ She pulled the final wire free of the tangle. ‘Now sit still. I need to connect these properly.’

‘Do you think I could transfer it to someone else?’ I asked. The adhesive patches of the electrodes were cool against my skin as she connected them to my head, and I had to suppress a shudder. It wouldn’t have bothered me a week ago, and I couldn’t help wondering if increased paranoia was accompanying the increased age. I liked Ruth. I trusted Ruth, but the world had been too weird recently for me to feel completely comfortable with something as odd as the brainwave machine attached to my head.

‘If you’re thinking about your sister, I’d say probably not. Maybe another hag, but I’d have no idea how you’d do it.’

She crossed the room and pulled out a large white machine on wheels. It looked like it might have been designed for electrical shock treatment, and there were entirely too many wires attached to the little plastic cap she stuck down on my head. I didn’t know what would happen if my body were accidentally electrocuted while I was dead, but I was sure I didn’t want to find out.

Ruth’s lips turned up at the corners again. ‘It’s just for measuring brain waves. It’s perfectly safe.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Really. I use this all the time. And on the living. You’ll be fine.’

I lay back, mollified if not completely at ease.

‘Just a minute,’ Ruth said. She fed paper into a dot matrix printer, then began clicking switches on the machine. ‘Okay, I’m ready.’

In the underworld, the lab hardly existed. No one had cared enough about this room in life to make it last in death. The floor flickered and became grass, then brush.

I left the university and made my way through dead streets towards the row of terraces that had been Ana’s home. In the underworld, they still existed but looked very different. Each window was barred, as was each front door, by locked security gates. High iron railings ran between the pavement and gardens, keeping any dead or not-real dead riffraff from casually coming closer.

I walked all the way to the end before I realised there was no gate. Ana had barricaded herself in.

Ana was a hag. A newly dead one, sure, but a hag nonetheless. She should have at least some awareness.

‘Ana!’ I shouted through the bars. ‘I need to talk to you!’

The iron railings turned into a brick wall twice as tall as I was.

‘Aw, come on, Ana. It wasn’t my fault.’

An intercom appeared on the wall in front of me. ‘Yes, it was. You should have left well enough alone.’

Before I could respond, it disappeared. It didn’t matter. It was clear she could hear me anyway.

I chose my words carefully. ‘Did that happen to you? In 1942? Did you feel them die?’

The intercom flickered into existence again. ‘This is your fault.’

‘Ana, you were living in a hole in the ground because you thought someone was coming for you, and you were there long before I was born.’

‘You stirred it all up again. Do you know how hard it was? They were always home. I had to hide everything bit by bit. Day by day.  It took weeks to get everything in place. And what did I get for it? A few more years. I was supposed to get centuries. It’s not fair. I’m not supposed to be dead.’

‘It was going to happen sooner or later. Everybody dies, Ana.’

‘But I made a deal.’

‘With who?’

There was silence. The intercom disappeared.

‘With who?’ I shouted again. ‘Was it the weasel?’ The brick wall grew taller. ‘Ana!’

But it didn’t matter how loudly I shouted. She refused to answer. The wall grew higher and higher until it was so far above my head I couldn’t make out where it ended.

The factory across the street could have a ladder, but as soon as the thought crossed my mind, I dismissed it. The wall was just going to get taller, and I’d have to get down the other side too. There was nothing stopping Ana from sending it shooting into the clouds, and even if I did make it over, she could just brick up every door and window to the terraces. If she didn’t want to talk to me, there wasn’t much I could do about it.

The world flickered all around. I made my way to the end of the street where the water lapped at the pavement, and flagged down Charon as he wove into sight.

‘Where to?’

The thought of returning to the house full of clucking and disapproving hags turned my stomach. I’d leave it until last, and then only if I had to.

The sight of him made me unreasonably angry. I got it. I wasn’t properly dead. I wasn’t privy to all the dead secrets, but he’d still kept something important from me.  But shouting wasn’t going to get me anywhere, even if it was my first inclination, so I swallowed my fury and plastered a smile on my face. ‘Are you sure you don’t mind me using you as a taxi?’ It was the nature of the underworld that the boatman appeared for all new arrivals, me included, but that didn’t mean I should take advantage of my unique status. He’d never indicated that he minded, but it couldn’t hurt to check.

He grinned at me. ‘Not at all. The newly dead are so single-minded. They only want to talk about their deaths. The harpies never say anything, and the minotaurs are only interested in starting fights with each other. It’s nice to have a little intelligent company. You should visit more often.’ He winked at me.

An entirely unexpected thought occurred to me, and before I had time to think, I asked, ‘Are you flirting with me?’

‘I might be.’

‘Uh, okay,’ I said. Now what? I had no idea what to say to that.

‘And this is your stop.’ His brown eyes flashed.

‘Thanks.’

I climbed down the rope ladder, feeling overly awkward, and watched the ship slip away. I’d had a big crush on Charon when I was a teenager, but now I’d known him for too long. The thought of a romantic relationship felt a bit weird. I filed the exchange away for later consideration.

He’d deposited me back in the ancient forest. My mother might be gone, but she’d been here a long time and for a reason. The fairy tale came back to mind. Deepest, darkest part of the forest.

The dead shape their world around them. My mother had been dead many times, but she was a hag, and an extremely powerful one. She wasn’t going to leave any residue, not if she didn’t want to.

Sigrid was another story. She must have died dozens of times over the centuries. Something like that had to leave an impact, and no matter how inevitable it might have been each time, she didn’t want to die. Every time it would have been new and scary and painful, and every time she would have found her soul back in the underworld.

In between her intermittent stints at life, she’d spent decades here. The Sigrid I’d known in the spirit realm was different from the other dead. I’d known that. I’d thought it was because she was a sister of a hag or because of the way she had died, but now I wasn’t so sure. She’d have gained awareness of her death and the nature of her born-again life. She had to have left some sort of mark here. And then Desma had just happened to have spent time here while she’d been dead. It couldn’t hurt to have a snoop around while they were both in the world of the living, for once.

It was no longer night, but it was still dark. The dense canopy above allowed little light through, and what did was green-tinted and faint, as if the struggle to get through the foliage had robbed it of any real strength. It smelt of loam and pine and rotting leaves, and of a freshness I’d never encountered before. The trees around were filled with birdsong, a cacophony of tweets and trills. This was a world long since dead to this part of Britain.

I made my way through the undergrowth and bracken. In some places, my feet sank into mud, and I learned to be careful where I put them.

Everything comes from somewhere. In the fairy tale, the wicked witch had gained her power by murdering and eating hundreds of people over centuries. Desma had then eaten her in turn and absorbed her power. I wasn’t quite sure where I stood on the idea that my entire existence had come about as the result of an act of cannibalism. Obviously, eating other people was not the done thing, but on the other hand, I quite liked that I existed at all.

I stopped, closed my eyes, breathed deep, and let the hag part of me loose. The surface part, that had almost been fooled by the birdsong into believing this forest was a real thing, was quelled. It was nothing but an illusion, a reflection of something that had once been, but the reflection wasn’t still. Somewhere to my left, something had disrupted it, creating ripples in its surface.

I turned and made my way towards the ripples. After a couple of minutes’ walk, I came to the clearing where I had found my mother. Unsurprisingly, it was deserted.

The ground around the hovel had been trampled flat, and the log on which she’d sat had three spaces worn through the bark.

The three children built a tower. Really? Three children left alone in a forest managed to build a stone tower, all on their own? And in a place that had very little stone but did have a lot of wood? That sounded like fairy-tale waffle. A hovel made of mud and branches seemed a little more likely.

I scanned the fire area and kicked away at the cold ashes but found nothing. I ducked my head into the hovel. The furs I’d seen on my previous visit still covered the floor, but they weren’t thick, comfy-looking things. They were small and raggedy, as if they came from rabbits and stoats and the occasional rat. Despite the fresh air of the forest outside, the inside of the hovel had a rank, unwashed odour. I got down on my knees. They sank into the damp earth. A flicker of compassion was kindled within me. The fairy tale had made it sound like a happy place, safe and filled with sibling support, but this was no place for children. It had to have been a hard, painful existence. Flecks of light spotted the manky furs. The roof would have leaked in the rain, and provided little protection from the cold during the winter. I imagined the three of them huddled together against the snow. A life like that, they had to be close, and then the witch and the woodcutter had come between them. Whether it was fair or not, I felt a sudden sympathy for the child my mother had been. All of this was driven by the hurt of betrayal. Maybe over the years it had corrupted her, or maybe the seed of corruption and evil was already there, but betrayal was what had made it grow.

One way or another, I’d found her here at the hovel where she had grown up, not the place where everything had gone wrong. I sighed and rubbed at my eyes. Empathy wasn’t going to get me anywhere. She’d made her own decisions, and they had been the wrong ones. She hadn’t been a cold and betrayed child for a very long time.

I ran my fingers over the furs and began moving them to one side. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but something was keeping this place stable, and it wasn’t my mother or Sigrid. They weren’t here.

I found it buried under a thin layer of dirt at the edge of the hovel, hard and small under my questing fingertips. I scraped away the dirt and uncovered a small figurine—the obese female carving from the hex bag, complete with same triangle-sized chip.

Too late, I remembered I’d left the original hidden in my bookcase. A place I’d thought was safe and close by, but where I now didn’t want to go back. I put the underworld version into my pocket.

Once outside the foul-smelling hovel, I straightened and moved my head from side to side to stretch my neck. I looked around. If the ‘stone tower’ was still standing, the ‘witch’s cottage’ might be too. I closed my eyes again, and took a deep breath. I became aware of a thrumming of power from my pocket. I took the figurine out again and studied it. I sent out the thinnest tendril of hag magic towards it, then snapped it back suddenly. It had felt as if the figurine had reached out to meet it. I wasn’t sure what it was or what it would do, but caution was the best course of action. I ducked back into the hovel and helped myself to a rabbit skin then wrapped up the figurine. It probably wouldn’t make much difference, but something about it made me want to put an extra layer between it and me.

A thin thread of power led from the figurine through the trees and off into the distance. I followed, taking it slowly through the undergrowth and stopping frequently to get my bearings. I’d been walking for almost half an hour when I became aware of the sound of running water. Another ten minutes, and I came across a stream, just small enough for me to jump across if I took a running leap but big enough that I might still end up with my feet wet if I tried.

If I remembered correctly, according to the story, the youngest sister had walked for most of the day before reaching the river. Either the story was wrong, or the underworld hadn’t bothered to stick in the bits in the middle.

Something large rustled in the undergrowth just ahead of me and I startled. A family of wild pigs, a sow and six piglets, burst out of the greenery and raced across my path. They weren’t the pretty pink things I was used to seeing. These were great grey hogs with bristles and encrusted mud. The sow snorted at me before she and her brood disappeared again.

Salt, pine, piglets, figurine.

The path widened and then opened onto a clearing. Unlike the story, the shack in the middle of it was no cottage. It was nothing more than a collection of crudely hewn logs stuck together to create a shelter. The thrumming from the figurine in my pocket intensified. I followed it into the shack.

Bloody human bones littered the floor. I held my hand over my mouth and nose against the stench. The figurine hummed so strongly now that it reverberated in my pocket. I followed the thread of magic to the corner of the shack and began scraping back soil, only to find yet another figurine exactly the same as the first.

I reached for the key around my neck. There weren’t any doors in the middle of the forest, but there was an opening in the hovel. It obliged and turned into the door I needed. I opened it with the key and returned to the world of the living.

35

I woke from the dead with a figurine in each hand. The lab was empty. While I’d been dead, night had fallen. It hadn’t felt as if I had been gone that long, but time always worked differently in the underworld.

Wiggly lines showed on the screen of the machine reading my brain. They looked normal as far as I could tell, and I wondered if I could remove the cap or whether it would make a mess of Ruth’s readings.

I sat up and the wires pulled at my hair. I swung my legs over the side of the chair and examined the figurines. They were identical to the ones I’d left hidden at home. Same pattern on the stones, same chip. Now there were four. I wondered what I was supposed to do with them.

A knock at the door made me turn my head. ‘Ah, you’re back.’ Ruth walked into the room. ‘Sorry, you were gone a while.’

‘How long?’

‘Hours.’

A full yellow moon was visible through the window wall. Hours. How long did I have? Minutes?

‘What are those?’

I held out my palms, a figurine on each. She shuddered. ‘They’re not real.’

‘They feel real to me.’ Each was a solid weight on the palm of my hand.

‘They’re echoes. They don’t feel right. They feel like you, like death.’

Gee, thanks.

‘May I?’ Ruth reached out her hand. It shook. I placed one of the figurines into it. She closed her eyes and sighed. ‘It’s so cold.’

It hadn’t felt that cold to me. Cool, maybe, like any other stone, but not cold. Frost began edging out from the centre of her palm. I grabbed the figurine back. Her eyes snapped open, and her face was a mask of pain.

‘Is that what death feels like? That cold and alone?’

‘No, it’s not like that,’ I said.

‘Maybe not to you,’ she said.

I reached up to the cap. I didn’t like the way she was looking at me. ‘Can I take this off?’

‘Yes, of course. Hold on.’ She pressed a couple of buttons then clicked the machine off. I pulled the sticky electrodes off my head, one by one, and passed the cap to her.

I stood up from the chair and straightened. I was feeling good, better than I had in days. Even my head felt better, and I realised that for the first time ever I hadn’t thrown up when I’d returned from the dead. I moved from side to side, jiggling my head. Nope, no nausea. Not even a sliver.

Ruth was watching me cautiously. ‘What did you see while you were there?’

I told her, and even that wasn’t right. I remembered it completely. There was no dream fuzziness.

‘You’re different,’ she said. ‘You came back different.’

‘I feel healthier than I have for hours, but I can’t see how that’s a bad thing.’

She crossed the room, opened a drawer of one of the cupboards, and pulled out two plastic supermarket bags. ‘Put those things in here. One in each bag. I don’t think you should be touching them with bare skin.’

I didn’t want to. They fit perfectly into each hand, hard and cool in my palms. They made me feel better. If I held onto them, maybe I didn’t have to die. Forget Tilde and her vengeance mission. These things would keep me going.

‘Vivia, that’s dark magic you’ve got there. Magic of blood and flesh.’

They didn’t feel dark. They felt good. ‘There’s nothing wrong with blood and flesh,’ I said. ‘They’re what make us alive.’

‘Blood and flesh consumed, Vivia. That witch in your fairy tale, she wasn’t born with such a dark power. She stole it. Everything she had she got from eating human flesh. That is not the type of thing you want to take lightly. And those things?’ She nodded at my hands. ‘They took all that stolen life from her. Just put them in the damned bags.’

I didn’t want to, but I did it anyway. They dropped into the plastic bags with a crinkly sound. The instant they lost contact with my fingers, a wave of exhaustion washed over me and the nausea returned. My head began to pound. I sat back heavily on the chair.

‘No time to rest, Snow White. The moon’s on the turn. We don’t have a lot of time.’

I really didn’t like being called that. Ruth had to take my elbow and help me to the car. I walked with slow, shuffling steps.

I don’t want immortality if that’s the cost.

Tell me that again one day when you’re old and ugly and desperate for just another five years of youth.

I wasn’t expecting that day to come so soon, but she was wrong about me. I didn’t want it.

Ruth opened the car door for me, helped me in, and reached across to buckle my seatbelt. I felt like a child. Fuzzy thoughts clouded my mind, and my attention kept wandering. I knew we were going to do something important, but I just couldn’t hold onto it for longer than a couple of minutes.

‘Where are we going?’

‘To the hospital, to pick up your sister.’

‘I don’t think they’re going to let her out yet.’

Ruth gave me an amused look. ‘They don’t have much of a choice if she insists on discharging herself. You know that.’

‘She needs to rest.’

‘She’s going to do entirely too much resting if we don’t get a move on.’

We drove out of the underground parking garage and into the night. The pale moon shone overhead, a continual reminder of my time running out. Bright stars lit the summer sky. The underworld never felt like this. It never felt so alive. I would miss it.

‘Vivia, are you listening?’

‘I think so. What did you say?’

She indicated left, then turned the corner much too fast. Without the figurines to hold it back, the post-death nausea rose. This was why I always preferred recovering in my own bed: much more comfy, and it didn’t race round corners while I was still queasy.

‘I was saying that I think I’ve worked it out. I was led astray by the moon. That’s the focus of the original curse, but it’s the curse tied to the Sun that corrupts it.’

‘You can’t break the Sun,’ I murmured.

‘No, of course not, and only the original caster can break the curse. That would be your mother. From what I understand, we won’t have much luck persuading her to help, but I think we can find a way around it.’

We slowed to a stop at a traffic light. I glanced at her. ‘How?’

‘Even the best spell weavings can’t last forever. That’s why they need to be tied to something. And the moon and the Sun? You’re right. We can’t break them, even if we wanted to, but they’ve got their weaknesses. The moon has a monthly cycle. It waxes and wanes. I don’t think Tilde had much of a choice about how long she sent you back for. As soon as the moon waned in power, so did she. So basically, right now, we’re at a time when hag magic is at its lowest. That’s bad news for you, but also bad news for your mother. She’s at her least powerful. Same with the Sun. It has cycles too, although they’re much longer—somewhere between nine and fifteen years, I believe. The curse tied to that waxes and wanes, too. And now the Sun’s activity cycle is on the wane. It’s why Sigrid never lived longer than fifteen years, and why she didn’t immediately get sick again when she came back. Why she wasn’t always reborn straight away. It all depends on the right combination of Sun and Moon cycles.’

I listened in silence, absorbing the information and trying to figure out how it could help. Desma might be less powerful, but she was far from powerless, and she was still the original caster of the corrupting curse.

Ruth turned back onto the high street, and back behind the same bus we’d been trying to outrun.

‘Damn,’ she said.

‘Ruth?’

‘What?’

‘Why are you helping me?’

‘Because this is absolutely fascinating.’ She turned sharply into a space at the side of the road to allow oncoming traffic through on the narrow street. ‘What was I saying? With those’—she nodded at the two plastic wrapped figurines in the footwell—‘we should be able to use you as a substitute for your mother. You are her flesh and blood, after all.’

‘I don’t know how to break it. I don’t even know how to do a basic spell weaving,’ I said. My hag magic was one thing. It was an intrinsic part of me. I had some mild sensitivity to other types of magic, but I’d never been interested in dabbling.

‘I’ll channel it through you. It’ll be a joint effort.’

We both fell silent. I wasn’t confident, but it was a better idea than anything I had.

She twisted in her seat and grinned at me. ‘Want to know a fun fact?’

‘Uh, sure.’

‘Members of the weasel family eat their own young when they’re under stress.’

I’d thought I was strange, but the more I got to know Ruth the more I realised strangeness was relative. ‘Wow, that is a fun fact. Thank you.’

‘All right, snarky. The point is, I think you made the wrong assumption. This whole grudge-match between hag and weasel. Your mother killing the weasels to make a point, and the Father of Weasels—what’s his name?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, him killing hags to get back at her. I think you got it wrong.’

‘They’re definitely dying. Hags are definitely dying. How did I get that wrong?’

We slowed as the bus ahead of us stopped. Ruth twisted her head to one side, but the traffic was too heavy even at this time of night to overtake. ‘God, I hate London traffic. It could get bad in Toronto, but not like this. Hmm. Let’s see if we can take a shortcut.’

She took a sharp left into a residential street, and then another right so that we were running alongside the high street. The road was narrow, and she drove a lot faster than I was comfortable with.

‘Not the deaths. It’s the why of it you’ve got wrong. I don’t think all the deaths were to do with a grudge at all. I think they’re a power struggle, through the Sun and moon cycles. You, the hags, the stoats—not weasels, remember—you’re all descendants of the two of them. You’re their flesh and blood, little pieces of themselves sent out into the world. Every part of them—including any power or ability they have—is also part of you.’ I glanced at her to see her face had suddenly turned serious. ‘Vivia, when Ana died, you absorbed her life. You absorbed her hag magic.’

‘Not all of it. I’m assuming the rest went to Desma.’ And that is when I understood. Ruth began to explain further, but I got it. It wasn’t the weasel who had tried to kill me, it had been my mother.

36

Flesh and blood. Family. Sacrifice. When the hags had all died in the house in Cooper Street, hag magic had flowed into Ana and Desma, making them both that much stronger. If I extrapolated from that, the same could happen for the stoats. Every stoat who died made their Father more powerful.

Ana had made a deal, she said. At a time when zombies and disease were being spread among refugees by the Nazis, the last thing my mother would have wanted was attention from the authorities on a houseful of dead hags with blood coming out of their ears. They’d simply waited for a bad night and timed the deaths accordingly. Desma had been protecting the stoats. Every one saved was one less for the Father of Weasels to claim for his own.

And the two girls cowering in the shelter? That I could only guess, but I supposed that if I died at the wrong time in the cycle, Desma couldn’t use me when she needed me most.

Anger and hurt rose up in my chest. The knowledge stung. ‘I’m nothing more than a battery to her.’

Ruth gave me a sympathetic glance. So much made sense. When Sigrid had died in the bath and Desma had walked in, she’d said: ‘Kill that,’ but she hadn’t. Sigrid had been nothing more than a shell, and she must have realised that that was more convenient than beginning the whole cycle again. I’d always wondered why she’d changed her mind.

We drove the rest of the way in silence, my mind ticking over. My chest hurt, but I wasn’t sure how much was shock and how much my sudden advanced age catching up with me.

Ruth pulled into the hospital parking lot. ‘It’s going to be quicker if you wait here.’

I couldn’t disagree. I needed a damned walker. She rolled down the window as if I were a dog waiting in the car, and I resisted the urge to stick my tongue out at her. I watched her walk away. All my eggs were firmly stuck in the Ruth basket. I had to hope she knew what she was doing.

I must have drifted off, because it felt like only moments later when one of the back doors opened with a creak, and my sister slid into the back seat. She wore shorts and a yellow strappy top, and looked nothing close to human. There was a grace and an energy to her that hadn’t been there before, and for a minute I thought I was looking at someone else entirely—a total stranger. Until she smiled, and she was my sister again.

Ruth slipped into the driver’s seat, and put the keys in the ignition. ‘Everyone ready?’

‘I don’t even know what we’re doing,’ I said.

Sigrid’s head swivelled towards me, ‘We’re going home, of course.’

‘What? Why? She’ll be there.’

‘We need the other two figurines,’ Ruth replied. ‘And your house is the best place to work the weaving. It’ll have hag magic soaked into its foundations. We can use that.’

‘I don’t think it’s a good idea.’

Sigrid’s robot voice said, ‘It’s not up to you. You don’t get to be in charge anymore. This is my life. I get to choose.’

‘I’m dying too, you know,’ I said, and even though it was true and a good point, it came out sulkier than I was intending.

‘Oh, so what? At least you’d get to stay dead. You have no idea what it’s like. Once you’re dead, you’re supposed to stay dead. Spend all that time being confused and not knowing what’s going on, and then finally find resolution. Come to terms with everything. The minute I do that—whoops, I’m torn back to the living world, and stuck in this amnesiac baby body. It’s horrible.’

I twisted round in the seat. It made my old back hurt. She was different. I hadn’t imagined it. ‘You remember.’

‘Yes, I remember. I switched on my upgrades, and now my memory is clear as a bell. I remember all of it. And I am not doing it again.’

‘I don’t want you to. I’m on your side, remember?’

‘Are you?’

Newly alive Sigrid was a lot grumpier than the girl who’d died, and I was tired of her taking it out on me. Not when my fingers were aching with arthritis, and my chest hurt in a way that worried me a little. My back hurt like someone had stuck a spike up it.

‘Oh, stop it,’ I said. ‘Really. I have done a lot for you. I kept your body safe. I looked after you.’

‘Not all the time. You ran off. The moment you were out of that room, you ran off and left me in that awful home.’

I had. I couldn’t argue. I’d left the country for more than a year. Run away and enjoyed having no responsibilities. ‘I came back, and how would you even remember? Your soul was in the underworld. Your body was empty.’

‘You think that’s an excuse for leaving me alone. I was completely vulnerable, and you ran away. You owe me.’

‘Owe?’ I said. ‘This has nothing to do with anyone owing anyone else. You are my sister. I’d do it for you regardless.’

The cool metal eyes examined me, and I had to suppress the urge to shudder.

Ruth chuckled suddenly. ‘Wow, you two really can squabble. If I hadn’t known you were sisters, I certainly would now.’

We were drawing closer now. The car turned down Sydenham Road, past Crystal Palace park. My stomach tensed. I closed my eyes and breathed in and out slowly.

A robotic laugh sounded from behind me. ‘You always were a little worrywart, Viv. Just relax. This is going to work.’

We drew up outside the house, and Ruth switched off the engine. The windows were dark, and to all intents and purposes, it appeared no one was home.

‘I don’t have my keys,’ I said. ‘I suppose I could knock.’

‘We need to wait for the boys,’ Sigrid said.

‘What boys?’

‘Ah, there they are.’ She pointed to the shadows. Three detached themselves from the wall and headed towards us: Per, Adonis, and the Father of Weasels. A half-robot, a pretty god, and a half-man, half-stoat.

I could understand why Per and the weasel would be willing to help. ‘How did you get Adonis here? He was quite adamant about not wanting to get involved.’

‘I told him I’d kill him if he didn’t,’ Sigrid said casually.

I stared at her. She stared back at me impassively. Sigrid had remembered. My sister was still in there somewhere, but she was only a small part of the girl who had lived and died over and over. The Elder Sister who had been murdered on the night before her wedding was the one looking back. She might have been wearing a robot suit, but she was as ancient as my mother, and she was furious.

‘Okay, then,’ I said, ignoring the wave of grief that rolled over me. I’d wanted her to live, and maybe, finally, she would, but the girl who had been my sister was gone forever.

Sigrid reached for the door handle and exited the car. I had to wait for Ruth to come round and help me out.

Per ran forward to help. He took my elbow. It was his turn to stare at me for once. ‘God, Vivia. Sigrid told me, but… you look about a thousand. Are you okay?’

‘No. I feel about a thousand. Let’s just get this over with, shall we?’

Sigrid didn’t wait for us. She just strode up to the front door, reached out with one metal hand, broke the handle off the door, and shoved so hard it came off its hinges.

I guessed we weren’t going to knock then.

37

The house was dark and quiet, but it wasn’t empty. It had an expectant air, and I could feel my mother’s presence somewhere within.

‘Come out!’ Sigrid screamed at the top of her voice. It echoed.

No one answered.

The doubts I’d had over this plan, or lack thereof, crystallised. With the exception of Ruth and Per, everyone in this house was my family. That meant ancient and crazy and demonstrably murderous. The sister I’d loved had been replaced by a creature I didn’t recognise. If I hadn’t been on my last legs, I’d have turned and run. Sigrid wasn’t just after life; she clearly wanted vengeance, too. I didn’t know where I stood on that. I understood it, but I didn’t like it. Adonis gave me a dirty look. I shrugged. I didn’t want to be involved either. Neither of us had much of a choice. Besides, he’d been one of those who started it.

Ruth nudged me gently. She held out the two plastic-wrapped figurines. I took one, but my stiff fingers had difficulty getting the plastic unknotted.

‘Let me,’ Ruth murmured. She took it back and unwrapped it, careful not to let the stone touch her skin, then passed it to me. The cool of the stone soaked into the palm of my hand and I let out a sigh. Fresh energy roiled through my flesh. I could feel my bones strengthen and my skin tighten. These things could keep me alive. There’d be a cost, that much was obvious, but I’d be alive. Ruth unwrapped the other, and I took it with my other hand.

The grey-furred stoat stood a little closer to Sigrid than was socially acceptable, a little closer than personal-space convention allowed. Per stood behind them. His face looked strained. I was reminded he was completely out of his depth. He knew about tech and medical advancements. Weird hag-and-death magic was way out of his league.

I leaned over to him. ‘You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.’

‘Yes, he does,’ Sigrid said. She strode off towards the stairs, and I heard her metal feet clomping up them.

I guessed her weird new eyes let her see in the dark, but I preferred not to bump into things. I reached for the light switch.

The hall flooded with light. The grey-furred stoat took off after her. Adonis and Per stayed with Ruth and me.

‘This house feels like her,’ Adonis said. ‘Are you sure I need to be here?’

‘Yes,’ Ruth said. ‘We need all the original participants.’

‘Great,’ he said. He didn’t look happy about it.

‘Where’s your bedroom?’ asked Ruth.

I pointed up the hallway. She took my arm. The figurines gave me more energy, but I was still a long way from walking on my own. The last thing we needed now was me toppling over and breaking a hip.

The others followed. I turned the light on. On the bookshelf where the novels had been there was a big gap. A pile of books had been shoved to the floor.

‘I guess she’s got them,’ I said. I gripped the stone figurines tighter. The power within rolled up my hands and through my veins.

Something thumped above. We all looked up. ‘If we’re looking for the place with the most hag magic, that’d be the attic. It’s where she spent most of her time, alive and dead,’ I said.

I wondered where Stanley was. I hoped he was out. He wasn’t my favourite person in the whole world, but he didn’t need to be in the middle of this.

It took me some time to get up the stairs, even with Ruth on one side and Per on the other. Adonis followed like a sulky schoolboy. I didn’t blame him. If someone had threatened to kill me, I wouldn’t be happy either.

We walked in to a standoff. Desma was in the process of preparing some sort of ritual. Tiny candles covered the floor, as did pig blood. A small mound of dead piglets lay in the far corner of the room. My heart lurched. I’d hated it when she’d killed them the first time round.

Desma stood as far back against the attic wall as she could without bumping her head against the slanted roof. She held the missing two figurines in her fists. Stanley stood at her side, his moustache bloody.

Sigrid and the grey-furred stoat stood just inside the door. All four parties seemed to be involved in a staring contest. Beside me, Ruth gasped. The power thrumming through the room was almost overwhelming.

With Ruth’s help, I stepped into the middle between them. ‘We still have the option to just sit down like reasonable people and talk about this,’ I said.

Behind me, Adonis gave a derisive snort.

My mother didn’t move her eyes from Sigrid’s. ‘Vivia, come here.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I need you.’

‘For what? You tried to kill me.’

‘Oh, don’t be so dramatic. It’ll be temporary. I’ll bring you back.’

‘No, thank you.’ I took a step back, and Desma’s eyes narrowed as if I’d chosen a side. ‘It doesn’t have to be like this. If you just help reverse what you did, then there doesn’t have to be an argument. Don’t you want the killing to stop?’

‘I don’t think she cares.’ That was the stoat. As if he could talk. He’d killed Harriet. I’d liked Harriet.

‘You can be quiet,’ I said.

Ruth covered my hand with her own. ‘Vivia, I need to start this soon. The moon will begin to sink any minute. The longer we leave it, the less success we’ll have.’

‘I do have another option if you try anything, Vivia,’ Desma said. She indicated Stanley with a nod of her head, and I remembered another line from the fairy tale. There was nothing more powerful than a willing sacrifice.

I turned to him. ‘Are you insane?’

‘She’ll bring me back.’

I wasn’t so sure about that. I’d be willing to bet good money that the loyalty he felt for her only went one way.

I wanted to stamp my feet in frustration. This whole thing was just so stupid. ‘Will you stop being so stubborn?’

Desma looked startled as if I’d said something that actually hurt. ‘You can talk. I just have to wait you out. Then she’—she indicated Sigrid with a nod of her head—‘dies, and the whole process begins again. Don’t get me wrong. I’d be happy to be rid of her, but she doesn’t get to win.’

Like I said: stubborn. ‘Mum, please. You have to acknowledge you’re in the wrong here. You murdered your own sister.’

‘So did you.’

‘I had a good reason.’

‘So did I.’

Ruth squeezed my shoulder. I turned to see she was holding hands with the stoat on one side. The stoat held on to Sigrid’s shoulder, on one of the few places she still had skin instead of metal. Adonis held the stoat’s hand.

‘All you have to do is reach into yourself and release your hag magic,’ Ruth said. ‘I’ll do the rest. Don’t let go of the figurines.’

‘Please don’t kill Stanley,’ I said, and I opened up the deepest, darkest part of my soul where the hag magic resided.

Immediately, Ruth’s essence flowed into me. It was warm, and determined, and above all practical. She had a streak of hard-headedness I hadn’t known was there. The figurines froze in my palms. Ice flooded my veins and shot through my bones. I shuddered. If Ruth hadn’t had me gripped so tight, I would have fallen.

I felt the others then. Adonis, nervous and worried, and I finally understood him. He’d been an easily influenced man, buffeted about like a crisp packet in the wind from one stronger-willed person to another, doing whatever he was told because it was always easier than arguing with any of them. The stoat was warm too, but also animalistic. His mind was focused on one thing only, and that was my sister.

And Sigrid, she was as cold as I was. As cold as my mother, but filled, too, with a hot-burning fury.

I could feel Ruth working through me, and I realised why it was called a weaving. Different strands of magic—hag, death, animal—wove through me and out towards to the moon and even further towards the Sun. It tangled and wove together to create something new. They met the old strands and combined with them.

Somewhere on the edge of my awareness, someone screamed and someone else fell with a meaty thump, but the power flowing through me was too overwhelming. I couldn’t focus on the real world.

The warm thread of magic that belonged to Adonis—the part of him that’d had the ability to call to animals—dissipated and faded away. Then so did the stoat power.

Ruth kept going. It was nothing but hag magic now. She wove and pulled, tore and knotted. In my hands, the figurines began to crumble under my grip.

‘Just another minute, Vivia. Hold on.’

I held on. The hag magic slowed to a trickle. It was all I could do to keep it going.

‘Done!’

I let go and fell to the floor, gasping. It was softer than I’d expected, and colder. I opened my eyes to see the floor was covered in a layer of soft snow. I shivered. Frost clung to my legs and arms, and a thin film of ice covered my dress.

I turned my head. Sigrid was still standing. The ice gave her metal limbs a ghostly sheen. Her face was turned upwards, and she had a slight smile on it, as if she were basking in the sun. ‘Did it work?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ Ruth said.

I breathed a sigh of relief. I looked around the attic. Everything was covered in snow. I frowned. Where my mother and Stanley had been, there were two snow-covered lumps. I twisted and checked behind me. Nothing but snow and ice.

‘Where is everyone?’

38

I crawled over to the lumps, began digging through the snow, and uncovered a face with a nicotine-stained moustache. Stanley. I reached inside for my hag magic, but the insides of my body felt as if they had been scraped clean. I almost came up empty. Almost. I gathered up the remaining scraps and sent it out.

He wasn’t dead.

‘Help me,’ I said. The words came out rough and raw.

Sigrid strode over on her metal legs and knelt beside me. ‘He’ll live. I can see his heart beating.’

She straightened and scanned the attic, then clomped to the far side to another snow-covered lump. Her silver fingers smoothed away the snow with surprising tenderness, revealing more metal: Per’s legs. Her hands worked faster, spinning away the snow with mechanical precision, clearing legs, torso, then a face so still my heart skipped a beat. He coughed suddenly.

Sigrid’s face softened, and I caught a glimpse of the human underneath. She picked up Per effortlessly and carried him down the stairs, heavy footsteps echoing.

I stared around the attic again. It was like some bizarre winter wonderland. There were even icicles on the ceiling. The two excavated mounds had been the only ones in the room. Ruth stood in the doorway, her face expressionless. Where was everyone else?

‘What on earth happened?’

‘Your mother tried to kill the old man,’ Ruth said. ‘Your robot friend with the legs tried to stop her.’

‘CAP,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t like to be called a robot.’ My words echoed in the almost empty space. ‘Where’s my mother? Did she run off?’

‘No, she’s gone,’ Ruth said.

‘What do you mean “gone”?’

‘Crumbled to dust,’ Ruth said. ‘She’s there under the snow, but there’s not much left but ash.’

I sat back on my haunches. Shock coursed through me. I began to shiver again. Desma may have been an insane mass-murdering maniac, but she had still been my mother. I hadn’t expected her to die. Ever. I’d expected to spend the rest of my life avoiding her. There’d never been any other possible future for us.

‘Oh God, where are the others? Also gone?’

‘Yes,’ Ruth said.

‘Gone gone?’

‘Yes,’ Ruth said again, evenly.

The snow lay pretty and even, like icing on a cake with two bites taken out of it. Somewhere underneath were the remains of three bodies turned to dust, but for the first time in my life I couldn’t feel them. The haggery within had been almost completely washed away, and I had used up what I had on Stanley.

I couldn’t mourn for Desma or the stoat, but I’d quite liked Adonis, and he hadn’t wanted to die.

‘Did you know that was going to happen?’

‘I knew it was a risk,’ Ruth said calmly. ‘Don’t worry. They wouldn’t have felt a thing. It’s what we agreed—to reverse everything. That included the sacrifices and long life. They had a lot more than their threescore and ten. It’s not unfair. You’re supposed to get only one lifetime. I told you that, too.’ Her eyes were still glued to mine, as if she were unsure as to how I was going to react. After all, she had just been the agent who had killed my mother. I remembered that streak of practicality I’d felt as Ruth used me as a conduit for her magic. Not just Ruth, but ruthless.

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yes, I think so. It’s just that she was still my mother.’

‘She was an ancient cannibal witch,’ Ruth said.

I couldn’t think of a good response. I tried to stand up, but my legs were too weak. I stared down at my hands that had bunched into fists in the snow. They were still gnarled and wrinkled. I reached up a hand and pulled a strand of hair in front of my face. There was nothing but white.

‘Am I still dying?’

‘No.’

‘I’m a crone. Oh, hell.’

‘You’re still alive. Nothing wrong with you except for a little age. And that’s not as bad as it was half an hour ago. The figurines wiped some of it off.’

It was something to be grateful for, I supposed. ‘Help me get Stanley down the stairs. I can’t do it alone.’ I wasn’t completely sure I was going to be able to get me down the stairs.

‘Sigrid will do it,’ Ruth said.

‘Will she?’ I still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened and how much was inevitable, but I did know that they had both known there was a risk that three people would die, at least one of whom probably wasn’t a mass murderer. They had decided to take that risk without even consulting me.

‘I’m not a monster.’ Sigrid appeared in the doorway. The sight of her scared me. I remembered how her soul had felt. Nothing but cold and fury. What did being murdered multiple times do to someone’s soul?

She picked up Stanley in one easy movement. He groaned in her arms. Ruth helped me up, and my bones creaked with the effort.

Sigrid went downstairs first, stopping at Stanley’s bedroom to dump him on his bed. I pulled my arm away from Ruth at the bottom of the stairs and went into the bedroom. His pulse beat steadily under my fingers, even if his skin was freezing. I got a blanket out of his cupboard and covered him up.

‘Where’s Per?’ I asked.

‘Outside in the car. I’m going to take him home.’

I straightened at the sound of something tapping from outside the room, then relaxed. High in the attic above, the snow was beginning to melt.

‘That’s a good idea,’ I said. I couldn’t look Sigrid in the eye. She had threatened Adonis with death to get him here, and now he actually was dead. He wasn’t completely innocent. He’d known what was being done to her and hadn’t lifted a finger to help, but I’d liked him, and not just for the pretty face.

‘I’ll call you later,’ Ruth said.

I nodded. I didn’t look up as they left, their footsteps echoing down the oak floors.

I tucked the blanket up around Stanley’s chin. When he woke up, I’d have to tell him Desma was dead. He was going to kill me, if the sheer shock of it didn’t kill him first.

I stood up slowly—I couldn’t do otherwise anymore—and left the room quietly, closing the door behind me. A fresh breeze blew in from the remains of the front door where Sigrid had torn it off the hinges.

I went into the living room and flipped through the yellow pages until I found the number for a local locksmith able to come out at a moment’s notice.

The house felt empty; the only sound was the tap-tap of the melting snow above. Deep inside, my hag magic curled and replenished itself steadily, a little at a time, almost as if it were dripping along to the rhythm above. The magic felt different, less greasy and dark than it had been. The changes in my body weren’t just age. I was a creature that shouldn’t exist—the living by-product of a broken hex. There were going to be consequences, and I thought even Ruth couldn’t know what they might be.

I cocked my ear. The dripping increased and became more insistent. The snow in the attic would melt into a flood before long, and I doubted Stanley had kept up with the household insurance payments.

I grabbed a bucket and mop from the kitchen, then headed upstairs slowly, still a little unsteady on my feet, and grateful for a physical distraction. I had a lot of explaining to do, or at least a lot of lies to come up with—about my appearance, possibly about Sigrid, or if anyone came looking for Adonis or the Father of Weasels. The thought struck that I still didn’t know his name and it was likely I never would.

It didn’t matter. Desma was gone. Sigrid was gone, or at least no longer my responsibility. It felt as if a weight had been lifted.

First things first, I thought. I’d deal with the mess upstairs first, and then it would be time for my life to begin.

Finally.

thanks and acknowledgements

As always, it takes a lot of people to knock a book into shape. I can't take all the credit.

Firstly, my lovely beta readers took the time to read the raw version and point out everything I got wrong in the kindest possible way—you are all wonderful people who deserve happy things.

Another big thank you to Lynn and everyone over at Red Adept: Jessica who helped close the final plot holes, the always brilliant Joann Dominik who somehow manages to be wonderfully strict while simultaneously cheering me on, and Irene who helped with the final tidy up. You are all fantastic.

My family and friends have been wonderfully supportive throughout. I can't possibly name everyone, but special thanks to Brent for his continued and unwavering support, and to Mandy and Andy, without whom I wouldn't even have a dedication.

Since publishing The Secret Dead I have had the privilege to get to know some wonderful fellow authors. Becoming part of the online writing community has been an incredible experience. As with my family, I can't possibly name everyone, but a special mention has to go to the talented Lucas Bale whose enthusiasm for writing and stories is incredibly contagious.

Finally, a special thank you to all the readers who took the time to say nice things about The Secret Dead, whether it was a review, an email, or a tweet. You made my day every time, and helped spur A Murder of Crones to the finish line. You are all awesome.

Author's note

Thank you for reading A Murder of Crones. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have the time, a review on Amazon, even if just a line or two, would be greatly appreciated.

I’m currently writing the third in the London Bones series. It’s titled The Hive and will be out in March 2021