Page 39

“You would trust someone who nearly caused the end of the world?”

Élise gazed back with a calm that no doubt made her seem made of stone to Havelock and Yannick, but I recognized the lie—her shoulders were held in tension, her voice unnaturally flat. “I’m not a simpleton. It’s a matter of relative, not absolute trust. I will place more trust in a man if I have his measure. At the moment, I can’t make you out at all.”

“Most prefer it that way,” Havelock said.

Élise gave a huff of laughter. “You clearly wish to seem mysterious, but you don’t look particularly frightening, and you dress like you are putting on a play.”

Yannick seemed to smother a snort. Havelock looked down at himself. He wore antiquated leather riding boots, and his sweater had an odd cowl-like hood and oversized sleeves. “Clothes can be Artefacts too,” he said. “This tunic is woven with a seventeenth-century protective charm, and each of these boots holds a separate spell for concealment. They were made nearly a century ago by a magician named Sébastien Medea, who was also a boot maker.”

“Ah,” I said. That explained one more mystery.

“Well?” Élise said, still gazing at Havelock. Havelock, for his part, looked as if he had been about to carry on about Sébastien Medea, and blinked as if he’d lost the thread of the conversation.

“I’m not a genie to grant wishes when commanded,” he finally said.

“Just one wish,” Élise said. “Think of it as one of the many favours you owe Agnes for everything you’ve put her through.”

“What!” I interjected, my nervousness growing, because I could see Havelock beginning to yield to Élise. Most people did eventually—Élise, when she chose, could wield a disarming combination of charm and self-possession. She had a way of appearing so sure of herself that most couldn’t help seeing the reasonableness of her position, even when it was fundamentally unreasonable.

“You have a peculiar appetite where wishes are concerned,” Havelock said. He removed a ring from his finger—it was such an absent gesture that I didn’t immediately realize the significance. Then Havelock spoke a series of foreign words, crisp with a hint of music in them, and the roof was ripped off the building.

I screamed and staggered back. Darkness poured through like fog, and a bolt of lightning struck the counter, charring the books and papers as it sent them careening through the air. Havelock lifted a hand, his lips moving—I couldn’t hear the enchantment over the chaos—and the walls were torn away like sheets of paper by a violent wind. The lightning was followed by a slap of rain, then snow—this was how it had been three years ago, day turned to night and the weather thrown into chaos.

I pressed Banshee to my chest and hurled myself to the floor just as the rumbling started. It was less the sound of an earthquake than of something monstrous moaning from beneath the earth. Élise was at my side suddenly, throwing her arms over me as it began to hail, pebble-sized stones bouncing off the floor. She was yelling something, and I yelled back—hysterical demands that she stop this, somehow. I was soaked from the rain, and I could feel the hailstones tangled in my hair.

Havelock wasn’t immune to the weather—he held an arm above his head as the hail pummeled him, the other hand trying to hold his hood in place as the wind buffeted it back. The ferocity of his own spell seemed to have surprised him, or perhaps he had never intended to revel in it in the first place, but he didn’t argue with Yannick, who was yelling and gesticulating. He leapt down from the counter—which was still there, an improbable island amidst the nightmarish dark. The wind nearly knocked him over, but he regained his footing, and with an almost desultory gesture drew the clouds into his hand. He was left holding a single shard of hail, which he tossed onto the ground. There was something embedded in it—a ring, its jewel flashing.

Havelock spun around and began rifling through the drawers of the counter. Though the weather had calmed, the rumbling beneath the earth was only growing louder. Yannick had his hands outstretched, a pocket watch dangling from one of them, but whatever spell he was trying to unleash didn’t seem to be doing anything.

Havelock excavated something from the back of a drawer and held it aloft like a magic wand. In another mood, I might have laughed—it was a pair of scissors, which I’d noticed before and had assumed belonged to the former shop owner. Havelock spoke another incantation, and the walls and ceiling abruptly returned.

In the wrong place.

I screamed again. My throat was raw by this point, but I barely noticed. The ceiling, its beams and cobwebs and all, had become the walls, and the walls, including the windows, draperies, and shelves, had been jumbled together and plastered across the ceiling.

A wave of dizziness washed over me, and I felt certain I would be sick. The windows above me showed the streetscape outside, sunlight streaming through, perfectly ordinary and completely wrong. An old woman walked past one, pulling a shopping trolley. Havelock was cursing under his breath and shaking the scissors.

“It’s old,” I thought I heard him say over the tremors, which had lessened but not subsided. “Some of the magic must have leaked—if I could just—”

He gave up with another curse and flung the scissors aside. He removed one of his pendants and hurled it at the ceiling in a glittering arc, the incantation coming out sharp and angry. The pendant struck one of the windows with a noise that was more like a vibration, the clang of a tremendous gong, and the ceiling and walls sorted themselves back into place. A second later, the tremors stopped, the darkness vanished, and all was as it had been before.

“Are you certain you should go alone?” Élise said. It was nearing nine o’clock, opening hour for the shelter, and we’d just finished the morning checklist. Our newest volunteer, a retired surgeon named Geoffrey, was completing Thoreau’s grooming, combing out a mat with gentle hands.

“Quite certain,” I said. We needed to find Vortigern’s book, and that meant I had to start looking for the damn thing at some point. “Especially since, between the two of us, I’m less inclined to provoke magicians with cataclysmic powers.”

She didn’t look in the least apologetic. “I got what I wanted.”

I didn’t see how this could be the case, unless what she wanted was to be properly terrified of Havelock or to terrify me. Now that I considered it, it seemed entirely possible.

Élise pointed to the counter, where, as usual, she’d left a paper bag full of bagels. “Eat breakfast before you go down there.”

“Why, because he’ll only enchant me if I’m hungry?” But I helped myself to a bagel nevertheless—Élise had bought chocolate and orange this time, my favourite from Rémy and Oliver’s menu, which I took as the apology it likely was.

After I’d eaten—and downed the rest of the coffee Élise had left out—I felt marginally more confident. I gathered my supplies and made my way to the basement, as behind me Élise flipped the sign in the shelter window from Fermé to Ouvert.

I hadn’t seen Havelock since he cast his terrible enchantment two days before—we’d been too busy trapping as many cats as possible to stock the second shelter. We now had eighty-five cats and kittens in total, as well as a sizeable veterinary debt, though Dr. Para had graciously allowed us to repay her by installments.

Also, despite the lurking danger presented by Valérie, I hadn’t been able to work up the nerve to see him.