Theodora smashed the glass against the floor. Shards of mirror splintered and for a moment she recalled that night – the bread knife, the blood. The wrong body ambushed. Her bare feet against bracken and twigs. Her calves sinking into the lilypond.
A mocking voice rose from the darkness.
‘Seven years, that.’
‘You don’t believe in luck,’ said Theodora, closing her eyes.
‘I do,’ said the voice. ‘It was luck that brought Dorothy to you.’
A tapping then came at the window, and Theodora looked up to see a raven. She flicked the latch open and in it flew. The raven landed on her knee.
‘Hello, Eliot,’ said Theodora, stroking its head. She took the scrap of paper from the raven’s leg, unfurled it, read it and sent it up in flame.
‘What did the spirits say?’ asked the voice.
‘More of the same,’ said Theodora.
‘So, your conscience is absolved, then, and we can proceed with your plan as intended. No use in wasting more time. You saw her use immediately; it was you who suggested it.’
Theodora leaned her head against the window.
‘You should have never told her she would be dead before her twenty-fourth birthday.’
‘I told her the truth,’ said Theodora. ‘Dorothywillbe dead before her twenty-fourth birthday. Long before.’
CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO
When Dot had enough strength to meander around the tea shop once more, collect her own breakfast and climb down the stairs without having to crawl, the summer had abandoned them and the autumn was rolling in. Five months Dot had been in Alliaster. For all the southern gusts Dot had suffered in her life, all the swimming she had done in cold currents, the sudden drop in temperature took her by surprise. She wrapped herself in blankets and often dozed on the sofa before the fire, listening to the gramophone.
All of it was an attempt at distraction.
Nightmares of the ocean roared back in.
What startled her the most about her newest transformation was the sensation in her fingertips. Not just the cold, wet, alien feeling of her scales against the air, nor the itchy discomfort of the new growth halfway up her left forearm, but the gentle buzz of magic. It was back. It was spotty and weak, but it was there.
It terrified her.
What if she reached for it by mistake and the affliction swallowed her entirely?
Theodora, who grew more exhausted by the day for no discernible reason, would often deliver a fresh batch of tonic and catch Dot deep in introspection.
‘What dark thoughts are going on under that curly mop?’ the witch had asked once, but Dot had merely shaken her head and picked back up the book she had borrowed,The Spirits of the Bygone,reading it all the way through to the end. The tome taught her about the Ancients and Their heavenly forms, and how, under the hierarchy of spirits, They were the most powerful creatures to take corporeal form – for in a war of magic, the elder spirit would always overpower the younger.
She learned that the youngest of spirits were tiny things, barely visible to the human eye, who rose out of flower seeds or eyelashes or sea spray, and when seen at night were often indiscernible from stars. The Ancients, however, were so huge and so old that they were impossible to miss; these were hidden in plain sight as a wide, forested mountain or a cold, warring sea.
One Sunday morning, Dot woke upon the living room sofa to see Lio reaching over her.
‘Oh,’ said Lio, jumping back. ‘Sorry. I left this on the side table, here. I was trying to be quiet.’
He held a book and Dot spied its title.
‘Memory charms? That’s Theodora’s, isn’t it?’
‘Rupert borrowed it for me,’ said Lio. ‘Be a love, and don’t tell her.’
He stood and when he looked at her face, his eyebrows knitted upward.
‘What is it?’ asked Dot.
