hadn’t been worried that he’d fall over.
Sacha never got a chance to find out which one of them could hold out longer. Just as he was certain he was about to collapse, Shen reappeared. “That’s enough for today,” she said, despite the students’ boisterous protests that she was ruining their betting. “Well done, both of you!”
Sacha and Lily hit the floor before the words were even out of her mouth. They lay there gasping for breath while Shen herded the others back to their practice mats. Finally Sacha recovered enough to sit up and ask Lily how she felt.
“Sick to my stomach!”
“Me too.”
“I guess now you’re going to tell me that you would have won if Shen hadn’t come along,” she said with a challenging toss of her head.
“Actually, I doubt I would have lasted another five seconds.”
Lily gave him a surprised look. then she grinned. “Me neither! that was
Sacha grinned back at her — and then felt his grin fade as he came to an astounding realization. He actually liked Lily. Really liked her. It was too bad she was an Astral. And rich. And blond. And … well, he had to admit Paddy Doyle was right; she really was pretty. What a shame. If Lily were any ordinary girl, he really thought they could have been friends.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE. Sacha Goes House Hunting
NEXT SUNDAY, in a cold, driving October rain, Sacha went house hunting.
He was looking for a house that was nice but not too nice, a house that he could pretend was his when Lily’s chauffeur drove him home every afternoon. He’d been making excuses every day since the fateful tea with Mrs. Astral, but he could tell Lily was starting to get suspicious. And Lily being Lily, he wouldn’t put it above her to follow him home out of sheer cussedness.
He started his search near Gramercy Park. But one look at the luxurious row houses and the shady green park cloistered behind its wrought-iron railings convinced him that Lily would never believe he lived in such a place. So he circled around in search of more modest lodgings. The tenderloin was no good — what respectable people would live there? Lower Fifth Avenue was out too — all those fancy apartment buildings with snooty doormen who would run him off before the Astrals’ car was out of sight. In theory at least, Astral place would work, but no amount of cold and rain would have made Sacha desperate enough to tell Lily he lived on a street named after her own great- grandfather.
As he hurried through the flooding streets, Sacha noticed ads for Edison’s etherograph going up all over the city. On building after building, workmen were taking down ads for headache remedies, patent medicines, corsets, and cigarillos, and putting up the now-familiar image of the heroic Inquisitor and cringing Kabbalist. It looked like Morgaunt and Edison were expecting the upcoming Houdini-Edison showdown to spark off a big boom in the witch- detection sector — and Sacha found this prospect even bleaker than the foul weather.
He had just turned onto a sedate block of respectable row houses when he noticed a ghostlike figure slipping along behind him. His blood chilled at the thought that it might be the dybbuk. But no, it was a grownup. A small grownup, true. But that was only because he was Chinese.
Sacha hurried on, pretending not to have seen the man, and trying to play for time while he decided what to do about him. When he reached the end of the block, he had a plan in mind. He looked back toward his pursuer, glaring fiercely as if to demand what the fellow thought he was up to, following him like that. When the man turned away, Sacha bolted around the corner and ran like hell.
Except that instead of running away, he ducked into the mews behind the comfortable residential block and jumped the gate of the first stable yard he passed in order to cut through the alley and come back around behind the man.
Or at least that’s what he’d intended to do. But when he skidded back out onto the street, there was no Chinese man there at all.
There was only Shen, standing with her hands in her trouser pockets and laughing at him.
He could have kicked himself.
“You really didn’t know it was me, did you?” she asked when her laughter had finally subsided into intermittent chuckles. “What are you doing, anyway? You’ve been wandering around all afternoon like a lost dog.”
“Just getting some exercise.”
“Isn’t it a bit wet for that?”
“I, uh, well…”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were casing out houses to rob.”
“Shen!”
“You don’t have to take my word for it. Look down at the end of the block.”
Sacha peered around Shen — and was alarmed to see a burly patrolman loitering at the corner, making no secret of the fact that he was keeping an eye on the two suspicious characters who had ventured onto his beat.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on,” Shen suggested. “After all, wouldn’t you rather tell me than him?”
Haltingly, Sacha told her about going to tea at Lily’s house, and Lily’s mother, and the situation with the Astral chauffeur. “So,” he concluded, “I need a house.”
“I don’t quite follow. Don’t you have a house?”
“Yes, but…”
“But you’re ashamed of it.”
He glared at her, but his angry answer died in his throat when he saw the gentle, understanding way she was looking at him.
“I — yes.”
“Of what? I mean, what would be so bad about having him drop you at your actual home?”
From any other adult, the question would have been infuriating, but somehow Shen managed to ask it as if she really wanted to know the answer.
“What would be so bad about it?” He imagined Lily’s incredulous face, the chauffeur’s haughty stare, the hoots and hollers of the kids on Hester Street, who treated the arrival of any motorcar — let alone a motorcar with someone they knew in it — as if it were Passover, Hanukkah, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. And then the awful, pitying look on Lily’s face when she saw the way the Kesslers lived. “Everything!” he wailed. “I’d rather die!”
For a moment Shen seemed about to ask him something else, but then she shrugged. “Well, we can’t have you dying,” she said. “Follow me. I’ve got an idea.”
Ten minutes later they were standing on the front stoop of the perfect house. Nice but not too nice. Comfortably middle class, yet still modest enough to be believable. Best of all, it stood in the middle of a long row of identical brick-fronted town houses, so that it would be difficult for even a girl as sharp-eyed as Lily to be quite sure of remembering the right house if she tried to find it again.
When Shen strolled up to the neat red door and rang the bell, Sacha almost jumped out of his skin. “Are we, um — I mean, are we going to get in trouble with the, uh — you know.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Most of the people who’d call the police on us aren’t likely to be home this time of day.”
That wasn’t very reassuring. And the haughty stare of the tall housemaid who answered the door was even less reassuring. “What on earth do
“I’m here to see James,” Shen announced calmly.
