“My family is at least honest: the pact we made requires us to sacrifice our own, and we hurt and we bleed and we remember them.” Now she smiled at him, an expression quite fey with derangement. “These are the graves of my ancestors’ brothers and sisters, did you know that? They’re all buried in here. This one is Grandpa’s younger brother. Imp would have been buried here, too, if Grandpa hadn’t broken and Dad hadn’t chickened out. He paid for it with his life, and all I got for it was a doubly incontinent nursing home bed-blocker with no tongue.”
“Fuck your mother!” Rupert burst out, exasperated. “Where is my book?” he demanded, taking a step towards her.
“Fuck you, Rupert, I quit!” She sent him a glare that by rights ought to have reduced half of London to cinders.
“You’re overwrought,” he snapped. He could escalate, he realized, but then he’d have to reveal his true degree of control over her, and she’d react unpredictably. “We’ll talk about this in the office—”
“You can get the book yourself.” She straightened up. “It’s in the elevator, which is stuck on the ground floor. Give me the map, I’ll mark it for you.” She snapped her fingers at him. “Come on, I don’t have all day to wait around—”
Rupert handed her the map, and a pencil. “I understand you’re very upset,” he oozed, “but I’m sure if you sleep on it you’ll feel a lot better. And really, you can’t quit.” She scribbled illegibly in the margin and drew an arrow on the map, pointing to the alleged location of the elevator. “Go home, take tomorrow off, and we’ll pretend we never had this conversation—”
“Enough.” She shoved the map back at Rupert, and pointed to the arrow. “Go through that doorway—we’re in this room, here—and down the hall, then keep on the map until you get to the lift. It’s stuck on the ground floor, the call button up here burned out. There’s a carpetbag in the lift, and the book’s inside it. I verified it: it’s the real deal.”
“You had it and you left it there?” Rupert said with palpable astonishment.
“Believe me, it would have been very unwise of me to have carried it further!” she said sharply. “You can go get it yourself if you want it so badly. Like I said, I quit: I no longer work for you.”
“You can’t quit,” he repeated, “but we will continue this conversation in the office, the day after tomorrow.” He strode off in the direction she’d indicated.
Eve turned away from him and departed, unwinding the trail through the labyrinth of dreams, leaving the family graveyard in peace.
A few minutes later, Imp, Doc, Del, Game Boy, and Wendy walked in, checked their bearings on the map, and exited through the same doorway as Eve.
Far below the dead conservatory, malign windchimes played their Tinkerbell theme again as Rupert opened the gates of the elevator and reached for the spell book lurking in the shadows, sleek and vicious with anticipation, waiting to feed again on dreams of death and avarice.
A week later, Imp returned to Bigge HQ to visit his sister in her office.
The Lost Boys had spent six days tidying up after they got home. The scene that had greeted them on their return was dismaying. Broken glass everywhere, overturned or slashed furniture, someone had trampled the Christmas present Imp had so carefully wrapped for Game Boy, and the kitchen sink contents had achieved sapience and were threatening to sue for full human rights. There was only one thing for it: they did the best they could with the front door, then bedded down on the top floor, Imp and Doc in one bedroom, Wendy and Del in the other, and Game Boy in the bathroom.
The morning after they won the war for Neverland, Imp had set them to work tidying, scrubbing, cleaning, and fitting new glass in the broken window panes. Four days later the house was spick and span, everyone had their own bedroom back (although Del seemed to be spending most of her time round at Wendy’s flat), and the door to Neverland was nailed shut and boarded over, with a second coat of paint drying.
Then Imp received a text message—a very headmistressy SEE ME—and of course he had to go and find out how Eve had fared with her boss.
This time, he didn’t dress to impress. What you see is what you get, and in Imp Eve was going to get what he wanted to grow up to be, which was to say, an aspiring director of artistically challenging long-form visual media, starting with the movie he intended to make: Dead Lies Dreaming.
When he got to the front door of Bigge HQ and rang the bell, he discovered that there had been a few changes.
“Mr. Starkey, sir? Please come in and have a seat! Would you like some tea or coffee? Your sister will see you shortly—” The receptionist fawned on him and the imperious butler was perfectly polite, as long as Imp ignored the apprehensive sidelong glances that implied he feared Imp might have him flogged for insolence. Which, quite honestly, wasn’t Imp’s kink, any more than the conventionally pretty blonde receptionist who kept pushing her chest up at him. (For the time being, Imp had decided, his type consisted of Doc, and Doc alone—at least until he got bored with the lack of variety and decided he was poly again.)
After accepting a cup of very fine tea—just to shut the poor woman up and stop her fussing—Imp settled down to wait. He didn’t have to cool his heels for long. “Jeremy!” His sister smiled warmly as she stepped out of a corridor leading back into the town house, an expression which (judging by the butler’s double-take) was most unusual. “Long time no see!” she added, unironically air-kissing him as she led him into a gigantic and luxuriously appointed executive lair.
“This isn’t your office,” Imp said, sounding stupid even
