The Gammon was sufficiently well trained not to comment on their nighttime walk through the quiet affluence of Kensington and Chelsea. Even on the side-streets houses passed hands for tens of millions of pounds and every other parked car was a Range Rover or Mercedes (with a sprinkling of Maseratis and Jaguars to leaven the stodgy mix). She could almost hear his thoughts: Some rough.
“This isn’t our final destination,” she said softly, then led him towards a crossing. “Nor is this.”
The houses on the road they entered were bigger and set back behind hedges and fences, with padlocked chains securing their gates and no sign of inhabitation. There were no parked cars and little passing foot traffic. It was a city of the dead in the heart of the capital, a mausoleum occupied by the decaying sarcophagi of the rich and powerful. She felt the ex-soldier’s shoulders tensing, noticed the bunch and play of muscles as he scanned their surroundings.
There was a brooding presence at the end of the street. Eve could feel it all the way from the corner, the immanent menace of her family’s original sin. It was alive with magic. She doubted the Gammon could sense it; he was alert for more material threats.
Her dog was buried in an unmarked grave in the front garden, a canine gatekeeper’s soul pinned before the entrance to Neverland. The first time she’d visited this place she’d been nineteen. Dad had brought her—carrying Nono’s ashes in a cardboard box—furtively sneaking under cover of darkness while the last human owners were on holiday. Imp had been too young, Mum already soul-lost to a narrow pursuit of redemption for unspecified sins, and Dad had needed a second set of hands to pass him the chalice while he burned runes into the front lawn using paraquat mixed with canine blood. Nono had been the last of a long line of family Cerberi and Eve still missed that dog, although she’d been old and graying around the muzzle when the cancer took her.
Shaking off childhood memories, Eve approached the front gate. It was chained and padlocked shut, but the lock yielded to her mind’s touch with well-oiled ease. It was almost like coming home. She beckoned the Gammon after her, although she didn’t expect any problems at the front door. “I’ll enter first,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Eve took the tarnished brass doorknocker and rapped, hard, three times. The hollow boom brought no response. She waited patiently, then tried again. This time, receiving no answer, she touched the keyhole and extended her will again. All the practice time with the coffee mugs paid off: the cylinder turned and the door creaked open as she pushed. Eve stepped into shadows cast by the moonlight flooding through the window above the door.
“Jeremy?” She called sweetly: “It’s your sister Evie! Girls and boys come out to play?” It was a childhood passphrase, as out of place in the darkened lobby as the red dot from the Gammon’s laser scope, flickering and dancing the tinkerbell waltz as he probed the treads of the grand staircase.
A glance over her shoulder told her that her bodyguard was perturbed. “Nobody home,” she mouthed. Which was a bad sign. Why had Imp decided to tackle the ghost roads to Neverland so early? Her ultimatum hadn’t given him much of a choice about doing it tonight but this was precipitous, even by his impulsive and sloppy standards. “I’m going to check these rooms. Rules of engagement apply.”
The front room was dark and empty. The back room held humming computers, their screen savers blowing endless fractal Escher prints in a perpetual zoom repeated across a row of monitors. A rail at the back confirmed her suspicions. At first she took it for theatrical supplies—but up close, under the glare of her LED flashlight, the quality of stitching was too high, the fabric too worn. This was the real thing, clothes of historic vintage that had somehow come through to the present day intact and unfaded without conservation. Unless they were the output of a crafter obsessed with the sort of outfits her great-great-great-grandmother might have worn.
“That nails it,” she murmured. A box of safety pins spilled half-empty at her feet. A laser printer stood beside the gaming PCs that pulsed softly green as a luminous deep-sea jellyfish. And on the output tray sat a document. One glance at it told her all she needed to know. She looked at the Gammon.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“We’re going upstairs,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.” A pause just long enough to reveal a blue line in the test strip window: “Is there something I should know?”
Eve thought fast and hard. It was not a stupid question, and Franke was a far cry from the Gammon who’d disgraced himself in the kitchenware shop. “The house we’re in used to belong to a family of magicians. Not the Paul Daniels kind, the New Management kind.” It was hard to tell by torchlight, but she thought his face paled. “There is a door on the top floor that leads to the ghost roads, paths that lead to other realities and times. The door used to be—should be—closed.” Grandpa painted it shut and sealed it with the bound souls of things best unnamed, to lock away the family guilt when he was forced to move out. “Now it stands open.” She could feel no trace of Nono’s soul: the canine psychopomp was delinquent, or Daddy’s binding had finally dissolved. Perhaps Imp had unwittingly freed her—he’d always had a soft spot for the pooch. She pointed to the map on the printer. “This is a treasure chart leading to a lost artifact. Mr. de Montfort Bigge tasked me with retrieving it. Unfortunately there’s a snag. The people I sent after it have already departed, and I need to catch up with them.” She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her own copy
