Portia was snoring again. Her hand lay on the pillow with her fingers twitching slightly.
‘She hasn’t woken up,’ Ada whispered.
‘No. She won’t. Even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to see us. Now it’s your turn.’
‘What do you mean?’
Jaws nodded towards Grace. ‘Go on. Don’t tell me you’re not feeling a little breathless.’
He was right. Ada’s lungs did feel constricted. Ever since she was little she had suffered from asthma, and although this tightness didn’t feel exactly the same as an asthma attack, she still felt as if she needed an inhaler. Or Grace.
‘I can’t,’ she whispered, but all the same she sat down on the side of the bed, next to Grace. ‘Suppose she wakes up?’
‘She won’t, I promise you. But even if she did, I don’t think she’d mind, do you? Tutti-frutti like you.’
Ada lay down beside Grace and looked at her closely, and even though the radiance that she was giving off was only dim, it was enough to illuminate Grace’s face. Her eyelashes were almost transparent and she had a spatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her pink lips were bow-shaped and slightly parted and now that she was this close, Ada could hear her quietly breathing in and out.
‘Kiss her,’ Jaws urged her. ‘But keep your mouth open. Take her breath in, and then give it back. In and out, in and out, until you start to go dizzy.’
Ada kissed Grace, lightly at first, but when she breathed out, she kissed her harder, so that their lips would be sealed tightly together and none of her precious exhaled air could escape. Once she had taken it into her lungs, she breathed it out again, back into Grace’s mouth. Grace made a muffled sound, and tried to twist her face to one side, but Ada took hold of her head in both hands, burying her fingers in her gingery hair, and held her fast.
She couldn’t believe that she was so greedy for this exhaled breath, even though it was so depleted in oxygen. It made her feel light-headed and it aroused an excitement in her – not so much erotic as the kind of helpless thrill she had felt on a roller-coaster. She sucked again and again at Grace’s lips, drawing out the last remaining gasp of breath from her lungs, until at last she sat up, panting, and now she knew why Jaws had looked so post-coital. It was nothing like anything she had experienced in the whole of her life – the fear of suffocation but exhilaration, too, and the sensation that she was sharing so much more than another woman’s breath; she was sharing her mortality.
‘What now?’ she whispered.
‘That’s it. We can take a tour of the house if you like. But you’ll have plenty of time to do that in the future. You’ll have years and years and years, until you know every floorboard and every windowpane and every knothole and every curtain hook by heart, same as I do.’
Ada looked down and saw to her surprise that Grace’s green eyes were open, and were staring up at her. For a moment, she forgot that Grace was unable to see her, and she promptly stood up, and raised both hands, as if to apologise for having kissed her and stolen her breath.
Grace raised her head off the pillow, still staring, but through her, rather than at her.
‘Is there somebody there?’ she said quietly, obviously not wanting to wake Portia.
Ada looked across the bed at Jaws, who shook his head, warning her not to answer. But she was desperate for Grace to know that she was still alive, and still in the house.
She leaned forward and whispered, ‘Yes, Grace, there is somebody here! It’s me, Ada! Ada Grey! Please, Grace! I’m in the priest’s room! Please find a way to get me out of it. Please!’
Jaws came storming around the bed and seized her arm.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ he demanded, his whisper blasting directly into her right ear.
‘Get off me!’ she snapped back. ‘Do you really believe I’m prepared to stay like this? If you think I have any intention of living with you and all those other leches for the next thousand years you must be out of your brain, if you even have one! I’d rather kill myself!’
‘Keep your fucking voice down!’ Jaws whispered at her.
Grace sat up in bed now and waved her arms around, trying to feel Ada, even if she couldn’t see her. ‘Ada? Ada! And who else is here? Ada!’
Now Portia sat up, too, rubbing her eyes. ‘Grace! What’s going on?’
‘Ada’s in here! Ada’s in here! And some – some man!’
Jaws twisted Ada’s thick glossy hair twice around the knuckles of his left hand and hooked his right arm around her waist. He was almost invisible, but he was twice as powerful as she was, and he was able to force her towards the door. She kicked and struggled as furiously as she had kicked and struggled when she had first been pulled through the wall in the witching room, but he was far too strong for her.
‘Grace!’ she screamed. ‘Grace, save me! Call Francis! Tell him that I’m here! Save me!’
Jaws pushed her through the bedroom door in what felt like an explosion of millions of atoms. She found herself out in the corridor, still struggling to get free. Jaws unwound his grip on her hair and stepped back, shaking his hand as if in disgust, with a grim expression on his face.
‘You don’t have a clue what you’ve fucking done, do you? I told you
