“Don’t,” muttered Eliot, but she ignored him. The clerk was sweeping his gaze over her. He broke into a grin.
“For you?” he said, leaning across the counter. “Perhaps we can work something out.”
Ilsa mirrored his body language and lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I can pay extra. Only, I heard there might be a supply surfacing somewhere ’round here.”
“Stars,” said Eliot under his breath, exasperated, and the clerk’s eyes darted to him. Ilsa cursed inwardly. She didn’t need to follow his gaze to know what he saw: hard lines, intimidating eyes, and a disapproving scowl. She’d bet he had his hands in his pockets like some common thug. The clerk straightened formally, any designs on her repressed, and shook his head. “Sorry, miss. Mr Kelley decided to run his supply down and wait out the burglaries.”
Ilsa scrutinised him. “That the truth?”
He frowned. “’Course it’s the truth.”
“Fine. Thanks for your time, then.”
She turned on her heel and made for the door, not waiting for Eliot to catch her up.
* * *
The second chemist Eliot thought likely was just north of Euston Road, in a glass-topped arcade near St Pancras Station.
“You’d think a Changeling boy’d be more suspicious of the way a girl looks,” Ilsa said as they weaved through the shoppers in the arcade. “My right eye was twitching like mad and he din’t even notice.”
“He saw the way you look. I don’t think he cared if it was your true form.”
Ilsa lowered her voice. “But ain’t everyone making themselves prettier than they are?” She squinted at an attractive young couple, trying to ascertain if their skins were their own.
“Working girls, maybe.”
“Know all ’bout that, do you?” She took his affronted expression as a no. “You telling me you’re just less vain this side of the portal?”
“When everyone can have a perfect face, one starts to see the beauty in a normal one. Or a strange one, even. I’m sure even in the Otherworld, beauty quickly loses its shine. Unfortunately for the likes of you.”
Eliot’s expression turned stony as he heard what he’d said too late, and Ilsa grinned. It was her turn to taunt.
“What’s that ’bout my perfect face?” she said with exaggerated sweetness.
“That’s what you took from that warning?” He countered quickly. “Wait a second.” He glanced left and right, then pulled her around a corner so they were alone. “Take the disguise off a moment.”
“You said I had to wear it.”
“I know.”
“You said not to hand no one the proof of what they think they know.”
“Are you a parrot often? Just take it off.”
Eliot’s smile made her do it. She hadn’t imagined the boy she’d woken that morning was capable of taking a teasing as well as he could dish it out, and yet her teasing had somehow coaxed a less cautious, more human Eliot from inside the monster, and she liked it.
He stood before her real face and looked at her straight on. Really looked at her, like he was deciphering a cryptic puzzle in the paper. Ilsa suddenly wasn’t sure who was teasing whom. She didn’t feel like the one in control.
“Your eyes are too big,” he said after too long. “And you only have one dimple.” He shrugged. “Your face is rather strange, come to think of it.”
“Guess I’ll take that as a compliment,” Ilsa said, finding her voice had gone liquid and warm. She slipped back into her disguise. “You look like I’d cut myself on you, and that’s just your normal face. Don’t get me started on your smile.”
Eliot did smile, in full force. He smiled like a boy who knew just how ferocious a full grin made him look. “And it serves me well.”
* * *
They had more luck at their second destination, though they paid a premium for one of the stockist’s very last tins. But once outside the shop, they examined the tin and concluded, to Eliot’s renewed irritation, that it was the chemist’s own.
“Alright, where else would he go?” said Ilsa.
“I’m out of ideas.” Eliot rubbed his eyes, then looked skyward. “How many chemists in Camden? A dozen? Two dozen maybe?”
Ilsa nodded seriously. “I can flirt with that many shop boys if I got to.”
Eliot continued to frown. “If we still don’t have a lead once we’ve swept the quarter…”
“Then we make a new plan. Which way?”
Eliot nodded, but he didn’t look reassured. “North. It’s not far. We can walk.”
They left the arcade and headed back in the direction of the park. Ilsa was glad to be walking. It gave her a chance to talk.
“You said something that night in the park,” she said once she’d built up the courage. “’Bout when you all thought I was dead.”
Eliot shot her a wary glance. “I told you, most of what I said was second hand.”
“Right. Which is why I kept thinking ’bout this one thing. You said you remembered it specifically.”
His paced slowed. “Oh. I told you that Walcott’s housekeeper had said she was holding Ilsa Ravenswood when she died.” Ilsa didn’t have to ask her next question: how he knew. Eliot sighed and ran a hand over his face. “When we were very young, Gedeon asked about his family a lot. Hester was never his guardian officially, she was too young, but she’s always made herself impossible to say no to, and she wouldn’t have him coddled. He knew his mother and father had been murdered, and that he’d had a sister who died in infancy. But you know the way children can be when they develop a fixation, especially when they can sense a bigger truth. Gedeon was always pushing Hester or Oren over some minor detail of the story. It was such an obsession that it rubbed off on me too. At the ages of seven and eight, our main pastime was unravelling the things we hadn’t been told about what happened to you all. It became a game.” He hesitated. “Perhaps you don’t want to hear
