Date: 2021-07-06 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; France
Description: Shadowseer: Paris continues the story of Kaia, 17, an orphan coming of age in the Victorian Europe of the 1850s. Kaia yearns to escape her horrific orphanage, to discover who her parents were, and to understand why she can sense shadows when others cannot. When the brilliant Detective Pinsley, 45, takes Kaia under his wing and enlists her help in solving a series of mysterious and bizarre murders sweeping over Europe, the two of them become unlikely partners. Are they part of a greater war of light versus dark? And is Kaia the only one who can stop it?

SHADOWSEER:

PARIS

(SHADOWSEER, BOOK TWO)

MORGAN RICE

Morgan Rice

Morgan Rice is the #1 bestselling and USA Today bestselling author of the epic fantasy series THE SORCERER’S RING, comprising seventeen books; of the #1 bestselling series THE VAMPIRE JOURNALS, comprising twelve books; of the #1 bestselling series THE SURVIVAL TRILOGY, a post-apocalyptic thriller comprising three books; of the epic fantasy series KINGS AND SORCERERS, comprising six books; of the epic fantasy series OF CROWNS AND GLORY, comprising eight books; of the epic fantasy series A THRONE FOR SISTERS, comprising eight books; of the science fiction series THE INVASION CHRONICLES, comprising four books; of the fantasy series OLIVER BLUE AND THE SCHOOL FOR SEERS, comprising four books; of the fantasy series THE WAY OF STEEL, comprising four books; of the fantasy series AGE OF THE SORCERERS, comprising eight books; and of the new fantasy series SHADOWSEER, comprising five books (and counting). Morgan’s books are available in audio and print editions, and translations are available in over 25 languages.

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Books by Morgan Rice

SHADOWSEER

SHADOWDEER: LONDON (Book #1)

SHADOWSEER: PARIS (Book #2)

SHADOWSEER: MUNICH (Book #3)

SHADOWSEER: ROME (Book #4)

SHADOWSEER: ATHENS (Book #5)

AGE OF THE SORCERERS

REALM OF DRAGONS (Book #1)

THRONE OF DRAGONS (Book #2)

BORN OF DRAGONS (Book #3)

RING OF DRAGONS (Book #4)

CROWN OF DRAGONS (Book #5)

DUSK OF DRAGONS (Book #6)

SHIELD OF DRAGONS (Book #7)

DREAM OF DRAGONS (Book #8)

OLIVER BLUE AND THE SCHOOL FOR SEERS

THE MAGIC FACTORY (Book #1)

THE ORB OF KANDRA (Book #2)

THE OBSIDIANS (Book #3)

THE SCEPTOR OF FIRE (Book #4)

THE INVASION CHRONICLES

TRANSMISSION (Book #1)

ARRIVAL (Book #2)

ASCENT (Book #3)

RETURN (Book #4)

THE WAY OF STEEL

ONLY THE WORTHY (Book #1)

ONLY THE VALIANT (Book #2)

ONLY THE DESTINED (Book #3)

ONLY THE BOLD (Book #4)

A THRONE FOR SISTERS

A THRONE FOR SISTERS (Book #1)

A COURT FOR THIEVES (Book #2)

A SONG FOR ORPHANS (Book #3)

A DIRGE FOR PRINCES (Book #4)

A JEWEL FOR ROYALS (BOOK #5)

A KISS FOR QUEENS (BOOK #6)

A CROWN FOR ASSASSINS (Book #7)

A CLASP FOR HEIRS (Book #8)

OF CROWNS AND GLORY

SLAVE, WARRIOR, QUEEN (Book #1)

ROGUE, PRISONER, PRINCESS (Book #2)

KNIGHT, HEIR, PRINCE (Book #3)

REBEL, PAWN, KING (Book #4)

SOLDIER, BROTHER, SORCERER (Book #5)

HERO, TRAITOR, DAUGHTER (Book #6)

RULER, RIVAL, EXILE (Book #7)

VICTOR, VANQUISHED, SON (Book #8)

KINGS AND SORCERERS

RISE OF THE DRAGONS (Book #1)

RISE OF THE VALIANT (Book #2)

THE WEIGHT OF HONOR (Book #3)

A FORGE OF VALOR (Book #4)

A REALM OF SHADOWS (Book #5)

NIGHT OF THE BOLD (Book #6)

THE SORCERER’S RING

A QUEST OF HEROES (Book #1)

A MARCH OF KINGS (Book #2)

A FATE OF DRAGONS (Book #3)

A CRY OF HONOR (Book #4)

A VOW OF GLORY (Book #5)

A CHARGE OF VALOR (Book #6)

A RITE OF SWORDS (Book #7)

A GRANT OF ARMS (Book #8)

A SKY OF SPELLS (Book #9)

A SEA OF SHIELDS (Book #10)

A REIGN OF STEEL (Book #11)

A LAND OF FIRE (Book #12)

A RULE OF QUEENS (Book #13)

AN OATH OF BROTHERS (Book #14)

A DREAM OF MORTALS (Book #15)

A JOUST OF KNIGHTS (Book #16)

THE GIFT OF BATTLE (Book #17)

THE SURVIVAL TRILOGY

ARENA ONE: SLAVERSUNNERS (Book #1)

ARENA TWO (Book #2)

ARENA THREE (Book #3)

VAMPIRE, FALLEN

BEFORE DAWN (Book #1)

THE VAMPIRE JOURNALS

TURNED (Book #1)

LOVED (Book #2)

BETRAYED (Book #3)

DESTINED (Book #4)

DESIRED (Book #5)

BETROTHED (Book #6)

VOWED (Book #7)

FOUND (Book #8)

RESURRECTED (Book #9)

CRAVED (Book #10)

FATED (Book #11)

OBSESSED (Book #12)

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Copyright © 2021 by Morgan Rice. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author.  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Jacket image Copyright Viacheslav Lopatin, used under license from istockphoto.com.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER ONE

Amelie de Fiaux put her all into her final monologue, her last before she was due to lie upon the bed, set up in the middle of the stage at the Theatre Rue St Germain in Paris, and play at being dead.

In those moments, Amelie was Juliet, golden haired and beauteous, ready to pretend death if it would let her be with her love. There was one more speech to come, before she stabbed herself and lay down atop Romeo’s body to die, but this was the moment Amelie loved. This was the moment when Juliet was trying to make things better, rather than lying down and dying for her lost love.

It was a beautiful moment, and in it, Amelie held the watching, packed audience alone, keeping the attention of the men and women of the common seats below, the gods above, and the expensive boxes in between. She loved moments like this, loved the adoration that came from being someone else.

She shone there like a jewel, and the Theatre Rue St Germain was about as glorious a setting as any jewel could hope for. Stucco and marble figures decorated every column and cornice, balcony and arch. Gilding and paint lit by gas lights turned the whole thing into something that seemed to amplify the beauty of her movements the way the acoustics amplified her words.

Now for her grand moment: as the drug she claimed to have ingested was supposed to take hold, Amelie lay down upon the broad expanse of the bed. She closed her eyes, but not completely, because she wanted to see them rapt as the next part happened.

Slowly, with the musicians in the pit playing furiously to cover the sounds of machinery, the bed started to descend through one of the theatre’s trapdoors. In the operas the theatre usually put on, such things were reserved for the appearance of gods and monsters, but the fashion was for grand moments like this. Juliet would disappear through the floor in a bed, rise up on the slab of a tomb, and that was where Romeo would find her.

Applause drifted in as the bed dropped through the floor. Amelie drank in that applause the way another might have drunk in wine or opium. She felt hollow without it, while the moments when the audience’s love poured down onto her were like… well, they were the only moments when she truly felt alive.

Amelie removed her blonde wig as the bed got below the level where anyone could see her, revealing darker hair beneath. She wiped away a little of her makeup, not caring that she would need to put it back in place before her cue to rise out of sleep and find her Romeo dead. Already, she could feel the rush of adoration fading, leaving her empty inside again.

The space beneath the theatre was a tangle of brickwork, metal and piping. It was as brutish as the rest of it was beautiful, shadowy where the rest of it was brightly lit. It reminded Amelie far too much of herself: beautiful out on the surface where everyone could see, but then everything all tangled up underneath.

She made her way back towards her dressing room. Not that she got a dressing room to herself, but Henriette would be performing in the brief ballet between acts, and Suzette’s part was done for the evening. She should get a dressing room to herself, shouldn’t she, when she was the lead?

Doubts filled Amelie, because it was almost impossible to avoid them, working in the theatre. A few weeks ago, and they’d been talking about the Emperor himself maybe coming down to see the play. Now, no one knew if it would last another month, and Amelie wasn’t sure what she would do next.

The old doubts ran through her head as she stood in front of the mirror in the dressing room, starting to reapply her makeup, trying to look as corpselike as possible. She’d come to Paris determined to be the grandest thing she could in the theatre, and she’d made it up into this role, on this stage, but it didn’t seem like enough now.

Nothing seemed like enough. Not the admirers who sent flowers or notes of admiration. Not the applause, or the adulation, or anything. Here, in the half dark beneath the stage, it felt like there were cracks in her soul as deep as the ones in her makeup.

Then something rose up and started to flow into those cracks.

It was like a shadow rose up around her, darkening the room.

In an instant, that shadow was pouring into her, pushing against her mind and then finding a way into it. It expanded within her, and Amelie didn’t even have a chance to scream before it claimed her completely.

*

One moment, the shadow was a thing in itself, free to move as it wished so long as it kept to the dark. The next, it had shape and form, solidity and depth. It had the freedom to touch the world directly, but also limits that hadn’t been there before. Skin was a thing that could touch, a thing that could protect from the light, but it was also a boundary, almost a prison wall.

Getting into this shell of meat had been easy enough; with most humans, their defenses were too much, but this one had so many cracks and weak places that it was easy to push through them and take what remained.

Now… now they were one. The shadow was Amelie de Fiaux, and Amelie was the shadow. The shadow had access to her memories, and could see all the hurts that had made Amelie into the fragile thing she was: the men who had seduced and left her, the difficulties of living life in the midst of Napoleon III’s Paris, the fact that she was poorer than she wanted, less sure of herself than she wanted, less beautiful, less talented…

The shadow spent several minutes simply adjusting to this new existence. It went through the memories it found, turning them around and examining them the way some collector might have examined a fossil in a cabinet of curiosities.

For the first time in her life, the young woman who had been Amelie felt complete. She felt as if she had a purpose in her life, because she did have a purpose. She knew what she was there to do, what she had to do. She would be as important as she had always wanted to be.

“Amelie! It’s your cue!” a voice from beyond the dressing room called.

Amelie remembered that there was somewhere she was meant to be, something she was meant to be doing. She stepped away from the mirror, moving to the door. There was a woman there, looking agitated.

“Hurry, Amelie! They’re waiting for you. And you forgot your wig!”

Amelie looked round, trying to make sense of that, and saw the wig sitting there, abandoned in the dressing room. She could hear the sounds of the stage off to her left.

She turned right instead, ignoring the shout of protest that came from behind her.

“Amelie! Where are you going?”

She kept walking, the shadow inside her propelling every step. She had things to do, far more important than some foolish play.

Very important things.

CHAPTER TWO

Her sister.

Kaia stood there, in the cells beneath Scotland yard, and stared back at Xander, hardly able to process what he had just said.

Hardly able to catch her breath.

Could it be?

In all the years in the orphanage, Kaia had somehow sensed…something. Another person. A connection. Sensed she wasn’t alone somehow, in a way she couldn’t describe.

But never did she allow herself to actually dream she truly had a living sister.

“What sister?” Kaia dared to ask, her voice barely above a whisper, her hands trembling, wanting to reach out and throttle him until he gave her an answer. “What sister, Xander?”

He didn’t answer, just shaking his head.

“I’ve said all I can. You have to go. Go Kaia.”

Kaia knew from the look in his eye that he would give no more.

She felt at once elated and crestfallen.

It felt like the world around her didn’t make sense as she staggered up from the cells below Scotland Yard. It felt as if everything she thought she’d known had been shaken underneath her, all in one short conversation.

It must have showed, because the policemen on the main floor of the station, in their blue greatcoats and top hats, stared at her as she came up onto it. Perhaps that was just due to the effects of having fought a shadow possessed killer earlier. Her blonde hair was tangled beneath her hat, while dirt from the chapel where the fight had happened smeared her heart shaped face.

Several of them looked at her as if they were waiting for her to cause trouble. Kaia was short and slight for her seventeen years, and dressed in an elegant, brightly colored dress that was a long way from the grey shifts of the orphanage she’d grown up in, but probably they all still remembered the way she’d fought to escape in this room before, and the way she’d sent peelers like them flying in the street.

Right then, Kaia didn’t care about those looks; she just needed to find Pinsley and tell him everything that had just happened.

“Where is the inspector?” Kaia asked the sergeant on duty at the desk.

“He’s gone up to his office, miss.”

Kaia knew the way, and didn’t wait for the sergeant’s permission before she headed up the stairs off to one side and went looking for Pinsley. There was no time to waste, with any of this. She went to his office and knocked on the door out of habit, but didn’t wait for an answer before she rushed inside.

The office within was largely blank, white painted, with a desk, a cabinet and a few shelves. Inspector Sebastian Pinsley was currently sitting at the desk, writing with a fountain pen.

He was in his forties, tall and slender, clean shaven aside from mutton chop sideburns, with features that seemed to settle naturally into a stern expression and movements that echoed the military precision of his time as a soldier, so that it was all too easy to forget that a good, kind man lay beneath them. Unlike the other police there, he wore dark street clothes, with a waistcoat, long overcoat, and somewhat blood-stained shirt. His eyes took Kaia in as she entered, and she knew that he would see everything about her in that moment. She’d seen the way he observed things, so her distress at what had just happened should be obvious.

“Kaia?” he said, standing. “What is it? Did something happen when you talked to the killer? I knew I should never have allowed it. Are you all right?”

“I think…” Kaia tried to work out what to say, and how to say it. “I think we need to go to France.”

She saw Pinsley’s eyes widen at that, saw his mouth open slightly in shock. “Kaia, what are you talking about?”

“We need to go to France, to Paris,” Kaia insisted. “Xander explained it.”

“Xander, the madman who murdered Tabitha Greene?” Pinsley walked around his desk, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Kaia, the man is quite deranged. Whatever he told you-”

“He said that the shadows are gathering in Paris,” Kaia said. She had to make him understand the importance of this. “They’re plotting something big there.”

“The shadows,” Pinsley said, in a tone that was obviously designed to be careful and non-judgmental. Combined with the hand on Kaia’s shoulder, it simply felt patronizing.

“The shadows that I can see,” Kaia said. “Following one is how I led you to the chapel. One possessed Xander, making him kill Tabitha, and then making him attack you. He said that I was something called a Shadowseer. He said he knew my family.”

“Kaia, he is a madman,” the inspector said, “you cannot trust what this man says. He probably doesn’t know half of what he’s saying.”

“It’s real,” Kaia insisted. “It’s true. I know it.”

“You want to believe it,” Pinsley said. “That isn’t the same thing. But a world full of shadows that can somehow control people makes no sense.”

“Then how do you explain the things I’ve done?” Kaia asked. She knew that she had to find some logic that he couldn’t escape, or he would never believe her. Kaia found that she needed him to believe her. He’d done so much for her already, but he had to see her as she was, as a Shadowseer.

“Finding the chapel was remarkable,” Pinsley said, “but there will be a rational explanation for it if we look hard enough.”

“It’s not just that and you know it,” Kaia said. “I threw off Xander and forced the shadow out of him.”

“I don’t know what happened while I was unconscious,” Pinsley said.

“You saw me throw aside two police officers,” Kaia pointed out, thinking of the moment when they’d tried to arrest her.

“Just because I have seen things I can’t explain, that doesn’t mean that I must latch onto a madman’s explanation for it,” Pinsley said. He went back to his desk. “Kaia, the matter is done. The murderer has been apprehended, thanks to you. I’m writing up my notes on the case now, and I assure you that there will be no mention of shadows possessing people or magical powers.”

“Then you’re not seeing what’s really there,” Kaia said. She knew that she shouldn’t be speaking to the inspector like this. By the standards of polite society, this was far too forward. But then, Kaia wasn’t a member of polite society. It wasn’t like she was ever going to go to the palace to meet Queen Victoria, or be invited to tea at the Reform Club.

Besides, she needed to do this.

“If we don’t go to France, something bad will happen,” Kaia said.

“Plenty of bad things have already happened in France, and Paris in particular,” the inspector countered. “It has only been a few weeks since a would-be assassin of the Emperor there killed more than a hundred and fifty people with his bombs. Before that… well, over the last sixty years it has seen an endless cycle of violence, from its Revolution onwards. I suspect that your man Xander plans to point to some random story in the broadsheets and say ‘there, I told you so, let me go.’ It’s what these people do, Kaia.”

“These people?” Kaia said.

“Madmen and charlatans,” Pinsley replied.

“And do you think I’m a charlatan?” Kaia said. “Do you think I’m lying when I tell you that I see shadows?”

She wasn’t sure that she could stand it if he said yes. Pinsley was one of the few people who had been kind to her in her whole life. Even the others, Reverend Faulkner and his sister Lottie, had only come into her life because of the inspector. If he thought that she was a fraud… no, she wouldn’t be able to stand it, she was sure.

“I think that you are certain of what you see,” Pinsley said, and it sounded to Kaia as if he was choosing his words very carefully indeed. “And it is undeniable that you have been right about certain things, but I think that I have not seen the same shadows as you, at times when you have said that you can see them.”

That didn’t hurt quite as much as if he’d called her a liar, but it still hurt.

“Well,” Kaia asked, “what do you think is happening?”

“I don’t know,” Pinsley said. “Perhaps you simply have good intuition, or perhaps you are observing things well and your mind is presenting you with answers without being able to explain the process by which it has done so.”

“Then my ‘intuition’ is telling me that we need to go to Paris,” Kaia shot back, hoping to trap Pinsley in his own logic.

“Kaia, do you even understand what would be involved in going there as things stand now?” Pinsley asked her. He gestured for her to sit, and Kaia did so reluctantly. The chairs in his office were so uncomfortable that standing might have been better.

She watched as Pinsley took a book from one of the shelves there, opening it up to reveal a series of maps stamped with the symbol of the Ordnance Survey. Kaia recognized Britain from the map of the Empire that had been used to teach geography in the orphanage, learning the principal exports and key features of Britain’s main colonies.

“Just to get to France, we would need to travel to Dover, here,” Pinsley said, jabbing a finger at the map, “a journey of some seventy miles. From Dover, we would need to take a boat over to the French port of Calais, another thirty miles as the crow flies across the English Channel. That is before the journey to Paris, which would be a journey of another…” he paused, measuring. “Nearly two hundred miles.”

“That’s just distance!” Kaia said, even though the distances involved seemed huge. Two hundred miles was as far away as York or Harrogate, the kind of near mythical, far off places that had only existed in Mrs. Garrow’s stories of her cousin going off to take the waters for her health. “We could… we could take trains, or ride in carriages!”

“You hadn’t done either until a day or two ago,” Pinsley pointed out. “Besides, there would be other problems that have nothing to do with distance.”

“Such as?” Kaia asked.

“J'imagine que vous ne parles pas français?” Pinsley said.

Kaia could only stare at him blankly.

“I imagine that you do not speak French,” Pinsley translated. “Then there is the rather serious matter that the English are not currently welcome in Napoleon III’s France. Some of the plotters who assisted Signore Orsini in his attempt on the Emperor’s life were English, and there is much ill feeling as a result. The government itself is on the verge of collapsing over the whole affair, and I am sure that no one on either side would allow a police inspector to simply start wandering around Paris.”

Kaia wasn’t sure what to say in response to all that. She wasn’t stupid; she’d heard what the broadsheet criers had been shouting about the government being on the verge of falling over the whole assassination business. She hadn’t imagined that any of this would be easy. It was simply that it was worth doing anyway.

She had a sister.

It wasn’t the only reason that Kaia desperately wanted to go to France. She’d wanted to even when Xander had been talking about the danger that the shadows posed, but when he’d said that she had a sister… that had clinched it. Kaia needed to go now. She had to find the one fragment of family that she might have remaining.

She still needed to persuade the inspector, though. “I thought that police inspectors didn’t leave cases unfinished?”

Pinsley looked at her sharply. “This is finished, Kaia. The killer is caught. The business is concluded.”

“Xander was being driven by a force more dangerous than any human killer,” Kaia said. “And I’ve felt how much it hates people, especially people like me, and like my sister, if she is anything like me. If we don’t stop it, it will kill more people. It won’t stop killing until it gets everything that it wants. Xander is locked up, but the thing truly responsible for Tabitha Greene’s death is still out there.”

“Enough,” Pinsley said, shutting the book of maps firmly. “I shouldn’t have indulged this even this far. This matter is finished, Kaia. We have caught the murderer, and that is an end to it. No, I’m sorry, but I will not hear another word on it.”

“But-”

“I’m serious, Kaia,” he said. “Talking about this not being done risks undermining all the work we did just to catch this madman. And all this talk of France… it is simply impossible.”

Kaia stared at him, hurt by that. She’d thought that Pinsley would understand, that he would listen, and he had in his way. He hadn’t been able to go far enough, though. His precious reason was like a wall keeping him away from all of this.

“Look,” he said. “I know you feel strongly about this right now, but why don’t you return to the vicarage and get some rest? You’ve earned it. You caught a killer tonight, and that is more than enough, without bringing all this business of France into it. I’ll have one of the constables hail a cab around. Here’s a shilling for the fare. We will speak again later today.”

“I…” Kaia considered continuing to argue, but snatched up the shilling instead.

She went outside, waiting for a carriage to come around to the front of Scotland Yard. As she did so, though, Kaia couldn’t escape the certainty that she had to go to Paris, whatever the inspector said.

That meant that she would either have to change the inspector’s mind, which didn’t seem likely now, or…

Or do this herself.

CHAPTER THREE

Inspector Pinsley sat there in his office for several minutes after Kaia left, trying to make himself get back to the business of writing a report on the case that the two of them had just solved.

He found that he couldn’t, though, and his pen hung poised above the paper, perfectly still while his thoughts refused to settle. He sat there so long that a single drop of ink fell down onto the paper, forcing Pinsley to reach for his blotter to stop it spreading.

Kaia’s words felt a little like that spreading patch of ink, flowing out within him, unsettling him and making Pinsley doubt, in spite of himself. She’d spoken as if it were obvious that there was more to this, and that they should simply go to Paris to chase after ghosts, or shadows, or whatever unlikely thing she thought of next.

Pinsley had been a little harsher in sending her home than he’d intended. It was just that he couldn’t live in a world where the careful underpinnings of logic were undone by… what? Whim? The impossible things a girl of seventeen claimed to see when no one else did?

That was what it amounted to: picking apart an entire murder investigation on no more than Kaia’s word. Potentially travelling to France, now of all times, simply because she said that they should. Put like that, it had been obvious that they shouldn’t do it, and that Pinsley should act to shut down this nonsense. A world where reason did not hold sway was a world that threatened to fall into madness.

Even so, the doubt continued to spread, like the patch of ink that was even now escaping the best efforts of his blotter. There shouldn’t have been such doubts, because they had a suspect in custody who was only too willing to confess to his crimes, but still, they ate at the inspector.

There couldn’t be aspects of this that were beyond what anyone could hope to explain, because that wasn’t how the world worked. They were in the most advanced city in the world, at a moment when further advances were starting to take place in medicine, science, engineering and more. Mr Brunel’s great iron works, from bridges to boats, were a testament to the kind of world this was, solid and real, constructed on sound principles. This was not a world for shadows, and feelings, and the rest.

Unfortunately, a feeling of his own was starting to batter against the edifice of Pinsley’s reason, insisting that there were still things about all of this that made no sense. It seemed indisputable that the man in the cells, Xander, had committed the murder, yet his reasons for doing so still seemed unclear to Pinsley. More than that, even if he didn’t share Kaia’s credence when it came to shadows and the like, he’d seen her send policemen flying in a way he couldn’t explain. He couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to all of this than met the eye.

“The world is not about feelings,” Pinsley said. “And sometimes, men’s reasons for killing make no sense.”

He knew that as well as anyone. The madman who had murdered his wife had needed no reason that made sense to other men. That had torn a hole through his life, driven away his daughter Olivia, and for what? Madmen caused chaos, and yet Kaia seemed determined that this one had something of value to say.

Pinsley set down his pen and took out the metronome that he used when trying to think through the details of a case without emotions becomin too distracting. He set it in motion now, the soft, repetitive ticking of it dividing the world into orderly slices.

In spite of it, though, Pinsley couldn’t shake the feeling that things were still disordered. He tried to resolve the conflicts of this case, from the way Kaia had found the killer in the end to the contrast between the skill it must have taken to break into Bedlam and the savagery of the attack there. None of it quite fit, and this latest business, this talk of trouble in France, fit even less well.

Pinsley didn’t want Kaia being taken in by the words of some manipulative killer. After all she’d been through…

“She is not your daughter,” Pinsley reminded himself aloud. “She is not Olivia.”

Even so, Pinsley felt the strong, almost unshakeable, urge to protect Kaia. Maybe it was just knowing what she’d been through, or maybe it was all the ways she’d helped him so far, but maybe a part of it was the similarity to his daughter, out there somewhere alone without her father to aid her.

Pinsley made a decision then to at least talk to the killer. Perhaps he would be able to convince him to admit that all of this was nonsense, or perhaps he would reveal something to make all the strangeness of the situation fit together properly. Either way, Pinsley rose and headed downstairs.

The duty sergeant opened the way for him as he walked to the cells.

“I wish to speak to the prisoner I brought in, Sergeant,” Pinsley said. “It shouldn’t take long.”

“Very good, sir,” the sergeant replied. “Just the cell along the way.”

Pinsley nodded and made his way down towards the cell the sergeant had indicated, moving past cells that held prisoners brought in for a wide variety of crimes. Most of them were asleep, although a few looked as if they couldn’t, probably dreading what would happen when they were brought before the magistrates.

Pinsley got halfway to the cell before he realized that something was wrong.

As soon as he saw that things weren’t as they should be, he ran for the cell, and stood in front of it, staring at the scene within in horror. Through the bars, he could see the body hanging there in the cell, swinging back and forth as if from a gallows at Tyburn.

Xander hung there, and his corpse seemed to stare out with accusing eyes at Pinsley.

“Sergeant!” Pinsley yelled, and the urgency of that shout must have cut through, because the sergeant came running on booted feet.

Pinsley had seen death before, in far too many forms. He’d seen men killed on the battlefield in Crimea and dying of cold or disease in the military encampments without ever firing a shot. He’d seen people murdered in the worst ways, including his own wife. He’d even seen people hanged before, for the crimes they had committed.

None of it made the moment any better.

Pinsley saw the sergeant fumbling with his keys, struggling to open the door, but Pinsley could only stand there, staring. He could tell from here that Xander was dead, but even so he went in with the sergeant and helped to cut him down.

The killer had hanged himself with his own belt, using the bars of the window to do it.

“I suppose it saves the hangman a job,” the sergeant said.

“A man is still dead, Sergeant,” Pinsley said, feeling a moment of disappointment at this, and not just at the thought of a life being snuffed out here, like this. “A madman, and there’s every chance that he would have been locked away rather than hanged.”

“He’s still a killer,” the sergeant said. Pinsley heard him sigh. “The superintendent will have to be told.”

He made it sound like that was the worst part of all of this, rather than a man being dead.

“I’ll do it,” Pinsley said, although he wasn’t really concentrating as he said it. He was too busy thinking about how wrong this all felt. It felt as if he had been taken away just as he might have helped to finish things neatly, leaving Pinsley with the uncomfortable wrongness that had plagued him before.

Kaia had been right, something about this wasn’t right, and now the one man who could explain it all was dead.

Pinsley turned and walked from the cells, heading up into the station, among the desks and the wood paneled walls. His first thought was to find Kaia and talk to her about what had happened. She would want to know, and probably deserved to know, as well. Pinsley realized that he would have to ask her about her conversation with the prisoner too, because the superintendent would want to know if there had been any sign that Xander was about to take his own life.

Pinsley collected himself as he stepped out into the foyer of the police station. He had to be the police inspector in this moment, not the man who had just seen a prisoner dead in front of him.

“Two constables get down to the cells to help the sergeant,” Pinsley called out, and he’d clearly managed enough of a tone of authority, because a couple of blue coated constables ran to obey the instruction. “Another run to Dr Florian and tell him that there will need to be an autopsy.”

He looked around, hoping that Kaia might not have left yet, but it seemed like a forlorn hope.

“Is Kaia still here, or has a constable found a carriage to bring her home yet?” he asked.

“No carriage, sir,” a constable replied from one side of the room. “The young lady just walked out.”

“Just walked…” A sense of horror dawned over Pinsley, in a single cold certainty. He hoped that he was wrong, but he knew then that he wasn’t.

“And no one escorted her back to the vicarage?” Pinsley demanded.

“She just walked off, sir.”

It took Pinsley a moment to realize what that might mean. If Kaia were heading back to the vicarage, logically, she would have taken the carriage. Therefore, she wasn’t heading back to the vicarage. There was only one other place he could think of she might be trying to go, as preposterous as it seemed:

She was going to try to get to Paris alone.

In that instant, a part of Pinsley made him want to run straight out of Scotland Yard and head after her, but the worst part was that he couldn’t, not now, not with a man dead when Pinsley had just gone to visit him. His duty and the law both demanded that he at least tell Superintendent Hutton what was happening.

He could at least hurry, though, and give himself the best chance possible to catch up to Kaia. Pinsley all but ran up the stairs, barely managing to stop before he simply barged into the superintendent’s office. He forced himself to knock instead.

“Enter.”

Pinsley stepped inside, and found himself facing Superintendent Hutton, who sat at his desk wearing full uniform. He was rail thin and sharp featured, with thinning, dark hair. His expression turned into something sour as Pinsley rushed in.

“What now, Inspector?” he demanded.

“Sir, there has been a death,” Pinsley said. “A prisoner, the man I brought in earlier, has hanged himself.”

Hutton’s expression only became more sour. “Is there no end to this night? There will need to be questions asked now, and reports. I will need a full report from you, Pinsley.”

“Sir,” Pinsley said. Every moment he was here was a moment when he wasn’t going after Kaia. He knew her well enough by now to understand where she would be going. She had a level of determination that would have made most of the soldiers he’d known look indecisive. “I believe I need to leave. There is an urgent matter I need to attend to.”

“An urgent matter?” Hutton said, raising his voice. “What could be more urgent than a death in our custody?”

Pinsley wondered how he was going to manage to explain all of it to his superior. He realized, of course, that he couldn’t, not really. He couldn’t put Kaia’s feelings and instincts into terms Hutton would comprehend. Pinsley barely comprehended it all himself. Still, he did his best.

“I believe that there is another matter related to tonight’s case that must be addressed,” he said. “A matter that I have been told is most serious.”

The enormity of what it might mean if Xander and Kaia were right started to sink in for him. It would be a matter that could shake the world. At the very least, it would put Kaia in tremendous danger.

“Told?” Hutton said. “Told by whom? By the prisoner? By your famous skills of investigation? No, this simply will not do, Pinsley.”

“Then I must request leave, effective immediately,” Pinsley said, in his best talking to officers voice. He pulled aside his coat to reveal the bloodstain in a reminder of the wounds he had suffered fighting Xander. “I have been injured in the line of duty, and request time to recover from those injuries. Also, I believe it may be necessary to go to France.”

“To France?” Hutton said, sounding utterly incredulous. As stiff necked as the superintendent was, he seemed taken aback by this, at least. “What could there possibly be in France?”

“If I don’t hurry, a young woman who very much needs my aid,” Pinsley said. He was wasting too much time. He needed to catch up with Kaia before she did something foolhardy. He turned for the door. “I’m sorry, sir, I’m needed.”

“Do not walk away, Inspector!” Hutton said. “Not until you have adequately explained yourself!”

“That would take too long, sir,” Pinsley said. “And I only half understand it myself.”

“Pinsley, if you walk out of that door, do not expect there to be a job waiting for you when you deign to return!”

Pinsley was sure that Hutton meant every word of the threat. After all, the superintendent hated him. He would probably see all this as a glorious chance to be rid of Pinsley.

Pinsley walked out of the door, leaving Superintendent Hutton’s angry shouts echoing behind him as he headed downstairs. He grabbed his things from his office and started to run.

With Kaia, there was no telling how much danger she might get into if he didn’t catch up to her soon.

CHAPTER FOUR

How far would a shilling get her, Kaia wondered as she walked through the streets of London. She’d never really had money in the orphanage, which made it hard to judge how much it was worth now. Presumably it wasn’t enough for a trip all the way to France, but just how much of the way could she cover with it before she had to think of something else?

Walking this first part saved Kaia some of it. She walked back in the general direction of the vicarage, but only because it also happened to be in the same direction as Euston Station for this part of the walk. The first rays of morning light were starting to hit the streets around Kaia, although a February fog off the Thames meant that she could see almost as little as if it had still been full darkness. The gas of the street lamps still glowed with an eerie blue edge to their flames ahead, but they were slowly being extinguished, the snuffers going by their watches rather than the light.

It didn’t matter; Kaia would still find her way.

She suspected that a shilling would be more than enough for a train journey to Dover, but not nearly enough for the passage across to France. Probably, she would have to hide away on a boat, and that was a prospect that filled Kaia with worry, but she couldn’t see another way. She had to get to France.

It had to be her; no one else would understand the threat that was still out there. The inspector had already proved that. Xander’s talk about the Shadowseers didn’t make her feel better, either, Kaia couldn’t just leave this to them, because she had no idea if they knew about the shadows’ plans or not.

That left her. She had to get to France. That it also meant that Kaia could try to find a sister she’d just learned of only made it more urgent.

She walked past small theatres and gin houses, and realized that she was probably in Soho. Even at this hour of the morning, there were places that noise seemed to spill out of as doors opened, suggesting that those within hadn’t bothered with anything as mundane as sleep. Kaia hadn’t slept either, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her. She had to do this now, before the inspector could talk her out of it, and because Kaia suspected that the shadows in Paris already had a good head start on her.

Around her, the signs on the shops didn’t make a lot of sense. Boulangerie? Pattiserie? It took Kaia a minute to remember her history: Soho was the part of London where French refugees had settled a hundred and fifty years ago. That worried her. If she couldn’t read that much French, what hope did she have in Paris, alone?

Kaia was still worrying about it when she almost stumbled into a group of young men, probably her age, in the fog. There were four or five of them, expensively dressed although their clothes were in some disarray.

“Careful, Hugo!” one said, even as he staggered into another of them.

“You be careful. We’re going the wrong way, you know. Matron will be furious.”

“Oh, who cares,” another of them said. “We got out of Eton for a reason.”

“The gin!” a couple of them chorused.

They were drunk, Kaia realized, and even as she realized it their eyes fell on her.

“Oh, hello,” one of the young men said, his eyes roving over Kaia in a way that made her start to take a step back. His hand caught her wrist, though, stopping her from stepping away into the fog. “No, don’t go. Not when we’ve got business for you.”

It took Kaia a moment to realize what they meant, and a mixture of disgust and terror rose up in her. She pulled back sharply from the young man’s grip.

“I’m not who you think I am,” she said. “I’m just on my way to the station.”

Another of the young men laughed at her. “A woman out alone at this hour? In Soho? There’s only one reason you’d be out here. So how much?”

“No, get away from me,” Kaia said, trying to pull away from them. She broke free, and turned to run, wanting to get away. She turned down a side street, hoping that it would be enough.

Instead, the young men behind her whooped like hunters taking off after a fox and set off in Kaia’s wake. Kaia ran, having to hitch up her skirts to do it, setting off through the filth of the London streets, hoping that if she got far enough away it would allow her to lose herself in the fog.

“Help!” she called out. “Someone help!”

Kaia wasn’t sure why she called out. Perhaps in one of the nicer areas of London, there might have been someone willing to help her, but here, no one cared. It was probably even better to be quieter, simply so that she would have a greater chance of slipping away silently in the fog.

She took turnings without thinking about it. It almost didn’t matter which way she went, just so long as she didn’t stay on one straight path. In spite of it all, though, Kaia could hear the sound of feet striking against the cobbles as the young men hunting her followed.

Even the hope that they might give up seemed forlorn now, because they’d turned the whole thing into a sick kind of game. Kaia’s only chance was to outrun them.

Then she ran up against the limits of a dead end, closed in on three sides by a tangle of old buildings that looked ready to fall down. Kaia looked around for any way out of there and saw a doorway that must lead into one of the buildings. It was locked. In terror, she hammered on it, but there was no reply. Even if there was someone in there, they didn’t want any part of this.

“Nowhere left to go,” one of the young men said, as Kaia turned at bay.

They spread out in a half circle around her, and Kaia knew that there was nothing she could do now, nothing she could say, that would stop them from attacking her.

*

“Help!”

Pinsley had almost given up hopes of finding Kaia when he heard her call out. It had been obvious which general way she would go, but the specifics of it were always going to be difficult, even for him. That she would head for a train station seemed obvious: it was what she’d done when she’d run before, and it was her best chance of getting to the coast. That she would head north, to Euston, seemed just as obvious to his way of thinking. Kaia knew where the station was, even lived in the shadow of some of its lines.

That part had been easy enough to deduce, but finding one girl in the midst of the largest city in the world was much more difficult. He’d already proven the near impossibility of it when it came to his daughter.

Pinsley stopped short at that thought. Kaia was not the same as Olivia. He would not accept that the two situations were the same at all.

Yet, in a lot of ways, they were far closer than was comfortable. In both cases, he’d driven them away, dismissed their feelings and what they wanted. In both cases, he’d been sure that there would be another chance to talk, and to make things right. Olivia had walked away, disappeared without a trace. Now, there was too much of a risk that Kaia might do the same.

“Help me!” Kaia called out, and Pinsley started to run through the London streets.

It was always hard to pin down the direction of sounds in fog, but he did his best, running through the streets of Soho, ignoring the revelers only just pouring into the streets after their nights of entertainment. His attention was only on catching up to Kaia before whatever danger she was in caught up with her.

Pinsley strained his senses. There were no more cries for help, but somewhere ahead, he could hear the sounds of young men shouting to one another.

“This way, chaps! Our fox has gone to ground!”

There could have been a hundred reasons why someone might shout that, but here, now, with Kaia calling for help, Pinsley felt certain that the two were connected. He felt just as certain that he was running out of time, and fear for Kaia propelled him forward.

He came out into an enclosed yard, where a group of five young men were surrounding Kaia. She looked terrified, and Pinsley swore to himself that if they’d laid a finger on her, they would feel the full force of the law. He took a step forward, reaching into his coat for his truncheon and warrant card.

“Now then,” he said, in his most officious tone. “What’s all this?”

A couple of the young men looked round.

“This has nothing to do with you,” one of them said.

Instantly, Pinsley started to reason out more about them from their manner and their style of dress. That they were drunk was no great feat of deduction. Since one of them had school colors protruding from a pocket made the next part barely more impressive.

“What is it lads?” Pinsley said. He wanted to wade into them and crack them round the head for what they were trying to do, but with five of them, that probably wouldn’t go well. “Up from Slough because the entertainment at Eton’s not up to your standards? Well, from the way some of you are staggering, I’d say you’ve had enough, and if you don’t hurry, you’ll never catch the train back in time for roll call.”

“This is none of your business,” the largest of the young men said, turning and puffing his chest out.

“This warrant card makes it my business, boy,” Pinsley said, letting his tone harden. “Now run along, before I arrest the lot of you.”

“Arrest us?” another of them slurred. “D’you know who my father is? Go away, or I’ll have your job.”

The big one seemed to take that as his cue to throw a punch, swinging one at Pinsley with more skill than some drunken youth should have had. But then, if they didn’t teach boxing at the finest schools, how would the young men aiming to go on to run the Empire know how best to strike their subordinates.

Pinsley slipped aside from the punch just in time and countered with a truncheon blow to the gut. There was no time for niceness now, or for second chances. His only hope was to strike hard and fast, and pray that the sight of it cowed the rest of them. Bullies like this were usually cowards.

The young man he’d hit doubled up and fell back, but didn’t fall. He came back with another couple of punches, neither of which connected, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that his friends saw him continuing to attack, and they took that as their cue to pile in alongside him.

Suddenly, instead of fighting a single opponent, Pinsley was trying to take on five at once. It was like being back in the midst of battle again, where in a melee everything could turn into chaos, and even the best fighter could be brought low by an attack they simply didn’t see.

Still, Pinsley did his best to fight back. Unlike these young men, he’d been in life or death fights, and he knew what it took to survive them. He’d been in one only earlier tonight, against an opponent far more dangerous than any of these boys could be.

Pinsley struck out with his truncheon at another young man, aiming for the jaw now. He heard the crack of wood hitting bone, and the young man staggered back. Pinsley struck out again, with a fist this time, slamming it into a gut that was already too soft with easy living.

If it had just been two of them, that would have been that, but in that moment, a fist caught Pinsley above the eye, making him stagger. Another caught him with a rugger tackle, and Pinsley went down, with the five young men rearing up above him.

Pinsley had a moment of absolute fear then, because he knew with cold certainty how the next few moments would go: one of the boys would throw a kick, and then the others would join in because they wouldn’t want to be left out of it. Soon, Pinsley would be at the heart of a kicking, baying mob, and it would only take one of those blows to land to his head for the inspector to die.

Worse, even if he survived, there would be no way for him to protect Kaia. The most he could hope was that she was taking this moment to get away…

Instead, she screamed, and memories of Kaia screaming before filled Pinsley’s mind even as the sound filled his ears. He remembered this from when the constables had tried to arrest her to drag her to Bedlam. He remembered the sound of it from the chapel, as well. Pinsley clapped his hands over his ears.

Even as he did so, the young men around him were sent flying by some unseen force, picked up and thrown away from him like cricket balls delivered by some gigantic bowler. They tumbled, and slammed against the houses. Some of them rose with groans, others had to be helped to their feet by their friends. All of them looked terrified. Somehow, that force didn’t touch Pinsley, as if it recognized him as a friend, or as if Kaia was able to aim it.

They turned and ran, off into the morning mist of the city. Pinsley let them go, instead sitting up and staring at Kaia. The echoes of her scream were still ringing out, and this time, Pinsley couldn’t dismiss it as some trick, some chance happening.

She’d just done something impossible, and Pinsley couldn’t even begin to explain how.

CHAPTER FIVE

Kaia stood there panting in the wake of what she’d just done. She felt empty and exhausted, as though everything inside her had poured out in one go. Emotions roiled in her, from the residue of the fear that had been in her before, to satisfaction at sending her would be attackers flying, to shock that she had somehow done it.

Even having used these powers before, it still took her by surprise. No, it wasn’t quite right; she hadn’t used the powers, it was more like they’d used her, flowing out of Kaia without any decision on her part. Now, she didn’t know what to feel, except grateful that the attack was done.

“You found me,” she said, going to Inspector Pinsley. She helped him to his feet. “If you hadn’t come along…”

“It looks as though you might have been able to save yourself,” Pinsley said. He looked shocked, like he’d seen a ghost. No, it was more than that, like he’d seen a ghost after years of thinking that no such thing could possibly exist.

“I don’t know if this would have happened if the situation had been different,” Kaia said. She was so touched that he’d come after her. No one else had ever been there for her, yet here he was

“What exactly did just happen, Kaia?” Pinsley asked. “What did you just do?”

That was the inspector Kaia knew, always looking for an explanation, trying to reason out what was happening in the world.

“I’m not sure,” Kaia said. “But it has something to do with the Shadowseers, something to do with the shadows, and all of this.”

“I…” She could see Pinsley trying to make sense of it. “I do not know what to say to all of this. I have seen you send five young men flying, and yet I cannot comprehend it. Such a thing feels like it must be a trick, and yet I cannot see how it would be. I must believe that you have done this, but for the how of it… there must be an explanation. There must.”

“That I’m what Xander said I was?” Kaia said.

She saw the inspector freeze in place. “Kaia… there is something I must tell you.”

The graveness of his expression said that whatever he had to say, it was serious.

“Xander is dead,” the inspector said. “By his own hand.”

Kaia felt shock at the suddenness of that. She also felt a wash of pity for the former Shadowseer who had become a murderer under the influence of the shadows. He had deserved so much better than that.

“I’m sorry,” Pinsley said, reaching out to touch Kaia’s arm.

“I know you don’t believe all the stuff about the shadows, or the Shadowseers,” Kaia said. “But will you at least acknowledge that there are other forces at play here?”

“There is something happening,” Pinsley said. “But even after this, as a man of reason, I cannot simply accept that some great play of supernatural forces is at work.”

“But you still came after me,” Kaia pointed out, feeling gratitude that he had, until one reason why he might have done that occurred to her. “I’m not going back. I know you don’t believe me, but I have to get to France, whatever it takes.”

“I can see that you’re determined,” Pinsley said. “And that’s part of the reason I have decided that I cannot permit you to go alone.”

“You can’t stop… wait, you’re not trying to stop me?” Kaia asked, caught a little off guard. “You’re coming with me?”

“It is all I can think of that will keep you safe,” Pinsley said. “And I believe that the death tonight speaks to something larger happening, supernatural or otherwise. So if you insist on going to France to pursue the matter, I will accompany you.”

Kaia hugged him out of sheer joy. She knew it wasn’t the appropriate thing to do out in the street like that, but she couldn’t help herself.

“Thank you!” she said. “Does this mean… should we go to the station?”

Even after everything that had just happened, she was eager to get started.

“If we are to do this, then we will do this properly,” Pinsley said. “We will return to the vicarage and collect whatever travelling clothes Lottie can find for you. I will return to my club, and collect what I need. We will make an application for the appropriate travelling papers. Then we will take the train and find a boat.”

*

“You want what?” The civil servant in front of them was in his middle years, of medium height, and apparently doing his best to be middling in every way. He stared at Pinsley and Kaia in clear disbelief.

“I want travel papers for myself and Kaia here,” Pinsley said. They were currently standing in a small office in Whitehall, wood paneled and almost deliberately drab.

“That part isn’t the problem,” the man said. He shook his head. “The problem is that you want them today. Such things take-”

“I know how long they usually take, Cecil,” Pinsley said, using the man’s given name deliberately and carefully. “That is why I’ve come to you. Do I need to remind you about the time back in the army when you chose to charge an enemy position single handed?”

“And you had to bail me out,” the civil servant said. “No, you don’t need to remind me.” He took out a couple of carefully written sheafs of paper. “But this makes us even.”

“Of course,” Pinsley said.

“Now, I know your name, but what about you, young lady?”

“Kaia,” Kaia said.

“And your family name?”

Pinsley saw Kaia freeze, obviously not knowing what to say. He hadn’t considered this.

“Smith,” he supplied, picking the commonest name he could.

“Kaia Smith,” Cecil repeated, writing it in, and then stamping both passports with an India Rubber stamp. “There, as far as the world is concerned, you both have the full protection of her majesty’s government around the world, such as it is. Her majesty’s government requests and requires… and so on. We’re still working on the wording from when we switch from the French.”

“For now, French is perfect,” Pinsley said. “After all, Kaia and I are headed to Paris.”

He saw the civil servant’s expression change. “You’re going where? Now? No, you can’t, think of the trouble that would…”

Pinsley didn’t wait for Cecil to finish. Instead, he snatched up the passports and turned to go.

“Thank you for your help,” he called back. “I’ll be sure to call in again next time I need something.”

“You said this made us even, Pinsley!”

*

“Tickets please!”

Pinsley enjoyed Kaia’s delight as she handed over her train ticket. She brought a joy to things that he had grown to see as ordinary, such as taking trains or riding in carriages. It reminded him a little of Olivia, but more than that, it reminded him of what it was like to be young.

Their bags, a small travelling bag for Kaia and his old kit bag for him, rested above. They had to share their compartment today on the train, with a man who appeared to Pinsley to be some sort of travelling salesman, and a young man whose bearing suggested that he had once been a soldier, although he clearly wasn’t now.

“Are you travelling far?” the salesman asked.

“To the coast,” Pinsley said. He didn’t elaborate on their plans beyond that.

“I’m travelling all the way to Calais,” the salesman said. “I know they say that France is no place to be English right now, but the Emperor is a reasonable man.”

“A reasonable man who helped arrange the overthrow of the old king,” the former soldier said. “And then got himself into position as president so that he could take the country nice and legally. No one who gets ninety seven percent in a plebiscite is honest, or reasonable.”

“A sentiment I will not be raising there, I assure you,” the salesman said.

Pinsley watched out of the train’s window as they headed south and east, down towards the point on the coast closest to France. The smoke from the train made it hard to see properly, but still, it was pleasant to watch the countryside flashing past. Most of it was still countryside, although the smoke stacks of towns were visible in the distance. Kaia seemed to watch all of it with delight, at least until tiredness started to catch up with her, and she drifted into a doze in her seat.

It was starting to catch up with Pinsley, too. After all, he’d spent the night running around London, fighting dangerous criminals and being hurt. His side still ached where Xander had struck him, and if he’d had more time, Pinsley might have found a doctor.

As it was, he slept. He slept until he woke with Kaia shaking his shoulder.

“I think we’re here!” she said with a note of excitement.

Pinsley looked out of the window and saw the station at Dover. He and Kaia took their luggage and stepped out. Outside the station, the first thing that Pinsley noticed was the sea air. Kaia clearly noticed it too.

“It smells so… fresh!” she exclaimed.

“It does,” Pinsley agreed. That was one of the things about London: it was easy to learn to ignore anything, including the stink of so many people so close together. It was only now that he was here, with the salt air of the sea in his nose instead, that Pinsley was reminded of how bad it could be.

“So,” Kaia said. “What’s next?”

“Now, we find a boat to take us across the Channel,” Pinsley said. “There will be someone, even if it is only a fishing boat willing to make the journey for the right payment.”

The two of them headed down towards the docks. Pinsley’s eyes took in the range of different vessels there, from small fishing skiffs to huge steamships, even a whaling ship or two in port before their next voyage. He observed them all with a practical eye, trying to judge which looked to be getting ready to leave port and which had only just come in. It would be better if they found a captain heading their way quickly, rather than having to wait a day or two. Judging by Kaia’s expression, she was more caught up in the wonder of it all.

“There are ships on the Thames,” she said. “But not like this.”

“Not like this,” Pinsley agreed. Thames ships tended to be barges, certainly once they reached the bridges. These were bigger and sleeker, some still powered by sails alone, but more starting to be a mix of sail and steam, or steam alone.

His eyes sought out a likely looking vessel. It was an older looking sloop, but it looked sound enough to Pinsley’s eyes, and it was clearly loading, ready to leave. He took in the crates being loaded, and the markings on them.

“Ahoy there!” he called out.

An older man in a woolen hat and slightly outdated frock coat came up to the rail.

“Ahoy yourself,” he said.

“Are you heading across the Channel?” Pinsley asked.

“All the way to Calais,” the man said, with a shrug. “Someone’s got to.”

“And are you minded to take passengers over with you?” Pinsley asked.

“Aye, maybe. I suppose coin’s coin. Just you and the girl?”

Pinsley nodded.

“Ten shillings each.”

It was more than Pinsley would have preferred, but he suspected that no other boat would be ready to leave as quickly. Besides, it wasn’t as if he normally spent much of his wages. He took out the money and handed it over.

“We’re leaving straight away,” the sailor said. “If you were thinking of a leisurely tour of the town, find another boat. Probably best to get aboard now. You and your… daughter?”

That word hit Pinsley like a punch. Still, he did his best to disguise it.

“Kaia is not my daughter,” he said.

“Oh, your niece, then?” the sailor said, and this time his laugh was enough to raise Pinsley’s hackles.

“I’m not his ‘niece’ either,” Kaia said, in a tone that suggested she understood exactly what he was implying.

“She is my…” Pinsley struggled to think of a good word for what Kaia was “…my ward, and if you are not capable of behaving with courtesy around her, we will find another vessel on which to travel.”

“No, no of course, forgive me squire,” the sailor said, and showed them aboard, leading them to a cabin before hurrying off about his tasks.

“I am surprised that you understood what he was implying there, Kaia,” Pinsley said.

“At the orphanage, the expectation was that we’d end up in service to a family, or maybe to a wealthy man. They didn’t talk about it openly, but we all knew what it meant,” Kaia said.

The thought of that filled Pinsley with disgust. “When we get back, I intend to see that the place is shut down.”

“You can do that?” Kaia asked.

“I can try.”

“Thank you,” Kaia said, as if he’d just given her a gift. “Thank you so much.” She seemed to think for a moment. “If you knew that was what he was going to think, why didn’t you just agree that I was your daughter?”

Pinsley shook his head quickly. “That wouldn’t be right.”

“I know it would be a lie,” Kaia said quickly. “I just thought-”

“No,” Pinsley said, firmly. He couldn’t even explain why he was reacting like this to her, because that would involve delving into things that were far too personal, and far too painful. “Excuse me, I need some air.”

He hurried out of the cabin, back up onto the deck. The ship was casting off, out into the Channel. The last time Pinsley had been on a boat leaving England, it had been with the army, making his way over to the Crimea for war. Now, he was heading to Paris for reasons he didn’t entirely understand, with a girl who had the ability to do things he didn’t want to accept as real, very probably at the cost of his position once he returned home.

It should have felt like absolute folly. Pinsley was abandoning his duties, going off to a place that wouldn’t welcome him, at a time when things were in flux there. All because Kaia had persuaded him.

He stood there waiting until the white chalk cliffs of the English coast disappeared out of sight. The sea was calm, but even so, Pinsley felt as if his stomach was roiling with the enormity of what he was doing.

Kaia came out onto the deck, watching alongside him. She didn’t ask him about his walking out like that. Instead, she stood staring out with him at the horizon.

“I don’t mind what your reasons are for coming,” Kaia said, keeping her eyes, straight ahead even when Pinsley looked over to her. “I don’t get why it’s so strange, pretending I’m your daughter, when you can say that I’m your ward, but I don’t mind that either. What matters is that you’re here, doing this.”

“I just hope that we find what you’re looking for,” Pinsley said. He had to hope that there would be some kind of answers out there, in Paris, or beyond.

“I hope so too,” Kaia said. “And I hope that I can prove to you that all of this is real.”

Pinsley wasn’t sure what to say to that, or what to hope. If Kaia was mistaken about all this, or somehow lying, then he was coming all this way for no reason. If she was right… if she was right, then it risked undermining everything he’d ever believed in.

Even so, he had to know. Not knowing what else to say, he stood there, looking out at the horizon as the ship made rapid progress across the waves. Gulls flashed past, and Pinsley thought he saw the flicker of a shoal of fish under the water, near the surface. Kaia laughed with delight as a couple leapt clear. Again, Pinsley had the impression of seeing the world through her eyes, but this time he couldn’t enjoy it quite as much, because it reminded him too much of the daughter he’d lost.

In spite of that joy, the journey still took several hours, and Pinsley was only too grateful when the unrelenting water on the horizon ahead finally gave way to something else. The thinnest ribbon of land lay there in the distance, barely visible, but there nonetheless.

“Is that…” Kari began.

Pinsley nodded. “France.”

And from there, they just had to make their way to Paris and finding answers to the situation that had somehow enveloped them both.

CHAPTER SIX

Kaia wasn’t sure what she’d expected when arriving in another country. Perhaps for it to be an almost fantastical place, full of wonders that the mind could barely comprehend. Perhaps hostility, or to be turned back.

Instead, there was a dock that looked remarkably similar to the one that they’d left, with ships arranged along it, and sailors hurrying about their business. One official looking man climbed aboard the boat, but after a quick inspection of the cargo and a brief conversation with the captain, he quickly left again.

“A customs official,” Pinsley guessed. “And that went more smoothly than I could have hoped. He didn’t even check our papers.”

They gathered their belongings and stepped off the boat, onto dry land. It briefly felt as though the whole world was swimming around Kaia, refusing to stay still, even for a moment. The inspector had to catch her arm, holding her up.

“What’s happening?” Kaia asked. Her legs didn’t seem to want to keep their footing, like she was drunk or ill, somehow.

“It’s normal,” Pinsley said with a smile. “Your legs have gotten used to the movement of the waves, and now they’re having to adjust to dry land again.”

Kaia noted that he wasn’t having any problems with it. Maybe it was just that the rigid military posture of the inspector made giving in to any kind of unsteadiness impossible. Maybe he’d just been on far more boats than she had. Either way, Kaia envied Pinsley his composure for the minute or two it took her legs to remember how they were meant to work.

“What now?” Kaia asked.

The inspector took out a pocket watch. After a moment’s thought, he started to wind it.

“Your watch isn’t working?” Kaia asked.

“I’m just remembering to wind the time forward an hour to account for the difference here,” Pinsley said.

That threw Kaia a little. In theory, she knew about different places in the world having different times, about it being night in Australia when it was day in London, but knowing it and experiencing the sudden, arbitrary shift was a different thing. It felt almost like an hour lost, never to be recovered.

“In any case,” the inspector said. “It is getting a little late. The crossing has eaten up most of the day, and I doubt that we would be able to get to Paris today, even if we tried. It may be better to find a hotel.”

A part of Kaia wanted to press on, but she could also feel the tiredness starting to seep into her from the long trip. Maybe it was better to do as the inspector had suggested.

They started off along the dock. Around them, people were working, or just out walking. They chattered as they did so, and while Kaia was used to filtering out the noise of London, this was different, because she couldn’t even understand what was being said. Suddenly, this place that had seemed almost normal when they’d alighted at the dock seemed utterly alien to Kaia. She felt as unsteady as she had when she’d first stepped off the boat, but this strangeness wouldn’t go away. It was reinforced with every word said around her.

Then the inspector stopped someone and spoke to them in rapid French, rattling it off with ease. The man he stopped said something back, and the only word Kaia thought she recognized was “Hotel.”

“This way,” Pinsley said, leading the way through the town to a tall, brightly painted building that was apparently a guesthouse, run by an older woman who gave them both a sour look before negotiating for rooms with Pinsley in more of that rapid, impossible to follow French.

The inspector showed Kaia up to a room, passing her a key.

“Apparently, dinner will be bouillabaisse, essentially a kind of fish stew,” Pinsley said. “I will need to go out before then.”

“What for?” Kaia asked.

“To change some money into francs at the local bank. You are welcome to come with me, but it might be better if you got some rest after the journey.”

“And also you don’t want the landlady rooting through our things?” Kaia guessed.

“Also that,” Pinsley admitted. “She seems the type to be nosey about these things. I won’t be long.”

He left, leaving Kaia alone in the room. She sat there, on the edge of a small bed so neatly made that it seemed as though the covers had been ironed in place. Almost immediately, Kaia found herself wishing that she’d gone with the inspector.

The landlady came up, giving her an intrigued look.

“Que fais tui ici?” the woman asked. “Pourquoi es-tu en France?”

“I’m sorry,” Kaia said. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

The older woman huffed and walked away, leaving Kaia by herself.

Kaia had never felt quite as alone as she did in the minutes that followed. She had never had a family, but there had always been other girls around her in the orphanage. Even when she’d run away, it had been within a familiar city. Now, she was in a place where she knew nothing about how things worked, and she didn’t even speak the language.

The enormity of what Kaia was trying to do hit her then. She’d felt so confident about going to Paris, finding her sister, finding out what the shadows were planning to do and stopping it; yet here she was, not able to even answer a simple question from some guesthouse keeper.

Kaia felt tears starting to form at the corners of her eyes. She’d left so much behind coming out here. Back at the vicarage, she’d had the first home she’d ever known, the first room that had ever been truly her own. She could have stayed there, and lived her life. Instead, she’d come all the way to France.

It would be worth it, though, if she managed to stop the shadows, and if she managed to find her sister… Kaia couldn’t even imagine what that would be like.

Even so, it was hard to sit there and not rush out into the town, trying to seek anywhere else to be rather than sitting there by herself. Only what had happened in London just last night stopped her, and kept her there.

Had it really been so recently? Had it really been only half a day since she’d fought against Xander and the shadow within him? Maybe this moment was what Kaia needed: a moment to just relax and recover, in the wake of everything that had happened.

Without really thinking about it, she lay back on the bed and fell asleep.

There were shadows in her dreams. They darted ahead of her while she chased them through a crowd, moving from person to person. They were flying ahead of her openly now, like tendrils of darkness that fled from the light blazing from her. Then, without warning, the shadows turned, and whirled in front of her, lashing out towards her…

Kaia woke to the inspector shaking her arm.

“Kaia, you need to wake up. Our train will be leaving in less than an hour.”

Kaia got ready as quickly as she could, washing and dressing, then heading downstairs. There was some kind of flaky, buttery pastry for breakfast, which seemed to be called a croissant, along with some cheese that was sharper and softer than any of the hard, crumbly stuff Kaia had been given back at the orphanage.

Where Lottie had given her tea back at the vicarage, here they had coffee, which was far stronger and more bitter. Kaia made a face.

“How do people drink this stuff?” she asked.

“It is an acquired taste, but many people swear by it,” Pinsley said.

“Including you?” Kaia asked.

Pinsley shrugged. “Traditionally, the British Empire runs on tea, but since we are not in it, I find coffee… acceptable.”

Acceptable seemed to be high praise coming from the inspector, so Kaia did her best to finish her coffee in spite of the bitterness. Ready to go, she collected her things and came down to find the inspector waiting with his.

“It’s only a short way to the station,” the inspector said, leading the way out of the guesthouse. The two of them walked through the streets of the town, and now, Kaia felt better prepared to deal with the strangeness of it.

“Will you teach me some French?” she asked Pinsley as they walked.

“I do not know how much I will be able to teach you on a train ride of a few hours,” Pinsley pointed out.

“Even something is better than nothing,” Kaia replied. It wasn’t about understanding everything then so much as simply feeling a tiny fraction less out of place.

“Very well,” the inspector said. “Bonjour is the word for hello.”

“Bonjour,” Kaia said.

“If you wanted to ask someone how they were, you would say ‘ca va?’”

“Ca va?” Kaia repeated.

“Bien, merci. Et vouz?” Pinsley said.

Kaia tried to work out what that might mean. She took a guess. “You’re saying that you’re good?”

“And asking how you are,” Pinsley said. “Bien is good. Merci is thank you. Et is and. Vouz is one of the two ways of saying you.”

“They have two ways of saying you?” Kaia said, surprised that any language could be so complex.

They reached the station. This was similar in some ways to those in London, still dominated by the platforms, the smoke and the bulk of the steam engines. There were differences too, with columns everywhere, and marble busts of a figure Kaia assumed had to be the Emperor.

“Following the Roman style,” Pinsley said. “After his uncle, the first Napoleon.”

They bought tickets, and Pinsley handed Kaia hers.

“We will be going via Lille, Amiens, Creil, and Pontoise,” he said. “From there, we will take a carriage into Paris, and try to work out what we are to do next.”

It sounded like a good plan to Kaia, and she repeated the names of the places they were to pass through in her head, wanting to make sure that she had them right in case she and the inspector should become separated by some chance.

“How long will it take?” Kaia asked. She remembered the inspector saying before that it was almost two hundred miles.

“A few hours, perhaps,” Pinsley replied. “We will be there later today.”

“So soon?” Kaia said. She had grown up with only a few streets in London as her entire world. Just the city had seemed huge, and her one trip beyond it with Pinsley had seemed like a world away even though it had only been into the Home Counties. Now, she was going to cover two hundred miles in a day? It seemed impossible.

The train set off through the French countryside, and it looked to Kaia a lot like the English countryside they had passed through on the way from London to Dover, although possibly with fewer signs of large towns in the distance. It seemed as if everything was more spread out here, and with slightly less in the way of large factories belching smoke into the sky.

Fields went past, and several of them seemed to have vines growing in them rather than corn or wheat. Kaia had no idea if that was a normal thing in the countryside, or something specific to France.

She and Pinsley had a compartment to themselves this time, and for a long time, the inspector was silent. He even looked a little uncomfortable.

“What is it?” Kaia asked him.

“I have been trying to think of the right way to say something,” Pinsley said. “I wanted to explain why I reacted poorly the other day when that sailor asked if you were my daughter.”

That caught Kaia’s interest. She’d known that there had been something about it that had hurt the inspector, but she didn’t know what.

“I had a family,” the inspector said. “A wife and a daughter.”

“Had?” Kaia said, catching that word.

“My wife was killed by a dangerous madman,” Pinsley said. “I was not able to save her. Our daughter… I do not know if she never forgave me for that, or if she simply could not stand my inability to forgive myself. Either way, I came home one day to find her gone, disappeared beyond even my ability to find her.”

In that moment, Kaia felt as if she understood so much more about the inspector than she had before. His reluctance to lie and call her his daughter seemed obvious after those few words, but it was far more than that. She felt as though she understood some of his prickliness, his need to make things right, and his unwillingness to allow harm to happen to anyone weaker than he. Even his need for logic, and to steer away from anything linked to madness, made more sense.

“Where do you think your daughter is?” Kaia asked.

Pinsley shook his head. “I do not know. I have scoured London, but England is a big place. Olivia could be anywhere. The fact that you are coming here after your family is part of what brought me.”

“Do you think I’ll find my sister?” Kaia asked.

“It is possible,” Pinsley said. “But you must not raise your hopes too high. As I said, finding one person can be difficult.”

And that was in London, which Pinsley knew like the back of his hand. Kaia didn’t want to think about how much more difficult it would be in Paris. Her only hope was that the business of trying to stop the shadows would somehow be connected to her family. Even then, though, how were they meant to go about finding the shadows once they reached Paris?

That was a problem for when they got there, though. For now, there was only the journey through France, the miles, or kilometers, or whatever they had here disappearing under the wheels of the train.

Without thinking about it, Kaia reached out her hand for Pinsley’s. He looked surprised as she took his hand, but he didn’t pull away.

Paris waited, and Kaia hoped that answers waited with it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Heloise had never expected to standing on stage as applause rained down on her, but now that she was, it felt right; it felt like it was meant to be. She had been born for the role of Juliet, and now it seemed that the audience were getting their chance to agree, clapping until the sound of it made the Theatre Rue St Germain seem to shake with it.

Flowers pelted the stage. Heloise didn’t collect them, because bringing flowers backstage was supposed to be bad luck, but she smiled out at the people who threw them, making a note of the potential admirers who sat there. In Paris, moments like these were so fleeting that it was important to make the most of them.

Heloise took her bow, and it was hers, despite the presence of the rest of the cast there on the stage. Instinctively, she knew that the people there were clapping for her, not just for the chorus or even for Jean-Charles, her Romeo in the play. The difference in applause between the performances without her and the ones with her now was night and day.

Heloise lingered there, drinking it all in before sweeping off with all the elegance she could muster. M. Lascelles was waiting in the wings, among the ropes and the sandbags, the director looking as enraptured by it all as the audience had been. He was a portly man of middle years, with thinning hair and usually a furious scowl at the antics of actors. Now, though, he was smiling broadly.

“My dear,” he said, hugging her tightly and kissing each of her cheeks. “A day ago, I despaired, and now you have brought me hope. And you don’t even need a wig for the part. I should have cast you as Juliet in the first place!”

Heloise almost asked him why he hadn’t, but she wasn’t quite secure enough in her new role to risk that. Besides, the important point was that she was the one who was on stage now, getting the applause from the audience. That could make up for almost anything.

All because Amelie had walked out of the play in the most spectacular way possible. Heloise had heard of actors walking away from productions at all kinds of inconvenient times, before opening night, in the middle of a run, even once ten minutes before the start of a performance before the Emperor, but all of those allowed for an understudy to walk on easily. All of those left the play whole. Amelie had walked out in the middle of it all. Heloise couldn’t even imagine someone doing that.

She’d benefitted by it, though, moving from simple chorus member and understudy to star of the performance in the space of a day. It was the kind of story that she might have dreamed of as a girl.

“Your name will be in all the newspapers,” M. Lascelles said. “Censors permitting. Your name will be known across Paris. I hope you won’t forget us all now that you’re going to be famous.”

“Oh, in an instant,” Heloise joked. “The first time Emperor Louis-Napoleon invites me to his residence, I shall completely forget to mention any of you.”

“Ah, actors,” the director said, with a theatrically exasperated shrug. “Now, you must tell us when you’re ready to leave, so that we can find a way to get you past any waiting hordes of admirers.”

Heloise couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. Maybe, or maybe not. This was Paris, after all, and a beautiful, successful actress tended to attract admirers.

Everyone was assuming that was what had happened to Amelie, because it seemed like the only thing that could trump the need to perform. Rumor among the stage crew had it that she had a wealthy admirer and had walked off because he didn’t want her performing in front of other men a moment longer, that she had been jilted and could not stand to be there, that a pair of admirers had found out about one another and she had been forced to go to try to prevent them from dueling with one another. All of it was the kind of thing that sounded utterly romantic and just as improbable to Heloise.

Still, whatever the reason, it meant that Heloise had the spot she’d always been waiting for. She even got Amelie’s dressing room, only having to share it with a couple of other cast members. Heloise went there now, making her way down among the tangled corridors beneath the theatre. They said that Paris was mostly built on older versions of itself, the layers forming a tangled network beneath people’s feet. Here, in the bowels of the theatre, Heloise could believe it.

There was no one in her dressing room at the moment. It seemed that the others were either still busy talking with the chorus or they had gone already. Either seemed possible, although there were a few fragments of clothing left behind that were not hers, from a stocking draped over one chair to a dress set out on a stand ready for tomorrow.

Heloise briefly considered asking M. Lascelles if the dressing room could be hers alone, but possibly it was still a little early to ask for that sort of thing. That could come later, when Heloise had had more performances like tonight’s.

To a combination of her delight and slight discomfort, there were flowers waiting back there, too. Not everyone knew the traditions, and gentlemen could sometimes be quite forceful in insisting that their roses be delivered, whatever the usual etiquette was. These ones were rich, and red, with a scent that made Heloise feel as though she could drift away in it.

There was no card, but Heloise had heard that some men preferred that. They wanted to be mysterious, and romantic, and if it also meant that their wives were less likely to find out and cause a scandal, then so much the better.

For the time being, Heloise focused on removing her makeup, feeling the buzz of being out on stage slowly ebb. In her way, she suspected that she made a better Juliet than Amelie ever had. She didn’t have to wear a wig to be the director’s vision of a blonde haired ingenue. She could pass for younger than she was on stage and convey a kind of sweet-voiced innocence that fit the part. They’d had to find a new dress to fit Heloise after Amelie had walked off wearing the old one, but that was no bad thing either.

As she kept working to remove her makeup, Heloise found herself thinking of all the things that might be next for her. There might be invitations to perform for important people, invitations to parties and balls, perhaps even just invitations to be seen in all the right places. She’d heard of actresses having their portraits painted by members of the Salon, so possibly she might even find herself immortalized that way.

At the very least, there would be more performances. Even if Amelie came back tomorrow, Heloise suspected that she would still have the role of Juliet tomorrow night. After that, if things continued to go well, she could have her pick of the Paris theatres. Her name would be the first one that directors thought of when they needed a lead actress for their plays, rather than one relegated far down the list, behind a dozen others. She would be able to command her own fees, maybe even enough for a home in the Place Vendome, certainly enough to get her out of a single room in la Marais.

Heloise was still thinking through the possibilities that might flow from tonight when she heard the click of the door behind her.

“Is that you, Suzette?” Heloise asked. Perhaps it wasn’t her fellow actor; perhaps it was whoever had left the flowers. Heloise was still trying to consider exactly how to respond to such a bold move when she caught sight of the figure moving towards her in her dressing room mirror.

The figure wore a full opera cloak, with the hood up to obscure their face. They wore kidskin gloves, and moved with a sinuous kind of grace.

Even then, Heloise thought that it might be her admirer. After all, someone who would send roses with no note might go to this much trouble as well to avoid people knowing their identity. Perhaps, she thought, it was some great figure of the Emperor’s court, a grand marshal or a notable figure of the Assembly that he summoned only when it suited him. Perhaps it was some famed artist or writer, one of the great figures of the Paris scene who wanted to remain mysterious.

Then Heloise saw the velvet rope in the stranger’s gloved hands, and sudden fear ran through her.

“What are you-”

Before Heloise could finish, or think to cry out, the rope was around her neck. Her hands went up, scrabbling at it as she panicked. She fought to breathe, to call for help, to break free, but the figure behind her pulled her tight against themselves, in an embrace that might almost have been loving except for the cord cutting off the air to her lungs.

A stupid part of Heloise wanted to demand of her attacker if they understood who she was? Who she was about to become? This wasn’t what was meant for her.

But it was clearly what her assailant wanted for her. They kept the pressure on the rope, viciously strong, pulling against Heloise’s neck as if they might slice clean through it with the rope. She tried to get her fingers under it, but already, Heloise could feel pressure building up in her head, and the world starting to turn dark around her.

She’d acted a death scene out on the stage just minutes before. It wasn’t anything like this. There was nothing grand about this, nothing that would move an audience to applaud through their tears. There was something ugly about this kicking, jerking, gasping scene, where Heloise’s legs wouldn’t work anymore and now it seemed that she was dangling from the rope like a marionette. It might count as tragedy, but even then, not the kind that people would remember.

Perhaps some would, Heloise thought as the last of her strength ebbed away. Perhaps a few would remember, years from now, the night they had seen the finest performance of Juliet they had ever laid eyes on, only for the chance for more to be snatched away.

She was meant to be the finest actress in Paris, not this. Not this…

CHAPTER EIGHT

Kaia stared out of the window of the carriage that formed the last leg of their journey, wanting to see Paris as soon as it came into view in the early evening. A flush of excitement rose through her at the prospect of it, because the very idea of Paris seemed special and different, even compared to London.

Then she saw it, and her breath caught.

“It’s huge,” Kaia said, as the sheer scale of the city started to spread out ahead.

“Only London holds more people,” Pinsley said. Looking across, Kaia couldn’t tell if he was sharing her sense of awe at this strange place, but then, it was always hard to read exactly what the inspector was feeling.

This wasn’t London, though. Both were grand cities, and both seemed to have a river at their heart. Both had huge buildings, and presumably huge numbers of people going from place to place, about their business. Yet they were nothing alike. The cathedral that loomed over the city was more squarely edged than St Paul’s would have been back home, while the blocky shape of what looked like a fortress, or perhaps a prison, rose up not far away.

“Those are Notre Dame and the Bastille,” Inspector Pinsley said, following Kaia’s gaze. “It was used as a prison, and stormed during their revolution here. Although there were only seven prisoners in it at the time.”

“Seven?” Kaia said. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would it matter if there were only seven people?”

She saw Pinsley shrug. “Perhaps because the symbol of it mattered more than what it achieved practically? Although there was also the part where it was used for storing armaments.”

Kaia couldn’t imagine being at the heart of something as world-changing as a revolution. It was the kind of thing that happened to other people.

“And then the revolution stopped and we ended up with the current Emperor?” Kaia said.

Pinsley looked as if he couldn’t tell if she was serious or not.

“When they taught us history, it was the history of the British Empire,” Kaia said, not wanting to seem stupid. “I guess they never thought any of us would end up in Paris.”

The Garrows had probably never thought that their wards would go anywhere beyond the sculleries and the bedchambers of better folk. They definitely hadn’t cared. They’d taught the children at the orphanage little, and that by rote, so that Kaia could recite the kings and queens of England, but had no way of knowing about this.

“They had a revolution against their kings,” Pinsley said, in the disapproving tones of someone loyal to Queen Victoria and her government. “Then various counter revolutions. Then Napoleon I took power and proclaimed himself Emperor. We beat him at Waterloo. After that, the monarchy was restored. Then it was overthrown by the second republic, which the current Napoleon, Napoleon III, took the place of.”

“That’s a lot to remember,” Kaia said.

“It is probably better not to speak about it too much,” Pinsley suggested. “The Sûreté, the police in the cities, will be on the lookout for anyone who seems to be talking about revolution, or the past, or anything even remotely suspicious. Especially after the attempt to kill the Emperor.”

Kaia would try to remember that. The last thing she wanted was to end up in the cells of an entirely different city. Suddenly, the city took on an entirely new tone as they approached it. It was somewhere they were both going to have to be careful, somewhere that could cause trouble for both of them, even as the larger threat of the shadows lurked.

Even so, it was beautiful. Their carriage drove down broad, tree lined streets, some of which still seemed to be under construction. The buildings had a classical, almost triumphal feel to them, as if the whole route they were on had been designed to be paraded down. Perhaps it had. Ahead, there was a giant archway that had clearly been put in place purely so that people could walk to it on the way to the great buildings of the city.

“Let’s walk from here,” Pinsley suggested, and shouted something up to the carriage driver in French. The carriage drew to a halt, and they both alighted.

Even the smell of the city was different than London. While it still had some of the industrial stink of a big city, Kaia could also make out the scents of bread and garlic in the air, and pick out the perfumes of some of the women who passed on the street.

As she and the inspector set off walking, Kaia could also see the way the broad expanses of the main avenues gave way to twisting, older looking streets behind. There were staircases leading down, too, some obviously leading to cellars, but some not seeming to make sense to Kaia.

“What are they?” she asked the inspector.

“Paris is built on layers of old catacombs,” Pinsley explained. “And on layers of old buildings, too, since the Romans and even before. It means that there is a city beneath the city that some of its criminals use.”

“There’s nothing like that in London,” Kaia said.

“Only because London is built much lower down,” Pinsley said. “As even Mr. Brunel’s engineers are finding, digging tunnels beneath it means dealing with flooding. The Seine is much less intrusive than the Thames.”

Kaia started to wander the streets. There were bakers’ shops that seemed to sell cakes that were tinier and more delicate than anything Kaia had seen before. There were dressmakers who were displaying designs finer than Kaia could even imagine. The whole city felt like the kind of place that it would be easy to get swept away in.

“The question now,” Pinsley said, as practical as ever. “Is how we find what we have come here for.”

He didn’t add anything about trying to work out if there really was anything to come there for, but Kaia knew he was probably thinking it. She knew that even now that he’d seen what she could do, he still didn’t believe everything to do with the shadows and the threat that they posed.

That should have hurt. It should have been discouraging that he didn’t believe her about all of it, yet Kaia didn’t find herself thinking of it like that. Instead, she felt gratitude that even when Pinsley didn’t really believe in everything she could see, he had still come all this way, to Paris. He’d trusted her enough to come with her, even when he couldn’t see the reason for it himself.

Now, Kaia had to justify that level of trust by finding the threat that the shadows posed here, and the Shadowseers, and her sister. The only question was how she would do that.

Kaia could remember what it had been like back in London, when she’d found the shadow that had possessed Xander. She’d felt that shadow from a distance, becoming aware of its presence the way she might have picked up on the change in the air that came before it started raining. Kaia thought that she could remember what that sensation felt like, with a sense of wrongness to it that was the same as nothing else.

Could she find that feeling again?

“We should start by finding somewhere to stay,” Pinsley said.

Kaia nodded, but she was already trying to pay attention to the city. She stretched out her senses as broadly as she could, trying to get a feel for the city. For a second or two, all that happened was that she heard more conversations she couldn’t understand, smelled more of the scents of cooking in a style that had nothing to do with pork pies or jellied eels.

“Shall we go, Kaia?” the inspector asked. “Perhaps we can find a hotel in one of the better areas, and then perhaps find a newspaper to establish what is happening in the city.”

All of that sounded sensible to Kaia, except in that moment, she caught the barest hint of the wrongness that came from the shadows. At least, she thought she did. It was hard to be certain. This didn’t feel as strong as it had back in London, but perhaps that just meant that it wasn’t as close by.

It was so faint that for a moment, Kaia thought perhaps she might be imagining it, and that the effort of trying to feel something had deceived her. What if it was real, though? Could she really afford to give up this chance?

Not knowing what else to do, Kaia set off into the city.

“Kaia? Where are you going?” Pinsley called after her, and a glance back told Kaia that he was hurrying along in her wake.

“I think I’ve found something,” Kaia said. She dodged out of the way of a horse, and was grateful for the first time since getting to France that she couldn’t speak French, judging by the tone of the things the rider called after her.

She set off through the streets, off the broad avenues and through smaller streets where the houses looked just as run down as in some parts of London. Kaia was sure that she could feel the traces of the shadow, now, and that it wasn’t just an illusion.

“We can’t just set off blindly through the city like this,” Pinsley said. He sounded worried for her. “We could end up anywhere.”

“It’s the same as the night we found Xander,” Kaia called back to him, sidestepping a couple of pedestrians who appeared to be arguing about the price of a string of onions. She couldn’t explain exactly what was going on, but she hoped that would be enough to keep the inspector following, at least.

Kaia reached the river, and there were bridges set over it that looked both elegant and almost new compared to those back home, made of white stone and decorated with yet more of the imperial symbols that she’d seen ever since they’d arrived in France. Kaia hurried across it, trying to focus on the feeling that led her onwards.

Notre Dame sat ahead, the cathedral rising up over the city, and for a moment or two, Kaia thought that perhaps the feeling was leading her in its direction. Instead, though, she found herself veering off into another district, one that seemed to be filled with venues advertising entertainments. A house Kaia passed had an artist painting from a balcony, while there were cafés here and there, busy even during the day.

Kaia took turnings, and at each one now she paused, trying to work out which way the sensation felt strongest. It meant that she found herself pulled along through the streets by it, trying to find whatever shadow lay ahead.

Maybe she and the inspector would be able to complete all this quickly. Maybe this feeling would be all they needed to lead them both straight to the shadows, and from there they could finish this. That hope made Kaia hurry, quickening her step until she stood in front of a large building that she was sure was where the sensation was coming from.

At first glance, it was a beautiful building, on a par with any of the grandest in the city. It had classical columns, and a broad, expansive façade that echoed the imperial lines of the rest of Paris. It seemed to be an edifice of almost pure carved marble, built like some ancient temple or grand museum.

Then Kaia saw that the brickwork behind the façade was crumbling slightly, and that most of what she’d taken for marble was actually plasterwork. There were signs up outside it, with the words Romeo et Juliet, une Romance in large letters. Even then, it took Kaia a few seconds to realize what she was looking at, because places like this hadn’t exactly featured in her day to day life up to this point.

It was a theatre.

“Kaia, what are we doing here?” Pinsley asked, coming to a halt beside Kaia. He sounded slightly out of breath, but then, he’d been carrying a much larger bag through much of Paris. Kaia saw him staring up at the edifice of the theatre, then over at her in confusion.

“What is all this?” the inspector asked.

“This is…” Kaia stopped short of telling him that this was where the feeling had led her, because she knew that he wouldn’t understand. “I think this is where we get our answers.”

CHAPTER NINE

Pinsley stood in front of the theatre, trying to make some sense of why Kaia had led him here. She’d said that it was the same as two nights ago, chasing after a killer through the streets of London, but as far as he knew, there was no killer here, and no chase.

Had that really just been two nights ago? A lot had happened in that time. Pinsley had probably thrown away his career, and had travelled a distance that would have seemed improbable in the days before modern steam railways. Now, he was in Paris, of all places.

Why? Because Kaia had led him this far. Now, she had led him across Paris, with people giving Pinsley looks as if they suspected that he was chasing after her for some nefarious reason. All because she wanted to see a play? It made no sense, but neither did the thought that she had been led by some mysterious power.

“What are we doing here, Kaia?” Pinsley asked, trying to make some sense of it. What had Kaia seen or heard to bring her here? Did she just want to see the production of Romeo and Juliet there? Pinsley didn’t want to believe that Kaia could be that… that flighty, but he wasn’t sure what else to think right now.

“There’s something happening here,” Kaia said. “We need to get inside.”

“Inside?” Pinsley said. “You’re sure? Right now?”

If they had a chance to pause and catch their breath, then maybe Pinsley would be able to talk some sense into Kaia about running off across the city.

“There’s something here,” Kaia insisted. “It’s important. Trust me.”

Those two words were the ones that made the difference. Pinsley knew how important trust could be, and he knew that almost no one had trusted Kaia before in her life. It was enough to make him take the few steps forward to the ticket office.

If he’d been in London, he would simply have taken out his warrant card and asked for assistance. As it was, the best approach seemed to be to buy a ticket for the performance. Switching into French, Pinsley approached the ticket seller.

“When is the performance tonight?” he asked, in French. Although he clearly didn’t get his accent quite right, given the next question.

“You are English?” The ticket seller looked like he wanted to spit, but still said the next part. “The performance will begin in half an hour. Although it will cost you. We are down to our last few tickets for tonight.”

And Pinsley suspected that there was about to be a hefty surcharge for being English thrown in. Did he really want to do this, all on the strength of Kaia asking him? Even as he asked the question, Pinsley knew what the answer was. He’d followed Kaia to Paris; he could follow her into a theatre.

“Very well,” he said to the ticket seller. “Two tickets, please.”

The joy on Kaia’s face as he came out, brandishing them, made it worth it. Even if this was just about her being entranced by this place, rather than anything real, it was worth it just for that look.

Pinsley couldn’t see what else it could be about, when there was no way Kaia could pick out one theatre from all the other spots in the city.

“What is it about this place?” he asked her, as he escorted Kaia into the foyer of the theatre, where a parquetry floor was so well trodden that it had started to wear smooth, and fliers on the walls advertised future performances. They left their bags at the coat check, although Pinsley kept his great coat on the basis that it had his pistol, his warrant card and his truncheon in its various pockets.

Kaia looked a little uncomfortable. “If I tell you the truth, you won’t believe me.”

“Tell me anyway,” he said.

“I can feel that there’s something wrong here,” Kaia replied. “I can feel that there are shadows here, or have been. It’s not as strong as it was with the chapel but it’s still… you see, you don’t believe me.”

“Would I have bought tickets to get us in there if I didn’t believe that you could do something?” Pinsley pointed out. He’d seen her send thugs flying in London. There was something going on here that he couldn’t quite comprehend. It was just that he wasn’t ready to buy into the whole business of shadows and strange feelings just yet.

As he and Kaia waited, people started to gather in the foyer with them. Pinsley could see then that the ticket seller hadn’t been lying about being down to his last few tickets, because it seemed that the theatre was going to be packed. He could also see just how underdressed he and Kaia were in comparison to some of them. The men and women there had come in their most formal clothes, the men dressed in sharp dark suits and frock coats, the women in gowns that made all this clearly as much about being seen as about what they would see there.

There was an excited edge to the crowd, with people whispering back and forth to one another. This seemed like one moment when playing the part of the ignorant foreigner might be useful, so Pinsley walked up to one of the men, an older man in a suit that looked as if it still had dust on it from not being used for a while, and cleared his throat, preparing his most formal French.

“It’s a little busier here than I had imagined when my ward wanted to see a play,” he said to the man.

“But of course it is,” the man exclaimed, talking animatedly with his hands. “What do you expect after everything that has happened?”

“After what has happened?” Pinsley asked. “Forgive me, but I only arrived in the city today.”

“Ah, the English,” the other man said. “They think that they rule the world, but they do not even hear the most important things!”

He more or less ignored Pinsley then, turning back to a conversation with his companions.

“…and I am telling you that Comte is barely a philosopher at all! What is this ‘sociology’ of his?”

“I’m sorry to interrupt again,” Pinsley said, trying to remain polite. “But what did happen? Was it just a fine performance, or-”

“A performance indeed,” the older man said. “They say that the part of Juliet was played most beautifully. But if you think that is why so many people are here, then you are foolish, Englishman, and I have no time to converse with foolish people, when I have important discussions to continue!”

He turned back to his friends, and this time it seemed clear that he wasn’t going to brook any more interruptions. That was one of the downsides of being somewhere like Paris: if this had been London, Pinsley could have tried to use his position as an inspector to get information, but here, people could simply ignore him. He found the difference galling.

“What is it?” Kaia asked, coming up to Pinsley’s side. “What’s going on? There’s something happening, isn’t there?”

She sounded eager for vindication, but Pinsley didn’t have anything to tell her, not yet.

“It seems that people are particularly eager to be here this evening, that’s all,” Pinsley said, not willing to concede more than that when he didn’t have all the relevant information. “I will try to find out more.”

He went up to another man, a fat man with a glass of wine already in his hand, trying the same tactic as before, of playing on his ignorance of what was happening.

“Excuse me,” he said, trying to make sure that his French had less of an accent to it this time. “But there seems to be a lot of excitement around this evening. I was wondering if you could explain…”

“You don’t know?” the man said. He turned to a man in another corner of the room, looking slightly offended as he did so. “Phillipe, there is an Englishman here who does not know what happened, and yet he somehow has tickets! Can you believe that? When Justine said that she and Albert could not get them?”

He wandered off towards his friend, apparently either forgetting that Pinsley was there or not caring. The inspector could feel his frustration growing, moment by moment. Clearly something had happened here, and clearly it was something big, if so many people had come because of it, but he still had no way of knowing what.

“That one sounded pretty animated by it all,” Kaia said.

“I think he was just upset by the idea of me asking him questions,” Pinsley said. “I will have to find another approach.”

He stopped in the middle of the floor, straining his ears, trying to pick up snippets of conversation while he thought. His greatest strength lay in the ability to reason through problems, not in running around playing catch up, trying to persuade strangers to tell him what he wanted. So he would think.

“…poor girl…”

“…eclairs at de Garique’s patisserie are wonderful…”

“…and after such a perfect performance too…”

“…possibility of another blockade…”

“…second lead they have lost in a week…”

The hardest part of it was working out what fit with what else. It was like some puzzle where one had to put the pieces in the right order, or perhaps like gluing the fragments of an ostrich egg back together for a display cabinet, only this puzzle had been jumbled up with a collection of random other pieces.

Slowly, Pinsley started to take those pieces to see which fit with which others. He put the information together, and when he did so, it was all he could do to contain a gasp of shock. No, it couldn’t be…

He went up to a woman who was dressed relatively plainly compared to some of the others there, as if she found such ostentation rather gauche. There was no polite way to broach a subject such as this, so he came out and asked it without preamble.

“Excuse me,” he said. “My ward and I bought tickets for an evening at the theatre, but the conversations here… am I right in thinking that a young woman was killed?”

The woman gave him a look of disapproval, but then seemed to relent. “Not just killed, she was murdered. They say she was strangled in her own dressing room. It only makes all of this more disgusting.”

“All of what?” Pinsley prompted.

“All if this,” the woman said, with a gesture towards the other theatre goers. “I bought my ticket because I had heard that the play was good. Now, this circus of people wants to be here so that they can say they were where a gruesome murder took place. Perhaps where they hope another will. After all, the original Juliet is missing. It is why the poor girl who was killed was playing her at all.”

“And the show is continuing?” Pinsley said. In London, he would have shut it down while he and the constables climbed all over the theatre, looking for answers. Apparently, they did things differently in Paris.

“They are making noises of ‘oh, the show must go on,’” the woman said. “But we all know that the director is rubbing his hands together in glee, because now these ghouls…” she waved another hand at the people around her “…will pay any price to be here. You say that you are here with your ward? Is that her, the young lady there?”

“Yes,” Pinsley said.

“Then if you have any sense, you will take her out of here. It is… what do you English say? Not a suitable place for a young woman.”

“Perhaps I will,” Pinsley agreed. “Thank you.”

He returned to Kaia, trying to think of what he would say to her. All of this was a lot to take in, and not just because of the shock of hearing that someone had been murdered here, in this place. That was a tragedy, but the police inspector in Pinsley, and the former soldier, could no longer be shocked simply by news of a death.

No, what was shocking was that Kaia had brought him here. Somehow, she had found a spot in Paris where a murder had occurred, just the night before. Put together with what he’d seen of her sending people flying, and Pinsley simply didn’t know what to think. Every iota of reason he possessed said that this should not have been possible, but here they were, and to dismiss it as a simple coincidence seemed utterly unreasonable in its own right.

“What did you find out?” Kaia asked.

Pinsley considered what to tell her. He supposed that he owed her an answer, yet to tell her about the murder now would mean that she would want to become embroiled in all of this. No, the situation was too complex for all of that, at least for now. Pinsley needed to know more, both about what was going on and about this strange talent of Kaia’s, before he revealed the truth to her.

“I haven’t found out enough yet to piece together what’s happening,” he said, because it was even true, as far as it went. He wanted to know more before he committed to anything.

“So now what do we do?” Kaia asked.

That part was straightforward enough, at least, even though a part of Pinsley was whirling with questions.

“We watch the play.”

CHAPTER TEN

Kaia could only stare in disbelief as she and the inspector walked into the theatre. She knew that she should be spending her time focusing on the sensation of the shadows, trying to locate them somewhere within the theatre, yet there were too many things here to distract her, too many things that drew her eye no matter how much she tried to focus.

There were the people. So many people, all dressed as elaborately as anyone she’d seen. The closest thing Kaia could think of to compare to it was when she and the other girls had walked down from the orphanage to the local church every Sunday, into a room full of people dressed in their Sunday best.

This went way beyond Sunday best, though, with the men wearing a variety of formal wear that made the inspector’s long coat look shabby by comparison. The women couldn’t all be wealthy or noble, yet they wore elegant gowns in every color of the rainbow, along with stoles or shawls, and most of them wearing jewelry that seemed to glitter by the light of the theatre’s lamps.

Compared to that, Kaia felt completely under-dressed. Her dress was a lilac one that Lottie had given to her, and she had a shawl at least, but compared to everything in this room, she was bedraggled.

Even compared to the theatre, she didn’t feel decorated enough. As she and the inspector found their seats within the main auditorium, Kaia’s eyes roved over the statuary that covered every corner. It was shaped as everything from elegant flowers to complex gargoyles staring down at the stage as if they were there to rate the performance. The walls were painted in deep, rich reds, and there was gold leaf on the decorations above the doors. How could anyone hope to compete with all that, especially her?

The seats sloped down towards the stage, so that Kaia could see over the heads of those in front of her all the way to where the curtains there stood closed. The stage seemed huge from here, like a giant window ready to reveal another world.

Kaia took her seat, and eventually the lights around her dimmed, leaving only those that lit the stage to see by. The curtains opened, what appeared to be a city street, and young men dressed in what appeared to be old fashioned tunics and hose. She could feel the tension of the silence as the play began.

Kaia couldn’t understand any of the words, since the whole thing was in French. That should have been enough to put her off, yet as the young men started arguing, leading to a brawl, she found that it didn’t matter. She still understood the ideas of what was happening, still saw the emotion of it, even if the language was lost to her.

Now a young woman came onto the stage along with a couple of other actresses, and Kaia understood that this was meant to be Juliet. The girl was lovely looking, with pleasant, open features and the lithe grace of a dancer, but she also looked nervous, as if she wasn’t used to the role.

Maybe that was how all actors looked when they first came on stage, though. Kaia didn’t know; she had never seen a play before. The closest she had gotten to any of this in her life was playing make believe with some of the younger girls at the orphanage, and even then they’d had to be quiet so that Mrs Garrow wouldn’t hear.

This was nothing like that. Kaia could feel a connection to the actions of these people pretending their roles in a way she wouldn’t have thought possible. The young man playing Romeo was a picture of brash action, but also romance, and Kaia felt her heart going out to him and Juliet as he hid beneath her balcony window, listening to her profess her love. The fact that she could tell what was happening despite not understanding a word of it was almost as spectacular as the scene itself.

Kaia felt her emotions rising and falling with the play, with joy and fear, sorrow and laughter all pulled from her just from the way the actors moved and the situations they were in. She tried to imagine what it would be like being able to do that, and now she was thinking about what it would be like to be up there, on the stage.

Kaia could imagine it: her, in a fabulous costume, striding across the boards of the stage, delivering her lines to packed rooms full of rapt, watching people who had come from all over London, or Paris, or the world. They would listen to her, and she would find a way to move them, so that they wept when they were meant to weep, and smiled with joy when they were meant to be happy.

She imagined herself at the center of the stage, delivering the last lines of a play, then standing there as the audience broke into a standing ovation. She imagined flowers raining down on the stage, or people calling out her name.

Kaia had never felt the kind of joy she experienced watching the play, the kind that came from, just for an hour or two, experiencing a life where she was not an orphan trapped at the center of some dangerous game featuring deadly shadows. It was a joy that made her wish that she could be up there, be a famous actress, known everywhere and respected by even the kind of well-off people who came to watch plays like this.

Kaia sat there and kept watching, dreaming all the time that it was her up there acting the part of Juliet, not wanting the play to end.

*

Plays had never been Pinsley’s thing. He would always rather listen to the music of Beethoven or Chopin than watch drama unfold on a stage. The music of the great composers had a kind of mathematical precision to it, where each performance seemed like an attempt to get to some greater truth of the piece, while even the greatest plays seemed simply like people pretending.

A part of Pinsley’s mind insisted that such pretending was inherently suspect. In a logical, rational world, things should be what they were, and not seek to feign being something else. A section of painted scenery should not pretend that it was a villa wall, nor should a play written in English, translated and performed by the French, try to say that all there had magically been transported to Verona.

Of course, Pinsley understood that such things were the whole point of plays, but that little, rational voice was there, nonetheless, critiquing the play to him as it went. The costumes did not reflect what the latest antiquarian works suggested about the time. The characters behaved in ways that had no logic to them.

Of course, he knew that he was using such a retreat into logic to make up for what he’d just learned, trying to pick at the rational holes in the world because Kaia had done the impossible by leading him here, to a place where there had been a murder. He was falling back on that sense of the world as a great mechanism with immutable rules because what had just happened seemed to break all those rules. Pinsley felt unsteady, as if the world were shaking underneath him; but no, that was just the applause for the interval.

Pinsley looked over at Kaia. She was obviously enjoying all of this far more than he was, the joy on her face unmistakable. Pinsley found himself wondering what it must be like for a girl like her, and realized with a start that this was probably the first time she had been able to see any entertainment more sophisticated than a street performer’s Punch and Judy show.

If Pinsley couldn’t take pleasure in the play itself, there was plenty to be had in Kaia’s reaction to it. If he had seen far too much of the world for his liking, Kaia was seeing it all for the first time, with the kind of innocence that could only come from youth. He watched her clapping her hands together with joy, and there was nothing forced or false about that movement. It made the fakery of the rest of it at least a little more bearable.

“You’re enjoying yourself?” Pinsley asked her, wanting to be sure.

Kaia nodded vigorously in response. “I know I should be watching for shadows, but this… no one told me that the theatre was like this. It’s like the whole of the world distilled down onto one small stage.”

Complete with all its petty rivalries, inaccuracies and flaws, if Pinsley knew anything about theatre from London’s productions. He didn’t say that, though, because he didn’t want to spoil Kaia’s experience. He could see how much all of this meant to her, and it was probably the purest reaction in the whole crowd when everyone else there was present to see what would become of the performance after the murder the day before. It was even the reason that he had stayed.

Pinsley was glad now that he hadn’t told Kaia. If he had, then she wouldn’t have experienced this in the same way. She wouldn’t have had a chance to see that she loved the theatre, before she saw the rest of it.

Currently, the theatre was starting a short ballet, after the fashion of an opera, before the next act. It was an addition to the play that Shakespeare would probably never have considered, but here in Paris it seemed to be obvious to both the director and the audience, who applauded politely as the dancers started to come onto the stage, pirouetting and leaping in what Pinsley could only assume was meant to be a grand ball hosted by the Capulets.

“Is this a part of the play too?” Kaia asked, sounding just as entranced by it as she was by the rest of it.

Pinsley was about to explain that no, it wasn’t a standard part, and go on to explain the tradition of having ballets in operatic productions to provide a break for the performers and a wider variety of entertainments when his eyes fell on one of the dancers there on the side of the stage furthest from him.

He didn’t know why his eyes fell on her, out of all of them. It wasn’t that she had the most important part in it, being just one of the chorus. She wasn’t one of those performing the grandest leaps or the big lifts. Instead, she mostly seemed to be keeping time with simple movements, stepping with the others in a complex web of dancers.

Even so, the moment Pinsley’s eyes alighted on her, they fixed there. He couldn’t look away, transfixed by what he was sure had to be a mistake. If not… if not, then for the second time that day, something impossible had happened.

Without thinking about it, he stood, trying to push his way along the row of seats.

“What are you doing, man?” a theatre-goer demanded, pushing him back into his seat.

“Shhh!” a woman hissed. “You’re interrupting!”

Pinsley realized then that he wouldn’t be able to go anywhere until the play ended. All he could do was sit there, his eyes still fixed on the dancer. She was a young woman of seventeen, slender and not very tall, with her dark hair tied back in a braid that whipped around her with every step she took. She was wearing a lot of makeup, but even at this distance, she was unmistakable.

He’d spent all this time looking for her in London, used every resource he’d had, and it hadn’t been enough. Pinsley had searched the streets, had tried to reason out her location, had given her description out a hundred times or more. Now, he understood the reason none of it had worked: he’d been looking in the wrong place.

Unbidden, tears welled in Pinsley’s eyes. He had never been one to display emotion, but now, he couldn’t help himself. He had found the one person he had never dreamed that he would.

She kept dancing, and in those movements she looked just like her mother. There was a grace to them that had always been a gift from her rather than from Pinsley. The ballet ended, and the moment she walked from the stage, Pinsley longed to walk to her, but he was still wedged into his seat.

She came out onto the stage again, this time as a part of a crowd, and Pinsley guessed that she must have a place as some minor member of the cast, performing in whatever parts came up in the plays there. Pinsley hadn’t been enjoying the play before, but now it was agony for him, counting down the seconds until everyone would move and he could go to the one person he’d been looking for over such a long time, the one person he hadn’t been expecting to see here, of all places.

There, on the stage of a Parisian theatre he’d found only because of Kaia’s strange talents, was his daughter, Olivia.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

As the play ended, Pinsley knew that his chance had come to get to his daughter. Olivia was there somewhere in the theatre, and he had to find her.

“Kaia,” he said, waving Kaia back into her seat, “wait here. There’s something I have to do. I’ll find you again, I promise.”

He knew that he had to do that much to keep her safe, at least, but he also couldn’t waste a moment longer before he set off after Olivia. He’d been trying to find her for so long that he couldn’t let this chance go past.

“What is it?” Kaia called after him. “Have you found something?”

If he’d had more time, Pinsley might have tried to explain. He might even have thanked Kaia for bringing him here, for finding Olivia with whatever strange talent she had when all his reasoning and his contacts hadn’t been able to do it. He didn’t have that time, though.

“I’ll explain everything when I get back,” he promised. “Just wait here.”

Pinsley started to push his way through the crowd. It felt as if he were a salmon trying to swim upstream against a torrent, because other people were trying to get to the exits now, ready to spill out onto the streets of Paris.

Pinsley didn’t want to get outside; he wanted to get backstage. He pushed his way forward, and there were a few people down by the stage, clearly wanting to congratulate the cast. Pinsley pushed his way through the crowd towards them, using his elbows to force people out of the way. It felt a little like being in the press of a London street after a crime, when everyone was trying to get forward to look, only here, his warrant card wouldn’t make a difference.

“No one is coming backstage tonight!” a fat man said, standing in front of the entrance to the backstage area.

“I need to get past,” Pinsley said. “I believe that my daughter is back there.”

“And this man is here to meet his beloved, and this woman wants to offer her congratulations. I know what you’re all here for: to see the spot where it happened. Well, I am the director, and I say no. I will not have such ghouls backstage, when… hey, wait!”

Pinsley pushed past him, hard enough that the fat man stumbled. It was a far more direct move than he wanted to make, yet if he didn’t do it, he would never get to see Olivia. He would do far more than just push someone if it meant getting to see her. After so long, there was no fire he would not run through, nothing he would not risk.

Even as the director cried out, other people among the crowd were pushing their way into the backstage area. They probably were there simply to see the spot where a murder had taken place. On another occasion, Pinsley would have found that distasteful and probably helped to shoo them away from there. Now, though, they were a valuable distraction for his own efforts.

He plunged backstage, trying to catch sight of Olivia. Some of the dancers and supporting actors were hanging around in a group together, and Pinsley approached, hoping that Olivia would be among them. There was no sign of her.

“Have you seen Olivia?” he asked, and then realized how it must look, some strange man running up, demanding to talk to a young woman in the cast.

In spite of that, one of the members of the crew waved a hand vaguely off to one side, and with nothing better to go on, Pinsley set off in that direction. He had to pick his way through the chaos of everything backstage. It wasn’t just that the whole place seemed to be a mess of pipes and brickwork, using the catacombs of the city the way another building might use its cellars. There were sandbags and ropes too, along with sections of set depicting everything from a castle’s walls to the interior of a grand ballroom.

Pinsley hurried through it and saw a door ahead, giving a glimpse of the world outside beyond it. A young woman was going through it, and while from this angle it was impossible to see who it was, it had to be Olivia. Pinsley would recognize his daughter anywhere, would know her gait, the barest glimpse of her hair. It had to be her.

Even as Pinsley thought that, the young woman disappeared through the door, leaving him running after her. He burst out into the open air, and the street around the theatre had started to grow dark in the time while they’d been watching the play. He looked around, not able to see which way his daughter had gone, and then he caught sight of her, walking towards the end of the street, turning right.

He set off in pursuit, and it was a pursuit now, running after Olivia and trying to close the distance between them. He was sure that it was her now, and he had to catch up to her. He couldn’t lose her again. He couldn’t.

She was still ahead of him, heading for the square in front of the church of St Germain. There were people in the square, gathering for what appeared to be a late night market that sold goods by lamplight. Pinsley plunged into it, trying to keep pace with his daughter.

Then… then she was gone. It was as if the crowd around Pinsley simply swallowed her up, and with her, every hope he’d ever had. He looked around frantically, trying to catch a glimpse of her browsing at some stall, or even just trying to walk away through the crowd.

There was no sign of her, though. It was as if she had vanished into thin air, the people of the crowd providing perfect cover for it. Pinsley stood there, and it felt as though his heart was breaking. He’d come so close to finding his daughter again that it hurt. He couldn’t come so close, only to lose her.

Yet he had lost her, at least for now. Standing there, Pinsley realized that he couldn’t just keep looking. He needed to get back to Kaia, before she thought that he’d abandoned her. Maybe in the morning, he could try the theatre again. He just had to hope that Oliva would be there when he did.

*

Kaia knew that she probably ought to stay put the way the inspector wanted her to. She ought to stay in her seat and be careful. She’d seen the kinds of dangers that could come from wandering off alone.

Two things made her rise up out of her seat anyway. The first was that everyone else in the theatre seemed to be leaving, so that if she waited, soon she would be sitting there alone, and probably people would start asking her questions about why she wasn’t moving, in French which she couldn’t understand.

The second reason was simply that she wanted to know more about the traces of the shadow she had felt there. It might be more difficult in some ways, investigating without Pinsley by her side, but it did mean that she could focus on the shadows more openly, without worrying about his disbelief.

Besides, she wasn’t some little girl for the inspector to simply order to stay in place. She could make her own decisions, and do what she wanted to do. Right now, what Kaia wanted more than anything was to look around behind the scenes of the theatre. It might even help with tracking down shadows, since this was the place Kaia’s sense for them had brought her.

Her mind made up, Kaia started to make her way down towards the backstage area. She could feel the presence of the shadows lingering here, the sense of something being fundamentally wrong with the world impossible to ignore. She reached the doorway that seemed to lead backstage, and now the man who seemed to be the director wasn’t even trying to guard it. Instead, he was moving among his stagehands, trying to get things packed away properly, or perhaps telling them to help get rid of the audience members who had already gotten back there. Kaia didn’t know which.

Either way, it meant that it was easy for her to slip past him, into the area behind the stage. The sense of the shadows was even stronger here, and Kaia found herself trying to follow it, trying to pinpoint exactly where they were. Or where they had been perhaps, because the traces didn’t feel as strong as they had been when she was chasing the shadows across London. This didn’t even feel the way Bedlam had, with layer upon layer of that wrongness ingrained into the very stones.

The presence of the shadows was still palpable, though, and Kaia found herself following it, down into the heart of the theatre, where there were rooms full of old props, and other rooms with mirrors and rows of costumes that were clearly dressing rooms. She found herself drawn towards one room over the others, and crept towards it on silent feet.

Then its door opened, and a woman came out, staring at Kaia with a hint of panic as she stared at someone she didn’t know, as if there was something very wrong about Kaia being there like that.

Kaia recognized her instantly, even though she wasn’t wearing her stage makeup or costume anymore, but instead a simple dress cinched at the waist by a corset. This was her, the woman who had been out there playing Juliet. She was even lovelier without all of her costume, with high cheekbones and wide blue eyes that seemed to pierce through Kaia, although that might have just been the interrogating look she was giving her.

“Ou est vous?” she said, in a tone that made it clear that it was a question whose answer would either bring a call for help or let Kaia off the hook. And if Kaia had had the first inkling what the answer should be, then everything would have been fine.

As it was, all she could do was raise her hands and back away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t understand.”

“Oh, you’re English,” the woman said, in accented English. “I was asking who you are, and what you’re doing here.”

“I’m Kaia,” Kaia said. “I came backstage because…” she knew that she couldn’t talk about shadows, but maybe there was a better way to do this. “Because I’ve never seen a play before, and it all seemed so amazing. You were the one playing Juliet? You were incredible.”

“But how do you know?” the actress asked. “If you cannot understand French?”

“That’s what made it wonderful,” Kaia said. “It was like I understood it all even though I couldn’t understand the words. It was like it was true, even though you were all just acting. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Ah, I think we have a new fan of the theatre,” the actress said.

“What’s your name?” Kaia asked. She tried to think back to the fliers that had been pasted to the wall. Are you Amelie de Fiaux?”

“Ah, non,” the actress said with a sad smile. “I am Sidonie Herve, her… replacement? Understudy? Tonight is my first night in the role. I am glad that you liked the performance though, Kaia. Here…”

She ducked back into her dressing room for a moment, coming out with a flower. To Kaia’s surprise when she touched it, the petals were made of silk, and the stem was a stick of green painted wood.

“To remember the night by,” Sidonie said. “Real flowers are unlucky backstage.”

Kaia took the memento gladly, holding it close. “Thank you, so much.”

“You’re welcome, although I imagine you should be getting back to the front of house. You didn’t come here alone, did you?”

“No, no, I…” Kaia realized that there was every chance that the inspector would be looking for her by now. She should get back and wait for him. If there were shadows in this theatre, she wasn’t going to find them tonight.

She went out into the theatre proper, and found the inspector standing there, well, more pacing than standing, waiting for her.

“Kaia,” he said. “Where have you been?”

“Where have I been?” Kaia countered. “You walked off with no explanation.”

“I had to…” She saw him shake his head. “No, that doesn’t matter. It’s too late now.”

“You’re not going to tell me?” Kaia asked.

“I don’t have to tell you everything, Kaia,” Pinsley said. “Now, where did you get to, when I told you to stay put?”

“I’m not a child,” Kaia replied.

“You are a young woman in a strange city, and you do not even speak the language,” Pinsley pointed out. “Forgive me for being worried about you.”

Kaia hated that, the way he made it sound like it was her fault for wandering off when he’d done it first. She knew that he was worried for her, but hadn’t she already shown him that she could take care of herself?

“Should we try to look for the shadows now?” Kaia asked.

She knew immediately that she’d pushed too far.

“What I found tonight has nothing to do with shadows,” Pinsley said. “And it is time for us to go.”

“But-”

“Everyone else in the audience has left,” the inspector pointed out. “And we still need to find a place to stay tonight. Our time at the theatre is done, at least for today.”

He said it firmly, and Kaia knew that there would be no budging him. There was clearly something bothering him for him to be so short with her, but right now, Kaia wasn’t in the mood to get it out of him. Instead, she found herself looking around the theatre. She could feel the touch of the shadows there, and that was only one of the reasons she found herself already trying to work out how she would come back.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sidonie was a whirl of emotions as she made her way home through the streets of Paris. She felt delight at how well her premiere as Juliet had gone, but it was all tangled up with sadness that someone else had died to give her the role, and nerves about whether she would be able to do as well tomorrow. If the events of the last few days proved anything, it was that a young actress could always be replaced.

Young? She was twenty-seven, practically ancient by the standards of the theatre. This was the kind of age when most of the young ingenues of the theatre had already been married off to artists, or occasionally even to wealthy men who got caught up in the glamor of the theatre. The ones who didn’t often gave up, trying to find jobs over in the Marais district or the Gare du Nord, where her home waited.

It was a long walk across the city, over the bridges that crossed the Seine and then up past the Palais de L’Elysée. Perhaps, Sidonie thought, she should have taken a carriage, but such things were expensive, and on the kind of money that an actress earned it wasn’t a liberty she could afford to take. If there weren’t this business of the killer, she wouldn’t even have entertained the thought, and she wasn’t about to let fear change her mind now.

So she walked, out past the abbey at the heart of St Germain du Pres, her coat wrapped tightly around her in the night air. In a month or so, when Spring came, it would be the most beautiful city in the world, but for now, it was simply cold. Sidonie was starting to regret her decision to walk, but there were no carriages in sight right now, so she had to keep going.

As she walked, Sidonie found herself thinking about the young Englishwoman who had come backstage earlier. She’d had such joy for the theatre, such enthusiasm when it came to the beauty of it.

There were days when Sidonie had almost forgotten about that side of things, with the constant work that went into preparing for performances, the shouting of directors, the low pay, the starving herself to look the way a leading actress was supposed to look…

Sidonie hadn’t given up, though, and the presence of the young woman, Kaia, had reminded Sidonie why. She loved it. She loved the theatre. Not just the applause, not just the chance at fame or importance; Sidonie loved it for itself, for the chance to be someone else, to bring whole worlds to life. Compared to a gift like that, one prop rose barely seemed like enough to repay it.

Sidonie was still pondering that thought when she heard a sound somewhere behind her. She turned, but didn’t see anyone there. Perhaps it was just a trick of her hearing, or one of the normal sounds of the Paris night.

She started walking again, keeping on the streets leading north, towards the river. She’d gone only a few paces when she heard the sound again. This time, it was more distinct, with the sound of a footstep scraping on cobblestones.

Sidonie started to walk faster.

The footsteps behind her sped up to match hers. Sidonie felt her heart starting to beat faster in her chest, fear rising in her.

No, no, this couldn’t be happening. Sidonie tried to work out what to do, where to go. Should she run? No, that would just make her look foolish if this turned out to be nothing. Maybe it was just someone who happened to be walking the same way as her.

To test that theory, Sidonie took a turning away from the main street, hoping that the footsteps would walk on by. They didn’t, and now Sidonie was worried enough that she didn’t care about looking foolish.

“I don’t have any money,” she called out. “I’m an actress, I don’t have anything.”

It might work. Paris was a city with more than its share of thieves, in spite of the Sûreté’s efforts, but thieves were only interested when there was something worth taking. There was a reason the pickpockets of St Germain mostly didn’t bother the cast at the theatre. Please let it just be a thief.

Just to be sure, Sidonie took another turning, and for a moment she thought that it had worked. Then she heard the footsteps again, closer now than ever. Sidonie started to run.

“Help!” she called out, projecting the way she might have for the back row of a theatre. “Somebody help!”

Help didn’t come. Even if there were people rushing to Sidonie’s rescue, even if there were Sûreté officers coming right now, they wouldn’t be quicker than the feet chasing after Sidonie. All she could do was run and try to hide.

She found another alleyway, this one smaller than the last. Sidonie ducked into it, hoping that the shadows there would hide her. She listened to the footsteps, feeling as though her heart might burst with the terror as they came closer.

She couldn’t hear them anymore.

Seconds stretched out as Sidonie waited there, listening in fear. She didn’t dare to move, didn’t dare to breathe. She waited for so long that she felt as if she might pass out from the lack of air. Still, there was no sound.

Finally, Sidonie dared a sigh of relief. She had lost whoever it was, assuming that there had been anyone at all. Maybe she’d been mistaken about the footsteps, or maybe it really had just been a case of someone heading in the same direction as her. Either way, it was over now.

She would probably laugh about this with the others back at the theatre tomorrow. They would probably joke about highly strung actresses, and how the whole situation had them all seeing things, and…

That was the moment when a figure stepped into the alley, wrapped in an opera cloak, advancing towards Sidonie.

“What do you want?” she demanded. “What’s this about? I haven’t done anything!”

The figure kept advancing, the combination of the cloak and the shadows meaning that Sidonie couldn’t see anything of them, except two gloved hands, the strangling length of a velvet rope stretched taut between them…

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Kaia woke, staring at peeling plasterwork on the ceiling and smelling the musty scent of a room that hadn’t been aired well enough. It took her a moment or two to remember where she was.

When she did, she sat up, staring round at the room of the small hotel she and the inspector had found in Saint Germain du Pres. When they’d got in there and the inspector had asked for rooms, Kaia had been tired enough that it hadn’t mattered to her what the room was like. Now, she couldn’t help seeing the stains on the wallpaper from the gas lamps, and the chips in the washstand.

It was a long way from Kaia’s new room in the vicarage, but at the same time, it was still better than the dormitory of the orphanage back in London had been. She still had a room to herself here, in a city as spectacular as Paris. That was more than Kaia could ever have imagined, growing up.

She got up, washed using the chipped wash stand and dressed, taking a second dress Lottie had given her from the bag that she’d brought with her. It was a simple cream and taupe affair, without the vividness of her other, but that one had probably reached the point where Kaia should wash it. In any case, just the idea of having two dresses to choose from was enough to make her want to wear it, fitting it over her layers of underskirts and fastening its stays.

Putting on her boots, Kaia went to the door of the inspector’s room and knocked. He didn’t answer. Kaia assumed that he was still asleep, and considered knocking louder, but he probably wouldn’t appreciate being woken up like that. Kaia had heard him pacing through the walls last night, worrying about something.

Kaia wanted to ask him about that, but didn’t know how. He’d been short enough with her last night, about whatever it was that had sent him rushing off. Kaia wanted to know about that, and about the sense of the shadows that she’d felt there. She’d been the one to find the place, and there was clearly something happening there, but Pinsley had refused to say anything about what was happening, treating her like… well, like some kind of child who needed to be escorted everywhere.

She certainly didn’t need a chaperone down to breakfast, at least, and maybe it was better to let the inspector sleep. Kaia went downstairs, to a dining room whose floral wallpaper was stained in a couple of places, but where a series of small round tables were covered with delicate lacework tablecloths. There, the landlady was laying out something that seemed significantly more elegant than a standard English breakfast. Kaia couldn’t see any sausages, porridge or toast, and instead found herself devouring small, elegant pastries.

“They’re very good,” she said to the landlady, who smiled and said something back in French.

There were a few other diners around Kaia, although most of them seemed to be getting up to leave for whatever business they had in Paris. A clock on the mantlepiece said that it was almost nine, which seemed fabulously late to be breakfasting when the orphanage would have had her doing chores for an hour by then at least.

The lateness of the hour meant that, by the time she had finished her breakfast, Kaia was alone except for the landlady, who seemed to speak no English. She sat there for several minutes, trying to work out exactly what she should do while she waited for the inspector to wake up.

There were newspapers, depicting events in Paris and beyond, but Kaia had no way to understand them. She spent another minute trying to feel what she could of the shadows in the city, trying to work on that sense while she could, trying to understand it. There was nothing to understand, though; the understanding of where the shadows were simply was, deep in the heart of her being.

After that, Kaia ran out of things to do. She found herself itching to be out there in the city, trying to find out more about the shadows, and what they were trying to do. She knew that the inspector would want her to wait for him, but how much longer would he be?

Even if he woke up now, how much would he help? He’d been crucial in getting Kaia to Paris, and there was no doubting that he was brilliant when it came to reasoning things through, but this wasn’t about reason. It was about what Kaia could feel and see, and Pinsley didn’t seem to really believe that, even now. Then there was his reluctance to tell her about what had happened last night. There was no point in waiting for him if he wasn’t going to tell her things.

As soon as Kaia thought it, she knew that she wasn’t going to wait. She mimed writing motions at the landlady until the woman brought her a pen and paper.

Going out to see if I can find out more about the shadows and the Shadowseers. Will try to get back for lunchtime. Don’t worry, I can take care of myself. K.

Kaia wrote Pinsley’s name on it. “For the man upstairs. For when he wakes up.”

She wasn’t sure if the landlady understood her or not, but she took the message. Going back to her room, Kaia fetched her coat and shawl, wrapping up warmly before heading out into the chill of the Paris morning.

It was time to find all the things that Xander had promised Kaia were waiting for her in Paris.

*

Kaia set out through the streets of Paris, hearing the sounds of conversations as she walked down the street, and making sure that she didn’t get in the way of any of the passing horses. There was a church or an abbey not far from their hotel, which looked even older than some of the ones back in London.

She started to walk, following the traces of the shadows, and realizing that they were leading her back in the direction of the theatre. Kaia walked there, watching the people around her, trying to decide what she would do once she got to her destination. Perhaps she would be able to persuade someone to let her inside, and from there, she could ask questions.

Kaia kept walking, past the shops that were just starting to open up to the public, and a site where it seemed that the streets were starting to be rebuilt in the same grand style as the boulevards she’d seen earlier. Now that she was able to simply walk through the area, rather than hurrying through it in pursuit of what she’d felt, she could see that the area around the theatre was a kind of artistic district, with small galleries and artists’ studios dotting the streets on either side of her. She walked past a coffee shop where half a dozen older men seemed to be arguing with one another over what she assumed was some philosophical point or other, while a door or two down, two men were carrying sculptures out from a building and setting them on a cart, whose horses waited with a kind of “seen it all before” patience.

Kaia remembered the way to the theatre, but even if she hadn’t, she would have been able to follow the traces of the shadows. They were faint now, but they were there, indelible as ink stains on the city. She could feel other shadow traces too, but these were the ones she’d been drawn to last night, and so these were the ones she wanted to investigate first.

Eventually, Kaia got to the theatre and stood staring up at its edifice. It was still impressive, still hinting at the mystery and beauty of what went on within with its columns and statues, only now it was much quieter than it had been the night before. Walking up to the front doors, Kaia found them locked.

It hadn’t occurred to her that the theatre might be closed. It hadn’t occurred to her that a place as huge and magical as this would ever close. Just in case it was simply the front doors that were locked, Kaia made her way around the building, looking for a side entrance. She found one and knocked on it.

A man in shirt sleeves, pants and work boots looked at her and fired off something in rapid French.

“I’m sorry,” Kaia said. “I don’t speak French. Do you understand English?”

The man said something else to her, and although Kaia couldn’t understand his words, she could make out the impatience in his tone.

“I was here last night,” Kaia said. “I need to get inside.”

She took a step towards the door, but the man shook his head, snapping out something else. Kaia could only stare in surprise and disappointment as he shut the door in her face.

That hadn’t gone anything like she expected.

Then again, what had she expected? Had she hoped that the nice actress from last night, Sidonie, would be there and recognize her? Had she hoped that some member of the cast or crew who spoke enough English to understand her would be the first to meet Kaia, letting her try to talk her way inside? Even then, what could she say? If she tried to explain about the shadows and the Shadowseers, they would probably assume that she was either making up a story or just spouting nonsense.

Kaia leaned back against the wall opposite the theatre in frustration. She hadn’t thought this through. She’d assumed that she would be able to find things out without the inspector present. She’d wanted to find them out that way, if only to show him that she wasn’t completely helpless when it came to investigating.

Now, though, she wasn’t sure what to do next, and the sheer difficulty of the task Kaia faced started to hit home. She was meant to be going out into the city, asking questions, but she couldn’t even talk to most people. She could feel the lingering traces of shadows, but would that even necessarily lead her to the Shadowseers? She’d come all the way to France on the word of a man who’d been possessed before, and now Kaia found herself wondering what on Earth she was doing here. How was she meant to find her sister when she couldn’t even say the word “sister” in French?

For a moment, the futility of it threatened to consume Kaia. She clenched her fists against that feeling. No, she wouldn’t give in to despair. She hadn’t when shadows had flung themselves at her back in London. She hadn’t during years at the orphanage. She wasn’t going to now.

So it wasn’t certain that following the traces of shadows would lead her to the Shadowseers; it was still the best chance Kaia had. If the shadows were plotting something in Paris, didn’t it make sense that a society dedicated to stopping them would be somewhere close at hand? For now, following those traces was the best lead she had.

Kaia started to feel for them, more strenuously than she had back at the hotel, trying to stretch out her senses as much as possible. It meant a rush of feelings and sensations that made her glad that she was leaning against a wall, the flood of different responses threatening to overwhelm her. Some felt fresh, some felt older. A few didn’t feel like shadows so much as like the more general kind of darkness that had hung over Bedlam. It was as if Kaia had a map of the city, composed in shades of shadow, so that she could feel the places where such things were more intense, and the places where they had yet to touch Paris.

Now, all she needed to do was fit that web of sensations to the actual streets.

Kaia started to walk out through the city, heading vaguely north, towards the river. For now, it seemed to her that walking was the only option that she had. She needed to learn about this city, try to find out something using the extra sense that she seemed to have since other methods weren’t open to her. At the very least, it might give her something that she could tell the inspector when she went back to the hotel later. Kaia definitely didn’t want to come back empty handed.

She made her way back through the district that held the theatre, heading north. She passed a grand, square building whose sign even she could decipher, proclaiming it to be some kind of grand school of art.

She was still walking when she saw the crowd gathered, off near a side street. Deciding to see what was happening, Kaia started to walk over, joining what proved to be a group of at least fifty or sixty people, all trying to get further forward to look at something.

It helped then that Kaia was small for her age, because it meant that she could slip through the gaps in the crowd more easily. She could see now that the crowd was being held back by the French equivalent of the police, although these looked more military than the top-hat wearing peelers she was used to in London. A quartet of large, serious looking policemen stood guarding the mouth of an even smaller alley, keeping people back with truncheons in hand and grim looks.

Past them, Kaia thought that she could just make out something covered by a white sheet. It took a moment for her to make sense of that shape, but when she did, she found herself both horrified and strangely fascinated. There was a body here?

“Excuse me,” she said. “Does anyone speak any English? What’s going on? I don’t understand what’s happening.”

A man turned to her. His English was halting, but still considerably better than Kaia’s nonexistent French. “You should not go… be here, girl. You are more… too young to see this, yes? You should run along.”

Why did everyone want to tell her where to go and what to do, like she couldn’t decide for herself?

“If you tell me what’s happening,” Kaia said.

“Non. A girl should not ask such things.”

Kaia realized that she was going to have to try a different tack, and tried to think of something that might work with a man who obviously thought that this was no place for a girl like her.

“Please, I want to go,” she lied. “But my father saw the crowd and sent me to find out what was happening. I can’t go until I do.”

For a moment, she thought that the lie would be too complex for the language barrier between them, or that the man simply wouldn’t believe her. Then, he shrugged.

“There has been another murder,” he said. “Another actress, from the theatre along the way.”

“Another actress?” Kaia said. “Actresses have been dying?”

“One missing, one found strangled, and now another… Sidonie Beauvais. Now, that’s enough. You should go.”

Sidonie Beauvais. Sidonie. Kaia’s blood ran cold at the sound of the name. What were the chances of it being someone else? No, it had to be her, had to be the actress who had spoken to Kaia just last night. Now, she was dead, and actresses were being murdered.

Suddenly, Kaia had a pretty good idea of exactly what Inspector Pinsley was keeping from her.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Gone?” Pinsley stood in front of the landlady and stared at her in incredulity. “You’re sure Kaia is gone?”

“The girl who speaks no French is gone,” the landlady repeated.

Fear for Kaia sprang up in Pinsley. Had she left because of what he’d said? Was this to be the same as with Olivia? Was she going to disappear the way his daughter had?

“Probably off shopping with your money on the Champs Elysée,” the landlady said in a dismissive tone. “All the girls who like theatre and shopping go there. Here, she left a note. It’s in English.”

Pinsley didn’t point out that there was an implicit admission that she’d read it in that. Instead, he read Kaia’s note. It was infuriatingly brief, without any details on where she’d gone. Didn’t she realize how dangerous it could be out there, with a killer on the loose?

Well no, because he hadn’t told her.

Pinsley realized the enormity of what he’d done by keeping Kaia uninformed like that. He’d put her in danger, and now he was going to have to find her.

“You let her go?” Pinsley asked. “When there is a killer out there?”

That just earned him a particularly Gallic shrug. “She is not my daughter, or niece, or whatever you are saying. And she is not an actress, so she should be fine. Did you hear that the killer got to another one?”

“That was two days ago,” Pinsley said.

“Non, last night. Oh, it is not in the newspapers, but only because the department of the censor is so strict,” the landlady said. “Another actress, strangled, just like that, and from the same play!”

“Where?” Pinsley demanded. That fact only made all this more urgent. It brought other worries to the front of his mind, too. Olivia was an actress. If someone was killing actresses… his daughter might be in danger. That thought was almost too much to bear.

“In an alley off the Rue de l’Universite,” the landlady said.

Instantly, Pinsley found himself heading for the door, trying to work out how best to go about finding Kaia. If she stumbled around the city blindly, trying to find these shadows of hers, there was every chance that she might end up in danger.

Another thought propelled him forward just as quickly as that one. Olivia was in at least as much danger as Kaia. She acted in the theatre where the others had. She was exactly the kind of young actress who had been killed.

Pinsley was sure that it was her he had seen back at the theatre, but now, it seemed that he might have found her only for her life to be in danger.

*

Pinsley plunged out into the cold of the Paris streets. It wasn’t as bad as London might have been on a February morning like this, but it was still enough for his breath to frost the air in front of him.

He set off in the direction of the theatre first, reasoning that Kaia might head that way. In any case, if it was open, there was a chance that Pinsley might be able to find Olivia there. He walked quickly, knowing that every moment he wasted was another in which the two of them might be in more danger.

When he got to the theatre, though, it was quiet and dark. Perhaps there would be people inside, but he doubted that they would open the doors to some random Englishman. He could try to force his way inside, but would Olivia even be there if there was no performance taking place? Kaia certainly wouldn’t have been able to talk her way inside when she couldn’t speak the language.

That left the site of the murder as a next spot to check. Whatever instincts Kaia possessed had drawn her towards the theatre and the murders there, so it made a kind of sense that she might find herself drawn to the spot where this killing had occurred as well. The landlady had given him at least a general location for it, so Pinsley set off.

He observed the people he passed. Most were just going about their mornings, whether that involved trying to get to places of work, shopping, or delivering things. He could see a tension in some of it, though. People were moving quickly, not really talking to one another. Perhaps it was just the aftermath of the attacks in the city earlier that month, but people had seemed friendly and open enough just yesterday. Pinsley suspected that the people of this district of Paris had heard about the murders, and they were starting to leave their mark.

If this had been London, the newspaper criers would have been shouting the news to anybody who would listen. Here, though, it seemed as though the Emperor’s control over bad news meant that the story would only come out in the newspapers once the killer had been safely apprehended by the SSûreté, assuming that happened at all.

Almost as the thought came to him, Pinsley found himself passing an office of the French city police force, marked with the imperial N and sporting the classical stamp that Baron Hausman seemed to be imposing on the city under the Emperor’s direction. It had the kind of Corinthian columns and elaborate carvings that… well, that one might find on the British Museum or one of the royal palaces. Britain had an empire of its own, after all.

He stood there staring at the office of the Sûreté for several seconds, trying to make up his mind. Logically, the best way for Pinsley to ensure that his daughter and Kaia both stayed safe was to catch whoever had been killing actresses. The best way to do that was probably to work with the French police, who would presumably have more information about what was going on.

It wasn’t a decision that Pinsley made lightly, though. When he and Kaia had set off from London, it had seemed vital to stay away from the Gendarmes and the SSûreté, because the whole Orsini business would not have them reacting well to anybody English. Especially to a police inspector. On that level, walking into a police station and declaring who he was seemed like a recipe for trouble to Pinsley.

Yet, if it would allow him to potentially protect his daughter from a killer, he would do far more than that. His mind made up, Pinsley started to walk towards the police station.

Inside, there was more of the classical motif, including a marble bust of the Emperor after the Roman fashion, and a large N on one wood paneled wall. In other senses though, it was simply a police station, as familiar in its general form as any in England might have been. There were the desks at which the constables worked, and a door at the back that obviously led to the cells. There were stairs leading up to other parts of the building, and, of course, a large desk sat at the front with an even larger sergeant standing behind it. He had the look of an officer who had been chosen for his bulk, and had a moustache that only added to it, giving him the general countenance of a walrus.

“Can I help you, citizen?” the man asked in French.

Pinsley collected himself. “Yes, and I believe I can help you, as well.”

“You are English?” the sergeant said. His meaty hands rested on the counter.

How did everyone know? Pinsley was certain that his French was flawless.

“I am,” he admitted. “Inspector Sebastian Pinsley, of the London Metropolitan Police.”

“An English… how do you say? Bobby? Here? Now?” The sergeant seemed to be reddening, as if he couldn’t quite believe that Pinsley was there, and the pressure of it was building up inside him. “An English policeman comes to Paris so soon after the English helped a madman to set off bombs here?”

“It was necessary for me to visit,” Pinsley said. He didn’t want to go into the whole reason why he had, mostly because he suspected that it would sound insane to any reasonable police officer. He had to believe that the sergeant in front of him would be that. “I had to chaperone a young lady of my acquaintance while she visited, and I also wanted to visit some family of mine living in Paris.”

That might not have been his intention when he set off, but it was definitely his purpose here now.

“What family?” the sergeant demanded. “Where do they live?”

“My daughter,” Pinsley said. “And I don’t actually have an address for her.”

Even if he’d had one, he would have been careful about simply handing it over when that would only create trouble for Olivia.

“You don’t know where your own daughter lives?” the sergeant asked. Pinsley knew why, because any good police officer would pick up on an inconsistency like that one. Even so, he could feel his own frustration rising.

“We’re getting away from the point,” Pinsley said.

“And what is the point meant to be, sir?” the sergeant asked.

“My point is that I happened to be in Paris when I heard about the murders that are occurring. Actresses being killed. I want to help, if I can.”

“You want to help?” The sergeant stood there for a moment and then called back to the others in the station. “Hear that, lads? This Englishman wants to help us solve our murders!”

The whole front office of the police station laughed along with the sergeant. Pinsley felt a tinge of humiliation at that, and also anger at the disdain in it. Yet at the same time, if some Frenchman had walked into Scotland Yard and demanded to be allowed to help, how would he have reacted?

“What on Earth do you think you can offer us by poking around in our affairs, Englishman?” the sergeant demanded.

“I believe that my investigative skills may be of some use,” Pinsley said. “Just a few days ago, in London, I solved a murder inside a lunatic asylum, when everyone else was trying to blame the situation on-”

“I don’t care!” the sergeant shouted at him, bellowing just a little way from Pinsley’s face. “I don’t care if you have solved the mystery of exactly how you English murdered the first Napoleon, the case of how some tiny island got to think so much of itself and the mystery of how you British manage to eat what passes for your food. Here, murders are the business of the SSûreté, not of ‘random’ travelers.”

The emphasis he put on the word random suggested that he didn’t believe Pinsley’s motives. That was potentially a problem, but not as much of a problem as the rest of this.

“Now,” the sergeant said. “Why don’t you get out of my station, find this daughter of yours at the address you don’t have, and then get out of Paris before I start thinking that maybe the English sent you for a reason? Maybe to tidy up your country’s involvement in the attempt to kill the Emperor?”

“I assure you,” Pinsley said. “I am just here to help.”

“And if you’re still here in ten seconds, I’ll arrest you for wasting my time,” the sergeant said. “One, two…”

Pinsley beat a retreat. Sometimes, discretion really was the better part of valor. He couldn’t help feeling utterly foolish as he did it. Of course the French police would turn away some civilian, some Englishman, offering to help. He would have done the same if someone off the street had offered to help with his work.

Except that he’d taken Kaia out of the cells to do exactly that.

That thought caught Pinsley a little by surprise, but the next one did not: he wasn’t going to give up. Perhaps the SSûreté would find the killer, but what if they didn’t? What if Pinsley did as they asked and walked away, only to hear that more actresses had been killed? That Olivia had been killed? He wouldn’t be able to forgive himself.

No, he decided as he stepped back out into the Paris air, he was going to have to keep going regardless of what the French police thought. He had the skills to do this, and he’d at least been into the theatre. He would find the killer, and make sure that Olivia was safe. If that made an enemy of the SSûreté, that was a price was well worth paying.

Pinsley checked his watch. If Kaia had been serious in her note, then she would be back at the hotel, and it would be better to have her with him. Mind made up, he started to stride back to the spot where they’d stayed the night.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

When Pinsley arrived back at the hotel, he was both relieved and slightly surprised to see Kaia sitting there in the dining room, eating an early lunch. He took the chair opposite her without waiting to be asked, and waved away the landlady when she approached. He had more pressing things on his mind than lunch.

“Where have you been?” he asked. “Kaia, going out on your own like that… you could have been in danger.”

“What, from murderers?” Kaia shot back. The look she gave Pinsley wasn’t entirely pleased. “That’s right. I know about the actresses being murdered. Sidonie last night, and the ones before that you didn’t tell me about.”

“I… didn’t want to spoil your first experience of the theatre,” Pinsley said, although even to him, it sounded like a weak excuse. “I wanted to be sure about what was going on before I said anything.”

“You wanted to protect me,” Kaia said.

“Yes,” Pinsley agreed.

“No!” Kaia shot back. “I thought we’d been through this? I don’t want to be kept in the dark for my own protection. I want to know what’s going on. I want to be a part of this. Including finding out what’s happening with these murders.”

Pinsley sat there, trying to think. She was right of course; he’d tried to cosset her, and it hadn’t worked, because Kaia had only ended up exposed to the truth anyway.

“You’re right, of course,” he said.

“I… am?” Kaia replied. She sounded as if she had been expecting more of an argument regarding her involvement.

“I should have told you about what was happening once I knew,” Pinsley said. “And you know about the other murder, last night as well.”

“I got close to the spot where it happened,” Kaia said, “but there wasn’t much that anyone would tell me.”

“The French police told me even less,” Pinsley said.

“So you’ve been looking into this?” Kaia asked him. There was just the hint of an accusation there still at not being included.

“I began when I heard of this morning’s killing,” Pinsley replied. “The murder at the theatre was worrying, especially so soon after the disappearance of another actress. Another murder, though… that is a sequence, with the theatre as the obvious connecting factor.”

“There are shadows involved,” Kaia said. “I could feel them in the theatre. I know you won’t believe me, but that’s at the heart of this.”

“I believe that much,” Pinsley said. He wasn’t sure what he felt about this business of shadows just yet. Clearly, Kaia could do some things that he couldn’t explain at this point, but it didn’t necessarily follow that she was correct about the shadows she claimed to see.

At the same time, though, he couldn’t just leave this to the Paris police, not when his daughter was in the place where the killer chose his victims. She might or might not be in danger of being targeted by the killer, but at the very least, going back to the theatre was Pinsley’s best hope of reconnecting with Olivia, and trying to solve this seemed like his best chance to spend time there.

“We need to go back to the theatre,” Pinsley said.

“It’s closed,” Kaia replied.

“They are probably rehearsing,” Pinsley said, “but that doesn’t mean we won’t be able to find a way inside.”

“All right,” Kaia said. “Just as soon as I’ve finished my… what are ‘escargot’ anyway?”

“Snails,” Pinsley translated without thinking.

Kaia pushed her plate away from her, making a face. “I’m done.”

Pinsley had to resist the urge to laugh. “It’s really no different than eating whelks, or cockles, or-”

“Let’s go.”

*

They walked back to the theatre, and it was still as quiet and dark as it had been when Pinsley had walked over there earlier. Still, he had to hope that there was a way inside, and that his daughter might be in there somewhere.

“There’s a door around to the side,” Kaia said. “But when I knocked on it, someone just shooed me away from it.”

“Still, it gives us a possible point of entry,” Pinsley said. He started to think of ways that they might do that without the advantages conferred on him by his warrant card when he was in London.

“Even if we get inside, won’t people throw us out?” Kaia asked. She imagined that they wouldn’t react well to people interrupting their acting.

“My impression is that theatres are chaotic places,” Pinsley said. “People come and go, everyone is moving quickly. In a place like that, I suspect that once we are inside, people will assume that we are meant to be there. They might think that we are guests of the play’s patrons, or visitors.”

He saw Kaia nod, obviously seeing the logic of that idea. She raised the issue that was currently occupying Pinsley’s mind, though.

“So, how do we get in there in the first place?”

That was the problem. If the front door was locked tight, then that left this side door of Kaia’s. It might be possible to force entry there, but if anyone saw them, there would be no chance of gaining cooperation later on from anyone in the theatre. No, they needed to find a way in that wouldn’t be seen.

For the moment, Pinsley and Kaia stood there, watching the door at the side of the theatre. Pinsley saw it open a couple of times, first so an actor could step outside, taking a break, then so that a delivery boy could bring a package.

He saw their chance.

“Come on,” Pinsley said to Kaia. “We need to go shopping.”

He led the way down towards the boutiques of the Champs Elysée , seeing Kaia’s face light up at the sight of them. He went into a small store that sold lace goods, and picked up a pair of gloves, taking them over to the clerk there.

“Could you wrap them, please?” the inspector asked.

“Your young lady does not wish to wear them from the shop?”

“They are for a friend of hers,” the inspector lied. “A present when we see her.”

“Ah, of course.”

The clerk wrapped up the gloves, and Pinsley paid, before leading the way back in the direction of the theatre.

“What was all that about?” Kaia asked, and then answered her own question. “Wait, you saw someone getting in with a package, so if we’re there to deliver a package, then they might let us in.” She seemed to think for a moment. “But that won’t work, because they’ll hear that we’re English, so we can’t be delivery people.”

“And so?” Pinsley asked. It was like the days before he’d gone into the army, when he’d done his stint among the dreaming spires of Oxford, and his tutors had prompted him with questions, expecting him to figure the answer out for himself.

He saw Kaia worry at that. “So we can’t be delivery people, but we can be fans, there to present a gift at the stage door.”

“Exactly,” Pinsley said, pleased with her. “It would not work with just me, because they would not admit some strange man demanding to see an actress, but a man bringing his ward, who is clearly a fan…”

“It will work,” Kaia said. “It has to.”

They made their way to the stage door, and Pinsley knocked upon it. A man answered it, looked them both over, and then his gaze fixed on Kaia.

“This girl was here before,” he said in French. “She wanted to get in, but I sent her away.”

“Ah, my ward was overenthusiastic,” Pinsley said. “She is so taken with the theatre, you see. She insisted on buying a gift for one of your actresses. Would it be possible for her to go in to deliver it personally?”

“Well, I don’t know,” the man on the door said. “It’s meant to be rehearsals.”

Pinsley slipped him a few francs. “It would mean a lot to her.”

“Well, I guess there isn’t any harm in it, and with everything that’s been going on, I guess one of the actresses getting a gift will probably lift spirits. Who are you here to see?”

“Olivia,” Pinsley said, deciding that this was his best chance to find out if his daughter was there.

“I don’t know the name,” the man said. “Still, with all the changes recently, who can keep up? In you go.”

He let them through, and Pinsley led Kaia into the theatre. There, backstage, everything seemed to be a tangle of pipes and ropes, pieces of set left in position to be hauled out onto the stage and props set out where they might be used. It was grimier back here than out front, as if the theatre had saved all its grandeur for the parts that faced the world. The layout seemed almost random, composed of whatever space had been left over after the main auditorium was built.

“That was a lot easier than I thought it would be,” Kaia said.

Pinsley nodded. “It also widens our pool of potential killers considerably.”

“Because anyone could get in,” Kaia said.

“Exactly.”

Out towards the front of the theatre, Pinsley could hear the sounds of actors delivering their lines, suggesting that they were in the middle of rehearsal.

“…Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace, Profaners of this neighbour-stained steel…”

Translated into French, the rhythms of the language sounded strange, changing the poetry of the Bard’s original, although the power of the play was still there.

“Come on,” Pinsley said to Kaia. “We need to find someone who can help us find out more about what’s going on.”

He headed towards the sounds of the rehearsal, both on the basis that it was away from any spot where the stagehand who had let them in might start to wonder while they were still there, and because it was where the majority of people in the theatre would congregate.

Pinsley found that he was correct in that, at least, because the space backstage was crammed with people rushing back and forth. Some wore costumes, while others seemed to be in just their normal clothes for this rehearsal, perhaps because their costumes were being cleaned between performances.

It wasn’t just the actors. Stage hands pulled on ropes to shift elements of the scenery, while a couple seemed to be moving gas lamps here and there to try to get the proper lighting.

The question now was finding a way to get someone to talk to them. Pinsley looked around until he found an actor in Venetian costume looking bored, probably because he was done with his part. He was a young man a few years older than Kaia, with swept back dark hair, a lithe frame, and an expression that said he would rather have been anywhere else other than at the rehearsal.

“Excuse me,” Pinsley said in French.

“I speak English,” the actor said. Really, this was starting to get tiresome. Was his accent so terrible?

“We were wondering if you knew anything about where the actress Sidonie was?” Kaia said, jumping in. “Only we spoke last night, and I wanted to give her this gift.”

That was a clever move, one Pinsley was proud of. Kaia knew that Sidonie was dead, but asking it gave them a way to broach the subject without it seeming wrong.

Pinsley saw the actor wince.

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you,” the actor said, with a pained look. “But Sidonie is dead.”

“Dead?” Pinsley asked, proud of his own acting skills for the moment. “What happened?”

The actor shook his head. “I don’t know anything. Only that this is our fourth Juliet in as many nights. It’s a wonder the city doesn’t shut us down.”

“Why doesn’t your director?” Kaia asked.

“Are you mad?” the actor shot back. “The show goes on. It doesn’t matter what happens. You keep going.”

That sounded to Pinsley like the kind of thing that only made sense to theatre folk. It certainly didn’t make sense to him, but he was grateful for it, simply because it meant that there was a greater chance of finding Olivia.

“Look, I don’t know anything,” the actor said. “Should you two even be in here? M. Lachelle?”

Pinsley recognized the bulky form of the director as he stepped backstage, and worse, it seemed that the other man recognized him.

“You should not be here!” the director declared. “No members of the public at rehearsal! Out! Out!”

Pinsley and Kaia headed back to the stage door they’d come in through, stepping out into the alley. There, the stagehand who had let them in seemed to be eating his lunch alongside another man in the same kind of simple, utilitarian clothes, smeared with paint in a way that suggested that he’d just been painting a set.

“Thank you for your help,” Pinsley said to the first stagehand.

“Shouldn’t be letting people in,” the second said. “Not with the killings. No offense, sir.”

“None taken,” Pinsley said, and decided to take a risk. “In fact, I am a detective, hired to look into the matter.”

“Hired? But you are English,” the second stagehand said.

Pinsley nodded gravely. “Which only shows how seriously certain parties are taking this, if they hire a man all the way from London.”

That seemed to catch the stagehands’ interest.

“Certain parties?” the first stagehand said.

“I must keep that part confidential,” Pinsley said. “But suffice it to say that those same parties would be very grateful for any information you have that aids in finding the truth.”

He was playing a dangerous game lying like this, but without his usual authority, it was the only strategy that Pinsley could think of.

“Well, everyone knows who has to be behind it,” the second stagehand said.

Pinsley looked at the man sharply. Everyone knew? If there was an answer to this out there and it could be found so easily, Pinsley was more than ready to hear it.

“Who?” Pinsley asked.

“Camille du Pont, of course,” the stagehand said. “An actress. She tried to get a role in this production, but no one would work with her. Particularly Sidonie. She is poison, that one.”

“And do you know where I might find her?” Pinsley asked.

“This time of the day? The Café du Mere,” the stagehand said. He pointed. “It is just a street or two over that way.”

“Thank you,” Pinsley said. He turned to Kaia, switching to English. “I think we have a lead.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The woman who had been Amelie de Fiaux walked through the departments of le Bon Marche, trying to make sense of the way her memories said that it was exciting to be in this grand store, with its sections for everything from clothing to luggage, patisserie to groceries. It seemed like such a strange thing to be excited by.

Yet there was a different kind of excitement to a place like this. As loathesome as it was to be forced to walk among the hordes of humanity, and to walk in the midst of bright light, it was also an experience that would have been hard to have in any other circumstances. Being joined like this brought protection from the light, and freedom to act in the human world, even as it cut back on the strength and purity of the shadows.

This woman was different than the others the shadow had inhabited. Those had been opium addicts and madmen, their wants simple things, that they were easily driven to. This one’s weakness was both less and more, less catastrophic and obvious, but easier by far to use. The need to be adored was absolute, unchanging. It did not even require a steady supply of human narcotics to maintain, although the shadow that was Amelie now had obtained some just in case.

At the same time, she was… sweeter than the ones the shadow had inhabited before, more innocent in some ways, and more broken in others. It was having to pluck at particular strands more strongly than usual to maintain control.

We can make you the most important woman in the world. You will do something no one else ever has.

That was a matter for later, though. For the moment, she was going about her life as a French woman, trying to understand this city, with its human-made beauty and its delicious patches of darkness. There were spots around the places where the guillotines stood that seemed to thrum with darkness, and other places that held more recent tremors of violence, thanks to the bombings in the city.

As always in a joining such as this, there was give and take. The shadow was not Amelie exactly, but nor was it purely what it had been. Having memories of a life, even having a particular physical form, changed the way a being reacted, and what it chose to do. It changed the very choices available, with the role of a beautiful young woman closing some doors and opening others easily. Even now, the assistants in the store smiled at Amelie as if they hoped that she might give them one iota of attention in return. Amelie apparently already knew how to use such exchanges, and the shadow filed that possibility away for future use.

Amelie learned the streets of the city, and the names of the rich and powerful, although it turned out that much of the information the shadow needed was already inside her. It seemed that the actress had kept track of such things, with the hope of becoming a mistress to someone of importance. Apparently here, in Paris, that meant something.

For now, though, she was engaged in shopping. The acquisition of physical things seemed pointless to the shadow, when the whole of human physicality seemed like an aberration distracting from the shifting tides of the darkness, and the ability to flit from one patch of shadow to the next. Every item owned or bought seemed like a chain tying it to form over formlessness, but still, it was here, because here was the kind of place that Amelie might have been if she had just been going about her life.

“Amelie? Is that you?”

The shadow that was Amelie turned and found herself facing a young couple. Memories always took a moment when inhabiting a body, and so it took her a second to discover that this was Lucette and Robert, who were supposedly friends of hers. Lucette was a petite, slightly plump woman who wore baggy dresses that were halfway to being an artist’s smock. Robert apparently was an artist, and looked the part with his wild hair and the occasional smudges of paint on his features. The shadow could sense the kinds of fractures in him that might let it in, a weakness to drink, most probably, and for an instant it was tempted, but only an instant.

Lucette embraced her. “Where have you been, Amelie? What have you been doing? You were meant to come to Claudine’s for dinner, but you never showed up. And they say that you abandoned your role in the theatre.”

The shadow that was Amelie collected herself. “Frankly, Lucette, I don’t think it’s any of your business.”

“Not my business?” the other woman said. “I’m worried about you.”

“Maybe you should worry about yourself,” Amelie said. “You’re aware that Claudine only invites you to dinner out of pity, yes? That she doesn’t actually like you?”

It was a thing that Amelie had in her memories, but would never have said without the shadow to push her.

“Amelie!” Robert said. “How can you say such a thing?”

“Oh, would you rather I said something else?” Amelie asked. “Like about the pass you made at me in your studio, the time you asked to paint me?”

That got a gasp from Lucette, swiftly followed by the appearance of tears in her eyes. Strange, how easy humans were to manipulate. They reacted so foolishly to the smallest things.

“I don’t know why you’re talking like this,” Lucette snapped, “but I don’t have to stand here and listen to it.”

“Yes, yes,” the shadow in Amelie said, waving a hand dismissively. The knowledge of how to show contempt was right there in the actress’s mind, even if she would never have done that to her friend. “Run along now.”

“I know you think that you’re too much of a grand actress for the likes of us,” Robert said. “But soon it will all come crashing down around you, and you won’t have us to turn to.”

“Why would I want either of you?” the shadow asked. She watched Lucette storm off in tears, then smiled sweetly at Robert. “Shouldn’t you go after your wife? Tell me, what will you say when she asks you if what I said was true?”

He swung a slap at her, but Amelie caught it. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have had the strength to, but now, she pushed Robert away with ease. The only reason that she didn’t kill him was that she suspected it would cause too many complications.

He stared at her for a second or two longer, and then ran off after his wife.

Amelie went back to her shopping. If some of the other customers stared at her out of the corner of their eyes, she didn’t care. After a minute or two, she left, being sure to take another exit than this body’s friends. Another confrontation with them was a complication she couldn’t afford.

Not with her mission in Paris only partially complete.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The prospect of maybe finding someone who had a reason to hate the actresses at the theatre didn’t fill Kaia with the same excitement that it did the inspector. For her, it seemed obvious that this was about the shadows, so looking for more human motivations seemed like wandering down a blind alley.

Still, she followed to the Café de Mere, where there were tables set up outside in a way that would only have invited being rained on in England, while Kaia couldn’t see the interior through blacked out windows. A sign next to the door proclaimed Can-Can! Les meilleurs vins! Animations quotidiennes!

Kaia almost ran into the inspector as he stopped short outside the café.

“Kaia, if the actress we seek is in there, I have to go inside,” Pinsley said. “But this is really not a suitable establishment for a young lady.”

“I’m fine,” Kaia said.

“No, no, I must insist,” Pinsley said. “The Can-Can is a most licentious dance. People have been arrested for performing it. I would be irresponsible to bring a young lady, one who is not yet eighteen, into such a place.”

“You realize that you’re not actually my chaperone?” Kaia said, amazed that the inspector would bring her here, only to want to leave her behind. Again. He was making a habit of this, and it was a habit Kaia did not like.

“But I do feel that I am responsible for your welfare,” Pinsley said. “And there are practical considerations too. Your presence in such a place might well invite comment, or see us both ejected. Then, we will not get answers regarding the murders.”

That was one point Kaia couldn’t argue with. Even if she didn’t feel that this was the way to go about finding answers, she couldn’t risk some clue that was important being lost because of her.

“All right,” she said. “But I don’t like it. I want to be a part of this.”

“I know,” the inspector said. He looked sorry about it, but Kaia wasn’t sure if that actually made it better. “Please, though, wait here. I will not be long.”

Kaia was starting to feel like a piece of luggage to simply be left whenever the inspector arrived anywhere. Even so, she nodded. “All right.”

“Good. And Kaia? Please, this time, for once, actually stay here.”

Kaia bristled slightly at that, but she let him go. She wasn’t a child, who had to be told to stay, but equally, that meant that she could see the importance of it all for herself. She sat there at one of the tables, and wished that she’d asked the inspector to send her out a warm drink or something at least.

It was cold out here; not as cold as it would have been in London, but still cold, and Kaia felt herself starting to shiver with it. It was also frustrating, having to sit there, not able to do anything to help.

Back in London, it wouldn’t quite have been possible to skate on the Thames this late in the year, but it would still have been freezing. Here, it was a more insipid sort of cold that got into Kaia’s limbs slowly, making her fingers feel numb.

There were other differences between the cities, too. The clean facades of the boulevards they were rebuilding here didn’t have an equivalent that Kaia had seen back home. Even in its richer areas, London was a tangle of built and rebuilt spaces. Both cities had their grand buildings, but here, those buildings seemed to be all white marble and grand columns, rather than the strange Gothic spikes of parliament back home. Kaia had the sense in Paris of a city being redesigned according to some grand plan, whereas London was renewing itself more chaotically, as great projects such as the railways demanded.

Thoughts of London made Kaia a little wistful. She loved travelling like this, and seeing a place that was so different, but London was the place she knew best, the place she could call home. Admittedly, for most of her life, that home had involved an orphanage where there had been no kindness, and no chance to get out to see the rest of London, but somehow, the city still had the feeling of home to Kaia. That was a strange thought, put like that, and Kaia found herself pondering it, trying to work out what it was about London, about England, that made her feel nostalgic now that she was elsewhere.

Kaia was still thinking about that when the feeling hit her.

For a moment, she thought that it was the sensation of the shadows, the same way that she’d felt it before. This felt different, though, not quite the same, more like…

More like the things she’d felt around Xander, and around Tabitha Greene’s body. If they were both like her, then maybe, just maybe, what she was sensing was the Shadowseers?

It was almost too much to hope, but what else could that sensation mean? It was close enough to the shadows that it had to be connected to them in some way, yet it wasn’t the same. The feeling didn’t have that fundamental undercurrent of wrongness to it, but it did feel connected to Kaia in a way she couldn’t entirely explain.

She looked round, thinking that she should fetch the inspector, but he was still in the café. If he was right about her not being able to go in there, then she would have to wait outside for him to come out. If she did that, then what if the feeling faded, and Kaia couldn’t find it again?

No, she couldn’t risk that. She couldn’t risk losing her only chance to find the Shadowseers. She could do this and still keep her word to the inspector; she wouldn’t go too far, and she would definitely be back before he got done in the café.

Setting off, Kaia started to follow the sensation. It was more like following a vague scent on the air than a sound or a signpost. Kaia had to stop at every turn, trying to work out if the feeling was stronger one way or another, following it as best she could.

To most of those around her, it must have seemed that Kaia was just out for a stroll, and she made sure that when she stopped to check the direction, she made it look like she was glancing into a store or pausing to read a sign. She didn’t want anyone thinking she was strange and stopping to ask what she was doing, when she didn’t have any means to even understand them.

Kaia kept following the sensation, and it occurred to her that she was getting a little far from the street where she’d started. The streets here weren’t the broad boulevards that were being built around Paris; instead, they were a tangled maze of smaller alleys that looked much older than all the other buildings around her before. These parts were more like the rundown parts of London, right down to the buildings that leaned in towards one another, close enough that two people on the top floors might have been able to reach out and touch.

She should probably turn back, because the inspector might be coming out of the café any minute, and because if Kaia got lost here, she might never find her way back again. She couldn’t even ask for directions. More than that, every step that she took away from the café was one step deeper into doing what she’d promised not to.

Yet if she didn’t keep going, Kaia would never find the source of the feeling, would never find the Shadowseers she hoped were there. Picking an alleyway where the sensation felt stronger again, Kaia kept going.

The buildings there were tall and crumbling, with half-timbered frames and walls that had been painted a long time ago. That paint had faded and peeled, while the windows of several of them were broken. As Kaia made her way along the row of them, she couldn’t escape the feeling that eyes were watching her from some of the windows, even though it was hard to tell if any of the buildings were occupied or not.

It reminded her of the brief time she’d spent in the Devil’s Acre in London, and Kaia found herself looking around sharply for the possibility of cutpurses or other criminals. Only the lingering feeling that drew her onward kept her there at all.

Finally, Kaia stopped, because the feeling grew stronger as she stood in front of one of the buildings compared to the others. It was a tall tenement building, with the abandoned remains of a shopfront down at the bottom. There had been a sign there once, with the remains of a few greying letters still visible, but Kaia couldn’t read it properly now.

In there. The others like her were in there, if they were anywhere in this city, and if Kaia found them, then she would presumably find her sister too. That had been the point of coming to France, after all. She couldn’t hold back now, even if the building in front of her looked as if the others around it were the only things keeping it from falling down.

Was this really where the Shadowseers were holed up? Actually, though, it made a kind of sense to Kaia. The Shadowseers were meant to be a secretive group, so wouldn’t it be easier for them to hide somewhere like this than in some grand location? Especially in Paris, where waves of revolution had swept through it over the last century?

Hope rose in Kaia, and she slipped forward, knowing that she couldn’t leave it at that now. She had to know what was going on in there. She had to find the Shadowseers, and her sister. Walking up to the front the apparently abandoned building, she tried the door.

Almost to her surprise, it opened. On closer inspection, Kaia saw that the lock was broken. She slipped inside, moving quietly through the remains of a storefront, stripped bare either by the storekeepers moving out or passing thieves. There was a door at the back, leading to stairs that headed up into the tenement proper.

There were old pictures on the wall, painted or drawn by what appeared to be a variety of people. There were cobwebs on the ceilings, and dust on all the furniture of the rooms she passed. There were clear paths through the dust, though, where people had been walking. Kaia followed those paths, assuming that it would lead her to people, to the Shadowseers.

She came to a door, and heard the sound of people talking in French beyond it. Kaia hesitated for the space of several breaths, then pushed it open.

A group of people, mostly rough looking men, was sitting around a table on which cards had been set out. All of them, men and women, looked up as Kaia entered.

“Ou est voux?” one of the men demanded.

“I’m sorry,” Kaia said. “I don’t speak French. Does anyone understand me? I’m looking for the Shadowseers.”

“Ah, English,” one of the men said, looking Kaia over and smiling in a way that wasn’t entirely friendly. “What is a pretty English girl doing walking in here, among us?”

“I told you,” Kaia said. “I’m looking for the Shadowseers.”

She said the word more clearly this time, just in case they hadn’t heard it the first time. Were these the people who shared a strange talent with her? Who fought against the shadows without letting the world know that they even existed? Was her sister in this room somewhere?

Even as Kaia asked the question, she knew the answer. The feeling that had brought her to the building was still there, but now that she was in the building’s heart, Kaia could feel the almost stale taste of it. It was the difference between the feeling she’d had around Xander and the feeling she’d had on seeing the mark on Tabitha Greene’s arm for the first time. One had been there, vibrant and alive, while the other had been dead for hours.

This was a place where the Shadowseers had been, but it was not where they were now. Kaia had come here looking for her sister and for those like her, but if they’d ever been here, they were long gone.

Kaia started to back away.

“I’m sorry,” she said, lifting her hands as she started to realize the truth of what had happened. She’d just walked into the middle of a place she shouldn’t be, a place of thieves and vagabonds. “I think I’ve walked into the wrong place.”

“Oh, that’s definitely true,” the one who spoke English said. “Completely the wrong place.”

“So I…” Kaia realized just how dangerous the situation she was in had become. “…I’ll just be going.”

“Oh, don’t go,” the man said, and he snapped something in French to the others so that they started to circle between Kaia and the exit. “I think we’re just getting started.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Kaia tried to look for a way out of the room, but there were men and women between her and the exit now. Too late, she realized her foolishness in coming here alone, and in wandering off after the Shadowseers.

Instead of finding them, she’d walked into the kind of place that people didn’t walk out of.

“I don’t have any money,” she tried, because it was simply the truth. The inspector had all the money. If that was all they wanted from her, then maybe they would simply frighten her a little and let her go now that she knew that they weren’t going to get anything for the risk of robbing her.

“Well, that’s a pity, ma petite,” the one who spoke English said. “But I’m sure we can find another way to get some value out of you. Even in the new Paris, there are plenty of people who will pay for a pretty English girl.”

He stepped forward, reaching up as if he might touch Kaia’s face. This close, he stank of unwashed sweat and garlic. She slapped his hand away.

“Stay away from me,” Kaia said.

“Or what?” he asked.

“The last men to try this ended up beaten bloody,” she snapped back. “My travelling companion is an inspector with the London police.”

She didn’t like hiding behind the threat of the inspector like that, but right then, it seemed like her best chance of getting out of there. Criminals might be afraid of the threat of the police when they wouldn’t listen to anything else.

“This is not London,” the one who spoke English said. He grabbed Kaia’s arm then.

She thought about trying to call for help, or break free, or simply hit him. None of them seemed likely to work, not here, with a dozen other people around her. Real fear rose in Kaia then, because she realized just how helpless she was there. There was nothing she could do to save herself then, and the consequences of failing were worse than Kaia could have imagined.

The man who’d grabbed her started to pull Kaia deeper into the room, towards one of the chairs there. Kaia tried to drag her heels and he struck her, almost casually.

That was when Kaia felt the power start to rise up inside her.

“You don’t want to do this,” Kaia said. Another second or two and the power would burst out of her as it had before, sending them all flying.

Only it didn’t. Instead, it seemed to spread out into the people around her, suffusing them, flowing into them, connecting Kaia to them so that she knew them.

“You don’t know what I want, girl,” the man said.

Except that she did. She couldn’t read his mind exactly, but it was almost as good. In that moment, Kaia knew all of the hopes and dreams of the people in the room. She knew what they wanted. She knew what drove them. She knew them. She knew more than that, too.

“I do,” she said, in French, and she was astonished to hear the sounds coming out of her own mouth. “I know what all of you want.”

That knowledge flooded into her, and it felt so strange, knowing so much. For a moment, Kaia felt uncomfortable with it, because it felt like an intrusion, an invasion of privacy deeper than anything else she could have done. It was like reading a hidden diary, but a thousand times more personal.

She pointed to one of the men there. “You want to go back to the countryside, because the city isn’t what you thought it would be.”

She saw him stop dead, his expression shocked, but she was already pointing to one of the women. “You want reassurance that the pain in your side isn’t the same thing that killed your mother.”

The woman gasped in surprise, and Kaia pointed again. “You want a life that isn’t just robbing people, you want an honest job.”

Again, she pointed, and again. It was so easy to see what lay in the hearts of the people around her.

“You want to know where you’re going to find cheap bread. You want to find a husband, but you think you aren’t good enough for one. None of you want to be here, doing this,” Kaia said. She was worried in that moment by how close this was to what she’d felt of the shadows, with their probing for weaknesses, their preying on desires. Yet she wasn’t trying to take these people over, or trying to force them to do anything evil, only to stop them from hurting her.

She stared at the man who’d grabbed her. “Except you, Henri. You’ve wanted to hurt people for as long as you can remember, just because you can. You’re like a cancer growing at the heart of this house, twisting it and the people there.”

“How do you know my name?” the man who’d grabbed her demanded. He let go of her wrist and stepped back. “How do you suddenly speak French? You are a witch, a mesmerist!”

Even as he backed away, Kaia did the same. “You don’t have to listen to Henri,” she said. “You don’t have to do what he says. He makes you all worse.”

They stared at her, and at each other. Kaia thought that she saw tears starting to fall from the eyes of one of the men there.

“Why do we listen to you, Henri?” another man asked. “What have you ever brought us except trouble?”

Kaia stepped through the door as calmly as she could, because the same part of her that knew these people knew that if she showed fear now, the hesitation she’d woven with her knowledge of their hearts’ desires would be gone. Henri would shout for them to get her, and they would fall on Kaia like a pack of hungry dogs.

So she walked calmly out of the door, leaving the others there trying to make sense of what was happening. Only when she was safely out of the room did Kaia start to run, down through the building and out into the alley. She didn’t stop until she was well out of the tangled medieval streets and back on the main boulevards.

Kaia stopped there, leaning against one of the trees that lined them, trying to catch her breath. She also tried to make sense of what had just happened. The most disappointing part of it was that the Shadowseers hadn’t been there, in the spot where she’d been able to sense them. They’d moved on. Perhaps they weren’t even in Paris anymore.

That thought made Kaia feel empty. She’d been so caught up with the idea of finding them, and finding her sister, that it hadn’t even occurred to her that they might not be there. They could be anywhere now. They could be somewhere else in Paris, but they could just as easily be in Australia, and Kaia had no way of knowing.

Only the strange turn that her powers had taken cut through the disappointment at not finding her family. She was used to her powers coming out in explosive, uncontrolled bursts. This had been different, very different. The last vestiges of the power were fading now, but the knowledge that had come with it still seemed to be there. Including…

“Excuse me,” she said to a passing Frenchwoman. “Can you understand me?”

“Of course I can. You are speaking French. Are you mad?”

“No, no,” Kaia said, or rather non, non, because she was speaking French. “It’s just that I wanted to make sure that my accent was all right. I’m English, you see.”

“Yes, it is fine,” the woman said. “Better than fine. I would not have known that you were English…” She sniffed the word “…if you had not said so.”

She walked off, leaving Kaia to wonder at her newfound skills. She started to walk back towards the café. She had to tell the inspector about this.

*

From the moment Pinsley walked into the café, he felt uncomfortable. It wasn’t just the high kicking Can-Can dancers on a small stage, showing far more ankle than would have been allowed in England; it was the whole grubby air of the place, with fat, greasy looking men drinking even at this hour, and the staff having the grim look of people who would rather be anywhere else. The space itself had small round tables set out at irregular intervals, a wooden floor, and a counter against which an owner with an impressively unkempt moustache lounged as if he would rather be anywhere else.

Pinsley walked up to the counter, and had to wait for more than a minute before the owner even deigned to look at him.

“What do you want?” he asked. “We have coffee, absinthe, anything you want.”

“I’m looking for Camille du Pont,” Pinsley said, not wanting to spend a moment longer in this place than he had to.

“I only answer questions for customers, Englishman,” the owner said, scrubbing the countertop with a cloth so grubby that it probably made things worse.

“A coffee, then,” Pinsley said, handing over the money. “And Camille du Pont.”

The owner handed over a cup of steaming coffee, and then pointed to where a woman was waiting tables. She was of middling height, with her dark hair kept in check beneath a relatively simple bonnet with a bavolet ribbon at the back. Her features were sharp, more striking than pretty, and she wore a simple dress with an apron over it, in what was probably a deliberate contrast to the dancers.

“What do you want?” she asked as Pinsley moved over to her, carrying his coffee. “I saw Gaston pointing, so you must want something.”

“I want to talk to you,” Pinsley said, taking a seat at one of the tables and gesturing for her to join him. She stood, instead. “It’s about the production of Romeo and Juliet at the Theatre Rue St Germain.”

Her eyes narrowed at the mention of the theatre. “That place? They wouldn’t know talent if it bit them!”

“I had heard that you weren’t happy about it,” Pinsley said. “Is it true that you auditioned to be Juliet?”

“And they didn’t want me,” Camile said. “Fools. Can you believe it?”

Pinsley chose his words carefully. “I’m told that you are a very fine actress.”

He gestured to the chair opposite him, and Camille sat this time, looking pleased that someone had recognized her talents, even if it wasn’t the theatre.

“I am,” she said. “But they said that I was too difficult to work with. Difficult! As if that isn’t another way of saying that I don’t just blindly go along with whatever the director wants.”

Having talked to her for less than a minute, Pinsley suspected that the full difficulties amounted to more than that. There was something bitter and sharp edged about Camille du Pont. He found that he had no trouble whatsoever believing that she might be able to do someone harm.

What he believed didn’t come into it, though. Whatever he had experienced in the last few days, whatever Kaia’s talents meant for the world around Pinsley, he was still a rational man. He needed proof. He needed Camille du Pont to give something away that he could use, some thread that he could pull at further.

He observed her, taking in the tiredness of her posture, the rigidity with which she held herself in spite of that. She was proud, and such pride wouldn’t suffer being ignored for others.

“It must have made you angry, being overlooked for the part,” Pinsley said.

“It’s not just some actor nonsense,” Camille replied. “If I don’t work, then I don’t eat, I can’t afford my rent. But yes, I’m angry. Angry that worse actresses than me all got the leading role.”

“Are you aware of what has happened to those actresses?” Pinsley asked, and didn’t give Camille time to think before he confronted her with the next part. “Two of them have been found dead, and one more is missing.”

“Then it looks like I had a lucky escape, doesn’t it?” Camille said. Pinsley saw the moment when realization dawned on her face. “Wait, you think I had something to do with it? Who are you to ask me about this?”

“I have been hired by an interested party to look into the killings,” Pinsley said, repeating the lie that he’d used with the stagehand. He didn’t like lying, but even the illusion of authority was better than not having any at all. He suspected that without that lie, Camille would refuse to say anything more. “Right now, your jealousy about the role gives me a reason to look at you. So, where were you the last three nights?”

“I was at my new job,” Camille said. “Like I said, if I don’t work, I don’t eat. I got a part in a new production of Reynard the Fox at a theatre out in Versailles. So If you think I’m your killer, then you need to think again.”

Damn, Pinsley had really thought that this might come to something. Of course, Camille could be lying, but her alibi was so easy to check that she clearly wasn’t. Versailles was outside the city, too, far enough that there would have been no way for Camille to get back in time to kill anyone. Then there was the fact that she was a relatively short, lightly built woman. Would she really have been able to violently strangle the others so easily.

Pinsley’s heart fell as he realized that he’d wasted his time here.

Although maybe not completely. There were still things he could ask that might help, and more personal things he might be able to get answers to.

“Then, as someone who clearly isn’t the killer, perhaps you can help,” Pinsley suggested. “Can you think of any other actors who have reasons to hate this production? Perhaps someone else who was turned down for the role?”

“M. Lachelle is not a popular man,” Camille said. “Although…”

Pinsley waited in silent anticipation.

“I did hear that their first choice as Romeo didn’t work out.”

That caught Pinsley’s attention. A former Romeo, killing the actresses playing Juliet? It seemed outlandish, but far from impossible.

“Who?” Pinsley asked.

“Pierre Duchene was the actor. A real creep. Used to show up drunk, pick fights. I swear, he spent more time leering at the actresses than practicing his lines.”

That sounded even more promising to Pinsley. Maybe he was going to get answers out of this after all.

“Do you know where he is?” Pinsley asked.

Camille took another few seconds to think, but then shrugged. “If you want to find him, you’ll need to check the wine shops, although he has a small place on the Rue Boutarel, on the Ile Saint Louis.”

“Thank you,” Pinsley said. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

“Now, if that’s everything?” Camille said, in a tone that made it clear that it had better be.

Still, Pinsley knew that he wouldn’t have this chance again, so he had to take it.

“Just one more thing,” he said. “You must know a lot of the actors and actresses in the city.”

“Of course,” Camille said.

“Including a lot of the ones playing smaller parts?” Pinsley said.

“I make a point of learning their names,” Camille said. It sounded like a nice touch until she said the next part. “That way, I know who is coming up after the roles that should be mine.”

She laughed with it, but she didn’t sound as if she was entirely joking. Was everything so bitter and brutal in the theatre? Still, it gave Pinsley the chance to ask what he wanted to know.

“Have you heard of one by the name of Olivia Pinsley?” he asked. “I believe she may have been acting in the production of Romeo and Juliet.”

There was another of those pauses as she thought, and to Pinsley, it seemed as if it dragged out forever. Maybe it was just because he wanted the answer so much.

“Olivia is a common enough French name,” Camille said, “but Pinsley? What kind of name is that? No, I would have remembered that name.”

It didn’t mean anything, Pinsley had to remind himself. Olivia could simply be acting under an assumed name, a French name. He was all but sure that he’d seen her. This wasn’t the moment to give up on that possibility, despite this setback.

Nor was it the moment to give up on trying to find the killer. Camille might not have proven as fruitful a lead as he’d hoped, but at least she’d given him one name that he could follow up on. Wherever Pierre Duchene was hiding in the city, he and Kaia would find him.

He headed out of the café to tell her the news, looked around, and felt an instant mix of panic and anger rising in him.

She was gone. Again.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

By the time Kaia got back to the café, the inspector was already waiting for her outside it. She could tell by the look on his face that he wasn’t happy about it.

“Kaia, where have you been? I thought I said that you should… wait, is your face bruised?”

Kaia put her hand to the spot where Henri had struck her. Clearly, the bruise there was already starting to rise, although it probably didn’t have to be much for the inspector’s powers of observation to pick it up.

“Kaia, what happened to you?” Pinsley asked, sounding concerned. In that instant, he seemed to have gone from the cold inspector, angry that she wasn’t there, to an almost fatherly picture of concern.

“I got too cold waiting,” Kaia said, the words coming out in a rush, “but then I felt something, and I followed the feeling, and I ended up in this house. There were these people there, but they weren’t the Shadowseers like I expected, they were just this group of criminals holed up there. One of them grabbed me and hit me, but then I did this thing where I just knew everything about who they were and what they wanted. Oh, and I can speak French now.”

Kaia took a gasping breath, and realized that everything that had just happened in the tenement was hitting her all over again. She was blurting it all out in a panic because now, she was panicking in a way that she hadn’t when she’d been back at the tenement building.

“Wait, slow down,” the inspector said, holding up his hands. “Take this one step at a time. You were attacked?”

“In a tenement building a little way from here,” Kaia said. It was hard to put her thoughts in order now, because it seemed as if they were all coming at her at once. “One of them grabbed me and hit me when I told him to let me go.”

“Show me where,” Pinsley said, his expression suddenly furious. “I’ll-”

Kaia shook her head, though, cutting him off. She didn’t need him to go there now and get some kind of revenge.

“I dealt with it,” Kaia said.

“How?” Pinsley asked.

“I talked to them,” Kaia said.

“You talked to them? In English?”

“In French,” Kaia said.

Now it was the inspector’s turn to shake his head. “But you don’t speak French, Kaia.”

“I do now, it seems,” Kaia told him, and then repeated the phrase in French, just to emphasize the point.

“But that’s… impossible,” Pinsley said. He looked as if he couldn’t make any sense of it. “Maybe some kind of unconscious learning? Being immersed in the environment…”

Perhaps because he couldn’t make any sense of it, of course he focused on the other parts.

“What were you even doing, wandering off alone, putting yourself in danger?”

“You left me alone first,” Kaia shot back. She still wasn’t happy with the inspector about that. “You left me out here like I’m a dog to be tied up outside a butcher’s while you go inside. If you’d been with me at the tenement, then none of this would have happened!”

She saw the inspector pause at that, deflating slightly.

“You’re right,” he said. “I put thoughts of propriety ahead of anything else.”

“Including what I actually wanted,” Kaia said. “You didn’t listen before when I said that we should follow the feeling of the shadows, and you weren’t listening when you asked me to just wait for you.”

“There was no way you would have been permitted inside,” the inspector said.

Kaia had to admit the truth of that, but she still didn’t like it. “I know, and I know that I shouldn’t have gone off, but it… I thought I had a chance of finding my family.”

Again, the words seemed to strike home with the inspector.

“I just don’t want to risk losing you. After my daughter, perhaps I am being… overprotective.”

Kaia could understand that, but she still wasn’t going to let him leave her out of this.

“Let me be a part of all this,” she said. “I can look after myself.”

“You still haven’t fully explained how you escaped,” Pinsley said.

“I told you,” Kaia said. “I talked to them. It was like I could see into their hearts.”

“If you’re suggesting that you can read minds now, like some spiritualist-”

“Not their minds,” Kaia insisted. The difference was hard to explain. “I could see what the things they wanted most in the world were. I understood them, who they were.”

“It still sounds very unlikely,” Pinsley said.

“Even after all you’ve seen I can do?” Kaia countered. That was the part of this that made it strangest: the inspector had seen her do impossible things. Was it normal for people to push that aside? To look away because it challenged what they thought about the world?

“You have done several inexplicable things,” Pinsley admitted. “And it seems that you can speak French. You also led us to the theatre, where…”

He tailed off, not finishing that.

“Where we found the murders?” Kaia guessed.

“Not just that,” Pinsley replied. “There is something else I must tell you. Shall we walk back in the direction of the hotel? You look tired, and it sounds like you’ve been through a lot.”

Kaia felt exhausted. It seemed that this use of her powers had taken a lot out of her after all.

“All right,” Kaia said. “But I know you’re just buying time to think of how to say this.”

“Through mystical powers?”

“Just because I know you by now,” Kaia replied, as they started to walk back. “What is it, Inspector? Something has been bothering you ever since we went to the theatre, and if it’s not simply the murders, then what is it?”

“I told you that my daughter ran away,” Pinsley said. “I believe… I believe that I saw her in the theatre the night we went there.”

That news came as a shock to Kaia, partly at the thought of Olivia being there, but also at the thought that Pinsley wouldn’t tell her about it. Other pieces of the puzzle started to make sense then, though.

“That’s why you wanted to get backstage so badly that night,” Kaia said.

Pinsley nodded. “Olivia always loved the theatre. She and her mother would go. She used to play pretending to be other people, and I never thought anything of it. Now though, it seems obvious that she wanted to be an actress. Perhaps she didn’t feel that it was an ambition she could tell me.”

“Because it wouldn’t have been suitable?” Kaia asked, unable to stop herself.

“Exactly,” Pinsley said. Kaia could hear the regret there in his voice. “It seems that my need to do the correct thing has led to more problems than just today. I tried to speak to her that night, and I have asked after her.”

“You need to keep trying,” Kaia said. She knew how much the inspector’s family meant to him. More than that, she knew how much not having a family had meant to her. If her father could have come to the orphanage to find her, she would have given anything to make it happen. “You can’t give up. We could go to the theatre right now, and demand to be let in again.”

“They wouldn’t allow us,” the inspector said. “Besides, things aren’t that simple.”

“What’s not simple?” Kaia demanded. Family meant everything. It was the biggest reason she was in Paris, after all. “You have to try to find her. You have to do whatever it takes.”

The inspector smiled wanly. “You don’t understand, Kaia. You haven’t lived long enough to make the kind of mistakes that complicate things with your family.”

“I’m too young to understand?” Kaia said. They were really back to that. “I understand that you’re missing out if we don’t go to the theatre right now.”

Pinsley kept walking towards the hotel, though.

“We’ll go there,” he said. “But not yet, and not just to find my daughter. We have to do this, but we have to do it the right way. We’ll get you back to the hotel. After what you’ve been through, you should rest. And then… we will find a man who I believe may be responsible for all of this.”

*

Pinsley was relieved once he got Kaia back to the hotel, although it was hard to contain his shock when she started to talk to the landlady.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you before,” she said, in French that was, frankly, even better than his own. Her accent had a strange roughness to it, though, as if it had been copied directly from… well, from exactly the kind of Parisian street tough she claimed to have learned the whole language from in a matter of moments.

“That’s…” the landlady began, and then turned to Pinsley. “I thought you said that she didn’t speak French?”

“She has been taking lessons,” Pinsley said, unable to contain a small smile. “And making very good progress.”

He was glad that he wasn’t the only one astonished by Kaia’s sudden proficiency in the language.

“What’s your name?” Kaia asked the landlady. “I’m Kaia.”

“I am Madam Farge,” the landlady said. “Tell me, young lady, are you eating properly? You did not finish your escargot.”

“I had to leave in a hurry,” Kaia said. “And now, I think I should probably go lie down for a couple of hours. My chaperone here will be taking me back to the theatre, tonight, after all.” She looked over at Pinsley. “Won’t he?”

Pinsley refused to be pushed into it, though. “Perhaps, if it is relevant to the case.”

“Case?” Madam Farge said. “What case?”

“Monsieur Pinsley is attempting to acquire a case of champagne to take back to England,” Kaia said. She was enjoying this far too much for Pinsley’s tastes. “He thinks the business might take him back to the theatre, but I say that we should go anyway. Someone important to him works there.”

“We do not know that for sure,” Pinsley said, trying to contain his annoyance that Kaia was trying to press the issue now. “As I have said, we might go, if it is appropriate. For now, though, you have been through a rough time, Kaia. I imagine that you are tired.”

“All right, all right,” Kaia said, heading for the stairs leading up to the rooms.

“I will bring you up some food later, dear,” Madam Farge said, as Kaia moved out of sight.

“I thought your policy was that diners had to eat in the dining room at set times?” Pinsley asked, confused by this sudden strain of niceness from the hotel’s proprietor.

Madam Farge whirled towards him, lifting a finger. “Don’t think I don’t see the bruise on her cheek. I know about men like you.”

“You think I hurt her?” Pinsley said, scarcely able to believe the accusation. “Kaia is like a daughter to me.”

Yet he was afraid to go see his own daughter, because of how badly that reunion might go if he didn’t handle it carefully. Focusing on the murders was easier, and that almost certainly wasn’t a good sign for the way his life was going.

“So you let another do this to her?” What kind of man isn’t there for someone when she needs him? You say she’s like a daughter to you, well, shouldn’t a father be there?”

That was another question that hit too close to home. All Pinsley could do was ignore the question, because he didn’t have an answer. He sat down in the dining room, considering his options. He went to his room and fetched his metronome from his bag, returning to the dining room and setting it on a table.

“There’s to be no singing here,” Madam Farge said.

“I intend merely to think,” Pinsley said.

He set the device in motion, letting the orderly regularity of it help his attempts to work through what was happening. He considered the murders. That they were linked to the theatre was undeniable. Returning there tonight was probably the best move, although the director probably wouldn’t welcome them. Worse, if Pinsley left it until too late tonight, the killer might already have struck again.

He needed to act, but he had too few leads. There was only the name and address Camille had given him. The most direct course was to try to find Pierre Duchene before this evening. If he proved to be the killer, then Pinsley would be able to stop him before he killed again. At the very least, he might be able to take Pinsley one step further along the path of evidence that would lead to the killer.

His mind made up, Pinsley stilled the metronome and stowed it away in his room once more. He considered knocking to rouse Kaia, but she would need her strength if they were to go back to the theatre. She’d obviously been shaken by what had happened. Pinsley left her for now, heading downstairs and hailing a carriage.

“Ile Saint Louis,” he told the driver.

The journey took them to the broad expanse of the Seine. The Ile Saint Louis was one of the islands in the middle of it, joining the two sides of the city with bridges and filled with businesses.

Alighting from the carriage, Pinsley looked around for the Rue Boutarel, finding it only as the evening light started to dim. His next problem was finding the right building, but he saw a potential solution in the form of a man walking back along the street, presumably coming home from work.

“Excuse me,” he said. This was one instance where being English might help. “A friend of mine lives on this street, but I’ve forgotten the number. Pierre Duchene?”

“Old drinking buddy, is he?” the man said. “If he’s in, he’ll be at number nine. Other than that, he’ll be at the Bar Marcel, or the Bar Villanelle, or another bar.”

Pinsley got the message. For now, though, it was enough that he had an address to work with. He went to number nine and hammered on the door, but there was no reply.

He told himself that it didn’t have to mean anything. As the man he’d asked directions from had said, Pierre Duchene might simply be in a bar. Then again, he could also be out preparing to commit murder. The only way to be sure was to find him, and find him quickly.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Kaia needed to sleep more than she’d thought she ever might. She wasn’t some fainting flower of the upper classes who needed to lie down after every little thing, yet now exhaustion claimed her.

The situation she’d been in had been dangerous, and she’d been hurt, if only a little. Then there was the question of using her powers. This hadn’t been the massive burst of energy that it usually was, but it still felt as though it had taken a lot out of Kaia to do it.

As a result, the moment she lay her head down on the pillow, Kaia slept.

As she dreamed, Kaia saw shadows gathering over Paris, and figures gathering, trying to chase them back. Only this wasn’t modern Paris, with its gas lights and its guillotines, its Arc de Triomphe and its broad boulevards; this was an older place, where everyone dressed in tunics and hose, and there were men in armor rather than police.

Kaia saw bodies piled up in the streets, collected on barrows. She saw people dying of sickness. In the midst of it all, she saw people gathering around a woman who seemed to glow from within, striding towards a man who seemed so filled with shadow that the sky darkened above him and thunder rumbled…

Kaia woke to the sound of someone knocking on her door. Assuming it was the inspector, she went to answer it, and found Madam Farge, with a plate of food on a tray.

“Rabbit, beans, and carrots,” the landlady declared, passing the tray to Kaia. “You need to keep your strength up. Your friend has gone out. Didn’t even leave a note.”

Kaia bit back her annoyance, knowing that she couldn’t take it out on the landlady. Even so, it was irritating to be left behind again so soon after they’d talked about including her. She understood that he would want to keep going with the business of the case, and with trying to find his daughter, but still, he could have woken her.

There was nothing to do, though, except eat the meal Madam Farge had brought her. It wasn’t as though she knew where Inspector Pinsley had gone, so she couldn’t follow him. All she could really do was wait, and trust that he would be back so that they could both head to the theatre together later, as a team.

“Thank you for this,” Kaia said, indicating the meal.

“You don’t have to stay around him, you know, if he lashes out,” Madam Farge said.

Kaia realized with a start that the landlady still thought Inspector Pinsley was behind the bruise on her cheek.

“I told you that wasn’t down to him,” Kaia said. “I went into a dangerous place, and ended up getting hurt.”

“And your so called chaperone wasn’t there with you,” Madam Farge said, making the same point she had with the inspector.

“I can look after myself,” Kaia pointed out. “I should be able to go anywhere without a chaperone.”

The landlady gave a shrug that seemed like a whole conversation in itself. “There’s what we should be able to do, and what we can do. The revolution of ’89 promised us freedom, brotherhood, and equality, but life is never so simple. You got out of trouble, but would there have been trouble if your guardian had been there?”

Kaia had wondered the same thing herself, so she couldn’t really argue with the point. Even so, she couldn’t just agree with Madam Farge, or with the inspector.

“I will be more careful in future,” Kaia said.

“Well, be careful now, and stay indoors,” Madam Farge said. “Paris by night is dangerous for a girl alone. It is a place for thieves, pimps, kidnappers, corrupt police, and killers, not for you.”

The landlady left, leaving the tray behind. Kaia looked out of the room’s window as she ate, watching dusk gathering over the city. Thanks to Madam Farge’s words, Kaia imagined the denizens of the night time city pouring out of houses a lot like the one she’d been in earlier, taking over the streets.

It was incongruous, therefore, when Kaia saw a pretty young woman walking past, respectably dressed, with her dark hair neatly coiffed beneath a hat. Kaia stared at her for a second or two, taking in her almost pixyish features, and it was only then that the feeling struck her.

She sensed the shadow as clearly as she had in Xander, or in Doctor de Vere before him. She felt it as a sense of utter wrongness that seemed to blight the world just by its presence. It wasn’t just that it was evil; it was that it didn’t belong in the world, had no place there among normal things. The sense of it was like a clashing note in Kaia’s soul, and it could only mean one thing:

The young woman down there was possessed by a shadow.

This wasn’t like the traces had been in the theatre. It wasn’t like the leftover remnants of the Shadowseers’ presence back in the tenement building. This was the real thing, right there: someone possessed by one of the shadows Xander had tried to send her to the city to find.

Kaia knew as soon as she saw the woman that she had to follow her. Yes, she’d heard Madam Farge when she’d talked about the dangers of the Paris night. Yes, she had only recently walked into a dangerous place and come out worse. Yes, she would rather have had the inspector there with her. None of that mattered right now, though. She’d lost the tracks of the Shadowseers; if Kaia didn’t at least try to follow the traces of the shadows, what was the point of being in Paris at all?

Throwing on her coat, Kaia headed downstairs. She was careful not to let Madam Farge see her as she made her way to the door, because the time needed for an argument would put her too far behind her quarry. Opening the door as quietly as she could, Kaia slipped out into the Paris night, past a newspaper seller.

For a moment, she thought that she’d been too slow, even moving as quickly as she had. She couldn’t see the young woman who’d passed beneath the window, but an instant later, she felt the sense of the shadow again, and hurried forward after it.

Paris looked very different by night. The trees that lined the boulevards looked more sinister by lamplight, flickering shadows sent across the walls of the tall townhouses that lined the boulevards. Clouds obscured the stars, and it seemed almost that the buildings loomed over Kaia, looking down on her like she was nothing. While it was still early enough that there were men in top-hats and women in fine dresses strolling together, Kaia couldn’t see many young women out there alone.

It meant that when the woman Kaia was following came back into sight, it was easy for Kaia to pick her out from the others on the street. At the same time, Kaia suspected that she could have followed the shadow within her blind, the way she’d done with the one that possessed Xander, following it like a bloodhound on the scent if she had to.

For the moment, Kaia didn’t need to do that, though. Instead, she kept her eyes on the woman in front of her, following half a street behind, not wanting to make it too obvious that she was tailing.

She couldn’t lose her quarry, though. Instinct told Kaia that it couldn’t be a coincidence that the murders had happened and now she’d seen this shadow, not after feeling the presence of the shadows at the theatre.

She was following a murderer.

That thought was almost enough to make her pause, but not quite. Kaia had faced down one shadow-possessed murderer before, after all, and that wasn’t even what she intended now. She was simply going to follow this young woman as far as she went, see where she lived, and then fetch the inspector for backup.

It was a good plan, a safe plan, even though Kaia immediately thought of a dozen ways that it could go wrong. What if she found this woman about to commit another murder? Well, then she would just have to find a way to stop that from happening, and it was just one more reason why she couldn’t give up this pursuit.

Briefly, the woman stopped and looked around, as if sensing that someone might be following her, or perhaps just wanting to be careful. Either way, the movement was enough to make Kaia duck into a café, making a show of looking around as if she’d lost someone there. That at least meant that it made sense for her to keep looking out of the window until she saw the woman she was following start to walk again.

“Oh,” Kaia exclaimed, to cover her as she left again. “She’s outside!”

She followed the woman down the street, trying to pick up anything about her that might prove useful. She was sure that if the inspector had been with her, he would already have worked out everything there was to know about this woman. All Kaia could see was that she was slightly built and elegantly dressed, looking around with the caution of someone who was about something suspicious. Even if Kaia hadn’t been able to feel the shadow within this woman, she might have followed just to find out what she was up to.

As it was, she had to know. Even when the woman turned off the main routes, onto the kind of smaller streets where Kaia had run into trouble before, there was no question of not following. Yes, Kaia felt fear at the prospect of going into this kind of bad part of town again, but it wasn’t enough to outweigh the prospect of actually finding out what the shadows were up to.

She tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, but Kaia couldn’t escape the feeling that every eye was on her. It was probably nothing more than her own worry at the prospect of being discovered, or maybe just that people were watching because she was an unfamiliar face in their part of town.

“Excuse me,” she said, as she had to push her way through a small crowd of people. “Pardon me, coming through.”

They seemed as surprised by her voice as by the sight of her there, perhaps because her accent was as incongruous with her appearance as Madam Farge had suggested.

Kaia didn’t have time to worry about that, though. In fact, she didn’t care, so long as the one person who mattered didn’t spot her. When the young woman looked round again, Kaia quickly stepped into the crowd around a game of chess being played in the street, apparently for money.

“How is the game going?” she asked a man, trying to fit in with the crowd.

He shushed her. “Can’t you see that people are concentrating?”

By then, though, her quarry was off again, and Kaia didn’t bother replying, but simply set off in her wake once more. That meant that she saw the moment when the woman ahead of her wrapped shadows around herself, making it hard even for Kaia to follow her properly. Either she’d realized that she was being followed, or she was simply being cautious as she got closer to her destination.

“Can you see her?” Kaia asked a night time flower seller by the side of the road. “Can you see the woman who was walking there?”

“What woman?” the flower seller asked, and made a sound of irritation. “Leave me be, strange girl.”

Kaia almost panicked then, thinking of the things that might happen if she lost the woman. Clearly something important was happening. Maybe these were even the last moments before another attack.

That thought made her stretch out her senses, trying to feel where the shadow-possessed woman had gone. Kaia followed that sense all the way to a stonemason’s yard, the door to which was slightly ajar in spite of there being no light from inside.

This was definitely the place. A part of Kaia wanted to back off now, but she knew that if she did and someone was killed here, she would never be able to forgive herself. Instead, she slipped inside, not caring if half a dozen people saw her enter. If they summoned the SSûreté, that was a good thing. It meant that they would be there to help Kaia stop a murderer.

The interior of the yard was filled with blocks of stone and completed statuary, the only light that of the moon above and the glow coming in over the walls from the surrounding city. Kaia kept low, moving among the statues as she tried to find the woman.

She found her in a space that was largely clear except for what appeared to be an ornamental stone arch, and a large block of uncarved stone. The woman Kaia had been following was there, perched on the edge of that block as if it were the most delicate of chaises.

Another figure stepped out from among the statues, bigger and more burly than the young woman by an order of magnitude. He had flat features and was probably in his twenties. He wore an apron and carried both a hammer and chisel. For a moment, as she crouched behind her protective stone block, Kaia thought that perhaps the stonemason who owned the yard had come out to tell the woman that she shouldn’t be there. Perhaps he was even meant to be her next victim, although that made little sense when all her others had been actresses.

Then she felt the waves of wrongness coming from him, matching those coming from the woman, dwarfing them, even. They’d been obscured only because Kaia had thought all of that sensation had been coming from the woman. She’d thought that she would find one shadow here in the yard.

Instead, she’d found two.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

Pinsley walked into the Bar Villanelle, and it seemed clear from the moment he set foot in there that he was in the right place to find an actor. Everything about it, from curtains that were clearly repurposed sections of theatre curtain to the fliers for plays plastered across the walls, said that this was an actors’ haunt.

It wasn’t too far from the theatre, either, which would make it the perfect place for a man like Pierre Duchene to set off from if he wanted to kill there. It gave him the opportunity, at least, and Pinsley already knew that he had a motive as someone who had been thrown out of the role. Wouldn’t it be suitably dramatic for a man who had been fired as Romeo to start killing Juliets, suggesting that if other actors couldn’t perform opposite them, no one could?

Pinsley walked up to the bar, where a balding man wearing a shirt and suspenders was running things.

“What can I do for you, officer?” he asked.

That took Pinsley a little aback. He hadn’t announced himself, and he certainly wasn’t known in Paris, the way he was in London.

“Officer?” a man said. He was a slender man in his thirties, athletically built with short cropped hair and slightly boyish features. “He’s SSûreté?”

“What makes you think I’m police?” Pinsley asked.

The barkeeper snorted. “You think I can keep a bar full of talkative actors running for so long without being able to spot when there are police walking in?”

“We don’t want SSûreté here,” the man who’d spoken before said. He moved to push Pinsley, and the inspector twisted out of the way, putting a foot out without thinking to trip his would be attacker.

“Don’t,” Pinsley said, but the man was already climbing back to his feet in obvious fury.

“You think you can get away with that?” the man demanded, and brought a foot up, kicking it at Pinsley’s midsection.

Pinsley knew better than to try to dodge back. Instead, he bulled forward, shoving his opponent to the ground. Again, he sprang up, and this time, there was the gleam of a knife in his hand.

“Jean-Charles Ariette, stop that!” the barkeeper shouted. “He’s English, he can’t be Sûreté. But you stab someone in my bar, and I’ll call them here myself!”

For a moment or two, Pinsley thought that his opponent might strike at him anyway, but then, instead, he cursed, turned on his heel and left the bar.

“Forgive Jean-Charles,” the barkeeper said, putting a glass of beer in front of Pinsley. “His lover left him, and it’s made him angry. A few savate lessons, and all the drunk actors think that they’re Jean-Charles Lecour.”

Pinsley shrugged that off. He’d seen plenty of similar situations back in London, when men with a few drinks in them suddenly thought that they could fight.

“I’m looking for a drunk actor,” Pinsley said, instead.

The bartender waved a hand expressively at the room. “You’re spoiled for choice here.”

“A specific one. Pierre Duchene,” Pinsley said.

“And why would you want him?” the bartender said.

“I need to ask him a few questions,” Pinsley said. He knew how ludicrous it must sound, an English policeman wanting to go around asking questions in the middle of Paris. Then again, that had been what he’d been doing since the start of this.

“Generally, people don’t like police asking questions,” the bartender said.

“Shouldn’t Pierre be able to decide that for himself?” Pinsley suggested. “Look, why not tell me where he is? It’s not like I can arrest him, but the matter I’m looking into is an important one.”

He set down a couple of coins to emphasize the point. The bartender stared at them, then scooped them up quickly. He pointed to a man who had to be Pinsley’s age, far too old to be playing Romeo. His dark hair was lank and his complexion was reddened from too much drink for too long. Several wine bottles were on the table before him, mostly empty.

Pinsley went over to him and sat down without waiting to be asked.

“Pierre Duchene, right? The actor?”

Duchene shrugged. “That’s me. Have a drink with me?”

“I have one, thank you,” Pinsley said, lifting his beer mug. He took a chair opposite. “I thought it was you. I saw you in something. Romeo and Juliet, wasn’t it?”

“You must have been in Paris a while, friend,” Duchene said. “I haven’t been Romeo for almost a month.”

Pierre tried to look as sympathetic as he could. “What happened?”

“They said I was too much of a drunk to do the job!” the actor replied. “Can you believe that?”

Right then, Pinsley could believe it only too easily. The man in front of him was clearly a longstanding drunk, and he could imagine the director of the play not wanting him anywhere near his performance.

Still, he had to say the right thing, keep this man talking. “That’s too bad. You must be very angry about it.”

“Angry?” Pierre said. “I am furious! I am wroth! I will do such things, what they are, yet I know not.”

“That’s Lear, not Romeo,” Pinsley pointed out. He decided to be more direct about this. “And do the things you would do for revenge include murder?”

“Maybe if I could get my hands on that fat director!” Pierre said.

“What about the actresses?” Pinsley said, his tone suddenly sharp. “What did you do to them? You know that at least two, possibly three, have been murdered?”

“What?” the drunken actor practically fell out of his chair. “What are you talking… no, that didn’t have anything to do with me.”

“Really? Where were you last night?” Pinsley asked. The other man was drunk enough that he might just blurt something out if Pinsley pushed him.

“What?” Pierre looked unsteady, like he could barely make sense of the question.

“What about the night before that?” Pinsley pressed. “Where were you while these killings were taking place?”

“I was here, of course,” the actor said. He looked worried, as if he couldn’t be sure about even that much of his life. “I must have been. I always am.”

There was an easy way to check, of course. Pinsley stood and went back to the bar. “Was Monsieur Duchene here last night?”

The bartender thought for a moment. “Yes.”

“All night? He couldn’t have slipped out?”

“He drank until he passed out, then he slept it off on the floor. After a while, you get used to that kind of thing in my trade.”

Those words hit Pinsley like a blow to the stomach. He’d been hoping that this lead, as slender as it was, would bring him to the killer. The disappointment of it not panning out was only made worse by the thought that if the killer kept to their pattern, another actress might die that night.

“Do you know of anyone else with reasons to hate the performance of Romeo and Juliet?” Pinsley asked.

“A dozen people,” the bartender said. “Two dozen. M. Lachelle upsets people as easily as an actor drinks wine.”

“But is there anything that would be enough to kill over?” Pinsley insisted.

“How’s a man meant to judge that?” the bartender demanded. “I could tell you all the rumors in the world, but the things men kill over are sometimes small things, trivial things. How can we know which are going to matter?”

Pinsley knew that the other man had a point. He’d seen it enough back at Scotland Yard, with the worst crimes being committed for reasons that only made sense to the people committing them.

He realized then the difficulty of what he’d been doing, chasing around the city, trying to follow up rumors of people who might have a reason to hate the performance. He simply didn’t have enough time to follow every one of them before tonight’s performance, and the possibility of another murder.

That thought made Pinsley realize that he was running out of time in another sense, as well. A glance at his pocket watch told him that, if he was going to take Kaia to the theatre again tonight, he needed to get back to the hotel soon. He’d been a fool to think that he could investigate in such a way, just letting rumors of actors with grudges lead him this way and that across the city. He needed to get to the heart of this. His only hope was that a return to the theatre would provide new information. Perhaps speaking to the director would help, in spite of the man having thrown him and Kaia out of the place earlier.

He made to leave, but the bartender called over to him.

“You look familiar, but I’d know your face if you’d been in here before.”

“I’m new to Paris,” Pinsley said.

“It must be someone else… it’s going to bug me for days. Who do you remind me of… ah, I have it. There’s an actress, Olivia Fabien. She looks so much like you, and, come to think of it, she’s English too. Her accent is better than yours, though.”

Pinsley froze at those words, all thoughts of leaving suddenly forgotten.

“Olivia?” Pinsley said. “You know Olivia?”

“Why, do you?” the bartender said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. As if those weren’t words that simultaneously made Pinsley’s heart swell with hope and fill with worries.

“I… I’m her father,” Pinsley replied. He didn’t know that for sure, of course. This could be an entirely different woman, but the similarities seemed too great for it to be simple coincidence. What were the odds on her having come here, though?

The more Pinsley thought about it, however, the more he realized that it wasn’t as unlikely as all that. If Olivia was an actress, then it was entirely plausible that this might be the kind of place she would frequent. He had to take that chance.

“Her father?” the bartender said.

“I only recently learned that she was in Paris,” Pinsley said. “I don’t suppose… do you know where she lives?”

“I don’t know,” the bartender said. “I shouldn’t just give out the addresses of young actresses like that.”

“Please,” Pinsley said. He couldn’t keep the desperation from his voice. “I’ve been looking for her for years. I need to find her.”

“I suppose it’s all right,” the bartender said. “She lives in a building on the Rue Saint Cecile, north of the river. Number… hey, Ricard, which number does Olivia Fabien live at again.”

“Fifty-three,” a man called back.

Pinsley’s heart sang at that news. He had a possible address for his daughter. A part of him longed to simply go there now, and try… well, he wasn’t sure what to try.

That lack of certainty was part of why he didn’t go. The other part was that there was still a chance that someone else might be killed tonight. He needed to get back to the hotel, and then to the theatre. Olivia was important, but this… this couldn’t wait.

Rushing out of the bar, he hailed a carriage back to the hotel. As it rumbled along, he thought about Olivia, and about Kaia. They were more alike than he wanted to admit, both headstrong, both more likely to do what they wanted than anything Pinsley said. Then there was the case. He’d run out of leads chasing around out of work actors. Now, he just had to hope that there was something at the theatre.

When the cab pulled up outside the hotel, Pinsley alighted and paid as quickly as he could. He rushed inside and found Madam Farge there behind the reception desk.

“If you’re looking for your girl, she went out, not long ago. A few minutes or so. She thought I didn’t see her, but I did.”

“And you didn’t stop her?” Pinsley said.

“I told her the dangers, and she still chose to go,” Madam Farge said. “I’m not trying to control what she does.”

“Damn it,” Pinsley said. “Which way did she go?”

“How would I know?” the landlady countered. “Maybe she went left out of the door?”

It wasn’t much to go on, but Pinsley knew that he had to try. Heading out into the street, he looked around, trying to guess which way Kaia might have gone. The problem with her being led by instinct, or whim, or… yes, he would say it, some power of her own, was that it made it impossible to establish her movements through logic.

The best he could do was to hope that, if it really had been just a few minutes, some of the same people might still be on the street, and might remember her. A newspaper seller not far from the door to the hotel was an obvious place to start.

“Have you seen a young woman come out of the hotel in the last few minutes? About this tall-” Pinsley didn’t get further than that before the newspaper seller reacted.

“Ah, the pretty one who seemed to be following the other woman.”

Pinsley didn’t know anything about another woman, but that sounded like the kind of thing Kaia might do, so he nodded.

“That’s her. Which way did she go?”

The newspaper seller pointed, and Pinsley set off, as quickly as he dared.

“Have you seen an English girl go past here?” he asked some passersby, and then then realized the problem with that. Kaia’s accent was more French than his now. “No, not English, a pretty girl, well dressed, but with an accent like a Parisian docker?”

They shook their heads; obviously it was no use asking someone walking along, because they wouldn’t have been here when Kaia passed. Pinsley tried a café instead, on the basis that people there were more static, and might be watching the people going by.

“Has anyone seen a girl go past?” he asked. “Seventeen years old, in a pale dress, with blonde hair, and out alone.” That might help to identify her, since most young women had chaperones at this hour.

“There was a girl,” a man called back. “Very pretty. She said she was waiting for her friend, but then rushed off.”

“Which way?” Pinsley asked, and set off again as soon as the customer pointed.

That got him down another street, and this was what finding someone in a city was, because it wasn’t like out in the countryside, where there might be footprints or disturbed foliage, the way he’d spotted ambushes back in Crimea. Instead, it was going from person to person, trying to find someone who had seen the right thing. That was harder when he didn’t have his contacts from London, but he could still do it.

Pinsley had to believe that, especially if Kaia was following someone. That could mean all kinds of danger for her. What if she was following another potential victim for the murderer? What if she was following the murderer themselves? That thought made Pinsley hurry more.

When he came to a crowd of people who were standing around, chatting with one another, he asked again.

“Did a girl come this way?”

“Yes,” a woman said. “Rude she was, too, pushing her way through in a hurry.”

“Which way did she go?”

Pinsley set off in the direction of another pointing finger, looking around for the next group of people who were likely to have been there long enough to see Kaia. He found them in the form of a street chess game.

“Did a girl come past here?” he demanded.

“There was one who interrupted like you before,” one of the players snapped.

“Which way did she go?”

“I’m trying to concentrate,” the player insisted.

Pinsley glanced at the board. “It’s mate in five if you play knight to F6. There, now you don’t have to concentrate. Which way did she go?”

The player looked down at the board, looked up at him, and pointed mutely. Pinsley hurried off to angry sounds from the crowd behind him. He kept walking briskly, only stopping when he saw a flower seller.

“Did a girl come past here?” he asked. “Seventeen, blonde hair, talks with an accent that doesn’t match her clothes?”

“There was a strange girl who asked if I could see someone who wasn’t there,” the flower seller said.

“Where did she go?”

The flower seller pointed to a stonemason’s yard. “There. She went there.”

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

Kaia tried to be as still as one of the statues around her, barely even daring to breathe as the two shadow-possessed people in front of her greeted one another.

“Welcome,” the stonemason said. “As you can see, all is in order.”

“In order?” the young woman said. “What about the Shadowseers?”

Even if the rest of this hadn’t already held Kaia rapt, that word would have caught her attention. Could the shadows themselves lead her to the Shadowseers, and to her sister?

“They are gone from Paris. They will not interfere,” the stonemason said.

Those words were like a dagger to Kaia’s heart. She’d hoped so much that she might find the Shadowseers, and now they weren’t even in Paris?

“Gone where,” the young woman asked, and it was exactly the question that Kaia wanted the answer to.

“To a city in the country of Bavaria called Munich,” the stonemason said. “Bavaria. Munich. Such a strange thing humans do, to pin the world down with words like that.”

“Words and light and order,” the young woman said, in a tone of absolute distaste. “Their kind has imposed itself on this world more and more. In the old days, our kind would come through, and the world was filled with beautiful darkness. Now, there is light, even at night.”

She gestured, and Kaia realized that it was in the direction of the faint glow coming from the gas streetlights.

“Hateful things,” the stonemason agreed. “But soon to be gone.”

“Assuming the Shadowseers can truly do nothing to stop this,” the woman said.

“I told you, they are not here. They left to find the relic.”

Even from her hiding spot in the dark, Kaia could see the worry on the woman’s face.

“And if they find it? There is no point in opening portals if they can simply shut them down and cut us off from the spaces beyond.”

“You worry too much,” the stonemason said. “They do not know yet that they need the girl to wield the relic, and they do not have her. By the time they find her, if they find her, this will be done.”

“It will be done for me tonight,” the woman said, and Kaia thought that she heard sadness there.

“Your sacrifice will echo within us,” the stonemason replied. “It will pave the way for a new world here.”

Kaia tried to make sense of all of that, but where could she even begin? The first fact that sank in was that the Shadowseers weren’t in Paris, but in Munich, in a completely different country. To find them, she and the inspector were going to have to travel again.

As for the rest of it… Kaia wasn’t sure what to make of it. The shadows talked as if they had come from somewhere that wasn’t this world, but what did the rest of it mean? What portals were they talking about? Were they talking about some kind of door to the place where the shadows came from?

Another question came to Kaia: who was the girl? Was there some girl out there who could stop the shadows?

Kaia was still thinking about that when a voice sounded, only a pace or two away from her.

“What are you doing here, girl?”

Kaia turned sharply, and found herself face to face with a middle aged, aristocratic looking man in a frock coat and top-hat. She felt the waves of shadow pouring from him and realized too late that if there could be two of them without her realizing, there could just as easily be three.

Kaia almost froze, but she’d been in so many dangerous situations in the last few weeks that it seemed that her body had started to react automatically when in them. She pushed the man away and then darted among the statues, trying to lose him among the human forms there.

She darted past them, the way she might have pushed her way through a crowd. Kaia could hear the sounds of the shadow-possessed aristocrat following, and she tried to slow him by pushing over a statue as she passed. She heard him curse, and smiled to herself as she turned, trying to make her way back towards the yard’s gate.

The stonemason was standing in front of it, his hammer and chisel still in his hands.

“No escape that way,” he said.

Kaia darted back among the statuary, leaping over a block of stone. Her dress snagged on it and she tumbled, but she rolled back to her feet quickly. The young woman was there in front of her then.

“You can’t go this way, either.”

Kaia turned at bay, but now all three of them were closing in on her, and the aristocrat had a cane in his hand whose weighted head looked as though it would make almost as good a weapon as the stonemason’s hammer.

“We weren’t expecting you here,” he said. “We thought we lost you in the Marais district.”

Kaia had never set eyes on him before. Did he think that she was someone else?

“I thought that someone was following me,” the young woman said. “I couldn’t quite see who, but I knew there was someone. And it turns out to be you.”

“I don’t know who you think I am,” Kaia said.

“Oh, don’t play dumb,” the aristocrat said. “Should we kill her now?”

“No,” the stonemason replied. He seemed to be in charge, and the sense of utter wrongness coming from him seemed to be the strongest. Maybe he was inhabited by the most powerful shadow? “I want her to see this.”

He took a length of rope out of his apron and bound Kaia’s wrists while the others watched her to make sure that she couldn’t strike out. He tied her to the arm of another statue, so that it looked stupidly as if she were holding hands with it. Testing out the ropes, Kaia barely felt any give in them at all.

“You should feel honored,” the woman said. “You are about to see things most mortals never see. You will see the death of a shadow, and the opening of a portal to our realm. You will be the first to glimpse it, in the moments before your end.”

“The death of a shadow?” Kaia said.

“These things have a cost,” the stonemason replied. “Opening a way to the between spaces that will last? There is only one way, and it requires sacrifice.”

“So you’re going to kill one of your own?” Kaia demanded. Could she use this? Was there a way to drive a wedge between them? “How did you decide which of you was going to die?”

“I chose this,” the young woman said. “I will be the one of our kind to change everything.”

There was a determination in her voice that Kaia found almost more disturbing than the rest of it. It was a kind of fanaticism that made it clear there would be no pushing her away from this, no talking her out of it or making her question why it had to be her to die rather than one of the others.

“Enough talking,” the stonemason said. “We have prepared everything. Tools that will use humanity’s own attachment to permanence and objects against them. The archway to anchor it is ready. The stone is carved. Now, there is only the ritual to complete.”

“Why are you even doing this?” Kaia asked. “Why are you trying to make a way into this world when you have a whole world of your own?”

“Why?” the aristocrat snorted. “When your kind see a new place, they do not need a reason to take it. Why should we?”

Kaia wanted to refute that, wanted to shout back that the shadow was wrong, but then her mind flickered back to the lessons she’d been taught at school about the empire that she lived in, which stretched further than any empire before. She was at the heart of another empire now.

“So you think you just get to invade?” Kaia asked.

“We have always entered this world,” the young woman said. “And the Shadowseers have beaten us back, but not this time. Not with portals at the heart of places like this. They have intruded on the dark with lights and fire, but these bastions of both will become the places we strike. So many people.”

“So many fractured people,” the aristocrat agreed. “So many with gaps we can flow into, and take. The mad, the addicts, the weak… delicious.”

Kaia swallowed as she imagined that, with a horde of shadows pouring out into Paris, seeking out body after body and taking over. Kaia had felt what it was like to have one of their kind crawling over her, enveloping her and trying to find a way in. Kaia had managed to fight it off, but how many people wouldn’t be able to?

“If you hate all this form and solidity,” Kaia said, “why take people’s bodies? If you hate humanity so much, why become us? I think you’re jealous.”

“Jealous?” the aristocrat said. “The only reason we take your bodies is to destroy you!”

“You’re jealous,” Kaia said. “You possess people because people can walk in the daytime, the way you can’t. All your powers, and you can’t even walk around when the sun is shining.”

She didn’t know why she was taunting them. Maybe she was hoping that if she did, they would do something stupid, something that might let her stop them. The only problem was that the ropes were still holding her tight to the statue, so Kaia wasn’t sure what she could do to stop them. She worried at the ropes, hoping to break clear of them.

“Enough,” the stonemason said. “Let the ritual begin.”

The young woman nodded, and then lay down on the stone slab. The stonemason and the aristocrat both moved over to the archway, and all three of the shadow-possessed people started to chant, in a language that seemed guttural and strange, every syllable of it seeming to promise pain.

The stonemason took his hammer and chisel, setting them to the stone and making just a couple of small incisions. They seemed to be the final parts to some greater pattern, though, because as soon as the stonemason made those cuts, the archway shone with light.

No, not light; this was more like the opposite of light, right through darkness and out on the other side. It was a darkness that seemed to burn in Kaia’s eyes, and the symbols that it formed were physically painful to look at. They seemed to writhe and twist, refusing to be pinned down or simply read.

The stonemason went to the stone block next, striking it with his chisel as precisely as he had the archway. Again, dark fire seemed to crawl up over the block, forming those same twisted symbols. Would Kaia have been able to see any of this if she hadn’t been different from most people?

The possessed people started to chant again, their voices starting low, but then rising, little by little. Kaia could feel a kind of power building in that, rising up with the chant. The symbols on the stone block and the arch seemed to move in response to the chant, their movements matching the rhythm of it.

Kaia worked more frantically at the ropes now, knowing that her only hope of stopping this would come if she could get out. It was her only hope of surviving this, too, because she had no doubt that they would kill her, as soon as they were done with the ritual.

“It’s time,” the stonemason said. He moved over to the stone slab, and set the chisel above the heart of the young woman lying there. “With this, you will change the world. It will never be the same again.”

He lifted the hammer he held above his head, and Kaia felt the power building to a surge. She knew in that moment that when he drove it down through the heart of the young woman below, that would be the spark for the rest of it, that it would send the full energy of the shadow within surging into the arch, and that would bring a host of them surging through into Paris.

Kaia yanked at the rope now in terror for the city, and the world, hoping that it would be enough to get her free. Maybe she still had time to throw herself at the stonemason and disrupt this.

The ropes still didn’t quite break open, though, and the hammer was at its apex, ready to come down. There was nothing that Kaia could do to stop this.

Then there was a crack as someone kicked the gate to the stonemason’s yard wide open.

“Stop, in the name of the law!” a voice called, and Kaia realized with a start that it did so in English. She looked over, and saw the last person she’d expected here.

Inspector Pinsley stood there, gun in his hand, clearly ready to fight.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Kaia had never felt as relieved as she did when the inspector showed up, his pistol out and leveled, ready to fire.

“You will let the young ladies go!” he ordered. Kaia realized then that he didn’t know exactly what was going on. He thought that the shadows were planning a murder in front of her, and didn’t understand the full scope of what was going on.

That was why, when the young woman hopped down off the slab and started to walk to him, he beckoned to her, rather than shooting her the way Kaia would have preferred.

“That’s right, miss, come over to me.”

Kaia knew that she had to say something, had to try to warn him, even if he wouldn’t believe it.

“Pinsley!” Kaia called out. “She’s one of them!”

A look of puzzlement passed over the inspector’s face, and he started to take a step back. A second earlier, and her warning might have been in time. As it was, though, the young woman lashed out, striking the inspector’s arm and sending the pistol in it flying.

The inspector reacted quickly, moving to the side, lunging for the gun again, but the others were already moving. The aristocrat lifted his cane and started forward, while the stonemason brandished his chisel like a knife. Shadows flowed out, wrapping around the gun, and Kaia guessed that to anyone without her talents, it would look as if it had simply disappeared.

Certainly, the inspector cursed and grabbed around for a different weapon. He came up with the marble arm of a statue, bringing it up in time to parry the first attack from the cane. It was a hard enough blow that the wood of the cane snapped, leaving the aristocrat holding just the stub of it.

As the inspector started to wield his makeshift club like a cavalry saber, Kaia kept working at the ropes that held her. She knew that she had to help with this, because even someone as skilled in a fight as him couldn’t hope to prevail against three shadows at once. He’d been hurt enough, just fighting the one inside Xander.

Then again, these people didn’t appear to have Xander’s skills, obviously learned in fighting the shadows. They were still strong and fast, as the shadows pushed their bodies in ways that they might not have done without them inside, but they didn’t have a lifetime of ingrained reflexes the way Xander had.

It meant that, for the moment, the inspector was managing to hold them off, striking out with the marble arm and forcing them back. It gave Kaia time to try to work to get free. If she could just get to the knots…

There, she felt the moment when they gave, and wrenched her arms clear of the statue. Even as she did it, the young woman came at her, swinging a punch at Kaia that she barely dodged.

“You think you can win?” the young woman asked her, lashing out again. This time, Kaia dodged back among the statues, so that her opponent’s strike knocked one over, sending it crashing to the ground in a shower of dust.

“I think we’re doing a pretty good job of it,” Kaia said, taunting her forward. If she could at least distract this one from the fight with the inspector, she could give him a chance in the fight.

She saw him continuing to fight back against the possessed people. The stonemason struck at him with his chisel, and the inspector deflected it the way he might have parried a fencing thrust. The aristocrat came at him from the side, but Pinsley struck him with a fist, driving him back.

Kaia had no time to watch after that, because the young woman had grabbed a metal support for one of the statues now, wielding it like a spear and jabbing it at Kaia. Kaia barely dodged aside, and the support spike scraped off another of the statues there.

Kaia could see the shadows closing in on the inspector, too. Maybe against one of them, he could have held his own, but even knowing nothing about fighting, Kaia could see that he couldn’t strike at one of them there without the other managing to attack him.

That was when Kaia felt the power starting to build up in her. She felt the relentless pressure of it expanding inside her, like her heart might burst. She saw a glow start to cut through the dark around her, and she knew what she had to do.

The young woman lunged at her again with her makeshift spear, and this time as she dodged, Kaia stepped in close. She put a hand out on her chest, and the energy within her burst out in a scream that seemed to fill the stonemason’s yard. It was loud enough that the statues shook with it, loud enough that one made from plaster burst where it was.

Kaia poured power into the young woman attacking her without quite knowing how, and that power simply left no room for the shadow that controlled her. It pushed it out in wisps, and then in a torrent, the young woman throwing her head back, joining Kaia in a cry of her own. Only this cry had the shadow with it, pouring it out into the night. It lunged in towards Kaia and she threw up a hand towards it, power bursting from her again to force it back. The young woman slumped back against a statue, shaking her head like she was trying to clear it.

Kaia saw the others stagger with the force of her shout, and the inspector seemed to sense his chance to act. He struck out with the stone arm he held, catching the stonemason across the jaw and sending him sprawling into unconsciousness. As he fell, Kaia saw the shadows start to pour from him, obviously not wanting to be trapped in his body when there was someone close by like Kaia, whose powers might be a threat.

That left only the aristocrat. He looked round at Pinsley, then at Kaia, obviously trying to weigh the odds. Then he took off, using one of the stone blocks as a stepping stone to leap over the wall of the stonemason’s yard. He was gone into the night then, so that even if Kaia and the inspector had wanted to go after him, they wouldn’t have been able to do it quickly enough.

The inspector came forward, approaching her and the young woman. He still held the statue’s arm, obviously ready to use it.

“It’s all right,” Kaia said, realizing that he still thought that the young woman in front of him was on the side of the others. “She’s not a threat anymore. I pushed the shadow out of her.”

She realized that the inspector wouldn’t have seen much of what had happened with the shadows. He might still think that she was a threat.

“Thank you,” the young woman said. “Thank you. While that… thing was in me, I felt… I don’t know what I felt. Like I was another version of me. Like I was just a passenger in my own body.”

“You understand how this sounds,” the inspector said. “Shadows, and the rest of it?”

He was going to try to cling to reason, even now? Kaia had expected that this might have been enough, but then, what would the inspector actually have seen? If he didn’t see the shadows, then it would have just looked like bursting in on three mad, murderous people.

“Who are you?” Kaia asked the young woman.

“My name is Amelie,” she replied. “Amelie de Fiaux.”

“The actress?” Pinsley said, sounding even more startled by that than by the rest of it. “The one who has been missing?”

Kaia realized then that they’d found an answer for at least part of the mysteries around the theatre. There was a kind of satisfaction in that, but also so many other things they still didn’t know.

“She was missing because she was controlled,” Kaia said.

“I… just walked out,” Amelie said. “I knew that I had something more important to do. Something that would make me more important than anyone had been.”

The ritual. The one they’d been performing, that was supposed to fill the world with shadows. Just the thought of it made Kaia shudder, but Pinsley was still focused on the theatre, apparently.

“Something that involved killing other actresses?” Pinsley demanded.

Kaia looked across at him, and realized that it was the obvious solution to this in a lot of ways. It seemed like too much of a coincidence otherwise that actresses were being murdered at the same theatre Amelie had gone missing from.

“That wasn’t me,” Amelie said.

“Not even under the influence of the shadows?”

“I swear it wasn’t me,” she insisted.

To Kaia, she sounded sincere, but was that enough? Kaia could remember when the police in London hadn’t been willing to believe her, but did that mean that she should believe Amelie now?

“If not you, then who?” Pinsley demanded, obviously unwilling to let the logic of it go. “All your replacements in the role were murdered.”

“It wasn’t me,” Amelie insisted. She looked over to Kaia. “You know about the shadows, so if I’d done it, I would just tell you. I would admit it, and you would understand that they made me do it, yes?”

“Yes,” Kaia admitted, she would. That made a kind of sense.

“Then I’ll tell you again, I didn’t do this, even with a shadow in me. That wasn’t what it wanted. It wanted me to help with this, to help make its doorway to another world.”

Kaia could believe the part about the portals, and the rest… Amelie was right. If she knew that Kaia knew about the shadows and what they could do, then she would lose nothing by admitting the killings. She would know that Kaia would understand that she was controlled at the time.

Pinsley clearly didn’t feel the same way.

“Do you know how that sounds?” the inspector said.

Amelie looked over at Kaia. “Is he always like this?”

“Pretty much,” Kaia said, and then turned to Pinsley. “I believe her. I don’t think she killed anyone. I think she was just caught up in the shadows’ plans.“

“You’re sure?” the inspector asked. Obviously he didn’t want to let go of a chance to finish this.

“I’m sure,” Kaia said. “I followed the feeling of the shadows; I suppose there’s no reason why it has to lead to the killer so simply.”

“Damn,” Pinsley said.

“Even they thought I was just here to try to stop their plans,” Kaia said. She stopped for a moment, as a thought occurred to her. “Actually, they thought I was someone else.”

If there was someone who looked that much like her, Kaia could think of only one person that might be. Was it possible that the shadows knew where her sister was?

“Amelie, I don’t know how it works, but the last time I met someone who had been possessed by a shadow, they had access to some of the things the shadow was thinking. Do you know anything about what they intend now?”

“They didn’t plan beyond this,” Amelie said. “At least, the one in me didn’t. It knew it was going to die.”

Of course, which meant that it wouldn’t need to know the rest of any plan. Kaia felt as if her best chance to stop all of this had been ripped away from her.

“But I do know it thought you were someone very dangerous, someone special. There’s a house not far from Montmartre Cemetery. It had me watch it, checking to make sure that there were no threats. A house with a statue of an angel above the door. When they saw you, they were afraid that you would go there.”

Kaia filed that piece of information away, not knowing yet how she was going to be able to make use of it, or if she was. She could only hope that it would be useful. She still wanted to know more, about the shadows, and about exactly who they had thought she was. She had a thousand questions for Amelie, and unlike with Xander, there might actually be time to get answers.

Then she heard the sound of boots on the ground outside the stonemason’s yard, with whistles sounding as figures forced their way inside, holding lanterns.

“Sûreté! Nobody move! We have had reports of a woman screaming here, and sounds of violence.”

Kaia winced at that. Of course her scream had carried around the quarter. Probably, it had brought every police officer who had heard it running. Maybe if the fight had still been going on, they might have been able to help, but now, they would only complicate things.

“Who are you?” one of the Sûreté officers demanded.

“I’m Amelie de Fiaux,” Amelie said. “Officer, these people have just saved me from-”

“Wait. Amelie de Fiaux? The actress? The one who has been missing?”

“That’s right,” Amelie said, sounding relieved, as if it was a good thing that the police had recognized her. Kaia could already guess all the reasons why it wasn’t.

“The one who disappeared immediately before the others started to die?” the officer said. “And now here you are? What role did you play in those deaths Mademoiselle Fiaux?”

“No,” Amelie said hurriedly, “I was telling these people that I wasn’t involved in any of that, I was controlled by a shadow, and it wanted to open a door to…”

She tailed off, obviously realizing how that must sound.

“Is that what it was?” the officer demanded. “You went mad, and then you killed them?”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” Amelie insisted. She gestured to Kaia. “She’ll tell you.”

“And who are you two?” the officer demanded.

“I recognize this one,” another said, stepping forward and pointing to the inspector. He wore the insignia of a police sergeant. “He came down to the station before, demanding that he be allowed to help with the case. Is that what it was, Englishman? You wanted to ‘help’ so that you could deflect attention from your accomplices?”

“From my accomplices?” Pinsley said, sounding shocked by it.

“This is probably all some English plot,” another of the Sûreté officers said. “Just like the bombings were!”

“Good point, Constable,” the sergeant said.

“That’s not a good point,” Kaia insisted. “No one here had anything to do with any murders. We were trying to help Amelie when she was attacked!”

It was the best thing she could think of to say, but even to her, it didn’t sound entirely convincing. It certainly didn’t seem to be enough to pacify the police officers.

“You can tell that to our inspectors at the station,” the sergeant said. “And then to a judge. And then probably to Madam Guillotine. We take spies and murders seriously in Paris.”

“What?” Kaia said, trying to think of a way out of this. She looked over to the inspector, hoping that he would have a brilliant idea that would save them all. Right then, though, he was still standing there, holding the marble arm that he’d been using as a club. It didn’t make him look any more innocent.

“You’re all under arrest,” the sergeant said. “Come quietly, or there will be trouble.”

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Pinsley looked around, trying to assess their chances of getting out of this in one piece. He didn’t like what he saw. With the police around them like that, he couldn’t see a way out that didn’t involve them all being hurt.

Yet if he let them be taken into custody for the murders, who would be left to stop the actual killer? They would be free to strike again at the theatre or around it. That would have been unacceptable if it had simply been a collection of random actresses there at risk, but when his daughter was there as well… no, he couldn’t allow this.

Pinsley looked around, trying to work out the best way to do this. To his surprise, Amelie de Fiaux shook her head slightly next to him, lowering her voice and speaking in English.

“There’s no need for that. Wait for the right moment.”

“What right moment?” Pinsley whispered back.

“You’ll know,” Amelie said.

“Here, less of that,” the sergeant snapped at them in French. “Now, are you going to come quietly, or do we get to treat you like the murdering scum you are?”

“We haven’t murdered anyone,” Amelie said. “But we will come quietly. We will explain all of this to your satisfaction, officers.”

She sounded utterly in control of the situation, and Pinsley had to remind himself that it was probably an act, even if it was a brilliant one. She even offered her arm to one of the officers to escort her as if this were a stroll down some promenade rather than an arrest.

Pinsley looked over to Kaia, and saw that she seemed as puzzled as he was. Yet the act seemed to have the desired effect: it meant that the Sûreté officers simply led all of them out of there, leaving only a couple to tend to the fallen stonemason, rather than dragging them out in handcuffs. It was only a small element of laxness, but maybe it was one they could capitalize on.

They led the three of them out into the street, walking them back in the direction of the police station Pinsley had been to earlier. It was another slightly lax element to the arrest, since he suspected it would have been more secure to summon a carriage to transport the three of them. Perhaps the officers thought that over a short distance, with three cooperative prisoners, it wasn’t worth the trouble. If they had been his officers, Pinsley would have reprimanded them for cutting corners like this. As it was, he was grateful for it.

The people who were on the street at night looked at them from doorways, as if trying to decide if they were entertainment, or if the whole thing spelled trouble for them as well. For the most part, Pinsley felt that he could tell a lot about them by noticing who shrank back, and who looked closer.

They reached a crowd, outside one of the cafés, where music was playing.

“Out of the way,” the sergeant bellowed. “Make way!”

That was when Amelie de Fiaux looked over to Pinsley. “If this all goes wrong, find Jean-Charles Ariette. Tell him… tell him that I’m sorry. Sorry for walking out without a word.”

“I will,” Pinsley promised. Something about that name caught at the corners of his mind, but there was no time to examine it, because Amelie chose that moment to faint.

At least, she appeared to, with such theatrical style that it instantly caught the attention of the crowd around them. She didn’t just collapse, she toppled, with a cry of distress that seemed designed to draw every eye there to her. If she’d done as much on stage, Pinsley guessed that it might have been thought pure melodrama, yet here and now, it did the trick.

For a second, just a second, every eye was on Amelie, so Pinsley grabbed Kaia’s arm and ran.

He didn’t shout for her to run, didn’t tell her that this was their chance. To do so would have been to draw eyes back to them. Instead, the inspector simply had to judge that Kaia would understand what was happening and go along with it. He had to trust her.

She clearly understood, because Kaia ran in silence alongside him. That first burst of speed got them away from the police around them, through the crowd and out. They were almost fifty yards down the street before the police realized what was happening.

“It’s a trick! They’re trying to escape!” a voice called behind them in French.

“After them, then!” the sergeant bellowed.

Pinsley and Kaia had two advantages then: the first was the head start that they’d gained thanks to Amelie, precious in any urban environment where it was never far to the next turning. The second was simply that he understood the way the police chased, and the kinds of things he hated when he was running after a criminal.

“This way,” he said, deliberately taking as many turnings as he could in a short space of time. In spite of being shorter than him and hampered by her layers of skirts, Kaia kept up with him easily.

They dodged in front of a carriage, close enough that Pinsley felt the wind of its passage as he jumped away from it. The horses reared, and he knew that would provide a moment or two of distraction for the officers following, but it had downsides, too. Too much disruption left a trail that the greenest of constables could follow.

There was no time to think about that, though, only to take the next turning, and the next. The Sûreté officers following them were still too close behind for comfort. If Pinsley and Kaia could just break their line of sight for long enough, they could disappear into the city and just be one more pair strolling in the Paris night. For now, though, they had to run.

They ran on through the streets of the city, past the colonnaded classicism of the Pantheon, making their way through the evening crowds until Pinsley spotted a fenced off space ahead that made hope rise in him.

“There!” he said, pointing.

“The zoo?” Kaia said as she ran.

Pinsley could understand her misgivings, but it appeared still to be open, even now, and there were still people strolling through it, staring at the animals. Paris’ grand menagerie seemed like the perfect place to lose their pursuers. They ducked in there, dodging past the ticket sellers, and kept going.

“In here,” Pinsley said, pointing to an animal house. They ducked inside, and leapt over a barrier in a way that almost certainly wasn’t safe.

“What are those creatures?” Kaia asked as Pinsley urged her to duck down among a herd of large, horned animals.

“They’re called rhinoceros,” Pinsley said. “They’re from Africa. And yes, they can be very dangerous if they’re angry. Now down.”

They crouched there among the rhinoceroses, trying to move with them in a way that wouldn’t get the two of them crushed. Pinsley found himself hoping that he wouldn’t startle them. The creatures might be herbivores, yet if they stampeded, they might still easily kill him and Kaia. He had to move quietly, and carefully, and…

“There they are!” a police officer yelled, starting to climb into the enclosure.

“Damn it,” Pinsley said, turning to Kaia. “We need to…”

“Hyah!” she yelled, slapping one of the rhinoceroses on its rump. The creature already seemed to be nervous from having them so close to it, and the extra blow was enough to get it running forward with a snort of annoyance.

Once it started to run, so did all the others, and in just seconds, Pinsley was clinging to Kaia, holding her upright so that neither of them would fall. The police, meanwhile, were scampering back, struggling to get clear before the charge crushed them.

Pinsley saw a chance, and helped Kaia over to a railing, lifting her over it and then hopping over himself. While the police were still trying to make sense of what was happening, the two of them slipped towards an exit.

“That could have gone badly wrong,” Pinsley chided her.

“I know,” Kaia replied, “but what was the alternative? Stand there and wait to be arrested?”

Pinsley had to admit that she had a point. They took a few more turnings to be sure that they lost the police, and then hurried back in the direction of their lodgings. Pinsley was fairly sure that the Sûreté didn’t know where they were staying yet, although that was presumably only a matter of time.

“How did you even end up there, Kaia?” Pinsley asked. “How did you find Amelie de Fiaux?”

“I followed a shadow,” Kaia said, in that frustrating way she had of assuming that the things she claimed to see were as natural as breathing. “The one possessing Amelie’s body. Inspector, there are things that I need to tell you, things about what the shadows are planning.”

“As soon as we get to safety and get all of this sorted out,” Pinsley said. He couldn’t focus on shadows or strange powers or any of it right now, however strange things had been back there in the stonemason’s yard.

He had to focus on the case, instead. His daughter was still in danger.

“Are you sure that Amelie de Fiaux isn’t our killer?” he asked.

“You were there when Xander confessed,” Kaia pointed out, as they reached their lodgings. Madam Farge wasn’t there, and that was probably a good thing, as far as Pinsley was concerned. It meant that he and Kaia would be able to leave quietly.

“I was,” the inspector agreed, and the memory of that lent some credence to the idea that Amelie was telling the truth. So did the fact that she’d helped them to get away. He wasn’t as certain as Kaia was on this matter, but ultimately, it was a question of trust. Did he trust Kaia?

He did, yet, if what she said was the truth, that meant that this latest effort at finding answers in all of this had come to nothing. Pinsley was running out of ideas.

“Kaia,” he said. “You should go to your room. Pack up your things.”

He saw Kaia frown. “We’re leaving?”

“The Sûreté will be searching for us,” Pinsley said. “We cannot continue to stay at this hotel, in case they trace us here. It is possible that we will not be able to stay in Paris at all.”

“But we’re not finished here,” Kaia said.

“I know,” Pinsley replied. He was thinking of the murders, and of his daughter. If he left Paris with the murderer uncaught, he could be as good as condemning his daughter to death. “We will go back to the theatre, and try to find answers one more time, but we need to be ready to leave as soon as this is done.”

“All right,” Kaia said, and hurried up towards her room.

Pinsley went to his room and collected his remaining things. His pistol was gone, lost somewhere in the stonemason’s yard, but he collected up his clothes and put them in his travelling bag.

He still needed to think, to work this out. There was still something nagging at the back of his mind. In an effort to stimulate that mind to greater efforts, he took out his metronome and set it ticking.

That tick sliced the world into manageable fragments, letting Pinsley focus, letting him concentrate. There was something lodged at the back of his mind, something that he’d heard, something that Amelie had said. He strained the sinews of his mind, trying to force himself to remember.

Then he did.

Jean-Charles Ariette. She’d wanted him to pass on a message to a man named Jean-Charles Ariette. Under any other circumstances, that would simply be a random name, a man to find if Pinsley was going to keep his word. Now though, the inspector realized that the name meant more to him than that.

It had been the name of the man who had tried to pick a fight with him in the bar he’d gone to. A man, in an actors’ bar, close to the theatre, who was so worried about the police that he had attacked Pinsley the moment he had heard that Pinsley was an inspector.

A man who had a connection to Amelie de Fiaux. Could it be as simple as that? Could it be that straightforward? It would only work if Jean-Charles Ariette had already been the kind of man to sit on edge, ready to snap at any moment. What if he had been, though?

What if, when Amelie de Fiaux disappeared, he’d taken it as a rejection, and decided to kill those who took on the most famous romantic role in theatre? Or many he thought of the actresses who had replaced Amelie as interlopers, who had to be killed to leave the way open for her return?

Pinsley wasn’t sure which option sounded more deranged, yet a cold certainty settled on him that it had to be one of them. He cursed himself for a fool; he’d met the killer, and he hadn’t known it. He’d been so busy trying to talk to a washed up actor that he hadn’t seen a murderer right in front of him.

Now, if they didn’t stop him, he would strike again, and again, killing young women in the theatre and maybe beyond. No, Pinsley couldn’t allow that. If he’d been able to, he would have gone to the police with what he thought he knew. Now, though, he and Kaia would have to stop Jean-Charles Ariette themselves.

Pinsley didn’t know where he was now, but he knew where he would be heading. It was time to go back to the theatre.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

Jean-Charles Ariette wrapped his opera cloak around his shoulders, preparing for his next great performance. His heart should have been pounding with nerves at the thought of what he was going to do, yet instead, he felt strangely calm. Killing calmed him, it seemed, in a way that almost nothing else did.

This role was different from any of those he had played out on the stage, meaning more, achieving more. How many years had he spent as only a middling actor, getting some roles, being cast aside from others for no reason that he could see? How many rejections had there been, because directors couldn’t see his potential? How many half-full houses had he played before, because the critics were damning, or simply uninterested?

Well, they were interested now. Jean-Charles had heard that the theatre was packed now every night with those wanting to see if something would happen, or simply wanting to say that they had been there. Honestly, he thought as he stretched a velvet rope between his hands to test the tension, the ghoulishness of some people was simply too much.

Not that Jean-Charles was doing this simply for the responses of the watching public, of course. That would be the motivation of a madman. In any case, if that were his only reason, then he could have done something like this years ago.

He’d had thoughts about it, obviously. All his life, he’d wondered what it would be like to kill someone. A part of him wished that he’d been there back in the days of the Terror of 1793, or the sudden violence of 1830’s attempt at a revolution. The quieter one of the current Emperor hadn’t provided the same… opportunities. Every time he’d thrust a prop sword under someone’s arm on stage, he’d found himself wondering what it would be like to drive it into their heart. Every time an actor pretended death on the stage, Jean-Charles had been disappointed at the unreality of it.

It certainly didn’t compare to the real thing.

How different would things have been if Amelie had never left, never walked away from him without a word like the prima donna she was? He would never have found this, never have found the one thing that felt better than all the rest of it put together.

This was her fault. He’d thought that he was happy while he was with her. He’d thought that life was beautiful. For a while, it had been. They’d been together, the two of them against the world when neither of them could get more than bit parts in plays. They’d been struggling, but they’d been struggling together, and they’d had one another.

Then, Amelie had started to get more famous. Admirers had sent her gifts, like they didn’t know, or didn’t care, that she was his. Her reaction to it was even worse, because she acted like it was flattering for strange men to send her the most expensive perfumes, or like she had the right to do what she wanted simply because she had never yet given in to his wish to marry her.

When Jean-Charles had raged at her for all that, she’d always walked out for a few days, and made him feel like he was the one in the wrong. Well, she’d gone too far this time.

She’d simply disappeared on the night of her grand performance, on the night when Jean-Charles had planned the most romantic evening possible for them both to celebrate. He’d bought the best wine he could afford, fine cakes and food. He’d even bought a ring, so that he could try one more time at proposing to her. He’d felt sure that she would say yes.

Instead, she hadn’t even shown up to their romantic rendezvous, and that had broken something inside Jean-Charles. No, not broken it, set it free.

Putting his rope away inside the folds of his cloak, Jean-Charles started to walk. Of course, by this point, everyone was on the lookout for a figure dressed as he was, but that was the beautiful thing about Paris: there was always another way, under the surface. He’d learned the routes through the catacombs, including the ones that connected up to the theatre. In the days when he’d been seeing Amelie, they’d provided a convenient way to meet up for trysts. Now, they gave him the freedom to do what he had to.

Jean-Charles started to work his way through the catacombs, guided by the light of a single lantern. There were thieves and beggars who lived down here, but they left him alone. They didn’t want to get too close to a killer, in case he turned on them.

Jean-Charles almost laughed at that thought. As if they were worth his attention. He targeted actresses, not scum. The same actresses who had spent most of Jean-Charles’s life turning him down, even as they courted attention from as many other men as possible. The same actresses who treated him like he was nothing, the moment that they got into the best roles.

Jean-Charles had spent enough of his life around them to know that they were all more or less the same. All vain, all self-centered, all looking only for the ways their pathetic efforts on the stage could give them more money, or fame, or lovers. Well, tonight, another of them would die, another Juliet paying the price for the one who had abandoned him.

Jean-Charles had decided that tonight would be a special performance, though. His work out on the streets of Paris and in the dressing rooms of the theatre had helped to spread the word and strike fear into the city. They had started rumors about who it might be and set the Sûreté running this way and that.

That had been satisfying for a day or two, but now Jean-Charles wanted more from it. The feeling that came when the light went out in an actress’s eyes was incredible. The moment when their scrabbling at the strangling rope gave way to stillness was almost perfect, yet now, Jean-Charles wanted to share that moment with an audience.

He took a left and a right, going until he found a set of steps leading up into the Theatre Rue St Germain. Carefully, Jean-Charles set his lantern down so that he would be able to find it again. He would need to make a quick escape, after he had completed his grandest act.

Would he escape? Jean-Charles believed that he would. He was not suicidal, was not about to walk into somewhere when he did not believe that he would walk out again, yet the possibility of being caught and guillotined added another layer of excitement to this, because escaping would have its own thrill.

First, though, there was the moment that mattered, the grand climax that would secure his place permanently at the heart of the theatre’s lore. He would add the one element to this that would make it perfect.

Tonight, he wouldn’t just kill another Juliet. Tonight, he would do it onstage, in front of a watching audience who had probably paid to attend in the hope that they would see just that.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Kaia could practically feel the urgency boiling off the inspector as they hurried down to find a carriage. The inspector left money for their rooms in an envelope at the front desk. He was serious about them not coming back.

“We have to get to the theatre, Kaia,” he said. “We have to get there right now. I know who the killer is!”

“Who?” Kaia asked.

“A man called Jean-Charles Ariette, who was jilted by Amelie de Fiaux almost by accident when she walked away for that ritual back there,” the inspector explained.

“So the shadows-” Kaia began, but Pinsley shook his head.

“This is not about whatever strangeness is going on in Paris, or in the wider world,” he said. “This is about one man; a man I should have already stopped. I had him in my hands, Kaia, but I didn’t reason out his role in all this.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself,” Kaia said, as the inspector managed to flag down a carriage. “You can’t expect to reason out everything. Especially not with the shadows involved.”

“If the world is not amenable to reason, then it is chaos,” Pinsley said. He sounded frightened, and Kaia wasn’t sure if that was because of the prospect of the world being unreasonable, or because of the possibility of what might happen tonight. “If we don’t get to the theatre, he will kill again. I’m sure of it.”

They could agree on that part. Kaia still had a suspicion that a shadow might be involved in all of this. If there were three of them, why not four? Why not have one of their number keep Kaia and Pinsley, or even the Shadowseers, distracted with a series of killings connected to them? It made a kind of sense, and Kaia knew that she would have to be prepared for the possibility that Jean-Charles Ariette had a shadow possessing him.

“The Theatre Rue St Germain,” Pinsley yelled to the driver in French. “As fast as you can!”

“About to miss a performance, are you?” the driver called down.

“I hope not.”

The carriage set off through the streets at speed. It was only a short way, but even so, any extra pace they could gather would help. Kaia could feel the urgency of this too. They didn’t want to show up, only to find that the killer had already struck. She could guess what was driving the inspector’s extra fear, too: he was probably thinking of his daughter. If she was in the theatre, then it was even more important that they got there.

In just a minute or two, they arrived at the theatre. There were even more people there for this evening’s performance than there had been the first time Kaia and the inspector had visited. She could hear the talk all around her already.

“…another one. Who do you think it will be?”

“One doesn’t like to speculate. Fancy, keeping a theatre open when there’s a killer on the loose.”

“But that’s half the attraction!”

Kaia hid her disgust at that and kept going through the crowd with the inspector, finally reaching the ticket office. The inspector stood there solidly until they reached the front.

“No more tickets!” the ticket seller declared, just as they reached it, putting up a sign to that effect even as she shouted it.

“But there have to be,” the inspector said. “Please.”

“No more tickets.”

“It is a matter of life and death.”

“No more tickets,” the ticket seller said, putting emphasis on each word.

They headed outside.

“We need to get in there,” Pinsley said. “It’s vital.”

“I know,” Kaia replied, trying to work out how they could do it. Should they try to sneak in.

“I have spare tickets,” a man said, approaching them through the crowd. “But they’ll cost you.”

“How much?” Pinsley asked.

The man named a sum, and even though Kaia didn’t fully understand how much a franc was worth, one look at the inspector’s face told her that it was a lot.

“That works out at almost an English guinea each,” he protested.

“Well, it’s a very popular play,” the ticket tout said. “Of course, if you don’t want to get in there…”

“No, no, I’ll pay,” Pinsley said, taking out the money and taking two tickets from the man before he could snatch them away.

“That was a lot,” Kaia said. She didn’t think that she’d actually seen a guinea, a whole pound plus a shilling.

“It was,” Pinsley agreed, “but if it gives us a chance to stop this madman, it will be worth it and more. Come on.”

He started to stride towards the entrance. Kaia followed, moving with the crowd as they all flowed inside.

“Do we search the theatre?” Kaia asked.

“I would love to,” Pinsley replied, “but the director has already ejected us once. If we interrupt now, and he throws us out again, we won’t have a chance to stop the killer.”

Kaia could understand the fear in Pinsley’s voice there. If they’d been in London, he could probably have just stopped the show and searched the building. Here, if he tried to demand anything, they might find themselves locked out completely.

“So what do we do instead?” Kaia asked.

“We search as surreptitiously as we can,” Pinsley said, leading the way down towards the stage.

“Non, non,” an usher in a red velvet uniform said, moving to intercept them. “Please take your seats. We cannot allow anyone to approach the stage. It is too dangerous. Where are your tickets? Ah, you’re not in this section at all. Follow me.”

The usher led them to their seats, and there didn’t seem to be any way to argue. They had to sit there. They were a lot further from the stage than they’d been last time. A lot further, all the way at the back, behind a pillar.

“What are we meant to do now?” Kaia asked.

Pinsley looked as frustrated as she felt. “We can’t try to sneak out of our seats with the ushers watching,” he said. “I suspect… I suspect that all we can do is sit here and watch closely for any sign of Jean-Charles Ariette. If we can stop him, we can explain our actions, but before that, trying to do more will simply see us removed.”

Kaia wasn’t sure that she liked that plan, and she was convinced that the inspector didn’t either. Having to wait like this was a kind of torture.

Worse, they were so far back from the stage that they might not be able to help. Kaia had another worry in that regard too. A part of her was still convinced that there had to be a shadow involved in this somewhere, that there was no way an ordinary man would do all this.

How close did she need to be to feel the shadows? She’d picked out a few manifestations of them across the city before, but when it came to possessed people, she suspected that she needed to be closer. Amelie had been practically underneath her window, and when she’d first sensed the shadow in Doctor De Vere back in London, he’d almost tripped over her.

Kaia was convinced that shadows were still at the heart of all this. What human would behave the way this killer had, however much the inspector thought he’d worked out his reasons?

That meant that Kaia had a chance to sense the danger coming, but for that, she needed to be closer.

*

If Pinsley had bought those tickets for the performance, rather than for the chance to stop a killer, he would have demanded his money back. He and Kaia found themselves jammed right at the back of the theatre, far enough away that it was hard to make out which actor was which, and the words to the play came to him half garbled thanks to the conversations of those in front.

Worse, he and Kaia were seated behind a pillar, so that Pinsley had to peek out like a soldier from a foxhole back in the Crimea. He could see Kaia craning her neck in an effort to see what was going on.

It made every moment of the play frustrating. They were doing all they could when he had no power as a policeman here, yet it still didn’t feel like nearly enough. They had to just sit and wait, when they should have been actively searching? The most Pinsley could hope for was that he could ensure that everyone was safe through the play, then convince the director to search the premises in the aftermath.

Pinsley looked back to the stage again, determined that, no matter the distance, he would spot any danger. The play was approaching its climax, with Romeo coming onstage while Juliet lay on a funeral bier, pretending death. The chorus of the play was up there with them, providing a background to what was meant to be a powerful moment of young foolishness in the name of love. Pinsley searched among them in case Jean-Charles Ariette had hidden himself in plain sight.

Instead of finding a face he only half remembered from a fight in a bar, he found one face that it would be impossible for him to forget. His daughter Olivia was onstage with the rest of the chorus, playing her part, oblivious to the danger that she might be in tonight.

She was so beautiful there, and so elegant. Under other circumstances, Pinsley would have felt pride in seeing her there, but now he just felt afraid.

Pinsley turned to Kaia to point out Olivia’s presence, but from the expression on her face, he knew that she had something more urgent on her mind.

“What is it, Kaia?” he asked.

“I have a plan,” she said.

“What plan?” Pinsley asked with a frown. What could they do that they weren’t already doing?

“Trust me,” Kaia said, and set off from her seat before Pinsley could begin to stop her.

She made it halfway down the stairs there before one of the ushers moved to cut her off her, obviously whispering for her to retake her seat.

“But I’m telling you,” Kaia said, in French, far too loudly for the silence of the space. “I need to get down there. I think I saw my friend, and-”

“You must retake your seat, mademoiselle,” an usher in a red velvet uniform replied. “We are in the middle of the play.”

“I know that,” Kaia said, “but this will only take a moment.”

“Non, mademoiselle,” the usher replied. “We cannot have people getting too close to the stage. Not when things are potentially dangerous.”

“It really is important,” Kaia said, continuing to argue.

What was she doing? It wasn’t just the fact that Kaia was trying to sneak forward at all, it was the fact that she was having this argument now that she’d been caught. Was she trying to get herself thrown out of the theatre?

It took him a moment to realize the truth of Kaia’s plan: she was causing a distraction, which would let him get closer to the stage.

Pinsley took his chance, slipping out of his seat and trying to get closer to the stage. As he did so, Pinsley thought he saw movement behind the chorus. He tried to tell himself that it might be nothing, just a stagehand working to prepare for the next scene. Every instinct Pinsley had told him that it was more, though. He started forward, moving along the row and then down the steps towards the stage while Kaia continued to argue loudly with the ushers.

“I don’t care if you throw me out,” she said. “Don’t you know who I am? I am the famous actress Kaia Smith!”

In all fairness, that was a good piece of acting in itself. She was a girl who had come from nothing, yet now, Kaia seemed to be channeling all the entitlement and rudeness of the worst prima donna. The result that nearly every eye in the room was on her.

Pinsley’s eyes were firmly on the stage. He made his way closer, and now he could make out the figure there, moving into position behind the chorus. Was he behind Olivia? The truth of it didn’t matter when the fear of it was so great inside Pinsley. He scurried forward, moving quickly, but not wanting to attract attention.

The figure on the stage edged forward, into the light. He wore an opera cloak, disguising almost everything about himself, but even so, Pinsley knew who it was.

“Jean-Charles Ariette!” he bellowed, and the head of that hooded figure snapped round towards him. The figure stepped forward more openly then, holding a strangling rope, as if it might kill a member of the cast even now, taunting Pinsley with his inability to stop it from happening.

Pinsley started to run forward. He didn’t care now if people saw him, only about getting to the stage in time. Around him, people started to shout, some of them pointing at the stage, some at him.

“It’s the killer!”

“It’s some mad fool charging the stage!”

“Don’t you see? It’s all part of the play. It’s brilliant!”

“Rather gauche, I thought.”

Pinsley realized that at least some of them thought that he was the killer, trying to rush the stage. He ignored all of the shouting, though, continuing forward. A man tried to get in his way, and Pinsley shoved him back into his seat, barely slowing down.

“The killer’s on the stage, you fools!” he yelled. “Jean-Charles Ariette, stop there, you’re under arrest!”

It didn’t matter right then that he wasn’t in London, and couldn’t arrest anyone here. All that mattered was that he was a police inspector, and his quarry was in front of him. Pinsley charged at him, trying to get to Jean-Charles Ariette before he could strike.

He did strike, though. He grabbed out with that rope of his, and since Pinsley had interrupted his plans, he grabbed at the first member of the chorus he could lay hands on. Was it coincidence that made his rope wrap around Olivia’s neck, or fate, or simply some horrific echo of the madman Pinsley had not stopped before he could kill her mother?

Whatever it was, Pinsley roared with anger at the sight of his child being hurt like that, and his headlong rush turned into the charge of an angry bull. He leapt up onto the stage and slammed into Jean-Charles Ariette, knocking him back from Olivia so that he lost his grip on the rope he held. He thudded down onto the stage, rolling and grabbing for his rope.

Pinsley went to grab at him, but there were actors in the way now. One of the actresses screamed, while others ran for the wings. In the audience, Pinsley saw people fighting to come forward, or get away, the two groups running into one another and causing chaos.

“What are you doing?” the actor playing Romeo demanded, stepping into Pinsley’s path.

Another grabbed at him, and Pinsley shook them both off.

“Olivia?” he called out.

Her voice came back, as melodious as it ever was, sounding utterly shocked. “Father?”

The stage was in almost as much chaos as the audience, now. The chorus must have seen what had happened, because some of them were huddling around Olivia, while others were trying to get away. The main actors, at the front of the stage, had obviously only seen Pinsley charge onto their stage and plow into someone there. They thought he was the threat, so that he had to shove away another set of grabbing hands.

Meanwhile, Jean-Charles Ariette was making his way towards the wings. Pinsley saw the flash of fabric pushing through the crowd of extras, shoving them out of the way without hesitation. Kaia was up there now, having managed to get past the ushers in the confusion.

“There,” Pinsley shouted, pointing. “He’s there.”

Too late, he realized his mistake, because Kaia set off in pursuit without waiting for him. It took him another second to break free of the crowd and get into the wings. By then, the two of them were already running.

Pinsley followed, down a flight of stairs, into the backstage area of the theatre. A part of him wanted to stop and make sure that Olivia was all right, but if he did that, he would be letting a killer go, and leaving Kaia to face him alone, all at once. Instead, Pinsley hurried on past dressing rooms and fragments of set. He dodged a rack of costumes, then leapt over a sandbag abandoned on the floor.

He saw Kaia ahead, and the flash of an opera cloak behind her, disappearing down more stairs. The catacombs beneath Paris, of course. He saw Kaia following without hesitation, and Pinsley cursed to himself. Did the girl have no fear?

He came to the top of the same steps, looking down into the dark.

“Kaia!” he yelled. “Wait for me.”

He knew that she wouldn’t, but even so, he had to try. He plunged down into the catacombs, determined not to give up the chase.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

Pinsley took the steps down into the catacombs beneath Paris two at a time, guided by the light of a lamp ahead of him that the killer must have lit to illuminate his way through the tunnels there. He thought that he could see a flash of Kaia’s dress there, moving quickly, showing that she was still chasing.

That thought worried Pinsley, because even if she’d felled dangerous men before with those uncanny talents of hers, there was no way of knowing if such things were reliable. He had to catch up.

He ran as fast as he could, down tunnels formed by the constant rebuilding of Paris, now lined with crypts and monuments to the dead. It was a macabre place, and a complex one, with fresh routes seeming to branch off almost constantly. Only the light ahead and the glimpses of Kaia provided Pinsley with any sense of which way to go.

Not all of the catacombs below the city were given over to the dead. Some parts seemed to have been seconded for use as storage spaces. Others had people, the very poorest of the city pushed into the parts that no one else wanted. They stared at Pinsley as he ran past, but didn’t move to interfere with his progress. Those islands of people brought patches of light that added to that of the torch, but in between, the tunnels were dim.

Pinsley tripped on something in the dark, caught himself, and kept running, following the light. He came to a set of steps leading up, and had to make a decision. Which way had Kaia and Jean-Charles Ariette gone?

“Kaia!” he called out, but there was no answer, leaving no data on which to make a real judgement. Or was there? The absence of anything could be a form of evidence in itself. There was no lamp glow ahead, so didn’t it make sense that his quarry had run for the surface?

Pinsley could think of a dozen ways that he might be wrong: Jean-Charles Ariette might simply have quenched his lamp, or might have turned a corner. Even like this, it was a guess, but there was no time for more than a guess. There was a killer to stop, but more importantly, Kaia needed him.

Pinsley barreled up out past an open iron gate, into the streets of the city. Even at this hour of the night, there were people out there, with crowds walking to Paris’ night spots. Pinsley realized, though, that he could use them to find the direction Kaia and Jean-Charles Ariette had gone in, looking for the spot where people were staring and shouting, then setting off as fast as he could run in that direction.

He saw them again, now, spotting Kaia first, but seeing the opera cloak of Ariette only moments later. They dove off into a side street, and Pinsley followed.

“Call the Sûreté!” he called out as he ran. “I’m chasing the theatre killer!”

It was too much to hope that the French city police would arrive quickly, but Pinsley had to try. He skidded around a corner in time to see Jean-Charles Ariette take another turning with Kaia following along after.

They were in smaller streets now, which were quieter than the main boulevards, and the absence of people made it easier for Pinsley to keep track of Kaia and the killer. He saw them both duck down one more street, and hurried after them. He was closing the gap.

This time, when he rounded the corner, the other two weren’t already on the verge of taking another turning, because there were no turnings to take. It was a dead end, and in that dead end, Jean-Charles Ariette turned at bay, with his opera cloak swirling around him.

He grabbed for Kaia, struggling with her as Pinsley rushed forward to help. He half expected to see Kaia’s assailant flung back in the same mysterious way that he’d seen others thrown from her. Instead though, and to Pinsley’s horror, Jean-Charles Ariette managed to slip behind her, bringing that velvet rope of his up to wrap around her throat.

The fear that Pinsley felt then was every bit as great as it had been when it had been his daughter under attack. The thought of something happening to Kaia filled him with horror.

“You’re going to let me out of here,” Jean-Charles Ariette said. “You’re going to let me go, or I’ll strangle her right here in front of you.”

Pinsley froze in place. He could not allow Kaia to be hurt, he could not. If he thought that letting this man leave would keep her safe, he would do it in a heartbeat.

“We’re going to walk out of here together,” Ariette said. “And then I might let her go, or I might just strangle her anyway to teach you not to interfere in matters that are beyond you.”

That was the problem, and the reason that Pinsley couldn’t let this man walk away from here. Let him go, and there was nothing to stop him from killing Kaia anyway. Let him take Kaia away, and there wasn’t even the chance to stop him before he did.

“I can’t let you go with Kaia,” Pinsley said. “Let go of her, and I’ll let you walk out of this alley.”

It was a lie, but hopefully one that might work. Just get him to let go of Kaia for an instant, and Pinsley would be on him. This would be over.

“No, don’t let him go!” Kaia called out, until Jean-Charles tightened the rope at her throat.

“Do you think I’m a fool?” Jean-Charles Ariette demanded. “I’m not a fool! I’m a brilliant man! An actor of the highest caliber, yet no one recognized it. No, they’d rather focus on pretty young things instead. Even when I started killing them, all the talk was of the loss of them, not of me!”

“Just let Kaia go, and we can talk all you want,” Pinsley said. Bizarrely, he found the sixth of Sir Robert Peel’s nine principles of policing springing to mind: To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice, and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public cooperation. It was a distraction he didn’t need, but it was also probably true that attacking here would only put Kaia in danger.

“I’ve had enough of this,” Ariette said, and yanked on the rope.

“No!” Pinsley cried out, as he started to strangle Kaia. Pinsley saw her face redden with it, and her hands went up to the rope. Then she did the one thing that he didn’t expect, and clearly Jean-Charles Ariette didn’t either: she turned into him and punched him, as hard as she could.

It wasn’t a blow to fell him, but the shock of it meant that Ariette loosened his grip on the strangling rope just for a moment or two.

It was all Pinsley needed. He charged in, landing a blow that the great prize fighters Cribb or Broughton would have been proud of. It knocked Jean-Charles Ariette off balance, sending him stumbling back to lose his grip on the rope.

He cursed and dragged off his opera cloak, flinging it at Pinsley. The move was enough to slow the inspector’s attack for a second or two, giving him some space. Pinsley ripped the cloak away, and saw the killer staring at him.

“I know you,” he said. “You’re the stupid Englishman I fought in the bar. Well, I’m not drunk now, and I’m going to enjoy this.”

He started to reach into a pocket, and Pinsley remembered the knife he’d pulled out before. Pinsley rushed forward, grabbing hold of his arm as it came out of that pocket. If you had to face a knife, the best time to take control of it was before it was out and waving in a blur of steel. He used his weight to drive Ariette back into the nearest wall, and then slammed his hand into it until he saw the knife clatter to the floor. Ariette hit him in the side with his other hand, but Pinsley ignored it until he could kick the knife well away.

Duchene pushed clear of him then, bringing his hands up and bouncing on his toes. He moved more gracefully now that he was sober, and his savate attacks came in quickly. His feet flashed out low, and then went up towards Pinsley’s head. The inspector slipped the attack, biding his time.

Another kick came in, this time thrown almost side on, with the heel of Ariette’s boot aimed at Pinsley’s knee. The inspector drew his leg back, but his opponent followed up with a flurry of punches designed to catch him while he was off balance. Pinsley managed to avoid one, and took another on his forearms, but a third got through, and for a moment the world felt unsteady around him.

His boxing master at school had one rule in situations like this: when hit, it was better to go forward than back up. Pinsley had found it to be true in war, too. In the Crimea, falling back under an attack was the surest way to see your men slaughtered.

He attacked.

He pushed past another punch, then used his elbow to stop a kick from reaching his side. Closing with Jean-Charles Ariette, Pinsley grabbed him and dragged him to the floor, wrestling with him to come up on top and land punches. To his surprise, Ariette twisted out from under him, throwing a blow with his elbow that stunned Pinsley enough for the other man to move into a superior position. One punch came down at him, then another.

“Not so tough now!” Jean-Charles Ariette gloated. “I’ll beat you to a pulp, Englishman!”

Right then, Pinsley feared that was exactly what would happen. Already, he could barely think with the blows that had fallen. A few more, and he would fall into unconsciousness, leaving Ariette free to do as he wished with both him and Kaia. Pinsley fought furiously to get up, but it made no difference.

Then Kaia was there, holding Ariette’s own velvet rope in her hands. She wrapped it around his neck exactly the way he had with her, and from behind, like that, it was enough to let her drag him off the inspector. Knowing that there wouldn’t be another chance, Pinsley surged to his feet and struck out with all his remaining strength.

He hit Jean-Charles Ariette, and the blow was one that would have felled any man alive. It had Pinsley’s full weight behind it, and it connected sweetly with Ariette’s jaw. The sound of it was like a mallet striking a peg, and Pinsley felt the impact of it all the way up his arm.

Jean-Charles Ariette slumped, falling backwards like a felled tree, and didn’t rise. Pinsley stood there breathing hard for several seconds. He stared down at the fallen man, almost daring him to move. He didn’t, and relief flooded through him.

It was done.

Kaia came over to him.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I should be asking you that,” Pinsley said. He could see the red marks of the rope on her throat. “Your neck…”

“I’m fine,” Kaia assured him. She looked down at the fallen form of Jean-Charles Ariette. “He’s just a man.”

“What did you expect him to be?” Pinsley asked, even though he knew what the answer was likely to be.

“I just thought that, to do something like this, he would have to be possessed,” Kaia said. “I was so sure it would have to be a shadow, even now.”

Pinsley shook his head. “People are more than capable of their own evil, Kaia, and he is just a cruel man who decided that if he couldn’t have the actress of his dreams, others should die for it. The world is full of such men.”

“But that’s…” Kaia paused as if she couldn’t find the words for what it was. “That’s horrible.”

Pinsley nodded. “I’ve seen ordinary people do the worst things it is possible to do. Some say that the devil made them do it, others claim madness. Maybe some are mad, but many are not. They simply choose to do evil.”

“How… how do you stand it?” Kaia asked.

“It helps that people choose to do the kindest things, the best things, for one another, as well,” Pinsley said. “It helps that I can try to protect those people from the ones who would do them harm.”

“And what do we do with him?” Kaia asked, gesturing to the fallen form of Jean-Charles Ariette.

That was the question. The temptation was to take revenge, but Pinsley knew better than to give in to that temptation. He was a police officer, not a judge, or an executioner.

Instead, he took the rope from Kaia and used it to tie Jean-Charles Ariette, ensuring that he wouldn’t be able to escape.

“Here!” he yelled, as loud as he could. “The theatre killer is here!”

He yelled it once more, just to be sure, and then led Kaia out of the alley, to a spot in a doorway where they could watch without being seen easily in the dark.

There, they waited until Pinsley saw uniformed officers of the Sûreté running along the street, hurrying towards the alley.

“What if they don’t realize who he is?” Kaia asked. “What if they don’t believe that he’s the killer? What about Amelie?”

“After I yelled it in the theatre?” Pinsley said. “People heard his name. They will investigate, and people will have seen him there, too. They will know that he is the killer.”

The Sûreté officers would find the truth, and Jean-Charles Ariette would face justice of his actions. Pinsley was certain of that much.

“We should still stay to tell them what happened,” Kaia said. “We should make sure.”

Pinsley shook his head. “We can’t. We ran from the Sûreté. They will probably still think that we are spies, regardless of what we say. Even if they arrest Ariette, things will be too difficult.”

Kaia hesitated, but then nodded. “So what now?”

“We need to leave Paris,” Pinsley said. He paused for a moment. “First, though, we need to rest. We’ll find somewhere to stay, and then… then there is something that I must do.”

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Kaia woke to someone hammering on the door, and for a moment, she thought that the Sûreté had found them in spite of their efforts.

“Kaia,” Pinsley called. “It’s time to go. Please tell me that you’re actually in there, and I’m not talking to an empty room again.”

“I’m here,” Kaia called back. “Let me get ready.”

She got dressed and got her things together. Pinsley was waiting as she reached the door.

“Are we going to have breakfast first?” Kaia asked.

Pinsley shook his head. “Once we’re moving. After everything last night, we need to get out of Paris as quickly as possible.”

“Straight away?” Kaia asked. “There was something I wanted to do.”

“Well, there is one stop I want to make first,” Pinsley said. “But then it’s straight back to London.”

It was Kaia’s turn to shake her head.

“I can’t go back to London, not yet. I need to go to Munich.”

“Munich?” Pinsley said. “In Bavaria? Why on earth would you need to go there, Kaia?”

Kaia did her best to explain. “Last night, when I was spying on Amelie and the others who were possessed…”

“Or whatever had happened to them,” Pinsley insisted.

“They were possessed by shadows.” Kaia wasn’t going to let that go. “Inspector, you’ve seen enough of what’s happening to acknowledge it, by now.”

“I…” It seemed as if he might try to deny it, even then, but then Pinsley sighed. “Yes, I suppose I must. I have not seen these creatures directly, but I have seen things that I cannot explain in other terms.”

Kaia knew how hard that acknowledgement must have been for the inspector. It ran contrary to his entire view of the world. Now, though, she needed to push further. She needed to tell him the rest of it.

“I overheard what they were talking about,” Kaia said. “They were telling one another about what would happen next. Their plan was to try to open a way through to… to the place that they’re from.”

She saw the inspector hesitate, and for a moment or two, she thought that he might try to deny it again.

“An invasion?” he said. “More people like… well, like that? No, that cannot be permitted.”

Kaia could only agree with that. “There are people who fight against them, the Shadowseers. The people who were possessed were talking about how they would have time to open a portal here, because the Shadowseers are all in Munich, trying to find some kind of relic.”

“They’re looking for religious icons?” Pinsley said.

Kaia realized that she wasn’t explaining herself quite right. “This is just something old, something that the Shadowseers think can close the portals, but the shadows were saying that only one person can make it work. They’ve gone to Munich to find it, which means that I have to go to Munich to find them.”

“It’s a long journey,” the inspector said, obviously trying to work it all out. “And not to the safest place. Bavaria is coming under pressure from Prussia at the moment, and things are potentially unstable.”

“We still need to go,” Kaia said.

“I know,” Pinsley said. He still seemed thoughtful. “London at the middle of a political crisis, Paris after a bombing, Munich at a time when there is pressure on it… I wonder if the shadows seek out such places.”

Kaia didn’t know about that, but she did know that she had to get to Bavaria, and find the Shadowseers.

Pinsley put a hand on her shoulder. “Whatever happens, Kaia, whatever is going on here, I will come with you. Too much has happened to us both now. Our fates, if there are such things, are bound together.”

“So, Munich?” Kaia said.

“Munich,” Pinsley agreed. “But later. There is business I need to attend to first.”

“Me too,” Kaia said.

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

Pinsley stood outside fifty-three Rue St Cecile, staring up at the tall, white painted expanse of the apartment building, and trying to screw his courage together. It was an impressive building for the area, but he could see the way each window had different patterns of curtains, and several had washing hanging out of them. It wasn’t quite as expensive as it looked.

He stood there, staring at the building, watching people come and go as the morning started to unfold. A part of him hoped that he would see Olivia there, just walking out of it, because somehow that felt easier than having to walk up to the door and knock, seeking entrance.

Would she be surprised to see him? She must have seen him at the theatre last night, must know that he was in Paris, yet Pinsley still couldn’t imagine what came next without gasps of surprise, and shock that he was there at all. It was hard to imagine it without recriminations, too, and that prospect fueled the fear inside him.

There were so many things that they both needed to say, and so many questions that they needed to ask. The prospect of all of it was terrifying in ways that facing a killer last night had not been. Olivia was one of the only people in the world Pinsley truly loved, and the thought of her turning him away or reacting to him with anger was almost too much to bear.

Yet he knew that he had to do this, because if he left Paris without seeking Olivia out, he would never forgive himself. Pinsley strode forward, keeping an eye open for the Sûreté, since he felt sure that they would still be looking for him. He tried to look purposeful, like he belonged.

When he got to the apartment building, he checked the nameplates. Mdms. O. Fabien lived on the top floor. Would she be home? What if she’d already left for the day? What if she hadn’t come home last night, or refused to open the door to him? Pinsley recognized his fears talking, and waited until another of the residents there opened the door, coming out to start their day.

“Hold the door,” Pinsley said, and walked past them before they could think to ask if he belonged there. He strode into the interior of the apartment building, relying on the probability that in such a place, no one would truly know who all their neighbors were.

He looked around until he found the stairs, and started to climb. The interior of the building was decorated in rich woods and had artwork on the walls that looked as if it had been hung there almost at random by the residents. There was a musician behind one of the doors he past practicing the flute, the tune coming through the wood muted. Was this some kind of building for artists and actors? The floor above featured the sounds of two people having an argument, and then a woman came out of a door with a sheet wrapped around her and an armful of clothes.

“If you want me to model for you, Francois, you have to pay me!”

It was a chaotic place, and a part of Pinsley couldn’t accept that his daughter would live like this. Yet honestly, was it any stranger than the way Lottie kept the vicarage back in London? The fact that it was his daughter changed things, though, even if Pinsley couldn’t exactly say how. He kept walking up the stairs, reaching a landing at the top that had a window opening out directly onto a rooftop terrace, and a green painted door that presumably led to his daughter’s rooms.

Pinsley stood outside that door with the same trepidation that he’d had outside. All the same fears came back to him. Was this the right thing to do? Should he be here, or should he allow Olivia to live her life as she wished? She’d given no indication that she wanted him here; quite the opposite, given that she’d run away.

For what seemed an age, Pinsley stood stock still outside the door. He tried to think of what Kaia would do in this situation. That answer, at least, was straightforward.

Lifting his hand, Pinsley forced himself to approach the door.

And knock.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Kaia walked through Montmartre Cemetery, the monuments to the dead reminding her too much of the catacombs she’d raced through after Jean-Charles Ariette. There were more people walking here than she’d anticipated, with couples out in the sun, as if this were a public park rather than a place for the dead.

Kaia was here only because it was the starting point of Amelie de Fiaux’s instructions. A house near Montmartre, with a statue of an angel over the door. Kaia left the cemetery and started to walk its perimeter, trying to find that house.

She realized how vague the instruction had been. There had been no indication of just how close the house was to the cemetery, or if it would be easy to spot. For all Kaia knew, she might walk for hours without finding it, and miss her chance.

Then, without warning, she spotted it.

It was a grand house, on a scale that made it seem impossible that it was just one building. It was easily the size that the orphanage had been, although its classical columns, painted façade, and large windows made it look far more welcoming. The doorway had a porch of rose veined marble, and unlike the theatre, Kaia had the feeling that this was the real thing.

She walked up to the front door, and Kaia was all too aware of how shabby she looked in comparison to this place. It wasn’t that her clothes were exactly rags, but she had travelled in them, and been engaged in chases through the city. She certainly didn’t look as though she fit in here.

Even so, Kaia forced herself to lift a hand to the house’s brass door knocker and struck it against its plate, creating a hollow, booming sound that seemed to echo through the house.

After a few seconds, the door swung open, revealing a young woman dressed as a maid in a dark dress and white apron. She looked Kaia over, and for a moment, there was disdain on her face, presumably at Kaia’s disheveled state. Then her eyes widened as she stared at Kaia a second or two longer, resting on her face as if trying to make sense of what she was seeing.

“You… you should come in,” she said, in a slightly shaky voice.

She let Kaia into a huge foyer that seemed as big as most of the houses Kaia had been in. The floor was a chequerboard pattern of black and white stone, while landscape paintings adorned the walls, and doors led off in the direction of more rooms than Kaia could count. A sweeping staircase led up into the rest of the house.

“Please remain here,” the servant said, indicating the spot where Kaia was standing. “I need to… that is, I… just wait here, please.”

She sounded as if Kaia’s presence there had shaken her, which Kaia didn’t quite understand. Still, she stood there, waiting as patiently as she could, while the servant all but ran up the stairs. Kaia waited, hoping that the next couple of minutes would explain what was going on.

A young woman came back down the stairs, wearing a dark dress with a corseted waist and a bonnet. That bonnet obscured her face until she got closer to the bottom of the stairs, but then, Kaia couldn’t do anything but gape at her.

She might have been looking in a mirror.

The young woman had the same blonde hair as her, the same blue eyes, the same heart shaped face and almost fragile looking features. Kaia knew every contour of that face, because she’d seen it so many times before. There was no mistaking who this had to be, even for a moment.

Her sister.

Her twin.

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SHADOWSEER: MUNICH

(Shadowseer, Book Three)

“This novel succeeds—right from the start…. A superior fantasy…It begins, as it should, with one protagonist’s struggles and moves neatly into a wider circle….”

–Midwest Book Review (re Rise of the Dragons)

“Filled with non-stop action, this novel is sure to keep you on the edge of your seat from cover to cover….Rice is setting up for an amazing series to rival series such as Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness, with her strong female protagonist making waves in her world and building the confidence of young women in ours.”

–The Wanderer, A Literary Journal (re Rise of the Dragons)

From #1 bestselling author Morgan Rice, a USA Today bestseller and critically-acclaimed author of the fantasy series The Sorcerer’s Ring (over 3,000 five-star reviews) and the teen fantasy series The Vampire Journals (over 1,500 five-star reviews) comes a groundbreaking new series and genre, where fantasy meets mystery.

SHADOWSEER: MUNICH (Book Three) continues the story of Kaia, 17, an orphan coming of age in the Victorian Europe of the 1850s. Kaia yearns to escape her horrific orphanage, to discover who her parents were, and to understand why she can sense shadows when others cannot. When the brilliant Detective Pinsley, 45, takes Kaia under his wing and enlists her help in solving the mysterious and bizarre murders sweeping over Europe, the two of them become unlikely partners.

Are they part of a greater war of light versus dark? And is Kaia the only one who can stop it?

Dark fantasy meets mystery in SHADOWSEER, a page-turning, atmospheric thriller packed with authentic period detail, with twists and cliffhangers that will leave you on the edge of your seat. Kaia, a broken hero, will capture your heart as she struggles to claw her way up from the depths, and to solve unsolvable crimes. Fans of books such as Spellbreaker, The Dresden Files, Mortal Instruments and Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde will find much to love in SHADOWSEER, satisfying fantasy fans who appreciate mystery and suspense, and mystery lovers who want something new, a clean hybrid that will appeal to both adult and young adult readers. Get ready to be transported to another world—and to fall in love with characters you will never forget.

“Morgan Rice proves herself again to be an extremely talented storyteller….This would appeal to a wide range of audiences, including younger fans. It ended with an unexpected cliffhanger that leaves you shocked.”

–The Romance Reviews (re the paranormal series Loved)

“The beginnings of something remarkable are there.”

–San Francisco Book Review (re the young adult fantasy A Quest of Heroes)

SHADOWSEER: ROME (Book #4) and SHADOWSEER: ATHENS (Book #5) are also available.

SHADOWSEER: MUNICH

(Shadowseer, Book Three)

Did you know that I've written multiple series? If you haven't read all my series, click the image below to download a series starter!

Books by Morgan Rice

SHADOWSEER

SHADOWDEER: LONDON (Book #1)

SHADOWSEER: PARIS (Book #2)

SHADOWSEER: MUNICH (Book #3)

SHADOWSEER: ROME (Book #4)

SHADOWSEER: ATHENS (Book #5)

AGE OF THE SORCERERS

REALM OF DRAGONS (Book #1)

THRONE OF DRAGONS (Book #2)

BORN OF DRAGONS (Book #3)

RING OF DRAGONS (Book #4)

CROWN OF DRAGONS (Book #5)

DUSK OF DRAGONS (Book #6)

SHIELD OF DRAGONS (Book #7)

DREAM OF DRAGONS (Book #8)

OLIVER BLUE AND THE SCHOOL FOR SEERS

THE MAGIC FACTORY (Book #1)

THE ORB OF KANDRA (Book #2)

THE OBSIDIANS (Book #3)

THE SCEPTOR OF FIRE (Book #4)

THE INVASION CHRONICLES

TRANSMISSION (Book #1)

ARRIVAL (Book #2)

ASCENT (Book #3)

RETURN (Book #4)

THE WAY OF STEEL

ONLY THE WORTHY (Book #1)

ONLY THE VALIANT (Book #2)

ONLY THE DESTINED (Book #3)

ONLY THE BOLD (Book #4)

A THRONE FOR SISTERS

A THRONE FOR SISTERS (Book #1)

A COURT FOR THIEVES (Book #2)

A SONG FOR ORPHANS (Book #3)

A DIRGE FOR PRINCES (Book #4)

A JEWEL FOR ROYALS (BOOK #5)

A KISS FOR QUEENS (BOOK #6)

A CROWN FOR ASSASSINS (Book #7)

A CLASP FOR HEIRS (Book #8)

OF CROWNS AND GLORY

SLAVE, WARRIOR, QUEEN (Book #1)

ROGUE, PRISONER, PRINCESS (Book #2)

KNIGHT, HEIR, PRINCE (Book #3)

REBEL, PAWN, KING (Book #4)

SOLDIER, BROTHER, SORCERER (Book #5)

HERO, TRAITOR, DAUGHTER (Book #6)

RULER, RIVAL, EXILE (Book #7)

VICTOR, VANQUISHED, SON (Book #8)

KINGS AND SORCERERS

RISE OF THE DRAGONS (Book #1)

RISE OF THE VALIANT (Book #2)

THE WEIGHT OF HONOR (Book #3)

A FORGE OF VALOR (Book #4)

A REALM OF SHADOWS (Book #5)

NIGHT OF THE BOLD (Book #6)

THE SORCERER’S RING

A QUEST OF HEROES (Book #1)

A MARCH OF KINGS (Book #2)

A FATE OF DRAGONS (Book #3)

A CRY OF HONOR (Book #4)

A VOW OF GLORY (Book #5)

A CHARGE OF VALOR (Book #6)

A RITE OF SWORDS (Book #7)

A GRANT OF ARMS (Book #8)

A SKY OF SPELLS (Book #9)

A SEA OF SHIELDS (Book #10)

A REIGN OF STEEL (Book #11)

A LAND OF FIRE (Book #12)

A RULE OF QUEENS (Book #13)

AN OATH OF BROTHERS (Book #14)

A DREAM OF MORTALS (Book #15)

A JOUST OF KNIGHTS (Book #16)

THE GIFT OF BATTLE (Book #17)

THE SURVIVAL TRILOGY

ARENA ONE: SLAVERSUNNERS (Book #1)

ARENA TWO (Book #2)

ARENA THREE (Book #3)

VAMPIRE, FALLEN

BEFORE DAWN (Book #1)

THE VAMPIRE JOURNALS

TURNED (Book #1)

LOVED (Book #2)

BETRAYED (Book #3)

DESTINED (Book #4)

DESIRED (Book #5)

BETROTHED (Book #6)

VOWED (Book #7)

FOUND (Book #8)

RESURRECTED (Book #9)

CRAVED (Book #10)

FATED (Book #11)

OBSESSED (Book #12)

About Morgan Rice

Morgan Rice is the #1 bestselling and USA Today bestselling author of the epic fantasy series THE SORCERER’S RING, comprising seventeen books; of the #1 bestselling series THE VAMPIRE JOURNALS, comprising twelve books; of the #1 bestselling series THE SURVIVAL TRILOGY, a post-apocalyptic thriller comprising three books; of the epic fantasy series KINGS AND SORCERERS, comprising six books; of the epic fantasy series OF CROWNS AND GLORY, comprising eight books; of the epic fantasy series A THRONE FOR SISTERS, comprising eight books; of the new science fiction series THE INVASION CHRONICLES, comprising four books; of the fantasy series OLIVER BLUE AND THE SCHOOL FOR SEERS, comprising four books; of the fantasy series THE WAY OF STEEL, comprising four books; of the fantasy series AGE OF THE SORCERERS, comprising eight books; and of the new fantasy series SHADOWSEER, comprising three books (and counting). Morgan’s books are available in audio and print editions, and translations are available in over 25 languages.

Morgan loves to hear from you, so please feel free to visit www.morganricebooks.com to join the email list, receive a free book, receive free giveaways, download the free app, get the latest exclusive news, connect on Facebook and Twitter, and stay in touch!