Chapter 4

Cordelia knew something was wrong the moment she woke up. The sun was already sinking, and long violet shadows were striped across the threadbare rugs. Why hadn’t her father woken her to help soften the diggles with their weekly milk bath, and give the filch its cold medicine?

She sat up. It was so quiet she could hear the cluck-cluck-cluck of the grandfather clock downstairs.

Too quiet.

A feeling of dread overcame her. Her hands and feet felt numb and overlarge, clumsy, as if she were moving in a body that wasn’t her own. She went into the hall, listening for the familiar sound of her father’s footsteps, for the growls and snarls and slurps of the monsters. The numb feeling spread to her throat, making it hard to breathe. She ran down the stairs and burst into the kitchen.

Empty. The clock kept up its clucking; she saw that it was nearly five o’clock in the evening. The pan in which she had heated hot chocolate was still sitting on the stove.

“Dad?” she called out. Now the panic was gripping her from all directions at once, making her chest vibrate.

She raced down the hall and threw open the doors to the great room. Empty. She dashed into the sunroom, skidding across the polished stone floor, and burst into the parlor. Her knees turned liquid. A whimpering sound worked its way out of her throat.

They were gone. All of them. The succubus and the hufflebottom, the pixies and the filch, the wailers and both growrks—gone.

“Dad? Dad!” Cordelia was screaming now. She moved blindly back into the hall and raced upstairs to her father’s bedroom, flinging open the door. The sheets had been pushed violently off his bed, as though he’d woken in a hurry. His window was open.

She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She dropped onto her knees, as though her father might simply be hiding under the bed. Of course, he wasn’t there.

She plunged downstairs again, through the kitchen, through the overgrown courtyard—mindless of the fact that she was barefoot, and still in her nightgown. She dashed out the gate onto Cedar Street and turned left onto Pinckney, brushing roughly past a sharp-beaked man wearing a tall hat and a high-collared coat, ignoring his cry of surprise.

Had she been thinking rationally, Cordelia might have realized that it was highly unlikely her father would have simply taken all the monsters with him on a stroll. They were difficult to control, and evidence of any quantity of monsters would have caused a panic in the city.

But she wasn’t thinking rationally. The word Dad kept beating through her brain.

Dad, Dad, Dad. Beneath its constant rhythm, another word kept tempo. Gone, gone, gone.

Her footsteps pounded on the slick cobblestones. She barely even noticed it was raining. Left, right, left, right. She cut across Louisburg Square, careened down the byway that ran parallel to Charles Street, scanning the face of every passerby, searching the reflections in every shop window, her feet pounding out the same urgent message. Dad, Dad, Dad.

On the north side of the Boston Common, she ran straight into the boy, Gregory, who had come to her with the zuppy.

“’Allo, Cordelia,” he said cheerfully, as if they were old friends. He was eating pistachios straight from a pocket. Cordelia noticed he was carrying a very wriggly rucksack and figured the zuppy was inside. “I was just on my way to see you, actually. Cabal’s in tip-top shape, never been better. Whatever you gave him must have been—”

He didn’t get any further. She flung her arms around his neck and let out a sob into the soft wool of his old coat, which smelled faintly like sour pickles. She couldn’t help it. She had no one else.

“What’s wrong?” Gregory’s voice inched higher. It had been years since anyone had hugged him, and he had a brief, overwhelming impression of a woman with a crown of dark braids, the snug fit of a warm blanket, a sense of warmth and closeness. He wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to hug Cordelia back or just stand there. He opted for the latter, since she was squeezing him so tightly he felt like he was in a straitjacket. “What’s happened?”

“They’re gone,” she sobbed.

“Who’s gone?” Gregory pulled away and gripped her shoulders tightly. “What are you talking about?”

“The monsters,” she wailed, and a woman wearing a great bustled skirt shot her an alarmed look and hurried rapidly past her. “Every last one of them.” Cordelia realized, too late, that she had broken the rules. Her father had forbidden her from speaking of the monsters to anyone else.

But her father was gone.

For a moment, Gregory said nothing, and Cordelia felt a terrible, gnawing anxiety. Would he believe her? Would he think she was crazy? Would he scream, or run away? Cordelia found that she was holding her breath.

After a pause that felt like an hour, Gregory reached up and rubbed the hat back and forth on his head, as if he were trying to heat up his brain. “I think—” he said, squinting at her. “I think you’d better start at the beginning.”