Glory was often exasperated by her dad but after their last encounter she just felt depressed. She had a sudden urge to celebrate Friday night, to join a crowd and go dancing. In the end, she made peace with Nate and gatecrashed a club night he’d scammed tickets for.
The doorman was a mate of Earl’s, so getting in wasn’t a problem. But it wasn’t Glory’s kind of place: an overpriced basement dive full of scruffy hipsters and the kind of public school type who likes to slum it in style. Nate had got their tickets from one of the latter – a trust-fund brat who wanted to play gangsters, and was dumb enough to think that Nate was the real deal.
It was a strange night. Glory felt tearful and panicky, yet laughed the loudest and talked the most. Her senses tingled all over, black flecks and bright sparks dancing before her eyes. She got home just before dawn and didn’t get up until lunchtime, when she was woken by a row in the room next door. Jacko and his on-and-off girlfriend were yelling blue murder. By the sounds of it, she’d just chucked her phone at his head. Then a door slammed, and it was quiet again.
Same old, same old . . . Glory stumbled out of bed with a groan. The pale yellow duvet ached against her eyes. The brush of a curtain rasped on her skin. A child crying somewhere outside scraped, monotonously, inside her skull.
Her window looked over a clutter of rooftops that widened out to London’s smoky rim. It was a view she loved. Today, however, the city didn’t seem to stretch out in all its possibilities, but appeared to box her in. Cooper Street showed few signs of spring. Since Auntie Angel had a theory that nature attracted germs, their own back garden was mostly concrete and plastic flowers in pots. The garden to Number Seven grew mud, beer cans and nettles; Number Eight’s was a barbed-wire prison camp for Joe Junior’s bull terriers.
This is it, Glory thought. My life, my world. Scams, squalor and stupid bickering . . . I should be better than this. Mab Almighty – I have to be.
Like Lily and Cora: self-made women, and head-witches worthy of the name. Style with substance. And unlike Lily’s thuggish sons, who’d made the Wednesday Coven a byword for viciousness and greed, they’d kept their integrity. That’s why people still talked about them with respect. Glory thought of the other coven women she’d known over the years, who’d grown pinched and sour from always coming second best to their man’s latest con or newest fling. Even Auntie Angel, for all her toughness and wiliness, hadn’t escaped. Married at nineteen to a bully who’d used her fae when it suited him, and blown everything she’d saved on drink and gambling . . . What were Glory’s chances of beating the odds? She leaned against the window frame, resting her hot cheek against the glass.
On the fence at the back of the concrete garden a tabby cat was licking its paws. Glory remembered she’d been petting it yesterday afternoon, even though it was a mangy old thing. Now it looked up towards her, ears pricked. And in that brief moment, the world changed.
Everything was suddenly washed-out, almost colourless, and blurred at the edges, though even the smallest of specks seethed with life. But it wasn’t just the quality of Glory’s vision that had altered. Her view had gone into reverse. She was outside the back of the house, looking up from the garden towards the attic window. For a second, Glory saw herself through the cat’s eyes.
Glory gave a stifled cry. She screwed her eyes shut, then stared out again. The view was back to normal. Yet all her senses were heightened and confused, sparking with fierce, hot energy.
Animals were more sensitive to witchwork than humans. It was why they made good familiars. It was said they could detect the onset of fae; some people thought they had a fae of their own, and that they used it to commune with witches.
Is it –? Is this how –?
No. Don’t start, she told herself, in a kind of panic. Don’t think about it, just do.
The cat, unconcerned, had gone back to its grooming. This gave her an idea. Light-headed, she went to find the jumper she’d been wearing yesterday, when she had stroked the cat. Sure enough, the front was covered in cat hair. Her trembling fingers raked over the wool until she had gathered a small, greyish-brown clump. The activity calmed her, giving her a focus for the gathering pressure in her head.
Thank Hecate. The animal was still there when she got back to the window. It was stiff and watchful. Listening, as if it had been called . . . Glory pulled out a couple of hairs of her own, and entwined them with the cat fur. Then she spat on it. Like everything else, this was pure instinct. But although she hadn’t seen anyone else do what she was attempting, her trembles had gone, and she felt strong and sure.
She kept the cat in view as she rolled the spit-dampened twist of hair and fur into a thread across her palm. Carefully, she looped it around her right forefinger, like a collar or ring. Then she held her hand up to the window, and beckoned.
The cat flicked its tail, but its unnatural stiffness did not change. Something was missing.
Glory thought back to their first encounter, and the crooning, kissing noises she had made when cuddling the cat. She made them again. In response, the animal opened its mouth in a soundless hiss. Still crooning, Glory beckoned it down from the fence. This time it obeyed. Her finger circled the air. The cat circled on the ground. She pointed left, and the cat followed. Right, and it came back again. She laughed delightedly.
All the while, she had glimpses of a second view, colour-bleached yet impossibly vivid, teeming with movements sensed rather than seen. Her own nose twitched at scents of blood and earth. As she drew the cat across the garden, she felt the coarse scratch of concrete under its paws.
The animal drew closer. Dark stars danced at the edge of her vision. The world reeled and sparkled, and Glory fell to the floor.
When she awoke from her faint or sleep or whatever it was, it was late afternoon and the house was quiet. She was a little stiff, but otherwise fine. No heightened perceptions or shooting stars.
Could she have dreamed it? Or exaggerated and confused what she thought she’d seen? There’d been a mortifying occasion when she was eleven and got the flu, and bragged to everyone that her overheated state was the onset of fae. The memory still made her wince.
She didn’t really doubt herself, though. Whatever she had felt, and seen, and done, was true. It was imprinted on her soul. Its aura still hung in the air around her.
Glory went to the drawer in her bedside table, and took out the photograph she kept there. Now that everything had changed, she wondered if she would find a resemblance to the stranger in the frame . . . the face that haunted her visions of the Burning Court. The woman’s eyes were guarded, distant, even though she was smiling. It was the same in every other photo of her mother, even the ones from her wedding day. Edie Starling, thought Glory, had always had the look of someone who was preparing to leave.
Perhaps Edie had been raised that way. Her mother Cora had been the wilder of the Starling Twins; Edie’s father could have been any one of the assorted celebrities, politicians and crooks Cora was partying with at the time. When Edie turned eight, Cora had had some kind of breakdown, quarrelled with Lily, and disappeared, taking her daughter with her. Nobody heard from them for five years. When Cora finally got in contact with her sisters, it was too late. Before the three of them could meet, she was arrested by the Inquisition, and died in the course of her interrogation.
By then, Edie was thirteen. Lily adopted her and raised her in the Wednesday Coven. Edie never spoke about the five years she’d spent on the run, but Glory sometimes wondered if it had given her mother a taste for escape. All those fresh starts and disappearances, disguises and false names . . . How many lives had she lived? Could she be living a different one now? Perhaps one day Glory would dream of it, instead of the Burning Court.
Yet although Glory did not look like the wide-eyed blonde behind the glass, today she felt closer to her mother than she ever had before. The fae that sang through her body had once leapt in her mother’s veins, and those of her grandmother and great-grandmother before that.
Carefully, Glory placed the photograph on the floor. She sat beside it, cross-legged, in front of her mirror. Her ordinary brown hair was dyed to match the Starling Twins’ white-blonde and her eyes were brown too; soft in some lights, black in others. She had her father’s slightly hooked nose, but her strong brows and wide curved mouth were her own. Perhaps these features were too strong for prettiness, but if people remembered her face, it was for the right reasons.
Glory took a deep breath. Then she pulled down the neck of her T-shirt. Again, instinct took her directly to what she sought. Nestled underneath her collarbone was a small bloom the colour of midnight. It was velvet-soft, perfect; a true beauty spot.
For many hours longer, Gloriana Starling Wilde sat in front of the mirror, hand resting on the seal of fae. Her birthright and destiny.