Blind Eye

Frances Hardinge

 

“Twenty pounds an hour?” The man on the other end of the line covered his phone, but not well enough. “Bloody rip-off,” Erin heard him mutter in the background.

“Jesus wept, Nathan!” hissed a female voice in answer. “Just tell her yes, okay? What else are we going to do? We can’t exactly call an agency, can we?”

“But we’ll be gone hours! That could cost—”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” There was a crackle and click, and the female voice became clearer. “Pepper Donovan gave us your number. She says you’re… trustworthy. Is that right?”

Erin knew what ‘trustworthy’ meant here. No questions asked, no talk afterwards.

“Yes,” she said quickly. “It’s like doctors. Confidentiality.”

“Right, then. We’re at the Harmony Inn in west Willbrook, just off the ring road. And you can have an extra thirty quid if you make it here in half an hour. We’ll talk properly when you get here.”

Erin didn’t like heading out to meet people she knew nothing about, but the mention of Pepper was reassuring. Pepper was a bouncer, and a regular customer who would probably be annoyed if Erin went missing. If these people knew Pepper, they probably wouldn’t want to annoy her.

As a rule, Erin liked to find out as much as possible before accepting a job. However, personal rules were like guy ropes. Whenever one of them snapped, it put more strain on the others. This evening, a week after an expensive MOT, her remaining rules were looking dangerously optional.

 

 

In the hotel’s pocket-sized lobby, next to the empty reception desk, a man, a woman and a small girl stood waiting for Erin. They all had a defeated, exhausted air, as if there had been a raging argument that nobody had won.

The child had a narrow, wan face and hair the colour of dishwater. Unlike her companions, she did not look up as Erin entered.

“You the babysitter?” asked the woman. “Oh, thank bloody God. I’m Kim. This is Mia.” She held the girl’s hand high, as though she were apprehending a criminal rather than making an introduction.

Kim and her male companion were both dark-haired and in their thirties, with the same jowly, sullen look. Brother and sister, Erin guessed, not a couple. Both looked sick, purple shadows lurking beneath their eyes. Neither bore any obvious family resemblance to Mia.

Erin had a secret dread that one day she would be called out to guard a kidnap victim, and that fear now flitted across her mind. She dismissed it, however. Abductors would have spirited their stolen child into a hotel room quickly, instead of waiting around in a brightly-lit lobby in full view of the car park.

“Here.” Nathan slapped a room key into Erin’s hand. “There’s food and tea in the room. And you’ve got my number.” He started doing up his anorak.

“Wait—anything I need to know before you go?” asked Erin, startled. “Anything medical? Diet? Any rules I should know about?”

Nathan handed her a pill bottle.

“She doesn’t sleep,” he said.

Erin’s hackles rose. She didn’t like dosing kids, particularly with sleeping pills. Even prescribed melatonin made her uncomfortable.

“I might see if I can get her to sleep without them, first,” she said, in what she hoped was a non-confrontational tone. “I have a few tricks that sometimes work. What have you tried?”

“No,” said the man. “You don’t understand. She mustn’t sleep. You can’t let her sleep. Not even for a moment.”

“What?” Erin looked down at the bottle, and spotted the word ‘caffeine’. “Why?”

“It’s medical,” Kim replied sharply. “She mustn’t sleep while we’re away. Health reasons. Look, we need to go right now. Is this going to be a problem?”

“No,” said Erin, and tried to sound like she meant it. “We’ll manage.”

Of course it was a problem. Caffeine pills weren’t safe for kids, let alone six-year-olds. If Erin walked away, however, Mia might be left with someone else—someone willing to chuck pills down her throat.

Erin had always wondered what she would do if she found herself in charge of a child suffering real abuse or neglect. She hoped that she was not about to find out.

She had known, of course, that her new customers would be dubious. These days they always were.

 

 

Erin had never been a morning person, or even an afternoon person. Day’s tedious glare made her sleepy, and she only seemed to wake up properly after dark. So when her smattering of temp jobs didn’t meet her rising rent costs, a friend suggested that she become a childminder and work evenings. For the first year or two, her babysitting was underpaid but mostly unchallenging.

When everything changed, it was the fault of Pepper Donovan’s daughter Lily. She was ten years old, with a craven, ingenious, furious hunger for attention. When she didn’t get it, she set fires. Being dumped with a babysitter counted as being ignored.

In the dead of night, after she had been put to bed, Lily climbed out of the window and set fire to some rubbish in a corner of the garage. Erin smelt smoke and rushed into the garage to put out the fire. That was when she discovered the four damaged cash machines stacked against the wall, wires trailing from where they had been ripped from their bases.

She should have called the police, but instead she phoned Pepper to report the fire.

“You went into the garage?” Pepper’s voice suddenly became tense.

“Yes.”

Above her, Erin could see Lily leaning over the bannister in her sequinned top, white-faced and shocked by the success of her arson. Lily was smart, hard-eyed and frenetic. Erin imagined her kicked from care home to care home, her crazy fire fizzling under a cold, steady drizzle of rejection and neglect.

“Yes, but it’s OK,” Erin heard herself say. “No harm done. I don’t think we need to… bother anybody with this.”

Pepper had a lot of friends. Word got round that there was a babysitter who was ‘trustworthy’, and who would babysit all night at short notice.

There was the burglar who kept getting arrested because of his ‘trademark’ of baking a cake in any house he robbed, and whose twelve-year-old son seemed relieved to have actual help with his homework. A white-van-man needed somebody to look after his twins whenever he was out stealing charity bags of clothes from doorsteps, or raiding allotment sheds for their tools. And there were a lot of other parents with strange schedules and suspiciously nice cars…

Gradually, the normal agency work was squeezed out by Erin’s new customers. Erin could not have explained quite how it happened. The work for her respectable clients was less well paid, of course, but it also started to seem less important, less rewarding.

Erin had already read up on child-minding and taken first aid courses. Now she took self-defence classes and Aikido lessons. She changed her dress style to something less cosy, a ‘mafioso PA on casual Friday’ look.

How bad would a crime need to be before she reported it? She didn’t know, and felt uneasy every time she compromised a little further. I’m doing this for the kids, not the parents, she told herself. I’ve got my foot in the door. I can make a difference. It was Vichy logic, but she clung to the hope that she could be a lifeline for the children.

She remembered her own childhood, and what it was like when people gave up on you. That broken, defeated look when they made their final goodbye, as if you were abandoning them, not the other way round. And the cars, all the cars, when they dropped you off for the last time, their smells of pine and mud and dogs and feet rolled into one. All the same car, blurrily pulling away from you, and melting back into the world.

Reporting the parents and passing the kids to social services felt like giving up.

 

 

As soon as they entered the hotel room, Mia ran off and locked herself in the bathroom.

“Mia?” called Erin, after allowing her a few minutes. “Are you OK in there?”

Silence.

“I’m sorry we didn’t get introduced properly. I’m Erin. I’m going to watch TV, okay? Come and join me if you feel like it.”

She didn’t waste time hammering on the door. Who could blame Mia, dumped in a dingy hotel room with some black-clad stranger?

Erin channel-surfed until she found cartoons. Sure enough, a little later she heard the bathroom door open. Without looking round, Erin shifted along the sofa to make room. When Mia perched on the very far end of the sofa, Erin put her crisp packet on the cushion between them, within reach of both. She didn’t usually resort to TV and snacks from the very start, but the runaway adults hadn’t given her much to work with.

Mia was silent, but Erin could respect silence. A different type of adult would have crouched in front of Mia, bringing their huge hot face level with hers, and talked to her in a loud, cheery voice. They would have wanted to ‘bring her out of her shell’. As if it were that easy. As if shells were always bad.

“You don’t have to make me like you, you know.” Mia’s voice was small but waspish.

“OK,” said Erin calmly, taking another crisp. “What do you do to people you don’t like? Do you stick forks in their feet?”

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

“Yeah,” said Mia, with quiet bravado, and snuffled a laugh. She reached over and took the remote, flipped a couple of channels then stopped on a blue-tinted, moonlit scene.

“Oh.” Erin recognised the show. “Maybe not that one—it’ll give you nightmares.”

“I watch it at home.” Mia shrugged. “He’s a werewolf,” she added helpfully, pointing at the screen.

“Nathan and Kim let you watch Bloodrise?” asked Erin, aghast.

“They’re only there in the day,” Mia answered promptly. “At night I watch what I like.”

It could easily be a lie. Kids often tested Erin’s gullibility to see what they could get away with. I’m allowed to stay up till midnight! Mum always gives me three biscuits. Dad said I could use his drill.

“What, you’re alone in the house at night? Every night?”

Small nod. Crisp packet rustle. Crunch.

Erin pursed her lips, and let out her breath slowly. Could it be true? Mia’s offhand manner was oddly convincing. Then again, if Nathan and Kim usually left Mia alone at night, why would they pay over the odds for a babysitter now?

She was still troubled by the idea of forcibly depriving a young child of sleep, but perhaps there were good reasons. Medical, Kim had said. Wasn’t there some weird kind of narcolepsy where people stopped breathing? Or perhaps Mia was suffering from concussion? Erin nursed a guilty hope that Nathan and Kim would return before she had to make hard decisions.

“Are you OK with TV, or do you want to play something?”

 

 

Mia had brought her favourite board game with her, and won the first six games by refusing to explain the rules to Erin. After sandwiches, they spent the next two hours playing the games that Erin had brought in her backpack. Mia forgot to be wary, and became excitable and aggressively competitive. As they played, Erin threw in more questions about Mia’s home life, and was quietly appalled by the answers.

Mia didn’t know where her home was, but it sounded like it was on an island. She said that from her bedroom window she could see Scotland ‘over the sea’. She didn’t go to school or know any other children. People came during the day—mostly Nathan and Kim—then ‘went away on the boat’. Mia could play outside if someone was with her, but at night she was left alone in the house, the doors locked.

At one-thirty, there was still no sign of Nathan and Kim. Mia’s moods were now zigging and zagging, her hilarity fierce and high-pitched. Eventually she tipped into tantrum.

“Noooo! You can’t put your piece there! I want you do that, so I can do this! I want Nathan and Kim!”

“They’ll be back in a bit.”

“But when? They’ve been hours.” The gale of distress ebbed, but only a little. “Is my mother coming here?”

“Did Nathan and Kim say she would?” Erin asked, surprised.

“No, but they’ve gone to talk to her. I wanted to go! I wanted to meet her!”

‘Mother’, not ‘mum’. ‘Meet’, not ‘see’. Hasn’t she even met her own mother?

Mia threw herself on the carpet, and howled herself red-faced, with the inconsolable anguish of the very tired.

This is ridiculous, thought Erin. This is cruel. I’m torturing this poor kid.

What kind of abusive weirdos leave a little kid alone every night? I can’t believe I’ve been following their instructions blindly.

“You should be in bed,” she muttered aloud.

“Nooooo! Nonono! I need to stay awaaaake!” Mia thumped a cushion.

“Why?”

“Because I’m not meant to sleep! Because if I do… everyone screams at me.” Mia gave a shuddering sob, her mouth rubbery and miserable. “You’re going to scream at me!”

“No, I won’t,” said Erin firmly. “If you did something really wrong we’d have a talk about it, and maybe I’d tell Nathan and Kim when they got back, but I won’t ever scream at you. I promise.”

In Mia’s wary gaze, Erin saw a tiny star of hope flare then die.

“Yes, you will,” Mia mumbled sullenly into her cushion. “Everybody always screams.”

Erin changed tack.

“Why don’t we make a nest here on the sofa?” If Mia napped there, with the light on, Erin could watch over her and make sure she was OK. They buried themselves under cushions and blankets, and Mia calmed down. Her head sank to the cushion. Her eyelids drooped, then closed.

And in that instant, the world broke open like an egg.

 

 

No room. No hotel. No world. Such ideas were forgotten utterly. Even the words had no meaning.

There was a wintry yellow light, which ached in Erin’s head and showed her nothing. The light got in her mouth, and was cold in her lungs, and then she couldn’t breathe any more.

And she barely noticed because of the arches all around that went up and up and up into the shadows, till she couldn’t see them any more, but could still feel them rising and rising to a sky of bone, stretching her mind until she begged it to snap.

Black things with dog-faces crawled around her, lashing their scorpion-words and trying to re-speak her into new shapes. And next to her pulsed the dark-light, a great and blinding mouth with teeth made for tearing horizons like crusts.

It was the heart of everything. It was sublime in its tragic, incurable hunger. And it was screaming…

There was a deafening smash.

The bright hotel room seemed to rush out of the darkness and surround Erin, then spun around her as she tried to remember where she was. She was on her knees on the floor, and for a confused moment she thought something was physically hitting her in the chest. It was her heart, banging around like a bird in a net. In one of her fists, Erin saw a tugged-out handful of her own hair.

Mia was still in the sofa nest, white-faced and aghast.

“You promised!” she squeaked hoarsely. “You promised you wouldn’t scream at me! But you did! Just like everyone else!”

The murmur of voices from other rooms had been replaced by yells and panicky gabbling. There were shouts outside as well. Erin staggered to the window, and saw that a van had careered into the car park and hit a tree. Lights were going on in the distant high rises. On the tarmac walkway near the hotel, a dying bat flexed and twitched.

It didn’t just happen to me.

“What…” Erin could barely speak, her throat raw. She was afraid that she might start coughing up gouts of unholy light.

“I have bad dreams,” said Mia in a small voice.

 

 

“What the hell!” Erin rasped into the phone.

“You let her fall sleep, didn’t you!” Nathan exclaimed on the other end. “The one thing we asked—we told you—”

“You didn’t tell me everything would go Event Horizon!” hissed Erin.

“No, course I didn’t! ‘Here, look after this kid, she’s only half-human and her dreams drag everyone to hell.’ Just… make sure it doesn’t happen again!”

“I’ve given Mia some strong tea, but she’s dead on her feet. How long has she been awake? I know you drove down from Scotland. She’s been up since the early hours, hasn’t she?”

“Oh bloody hell,” muttered Nathan distractedly, “it’s coming up as ‘breaking news’ on the Post’s website. Chaos all over west Willbrook. They’re sending helicopters!”

“Why did you bring her here?” Erin was starting to understand why Mia was housed somewhere far from other people, but the new mystery was why she had been so dangerously relocated.

“Because Mia’s mother is local, and we need to talk to her. For the last three years she’s been paying us to look after Mia, but she’s not paying enough. The dreams get worse and worse. She won’t answer our emails, so we thought bringing her daughter back here might focus her mind.”

“You took Mia from her home and drove her several hundred miles without her mother’s permission?” said Erin, aghast. “That’s kidnapping! I can’t be a part of that! I want to talk to Mia’s mother.”

“You really don’t. Ever heard of Gail Delaney?”

Nobody with a sensible, well-lived life would have known that name. Even Erin’s usual clients stayed well away from her. Delaney’s name was shrouded in a sour fug of rumours—murmurs of narcotics networks, human trafficking and mutilations. Her enemies had a habit of vanishing without a trace.

“You’re joking,” whispered Erin.

“If you contact her, she’ll know you know about her daughter. She keeps her kid a secret, so nobody can use Mia to get to her. Don’t go thinking that she’ll be grateful if she hears from you. She’s a psycho—and you don’t even want to know about Mia’s father. Just keep Mia safe. We’ll pick her up in a few hours, and Gail won’t ever know you were involved.”

“I’ll keep her safe, but I can’t keep her here.” Erin’s shell-shocked brain was still struggling with the new revelations. “There’s an old people’s home just down the road! And a dual carriageway five minutes’ drive away! I need to take Mia somewhere where her dreams might not kill anybody.”

 

 

“You were right, Mia, and I should have listened to you. OK, new game—‘Let’s Stay Awake.’”

Loaded down with her own rucksack and some blankets, Erin hustled Mia out to the car. Once they were strapped in, she put on a CD of comedy songs with sing-a-long choruses. Erin sang as she drove with all the gusto she could manage. Mia remained hunched and despondent.

“Come on, Mia! Join in! You can’t fall asleep if you’re singing.”

Mia made some hollow-eyed attempts to mouth the lyrics, while Erin drove away from Willbrook. She had to steer up onto the pavement to get past two cars that had hit each other head on, and a few lanes were cordoned off by the emergency services, but further from Willbrook the lanes became clearer.

Erin still felt queasy and unglued. There was a tingle in her joints, and a faint, nagging feeling that she had been dismantled and then reassembled slightly wrong. Her headlights hypnotised her. There they were, forcing little scoops of reality to exist. All around them lay the void.

What was ‘seeing’, anyway? Energy bounced off things, and entered holes in the front of her head, and then her brain told her stories about what was in front of her. It didn’t mean the stories were true.

The headlights abruptly sallowed, and everything tipped so that the road ahead was a helpless plummet into darkness. The steering wheel became a snake in her hands…

…and then she was back in the world again, her heart jumping. She swerved desperately, just in time to avoid a looming hedge.

“Mia!”

Mia’s forehead had been resting against the window, her eyes half-closed. She jerked fully awake as Erin called out.

“You shouted at me!” she wailed, her eyes glossy with tears.

“I know—I’m sorry! Do you want to shout back at me?” Erin turned off the radio. “Let’s shout our favourite things, shall we? Favourite dinosaurs—go!”

They yelled their favourite pizzas, vampire films, and animals beginning with S. It was too dark for ‘I Spy’ or ‘First One to See’, so they took turns to tell instalments of a story. But Mia grew sullen, and kept killing characters, so Erin was relieved when the estuary came into view. She turned onto a narrow tarmac lane along a slender promontory, and pulled up outside the stone hut that was the Ferry Museum.

Mia stared at the unlit building and car park, and burst into angry tears.

“I don’t want to be here! I want to go back!”

“It’s just for a bit, till Nathan and Kim get here—”

“They won’t! They said they’d come back to the hotel! And if they bring my mother there I won’t see her!”

Erin had temped at the museum for a while, and as she suspected the door code had not been changed. Most of the building was taken up by the exhibition hall, the big skylights letting in the grey-ish, pre-dawn light to reveal the info boards and 18^th century rowboat. Erin led a fretful Mia into the tiny staff kitchen beyond, where she risked turning on the light and boiling a kettle for coffee.

“I hate you! I want to meet her! You’re all just scared I’ll tell her things! Like all the times they didn’t play with me, and things Kim called me, and when nobody came! I’ll tell her, and she’ll stab you all! And … and… eat your eyes!”

“Eyes don’t have much nutritional value,” said Erin as calmly as she could. Clearly Mia knew enough to guess that her mother could be used as a threat. “She ought to eat them with some nice peas. Or Brussel sprouts.”

I could leave, thought Erin. I’ve brought Mia somewhere safe and warm, far from any houses. If I go, she can get the sleep she needs, and it probably won’t hurt anyone.

But I’d be abandoning a six-year-old in a strange building by a river. I can’t. I just can’t. She needs me.

 

 

At 4.30 am Erin’s phone rang. It was Nathan, and he sounded surprisingly chipper.

“Everything’s sorted. Where are you? OK, we’ll be there soon.”

As the next hour crawled by, Erin feared that ‘soon’ would not be soon enough. Mia was groggy and wobbly, and her head kept drooping dangerously. Erin wanted to shake her, out of sheer, craven fear.

“Mia, look at me! Mia, eyes open!”

The eyelids sank again, and for a sickening instant everything tumbled back into the abyss. Then Mia’s dropped mug smashed, splashing her leg with hot coffee and waking her. Erin treated the scald, while trying not to throw up.

At last a car pulled up outside, and Nathan and Kim got out. To Mia’s obvious disappointment they were alone. Both seemed in better humour.

Kim paid Erin without complaint. Nathan asked for the caffeine pills, and Erin felt a guilty pang as she handed them over. Nothing was solved. Mia would still be prevented from sleeping. It just wouldn’t be Erin’s responsibility any more.

Nathan opened the external door to leave, then hesitated, frowning.

“A car’s stopped out on the main road,” he said. “It’s just turned its engine and lights off.”

Kim scowled at Erin. “Did you tell anyone else you were here?”

Erin shook her head.

“Take Mia into the kitchen!” Kim hissed at Erin. “Turn that light off!”

Erin obeyed. In the darkened kitchen, Mia’s breathing sounded frightened, so Erin crouched and put her arms around her. The door was open a little crack, giving Erin a view of the exhibition hall, and the tensed figures of Nathan and Kim.

There was a crunch of gravel outside, and then a loud, sharp knock at the door. Everyone stayed motionless.

“Stop messing around!” called a woman’s voice. “I know you’re in there! Your car’s outside.”

“It’s her!” whispered Nathan, peering through the window. “Alone.” Kim gave a reluctant nod, and Nathan opened the door.

The woman that entered was taller and more athletic-looking than Erin had expected. Despite the cold, she wore only combat trousers and a dark sleeveless top. Her dark hair was drawn back in a short plait. It looked girlish, in a way that her strong, hard face did not. Even in the dim light, Erin could see that the woman’s muscular arms and shoulders were criss-crossed by lines that were too dark for scars, and could only be tattoos. They looked like fractures in ceramic.

“What can we do for you?” asked Nathan, failing to sound confident.

“I want to see her.” Gail Delaney had a local accent, but it was tempered with something else Erin could not place. “If she’s going to be used to threaten me, I’d like to see if she’s worth it.”

“She’s not here,” Kim said quickly, to Erin’s relief. A mother-daughter reunion suddenly seemed a chilling prospect. Mia made no attempt to burst from Erin’s arms and sprint to Gail. Perhaps her mental image of her mother did not match this hard-featured stranger.

“Really?” asked Gail, and her tone of menace was unmistakable.

“Don’t try to scare us,” Kim said bluntly. “You need us, and you know it. Anyone else you got to look after her would freak out in a day. They’d call an ambulance, or have a breakdown, or blub on the internet. We know everything. And we don’t care.

“You told us Mia was half-human. You didn’t tell us what her dad was, but we joined the dots. We heard about the mess the police found on Strapper’s Hill eight years ago. Ritual stuff, severed fingers, the rest. And that was just before you and your boyfriend started making a name for yourselves, and kicking the hell out of anyone in your way.

“So… we reckon you did some occult shit and summoned something to help your ‘business’ along. And you told it to be your boyfriend, and together you took everything you wanted. And then the magic wore off or whatever, and it buggered off to where it came from, leaving you pregnant. That’s about it, isn’t it?”

Erin held on to Mia, wondering how much she understood.

“No,” said Gail. “That wasn’t it at all.”

Despite the queasy, grey light from the skylights, the darkness in the hall was becoming more oppressive. Gail’s eyes and her fracture-like tattoos grew blacker by the moment.

“The summoning wore off very quickly,” Gail continued. “Within a couple of days. He didn’t really know what he was doing with that book. But I decided to stay. I liked his ambition… and something about his bones. I suppose I loved him. That’s probably why I ate him in the end. I did warn him I might, but I think it still surprised him. I regretted it afterwards, which is why I stayed on in this form, to find out what our offspring would be like.

“I didn’t mind the pain of childbirth, but afterwards they handed me this… thing. A little, leaking wobble-headed cripple that couldn’t even stand or find its own food. It was too weak—a waste of good flesh and bones. I wanted to eat it too, to return its flesh to mine. And I knew that I would, sooner or later, when I wasn’t concentrating.

“But that little blob was all that was left of him in the world. If I ate it, I thought I might regret that too. So instead I sent it away, and paid people to look after it.”

“You’re…” Nathan looked flabbergasted.

Gail smiled. The cracks in her skin darkened and deepened, and then broke open, with a dry splitting sound. Clots of shadow leapt out of the fractures, and landed around her on dozens of knife-pointed legs.

The shadow-clots swarmed across the floor towards the siblings. They didn’t move like spiders, but the motion triggered the same primal panic in Erin’s hindbrain.

Nathan tried to smash at the shadows with a chair. Kim, perhaps remembering some childhood lesson, sprinted over and slammed her palm on the light switch, flooding the hall with light. It didn’t help.

“Don’t look!” whispered Erin, shielding Mia’s eyes. Mia didn’t need to see Nathan’s skin spiralling off him like orange peel, or Kim being folded, and folded, and folded…

At last there was silence in the exhibition hall. There was no blood. Brown-pink ribbons of something scattered the floor, and hung from the lamp and the display stands. They did not drip. Sometimes they twitched.

A few moments later Gail walked into the kitchen. The shadows at her heels were the size of Great Danes now, but full of insectile angles. The black crevasses in her skin still gaped wide. Erin tensed, but Gail only had eyes for her daughter.

Mia scrambled to her feet, eyes and mouth soup-plate wide. But she did not whimper or try to hide behind Erin. Instead, she reached out one small hand.

“Mia, don’t—” began Erin, but Mia was already gently stroking the mandibles of the nearest shadow-thing. She looked at her mother, eyes bright with excited appeal, as if she had been presented with a puppy. Is it mine? Can I keep it?

Gail let out a small, surprised ‘huff’ of a laugh. Her expression fogged, as if she were unsure whether to feel pained, pleased or confused.

Perhaps this was the mother Mia had dreamed of after all. A mother who would stab her enemies and eat their eyes. A monstrous mother, who would make sense of Mia’s own monstrosity. In Mia’s eyes, Erin saw recognition and hope. She was no longer the only freak in a fragile world.

“You should see this,” Erin said, trying to keep her voice level as she held up her phone.

“Let me guess. You filmed everything, and I’m supposed to be scared.”

“No. I’m not an idiot.” Erin swallowed hard. “It’s my CV. You’ve got a vacancy for a child-minder.”

Erin felt her heart hammer as Gail peered at the little screen. Yet at the same time her mind had a strange, cold clarity. She felt as though every step she had taken for the last few years had led to this. Her destiny. The hole in the world where she fitted.

Who else would look after Mia? Who else could?

Gail raised her gaze, and her stare seemed to cut through Erin, right to the soft, tangled mess of her doubts and needs.

“Mia needs—” began Erin.

“Needs what? You?” Gail shook her head. “Don’t kid yourself. You don’t know what she needs. She isn’t yours.” She gave a mirthless smile. “Are you trying to save her from me? What did you see tonight?”

Erin felt her spirits sink. There was only one answer.

“Nothing,” she said huskily.

“Good girl. Keep it that way.”

Gail lifted Mia, and placed her astride the shadow-fiend as if it were a Shetland pony. She walked out of the room, followed by the beasts and Mia on her indistinct steed. Mia did not look back at Erin, not even once.

Erin let them go.

She had survived, somehow. And without having to throw aside her entire life, and work for a demon. She felt vertigo at the thought, as though she had halted at the edge of a dark precipice. Just for a moment, that step off the edge had seemed so right, so perfect.

What was I thinking? Erin had accepted questionable jobs, but she had always thought—hoped—that some internal brakes would stop her going too far

Perhaps tomorrow she would feel relieved at her escape. Perhaps she would start to retreat, inch by inch, from the precipice. Right now, however, she felt a tearing sense of loss, as if something had been snatched away from her. Her martyrdom had been rejected. And the girl that should have needed her had left without a backwards glance.

Outside a faint roar revved, then receded. A car pulling away.

She’s not mine, Erin thought. None of them are. I want them to need me. But they don’t.