9.57pm. Molly was using her phone only as a clock, but even so it wouldn’t last much longer. Her charger had been in her room, along with everything else she owned.
All she had now were the clothes she was wearing, two week’s worth of the good painkillers, a phone that was about to die, and a magic book.
She read Paul’s journal as he wrote it, his words forming on the page before her eyes.
Did she believe the magical story?
Yes. Without hesitation, she did.
It made sense that, for all these years, Paul had been not creating an invented hero’s adventures but chronicling his twin brother’s life. It made sense because after the war and the wedding, when things had got quiet in Tamass’s life, Paul’s inspiration had dried up.
And now he was somewhere out there in Tamass’s world, chronicling events again. Except that now he knew it.
It made sense because Molly had visited Tamass’s world herself. Twice. Once in a dream, powered, she supposed, by her imagination after reading Paul’s description of the wedding, and once deliberately by means of Sted’s book.
Which was still problematical, by the way. It was still heaving down outside, but sooner or later the rain would stop and those bastard demons would be on to her the moment she used the book to travel between the worlds.
She didn’t know what they would do to her. She didn’t want to find out.
They’d hurt poor gentle Lucien.
And they’d burned down her home, and Paul Best’s home too.
He and she were linked somehow.
Apart from them both being orphans, which she’d known about for years.
Apart from him being an author and she being one of his fans, even though they’d never met or even spoken to each other.
She supposed there was an actual existing link: the online Fearless forum where she knew Karen as Flipper and had talked with her a few times about Tamass’s world.
But the strongest link, the only relevant link, was the new one: Sted’s book.
Which she couldn’t use.
An idea bloomed and she cocked her head, wondering if she could travel intentionally between the worlds, while awake, by reading a passage in one of Paul’s novels.
It was definitely worth a try.
Especially as right there on the other side of the wall she was leaning against was her beloved library and all of Paul’s novels.
That brought a wry smile, and a shiver of anticipation. She’d never been in the library after closing time. She could go straight to the Tamass books on their shelf with her eyes shut, but that wasn’t the point.
She would be crossing a line.
Stealing a book.
There was no question which one. Tamass the Fearless offered the most detailed description of Ys. And its second edition contained the additional scene that she still thought might lead her somewhere in the confusing mental labyrinth that her life had become in only two days.
But she would be a thief.
All through her dangerous younger years, she’d worked hard to stay out of trouble.
When she started university, she was in the one per cent of eighteen-year-olds leaving care who did so that year. Compared with the something like forty per cent of kids not leaving care who started university that year.
The point was that by keeping her head in her books and working bloody hard, she’d done it.
Thirty or forty per cent of prisoners in the country had been in care as children. She’d avoided becoming one of those statistics the same way she’d achieved her ambition of getting her degrees, by keeping her head in her books and working bloody hard.
So it was a hefty kick in the gut that life was urging her to be a thief now.
That’s the line she would have to cross.
But did she have any other option?
She couldn’t go to the police.
Hello, my name is Molly Matthews. I didn’t burn my landlady’s house down. Demons did it.
Yeah, right. Guess where that would take her with one flourish of some psychiatrist’s pen.
So.
She was homeless and probably jobless. She didn’t have a penny to her name, and already after one day of it her menu of crisps and biscuits was playing hell with her blood sugar. In two weeks, her painkillers would run out, and that would be shit.
That would be impossibly shit.
But even before that happened, she had no money, no food, nowhere except the lost property room to hide, and sooner or later someone was going to find her in there. Sooner or later the fucking demons would find her in there.
Her world offered nothing.
The other world offered little more. She’d still be homeless and hungry. She’d still have ME. She’d be chronically ill in a world that wasn’t her home.
But at least it might throw the demons off her trail long enough for her to take a breath and try to find a more permanent solution.
Maybe even to make contact with Paul Best and his entourage.
Yes! After all, even if he didn’t know it yet, they had a lot in common.