The Name of the Star

“Why?”

“Because he’s brilliant,” Callum said. “Top marks at Eton. That’s as clever as they get. But he’s not a total wanker, like most of those people are—he’s just a little special sometimes. Anyway, from there, I shadowed someone on the Underground for a while. They had me in as a trainee. Stephen taught me about the Shades, about the history, about the new plans for how everything was going to be run. When he thought I was ready, he gave me a terminus.”

He held up the phone and looked at it with admiration.

“A terminus?” I said. “That’s what it’s called.”

Callum nodded.

“The very first thing I did was go back to that building site. By the time I got there again, the new flats were up. Shiny glass ones, with a gym up top, all full of bankers. I had to look around for a little while, but I found him. I guess he didn’t like the new building much. He was down in the car park, just wandering around, looking bored. I actually felt sorry for him for a second, poor bastard, doomed to walk around some car park, and whatever monstrosity comes next. He didn’t recognize me. Didn’t think I could see him. He paid me no mind as I walked right up to him, took out my phone, pressed one and nine, and fried him. He’ll never hurt anyone again. But that’s the first day I knew—this was my real calling. I don’t know what I would do without it. It’s the most important thing in my life. It gives you back some control.”

“When Boo walked up to him, she had her phone out,” I said, putting this together with the memory that was playing over and over in my mind. “I thought she was handing me her phone.”

“She finally tried to use it,” Callum said, stopping. “God . . .” He leaned over and put his head in his hands. “She doesn’t believe in using the terminus,” he explained. “We fight about it all the time.”

I’d been so wrapped up in my own part of this that I hadn’t really noticed how Callum and Stephen and Boo felt about each other. I saw they were upset, but . . . now it hit me. They were friends.

“So,” he said, lifting up his head. “Now you know how we can take care of him. Do you feel better?”

I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know.

Jazza was out when I got home, so I was on my own, listening to people talking and laughing in the rooms around mine.

My desk was a nightmare—an altar to all the work I hadn’t done over the last few days. It was amazing how quickly your academic future could crumble. A week or two and you were totally out of step. I might as well have missed the entire year. I might as well have never come to Wexford. Of course, now I had bigger things to worry about, but I allowed myself a few minutes of panic to take in the enormity of how screwed I was, Ripper stuff aside. It was almost like a mental vacation from the stress of the ghosts and the sight and the murders.

The dark came fast, and I had to switch on my desk light. Then I heard people getting up and going to dinner. It was already five. I had no appetite, but I had to get out as well. I wasn’t staying here by myself. When I got outside, Callum was gone and the police car had taken his place. Stephen sat in the driver’s seat. He waved me over and opened the door. As soon as I got in, he drove around the corner, away from the prying eyes of people going to dinner.

“It’s time to go over the plan for tomorrow,” he said. “It’s very simple. You stay at Wexford. We’ll cover the building at all times. Boo’s well enough to come. She can’t walk, but she can be here, in a wheelchair. She can keep her eyes open. Tomorrow morning, I search your building from the top down. I’ve got special permission from the school. Once we’re sure it’s clear, you stay inside your building all night, with Boo. I’ll be at the front of the building, and Callum will be at the back. He won’t be able to get in without one of us seeing him. You’ll never be alone, and you’ll never be undefended. And you’ll have this.”

He held out a phone—specifically, Boo’s phone, which was the same low-tech model they all carried. This one still had the white scratch marks on the black plastic from when it had skidded across the road after Boo’s accident.

“I know you know what this is,” he said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I replied.

“I followed you two,” he said simply. “I saw you go into Bethnal Green station, and I saw your reaction when you emerged.”

“You followed . . .”

“Callum’s wanted to tell you from the start,” he said. “I probably would have ended up telling you if he hadn’t. I had a feeling it was going to happen. But now that you do . . .”

He held up the phone. “It’s called a terminus. Terminus means end, or boundary stone.”

“It’s a phone,” I said.

“The phone is just a case. Any device would do. Phones are just the easiest and least conspicuous.”

He removed the back of the phone and showed me the contents. Inside, where all the circuitry and computery bits were supposed to be, there was a small battery and two wires joined in the middle by some black electrical tape. He pried this up very, very carefully, and waved me in closer to look. There, wrapped in the fine ends of the wires, was a small stone of some kind—a pinkish one, with a twisting streak down the middle.

“That’s a diamond,” he said.

“You have phones full of diamonds?”

“One diamond each. These wires run a current through it. When we press the one and the nine at the same time, the current runs through the diamond and it emits a pulse that we can’t hear or feel, but it . . .”

“Explodes ghosts.”

“I prefer to think that it disperses the vestigial energy that an individual leaves behind after death.”

“Or that,” I said. “But diamonds?”

“Not as strange as it sounds,” Stephen replied. “Diamonds make excellent semiconductors. They have many practical uses. These particular three diamonds are highly flawed, so they aren’t really valuable to most people. But to us, they’re priceless.”

He carefully snapped the cover back onto the phone. Once he had made sure the phone was closed correctly, he handed it to me.

“They have names,” he went on. “This one is Persephone.”

“The queen of the underworld,” I said. I used to have a book about myths when I was little.

“Described by Homer as the queen of the shades,” Stephen said, nodding. “The one Callum carries is Hypnos, and the one I carry is Thanatos. Hypnos is the personification of sleep, and Thanatos is his brother, death. They get the poetic names for a reason. All secret weapons have code names for the files. What I’ve just given you is an official secret, so please be careful with it.”

I looked at the phone in my hand. I could still smell that smell from the Tube tunnel. I could still feel that wind, see the light . . .

“Does it hurt them?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” he replied. “That question has bothered me in the past, but not now. You need to take that, and if the time comes, you need to use it. Do you understand?”

“I’m never going to understand this,” I replied.

“One and nine,” he said. “That’s all you have to remember.”

I swallowed hard. There was still a burning in my throat from the vomiting.

“Go on,” he said. “Try to get some rest. I’ll be right here. Just keep that with you.”

I got out of the car, gripping the phone. I tried to remember what Jo said about young people defending the country as I looked at Stephen. He looked tired and there was just a hint of five o’clock shadow along his chin. I had him. I had Callum. I had an old phone.

“Night,” I said, my voice dry.

29

AGAIN, I WOKE UP AROUND FIVE IN THE MORNING. I’d gone to sleep with the terminus in my hand, but I’d let it go in my sleep. I had to look for it for a few seconds. It was under the duvet, down by my feet. I don’t know what I’d been doing in my sleep to kick it down there. I dug it out and held it tightly, pressing my fingers on the one and nine. I practiced this several times, setting it down and grabbing it back up again as fast as I could, putting my fingers on the buttons. Now I understood why they used old phones—no smart buttons. When the time came, you had to find them and feel them under the pads of your fingers.

I got up and leaned against the heater under the window. Stephen’s police car was parked just outside. It was the only thing I could see very clearly, since the sun wasn’t up—it had yellow reflective squares all over the sides, alternating with blue, and orange and neon yellow on the back. English police cars were serious about being seen.

For everyone else at Wexford, this was just a normal Thursday—mostly. As on the last Ripper day, we would be on lockdown starting after an early dinner. A few police cars were now parked along the side of the building, and some news vans were joining them.

That afternoon, I went to the library. The carrels were all full—people seemed to be going on as usual, working away, cramming down the material for when classes started up again next week. I went directly upstairs, to the stacks. Alistair was in his usual position, draped all over the floor, book in front of him. Today, it was poetry. I could tell from the wide white margins on the page and his particularly languid pose.

I sat down nearby and put an open book on my lap, so I at least had the pretense of reading if anyone found me. We said nothing to each other, but he seemed fine with my presence. A few minutes later, though, a library assistant came by with the cart. He pointed to the book on the ground in front of Alistair.

“Is that yours?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

I should have realized why he was asking, because he reached down and took it away, dropping it on the cart. Alistair looked sour as his reading material rolled off.

“What’s your problem?” he asked. “You look miserable.”

When Alistair said it, it almost sounded like a compliment.

“Is it bad?” I asked. “Dying?”

“Oh, please don’t,” he said, flopping flat on the floor.

“I’m afraid of dying,” I said.

“Well, you probably won’t for a while.”

“The Ripper wants to kill me.”

That made him pause. He lifted his head from the ground to look at me.

“What makes you say that?” he said.

“Because he said so.”

“You serious?” he asked. “The Ripper?”

“Yup,” I said. “Any advice? In case it happens?”

I tried to smile, but I know it didn’t look like a smile—and there was no hiding the quake in my voice.

Alistair sat up slowly and tapped his fingers on the floor.

“I don’t even remember dying. I just went to sleep.”

“You don’t remember it at all?”

He shook his head.

“I thought I was having a really strange dream,” he said. “In my dream, the IRA had put a bomb in my chest, and I could feel it ticking, and I was trying to tell people it was going to explode. Then it went off. I saw the explosion come out of my chest. Then that part of the dream faded, and I was in my room, and it was morning. I was looking down at myself in bed. For all I know, this is all part of that dream. Maybe I’m still having it.”

“Why do you think you came back?”

“I didn’t come back,” he said. “I just never left.”

“But why? I mean, don’t they say that ghosts come ba—stay around—because they have unfinished business or something?”

“Who says that?”

That was a good question. The answer was television shows, movies, and Cousin Diane. Not exactly the most reliable places to get information.

“I hated this place,” he said. “All I wanted was to get out. Death should have taken care of that, and yet here I am. Over twenty-five sodding years at this sodding school. I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know why I’m like this or what happens to other people. I just know I’m still here.”

“Would you go, if you could?”

“In a second,” he said, lying back down. “But that doesn’t seem to be happening. I don’t even think about that anymore.”

I squeezed the terminus in my pocket. I could make Alistair’s dream come true, right now. In a second. The enormity of it just made it funny. Don’t want to exist anymore? Okay! Zap. Done. Puff of smoke and you’re gone, like a magic trick. I ran my finger over the buttons. Maybe this was how I was meant to spend this day—setting someone free.

But this was Alistair, whom I’d come to think of as someone who went to my school—not just some shadow in a tunnel. Or what did they call it? A shade.

I took the terminus all the way out of my pocket and put it on my lap. I’m not actually sure what I would have done if Jerome hadn’t appeared and sat down next to me. Luckily, he took my opposite side, or he would have ended up right on top of Alistair.

“What’s that?” Jerome asked, nodding at the phone.

“Oh . . . Boo’s phone.”

“That’s her phone? How old is that thing?”

He reached for it, but I moved it aside.

“Shouldn’t you be studying?” I asked.

“I’m supposed to be meeting with my Latin group. But there are only five of us, and three left school.”

“Chickens.”

“Audaces fortuna iuvat.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Fortune favors the brave,” both he and Alistair said at the same time.

Jerome shifted around a bit so that we were arm to arm and leg to leg.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Why are you up here sitting on the floor?”

“It’s quiet,” I said. “And I just like floors.”

I think Jerome was prepared to take anything I said at that moment as a flirtatious remark. He had that look on his face that indicated that hormone levels were high and the time was right. Under any other circumstances, I would have been delighted. At the moment, I wasn’t feeling much of anything. I’d exhausted my supply of emotions.

“Oh, God,” Alistair said.

“Sorry,” I replied.

“Sorry for what?”

That was Jerome.

“I thought I . . . scratched you,” I lied. “With my nail.”

“Just do it,” Alistair said tiredly. “It happens all the time. I’m used to it.”

“Are you all right?” Jerome asked, his face close to mine. He sounded so English. Awl riiight. I didn’t answer. I kissed him.

Our previous making out had been a little frenzied. Today was different. We pressed our lips together and held them there. I could feel the warm air from his nose as he breathed in and out. We kissed each other’s necks. I started to warm up a bit and gave in to the slow molasses that was creeping back through my veins. Kissing is something that makes up for a lot of the other crap you have to put up with in school, and as a teenager in general. It can be confusing and weird and awkward, but sometimes it just makes you melt and forget everything that is going on. You could be in a burning building or a bus about to fall off a cliff. It doesn’t matter, because you are just a puddle. I was a puddle on the library floor, kissing the guy with the curly hair.

“Could you not roll on top of me, though?” Alistair asked. “I was here first.”

When the bell went off, signifying what would have been the end of the period had it been a normal school day, we both jumped a little and blinked. Alistair had gotten up and moved away to another corner, and I heard some sniggering in our general direction. We emerged from the library bleary-eyed and collars crooked. The three police cars had turned into two police cars and four much larger vans. There were also people coming in twos and threes and fours carrying signs and candles.

“There’s going to be a vigil tonight,” Jerome said, adjusting his prefect’s tie. “On the Mary Kelly murder site. It’s just a few streets over. Supposed to be thousands of people.”

The sun was already retreating, and the crowds were coming. The Ripper, the Ripper, the Ripper.

We went right next door to the refectory. Jerome held my hand. This did not go unnoticed. It wasn’t mentioned either. But I saw it register. I was suddenly starving and took a heavy helping of fish pie. I ate with one hand, and with the other I held Jerome’s hand under the table. There was just a trace of sweat on his brow. It made me proud. I caused that sweat.

And life was good for about half an hour.

“So there’s some speculation on where tonight is going to happen,” Jerome said. “Because it’s going to be indoors, right? A lot of people are saying hotel, because of all the tourists . . .”

My good mood exploded. Pop. Gone.

He went on for a good ten minutes about the various odds on locations for that night’s murder. I took it as long as I could.

“I have to call my parents,” I said, getting up. I shelved my tray roughly and joined the many people who were heading out.

The stupid misting rain had started up again. I could see it under the orangey glow of the lights along the green and in front of the school. Loads more people were around the school now, the people with their signs and the police officers and the handful of press people who had decided to use the previous murder site as a place to broadcast.

“Hey!” Jerome called. “Wait! Rory!”

“It’s not a game,” I said, turning around.

“I know that,” he replied. “Look, I know you were a witness. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t know anything,” I snapped.

I regretted it even as I said it, but the simple fact was—something had to give. The kissing had distracted me for a little while, but reality was back.

Jerome looked at me in confusion and shook his head, unable to come up with the words.

“I’m going back,” he said. “I’ve got desk duty all night.”

I watched him as he cut across the square, turning up the collar of his blazer against the rain and stopping only to adjust his messenger bag.

Stephen was standing by the door in his uniform. I noticed Callum as well, also in a police uniform. It took me a moment; the helmet was low over his face. Usually, Stephen wore a police sweater, a dark V-neck with epaulettes on the shoulders. Tonight, he and all of the other officers, including Callum, were wearing heavy tactical vests covered in tiny pockets. Stephen gave me a nod as I went in.

There was a mild commotion in the common room. It turned out to be a group of people gathered around Boo, who had triumphantly returned in a wheelchair. It’s not that Boo had been hugely popular or anything, but she had been hit by a car and she had come back in a wheelchair. That kind of thing draws a crowd. Jo, I noticed, was standing just behind the chair, her arms politely crossed. I didn’t even go in to greet them. I went right upstairs.

I had promised my parents a call after dinner, so I went upstairs to take care of that. They extracted some very serious promises from me that I would remain in the locked building surrounded by all the police officers. Bristol, from the sound of it, was also under a state of high alert, as were most of the major cities. Would the Ripper suddenly cross the country? Would copycat killers join in? It seemed like people didn’t want London to have all the fun. Everyone deserved to share the fear.

I got off the phone as soon as I could and shut my eyes. I heard Jazza come in.

“Did you see Boo?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“You didn’t come in to say hello. And Jerome was wandering around out in front of the building looking upset.”

“Argument,” I said.

“You’re not saying very much.”

I felt her sit on the end of the bed.

“Everyone is scared, Rory,” she said.

The impulse to scream was very great, but I held it down. Screaming at Jazza would be bad. I just kept my eyes closed and rubbed my face.

“You should go down and say hello,” she said.

“I will.”

Jazza was disappointed in me. I could tell from her light-asair sigh and the way she got up and went out without saying another word. I’d managed a trifecta—Alistair, Jerome, Jazza. Really, the only three people at Wexford I had any special bond with. If this was going to be my last night, I’d done a great job so far.

The dark had come, and Ripper night was here.

30

IT WAS A LONG NIGHT, AND I WASN’T SURE WHAT WAS worse—the terror I was just managing to keep at bay or the boredom. We sat in that study room for six straight hours. Boo tried to keep me entertained by reading to me about celebrities, mostly English ones that I’d only recently learned the names of. My butt went numb from sitting. My back hurt from the chair. The air in the tiny study room got stale, and I grew to hate the powder blue walls.

It seemed to me that things should be more dramatic—not just sitting around with the ever increasing weight of time on my shoulders.

“You can go to sleep if you want,” Boo said, just after one in the morning. “Not to bed, but if you want to lie down.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I can’t do that.”

She rolled herself back and forth in her chair.

“You’ve seen Callum and me, yeah?” she asked.

I wasn’t sure what this question meant. I’d seen Callum, and I’d seen Boo.

“Do you think . . .” Again, she said fink instead of think. “Okay. I . . . I really like him. I have for the whole time, yeah, but I’ve had no one to tell. One year with no one to tell. And maybe he just doesn’t think we can date because we work together. The two of them, they take it harder, you know? They were more messed up by whatever happened to them. Callum’s angry. And Stephen . . . well, Stephen is Stephen.”

This sudden insight into Boo’s love life was confusing.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“He’s smart—like, proper smart. He went to Eton. Proper posh. But something about him . . . I mean, I know something bad happened. I know he doesn’t talk to his family. He doesn’t do anything outside of this job. I mean, they must have picked him for a reason to be the person to restart it all. And I love Stephen. I do. I didn’t ever think I’d have a friend as posh as him, you know? He’s dead sweet. He just has no life. He reads. He makes phone calls. He sits in front of his computer. I don’t know if he has hormones.”

There was something in what Boo was saying. Of all the guys I’d ever met, Stephen seemed the most . . . I wasn’t sure what the word was. But I took Boo’s point. You never got the feeling that Stephen had those kinds of thoughts.

“Callum has hormones,” Boo continued. “I’ve seen him in action when we’ve gone out—I mean, as friends. We go out and he meets someone almost as soon as we get in the door of the club or whatever. But he doesn’t date anyone, ever. Maybe we can’t. Maybe that’s part of it. I mean, we can’t say what we do. But that’s what makes me perfect, you know? You need to help me with this, yeah? It’s good to have a girl around.”

She sighed and smiled a little.

“And you have hormones,” she said. “You and Jerome, always snogging each other’s faces off.”

Jerome. He was just over in Aldshot, but he might as well have been on the moon. I could have texted him or called him or sent him a note, but this wasn’t a night where I could have a conversation like that. So maybe there wouldn’t be more snogging of faces.

“Yeah,” I said sadly.

Another hour ticked by. Jazza knocked on the door and said she was going to bed. Charlotte came to tell us that biscuits were being passed around in the common room, and brought us a handful. Gaenor came in to talk to Boo. Jo came in every once in a while to tell us the building was clear.

I jumped when my phone buzzed. There were a few people who might text me at this hour—my friends from home (though they usually e-mailed) and Jerome.

Hello, the text read. I’m bored.

I shared the sentiment, but I had no idea who I was sharing it with. The number wasn’t Jerome’s. I had only five English numbers in my phone, and this wasn’t any of them.

Who is this? I replied.

The phone buzzed again. Yet another number this time, and another message.

Everyone loves Saucy Jack.

“Is that Jerome?” Boo asked.

Saucy Jack. That was another Ripper nickname from the past, another fake signature. The phone buzzed again. Yet another number.

Come to the King William Street Tube station at four.

The room felt very cold all of a sudden. Boo must have known something was wrong, because she took the phone.

“King William Street?” she said, looking at the message. “That’s not a station.”

She was still holding the phone when another message came in. She read it without asking my permission, and I saw her expression grow dark.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’m getting Stephen,” she said. She was reaching for her own phone and tried to keep her grasp on mine, but I got it away from her.

I will kill tonight, the new message said. I will kill and kill and kill and kill again until I make my way to you. I will kill all along the path. I will draw a line of blood until I reach you. Come to me first.

At least that cleared things up. I almost appreciated how unambiguous it was.

Stephen was in the study room with us about a minute later. He took the phone out of my hand and quickly scanned through the text messages.

“All different numbers,” he said. “Do you recognize any of them?”

I shook my head. He already had his own phone out and was making a call.

“I need a trace on some text messages . . .”

He rattled off the numbers from the messages and hung up without saying good-bye. Boo was already on her computer.

“King William Street station,” Boo said. “I looked it up. It’s a disused Tube station just north of London Bridge.”

Stephen looked over her shoulder at the entry on the station.

“What’s this down here?” he said, pointing. “Also the scene of a failed drugs bust in 1993 that resulted in the death of six undercover police officers.”

“Bit of a strange coincidence that he wants to meet Rory at an abandoned station where six police officers died, isn’t it?” Boo asked.

“Very,” Stephen said. “There’s a link to an article. Click on that.”

They were still scanning this when Stephen’s phone started to ring. He answered it and listened, mumbling a few yeses, then hung up.

“They traced the texts,” he said. “All different phones, all triangulated to a pub two streets over. There’s a party in there tonight. We can trace all the owners, but that’s irrelevant. He’s just picking up phones. What matters is that he’s close by.”

“Which is fine,” Boo said. “We’re ready for him. This thing about the station . . . he can’t mean it.”

I pulled Boo’s laptop over. They were reading from a “this day in history” news site. Down the left side of the page, there was a column of photographs, the faces of the victims.

At first I thought I was imagining things. I definitely wasn’t feeling right in the head.

“I don’t like it,” Stephen said, taking off his helmet and setting it on the table. He rubbed his hands through his hair until it stuck up. “We know he’s close to this building right now. Why tell her to go across town to some old station?”

“Maybe he wants her to come out, and he kills her when she does?”

“Possibly,” Stephen said.

I ignored the casual way they were talking about my impending murder. My attention was still drilled on the screen. No. It wasn’t my imagination at all.

“He wants me to go to where he died,” I said.

Boo and Stephen both looked at me. I pointed to the fifth picture down the side of the screen.

“That’s him,” I said, pointing to the bald man smiling back at us. “That’s the Ripper.”

31

A LONG SILENCE GREETED THIS ANNOUNCEMENT.

I was still staring at the photo on the screen. The Ripper had a name—Alexander Newman. In life, he smiled.

“Rory,” Stephen asked, “are you sure that’s him?”

I was sure.

“She’s right,” Boo said, leaning in and staring at the photo. “I didn’t even recognize him. I mostly remember him throwing me into the bloody road. But she’s right.”

“This changes things,” Stephen said. “He’s playing a game with us. It’s just after two, so we have two hours.”

He paced the study room for a moment. There was a knock on the door. He threw it open to find Claudia in the doorway.

“Yes?” he snapped.

“All right in here?” she asked.

“Just doing some follow-up questioning,” he said.

Claudia didn’t look convinced. Now that I thought about it—Stephen really did look young, and he’d been around a lot. I don’t think she questioned that he was a policeman, but I’m not sure she was completely convinced that he was around the building purely for police reasons.

“I see,” she replied. “Well, make sure to pop by on your way out, please.”

“Yes, I will,” Stephen said quickly. “Thank you.”

He didn’t exactly slam the door in her face, but he came fairly close.

“We do two things,” he said. “We make him think that Rory will meet him. We’ll draw him away from here. The second thing is, we get Rory out of this building without anyone noticing.”

“Why?” Boo asked.

“Because,” he said impatiently, “before, we thought he was just going to come here and we’d be waiting. But now I have no idea where he plans on going or what he plans on doing. So our move is, we confuse him. He’s been in control of this situation for so long, I can’t imagine he’ll be pleased if he thinks he doesn’t know what’s going on for a moment. Is there any other way out of this building besides the front door?”

“The only other way I know is through the bathroom window,” I said. “And they fixed the bars.”

“You can’t go out a window. This building is surrounded. The police would notice, even if the Ripper missed it. No other way?”

I shook my head.

“All right,” he said. “The two of you stay here. I’ll be back.”

Stephen was gone for about ten minutes. Jo came by on a break from patrolling the building, and Boo told her what was going on, so she stayed with us. When Stephen returned he had a plastic shopping bag with him, which he tossed onto the table. The bag had one busted handle and looked dirty, like it had come from the trash. Inside, there was a lump of black and white cloth and a very bright green plastic object.

“Put that on,” he said.

I dumped out the bag and found what had been inside was a bunched-up police uniform, complete with the vest.

“Where did you get this?” Boo asked.

“It’s Callum’s,” he said.

“What’s he wearing?”

“At the moment, not much of anything. Put it on.”

I noticed Boo perk up a bit at this piece of information.

“I’ll go and have a chat with your matron. Change. Put your clothes in the bag. Hurry.”

Callum and I were of a similar height; the pants were a little long, but not insanely so. The shirt was much too large—Callum had big arm muscles and a chest that was wide in different places. The belt was heavy and loaded down with things like handcuffs, a flashlight, a baton, and what appeared to be Mace. The tactical vest was also massive and heavy, with a radio on the shoulder.

“Take my shoes,” Boo said.

She was wearing a pair of black flats, something she could easily slip on. They were kind of sweaty inside and too large for me, but they were better than the pink dotted slippers I’d been wearing. Stephen knocked once, then opened the door while I was still making the final adjustments.

“What about me?” Boo said.

“You can’t move with that leg. Plus, you’re needed here with a terminus in case I’m wrong. And you have to do this . . .”

He took out his notebook and wrote something down, then passed it to her. “You figure out a way to get this message all over those cameras at the vigil. Quick as you can.”

“I can help with that,” Jo said.

The helmet didn’t fit at all. It was one of those tall, distinctly English bobby helmets. It had a large silver badge on the front, topped with a crown. The helmet was heavy and instantly fell over my eyes.

“Just hold it in place by the brim,” Stephen said. “It’s the wrong headgear for female officers, so keep your head down.”

“I don’t look like a cop.”

“It doesn’t have to fool anyone close up,” Stephen added. “All we have to do is walk out of the building and around the corner. I’ve sent Claudia off to check a window. We need to move.”

Boo looked pained that we were leaving, but it was all happening very fast.

“You lot be careful,” she said. “And don’t do anything stupid.”

“We’ll see you in a few hours,” Stephen said. “Stay alert. Keep Jo with you.”

Getting out of Wexford was easy—it was only a few steps down the hall, then a few more steps to the front door. We walked past the common room so quickly that all anyone saw was two briskly moving, vaguely police-like figures.

Once we were outside, it felt like a very different game. There were four police officers out front. Most were talking to each other or staring at the people who were coming and going from the vigil. Still, one of them turned in my direction. I put my head down instantly, holding the stupid helmet in place. There was a radio attached to the shoulder of Callum’s vest, so I pretended to be talking into that. I couldn’t walk that steadily in Boo’s slightly oversized shoes, and once again, the stupid cobblestones were my enemy. I felt the cuff that I had shortened by tucking it up the pant leg coming slowly undone. Stephen couldn’t support me because that would have looked too odd, but he walked very close, so I could bump into him as a way of keeping from falling over. He walked me straight down the cobblestone street, which led past one of the classroom buildings, and then to the main shopping road. As soon as we were clear of the place, Stephen caught me by the arm to help me. He half dragged me down the street, turning abruptly at a small alley next to a building that was being refurbished and converted to fancy new apartments.

There was nothing there but trash—old office chairs and rolls of discarded carpet and a Dumpster filled with scrap wood and broken pieces of wall.

“It’s us,” Stephen said.

“Oh, thank God,” said a voice.

Callum emerged from behind the Dumpster. Even with all that was going on, it was hard not to take notice of this: he wore only his underpants and his socks and shoes. The underpants were those tight kind—not tighty-whities, but the slightly longer-legged ones that looked kind of sporty. His legs were hairier than I would have expected, and he had a long tattoo of what looked like a vine running from somewhere just above the leg of the underwear to a few inches above his knee.

I don’t think I hid my staring very well either.

“Go ahead and change,” Stephen said, handing me the bag. “I’ll go and get the car.”

“Please be quick,” Callum added. “This is not as fun as it appears.”

I stepped over the boards and got myself behind the Dumpster. It was cold and dusty back there, and it only got colder and more unpleasant when I shed my outfit. I tossed out the clothes as I finished with them, so by the time I emerged, Callum was fully dressed, doing up the buttons and zippers. This was slightly disappointing.

Stephen pulled up at the end of the alley, and we got into the car. The spot was probably illegal, but being in a police car, he could do what he liked. He had opened a laptop that was attached to a center console in the front of the car, and it appeared he was going into a police database.

“There’s an Alexander Newman in here,” he said. “Says he died in 1993, which was the year of the King William Street incident, but his file doesn’t mention it. Says he was Special Branch. Medical degree from Oxford. Trained as a psychiatrist at St. Barts Hospital, three years on the force . . . What was this man doing on a drugs squad?”

“Is this what we should be worrying about right now?” I asked.

“He wants you to go where he died,” Stephen said, not turning around. “Clearly, this place has significance to what’s going on. The more we know, the better we can determine what to do next—or what he’ll do next. There’s also something very strange about this case file. A case like that, six officers dead, there should be endless documentation. This file seems light.”

“You just love the paperwork, don’t you?” Callum asked.

“I’m saying that for a case of this magnitude, there should be hundreds of pages. But all that’s in here are the general report, the coroner’s report, and four officer statements. Basically all this says is that a firearms unit was dispatched to the scene to try to take control of the situation, but by the time they got there, all the officers were dead. According to this, there were four officers in the armed response vehicle.”

He typed some more. I looked out of the window to the dark street we had parked on. Not a person in sight. There was a CCTV camera pointed right at us. That was almost funny now.

“It looks like one has died and two are retired. But one’s still working—Sergeant William Maybrick. City of London Police, Wood Street. He’ll be on duty tonight.”

“How do you know?” Callum asked.

“Because everyone is on duty tonight,” Stephen replied. “I think it’s worth the time to go and find out what he knows. Sirens on, I can get there in five minutes.”

32

ONE THING ABOUT STEPHEN—HE COULD REALLY drive. He power-shifted through the gears as we tore into the City, ripping past banks and skimming inches away from the cabs and very expensive-looking cars that still floated around the streets. I caught a part of some snarky remark Callum made about Stephen celebrating a lot of birthdays by doing racing track days. Stephen told him to shut up.

We came to an actual screeching halt in front of the station. Because we were in a police car, we got to pull right up front. The Wood Street police station looked like a fortress built entirely of blocks of white stone. There were a few windows, and a big set of brown wood double doors with a crest sculpted into the stone just above—two lions snarling at each other over a shield. Two old-fashioned lamps, ones that looked like converted four-sided gas lamps with the word POLICE on them, provided the only light or identification.

“How exactly are you going to get him to talk to you?” Callum asked as he unbuckled himself.

“We have ways,” Stephen said.

“We? I am part of that we. I don’t know our ways.”

They got out and continued their conversation outside of the car, but I couldn’t hear it that well. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. I was in the back, and I was dressed in my alligator pajamas. Getting out seemed like the logical idea, but the door didn’t open. Stephen came back and released me. The three of us marched into the station. At the front desk, Stephen asked for Sergeant Maybrick in such a firm and entitled way that the front desk officer raised an eyebrow. He looked at Stephen, then at Callum, and finally at me. I seemed to be the weak link in this overall picture.

“And you are?” he asked.

“Just ring him.”

“He’s quite busy at the moment.”

“This has to do with the Ripper case,” Stephen said, leaning over the counter. “Time is somewhat of the essence. Pick up that phone.”

The word Ripper really had an amazing effect on people. The desk officer picked up the phone instantly. A minute later, a man emerged from the elevator down the hall. He was at least an inch or two taller than Stephen and probably twice his weight. There were sweat marks under the arms of his white uniform shirt, and the epaulettes on his shoulder had a lot more stripes than Stephen’s.

“I understand you have some information for me?” he said.

His accent, I now could recognize, was Cockney—serious London.

“I need you to tell me everything you remember about the deaths of the six officers at King William Street in 1993,” Stephen replied. Even to my ears, this demand sounded ridiculous.

“And who are you exactly, Constable?” the sergeant said.

Stephen took a notepad from his belt, opened it, scrawled something, and passed the paper to the sergeant.

“Ring this number,” he said. “Tell them you have Constable Stephen Dene with you. Tell them I need you to give me some information.”

Sergeant Maybrick took the paper and stared Stephen straight in the eye.

“If you’re wasting my time, son—”

“Ring the number,” Stephen said.

The sergeant folded the paper in half and sharpened the fold by running his fingers along it several times.

“Ellis,” he said to the man behind the desk, “you see these three stay here.”

“Yes, sir.”

The sergeant stepped down the hall and took out his phone. Stephen folded his arms over his chest, but from the way he clenched and unclenched his fists, I could tell that he wasn’t entirely sure this was going to work. The desk officer studied us. Callum turned toward the wall to hide his alarmed expression.

“What number is that?” he hissed in Stephen’s direction.

“One of our overlords,” Stephen whispered. “And he’s not going to be happy I gave out his number.”

The conversation was a brief one. Sergeant Maybrick marched back down the hall in our direction, past the curious desk officer.

“Outside,” he said, walking right past us to the door.

Once outside, he moved away from the building. He had a coughing fit, then took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

“What are you?” he asked. “Special Branch? CID?”

“I’m not authorized to tell you that,” Stephen said.

“Then I really don’t want to know. You sure you want me to tell you this with her here?”

I guess my pajamas didn’t inspire much confidence. Or the fact that I was hopping on my toes to keep warm.

“I do,” Stephen said.

“King William Street was a nasty business, one I was glad to have behind me.” Sergeant Maybrick shook his head and took a long drag of his cigarette. “Call came in that shots had been fired and officers were down. We didn’t know what they were doing down there or why. Four of us responded in the ARV. We were directed to a building on King William Street—Regis House. There was a door in the basement that led to the old station. It’s deep, no lift, long set of stairs. I remember sizing that situation up—four of us, walking into a completely unknown terrain, underground. If the shooter or shooters were still down there, they’d be cornered. They could pick us off on the stairs, or we could end up in a situation where they’d end up killing everyone. No good no matter how we looked at it. Absolute pitch-black down them steps, seemed to go on forever, round and round. Lost radio contact. We shouted that we were coming, flashed our lights—gave whoever was down there every chance to stand down. Dead silence.”

He looked at me again before continuing.

“The platform area was divided into two floors during the war. So there was a set of steps and an office on the upper floor. The door was open. Once we cleared the general platform area, two of us went up the stairs and another two went into the tunnels. I found a woman, Margo Riley, first. She was at her desk. David Lennox was on the floor by the supply cabinet. Mark Denhurst was in one of the back rooms. Jane Watson died with a pipe in her hand, trying to fight, I suppose. Katie Ellis was near the entrance of the tunnels. All of them long dead before we arrived.”

“And Alexander Newman?”

“We’d been told to look for six officers. We found five in more or less the same area. Newman was the one missing. We finally found him as well, deeper in the tunnels. Bullet to the head. Always bothered me. There was something not right about what I was seeing. It was only later that we found out it was an undercover operation, a drugs bust gone bad. The dealers had gotten access and were storing and moving cocaine through the old tunnels. It was a terrible scene, and strange. Not like any drugs bust I ever saw, and I’ve seen a few. There were no drugs around, no evidence of a firefight. It was some kind of office down there. It looked like a group of people killed while going about their business. And it looked to me . . .”

This time, his hesitation didn’t seem to be connected to me. He smoked for a moment, then tossed the cigarette to the ground and stomped it out.

“It certainly looked to me like Newman was the doer. The others were unarmed and had all been shot. He had a gun in his hand and the wound in his head looked self-inflicted—but it was very dark. You don’t want to accuse a fellow officer of something like that without proof, but . . . anyway, they got us out of there pretty quick. I don’t even remember seeing the SOCOs down there. No one was taking pictures or anything. They got us out of there and told us to keep schtum, which I have until now. There was a rumor—just a rumor, mind you—that Newman had been sectioned at some point. We all suspected that he’d had some kind of breakdown, killed the others, maybe under the stress of working undercover for too long. The official story was drugs bust, and we never challenged it. Those officers were dead. Nothing was going to bring them back. Their families deserved peace. But that scene was wrong. I always knew it was wrong. You’re telling me this has to do with the Ripper?”

“Is there anything else you remember about that night?” Stephen asked.

“Just that it was terrible,” he said. “You don’t see many like that, and you don’t want to. Once in a lifetime is enough.”

“Nothing else? Nothing strange?”

“I suppose,” Maybrick said, “there was one odd thing. When we found Newman, he was holding a Walkman.”

“A what?” Callum said.

“You’re too young for that, I suppose,” he said. “A Sony Walkman. A music player. Used to be the thing. Played tape cassettes. He wasn’t just holding it—he was clutching it tight to his body. Strange thing to be clutching during a drugs bust or a mass shooting, at any rate.”

Stephen’s expression changed instantly. His eyebrows rose so much, they seemed to drag his entire face along for the ride.

“That means something to you?” the sergeant asked. “What’s going on here? I deserve to know. I’ve got a lot of people out on the street tonight looking for this bastard.”

“Thank you,” Stephen said. The deep, serious voice was dropped. This was normal Stephen. In fact, there was a shake in his voice. “That’ll be all.”

There weren’t a lot of options for places to huddle at three in the morning on Ripper night, so we sat in the police car a few streets over, the engine idling.

“I’m not sure what we just learned,” Callum said. “I just know I feel sick.”

For once, I wasn’t the only one who was completely baffled and uninformed. Stephen had fixed his gaze straight ahead, at the back of a van.

“Stephen?” Callum said. “Tell me you aren’t thinking what I’m thinking. Please tell me that.”

“A Walkman,” Stephen said quietly. “Before mobile phones, that would have been the perfect device. Same idea. A common object that anyone could be seen carrying. A few buttons to push to send an electrical current through the stones. A Tube station used as an office. A body found clutching a Walkman. They weren’t undercovers—they were us. The squad wasn’t disbanded because of funding—it was disbanded because one of us went insane and murdered everyone else.”

Callum laughed darkly and dragged his hands over his face.

“A dead station,” he said. “For the dead police. That’s what they’re called, the disused ones. Dead stations.”

“He knows we exist,” Stephen went on, his gaze still fixed. “All the messages. Murdering people in front of cameras. He wanted to make sure we knew he was a ghost. He wanted to get our attention. He knows us. He’s one of us.”

“This seems like an ambush,” Callum said. “If you’re right, he wants us to go to the place where he murdered the entire previous squad. I’ve been in those tunnels and old stations. If you don’t know your way around, you’re in trouble.”

“If we don’t go,” Stephen said, “he’s going to kill people. This is our one and only chance. And we have to decide now.”

Callum exhaled loudly and banged his head against the headrest. In the distance, I could hear the neer-ner-neer-ner-neerner of sirens, police cars chasing a man they could never see, never catch.

“Can’t you call someone?” I said. “Get someone to tell you what to do?”

“There is no one,” Stephen said. “We have superiors, but no one can make this decision. There’s too little time and too little information. It’s up to us.”

He opened the computer once again.

“King William Street station,” he said. “Popular with urban explorers. They have drawings and photos up. Built in 1890, closed in 1900. During the Second World War it was converted into an air raid shelter . . . There are two access points. The main one is in the basement of a large office building called Regis House on King William Street, like the sergeant just said. That leads to the original spiral emergency staircase. You go down seventy-five feet to the tunnels. The other access point is at London Bridge station. The old King William Street tunnels are used for ventilation for that station. The only people who can get down there are London Underground engineers. The public can’t go down there anymore, because it’s full of live cables.”

“My favorite words,” Callum said. “Live cables.”

“You can go in through London Bridge,” Stephen said. “It sounds like you can cross under the Thames through a tunnel. I can go down the steps. We’ll come at him from two directions and get him between us. I’m not saying this is completely safe, or that it’s ideal. But we are quite literally the only people who can stop him, and this is the only time we’ve ever known where he plans to be. We signed up to this job for a reason.”

“Because we’re freaks,” Callum said. “Because we’re unlucky.”

“Because we can do something other people can’t.”

“But they didn’t tell us about this, did they? They didn’t tell us that someone on the last squad went mental and murdered the others.”

“Would you mention that?” Stephen asked simply.

I don’t plan many sieges or raids, but even I know that it’s bad when you are going somewhere through a basement, to a place seventy-five feet underground that most people aren’t even aware of.

“I hate this plan,” Callum finally said. “But I know you’ll go down there alone if I don’t go. So I guess I’m in.”

“I have to go with you,” I said.

It’s not that I am extremely brave—I think I just forgot myself for a minute. Maybe that’s what bravery is. You forget you’re in trouble when you see someone else in danger. Or maybe there is a limit to how afraid you can get, and I’d hit it. Whatever the case, I meant what I said.

“Not a chance,” Stephen said quickly. “We’re hiding you somewhere along the way.”

“You don’t have a choice,” I said. “Neither do I. He wants me. He’s going to come after me. And if you fail, he’s going to get me eventually.”

“She’s right,” Callum said.

“She’s never done this before,” Stephen said.

“You’ve barely done this before,” I countered. “Look, Callum just said this sounds like an ambush. You can’t just sneak in and hope you’ll corner him. You need something to keep him busy.”

“She’s right,” Callum said again. “I hate this entire conversation, but she’s right.”

“She’s also unarmed,” Stephen countered. “The other terminus is with Boo. She’s going to need it if he decides to go into Wexford instead. We can’t leave her helpless.”

“Let me put this another way,” I said. “I’m coming. I’m not asking permission. I can’t live like this. I can’t live not knowing how this ends.”

As soon as I said those words, I knew I had hit on the reason for my sudden burst of pure courage. I couldn’t go on this way—with this sight, knowing that some ghost could come after me. I was either going to stop this, or I was going to die trying.

Stephen put his head in his hands for a moment, then beat a terse rhythm on the steering wheel. Then he turned on the sirens again and hit the gas.

WHITE’S ROW, EAST LONDON NOVEMBER 9 2:45 A.M.

IN 1888, MILLER’S COURT WAS A DARK OFFSHOOT OF Dorset Street, known as “the worst street in London.” Room thirteen, at 26 Dorset Street, had its own entrance on Miller’s Court. Room thirteen wasn’t even a real room—it was just an old back parlor cut off by a thin partition, twelve feet square, with a broken window. Inside, there was a bed, a table, and a fireplace. It was here that, on the morning of November 9, 1888, the body of Mary Kelly was discovered. She was found by her landlord, who came by at ten forty-five to collect the rent. It was the only time the Ripper struck indoors and the only time the crime scene was photographed. The hideous images of Mary Kelly in room thirteen entered the annals of history.

Dorset Street was so irredeemable that in the 1920s, the buildings were all demolished to make room for the new fruit market being opened in Spitalfields. On the exact spot where room thirteen once stood, there was now a warehouse where trucks could deliver goods for the market. And at two A.M. on this November 9, over five thousand people had gathered there. They filled the narrow passage between the warehouse and the multistory car park and spilled out onto the streets around. Most of those people had come for an all-night vigil to honor all the Ripper’s victims, both from 1888 and the present.

But there were other people there as well. There were dozens of news reporters babbling on to rolling cameras in dozens of different languages. There were dozens of police officers, uniformed and plainclothed, wandering the crowd. There were souvenir carts selling WELCOME BACK, JACK and I SURVIVED NOVEMBER 9TH AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS BLOODY T-SHIRT (complete with fake bloodstain) shirts. There were food and drink vendors selling hot chestnuts, sodas, tea, sausage rolls, and ice cream. In many ways, it looked like a carnival.

No one noticed who started passing out the flyers. They just started circulating through the crowd and were passed on automatically. They contained six words only—no call to action, no instructions. Just a strange, simple message.

Several minutes later, to bring the point home, a flood of flyers drifted from the sky. The drizzle dampened them and made them heavy and sticky, so some adhered to the walls as they came down. The crowd looked up at the multistory car park behind them. The flyers were still falling, but there was no one throwing them. They came and they came, handfuls at a time.

One of the vigil organizers peeled a flyer off the wall and read it.

“What is this?” she asked. “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

Because the car park was sitting more or less on the site of the fifth Ripper murder, it had been closed and locked down for the night. Several police officers patrolled the ground floor. No one could have gotten to the top. And yet that was where the flyers were coming from. There was a lot of talking into shoulder radios, and a team ran up to scout every level and find whoever was up there. Two more police officers were in the car park office, looking at the CCTV camera screens in confusion. They could see the flyers going out, but couldn’t see the person tossing them. The reports were coming in: “Level one, clear.” “Level two, clear.”

Down in the street, the reporters stared up at the shower of paper. The cameras turned upward to get the shot. At least it was different, something to break up the monotony of waiting for this thing to happen, the endless newscaster drivel and footage of police cars cruising along.

Only one person in the crowd saw who was throwing the flyers. That person was seventeen-year-old Jessie Johnson, who, three days before, had gone into anaphylactic shock after eating a peanut. She saw the woman in the 1940s army uniform leaning over from one of the levels, tossing the papers into the air.

“She’s there,” Jessie said. “Right there.”

Jessie’s observations were lost in the mayhem as a helicopter appeared low overhead, drowning out everything with the sound of chopper blades and blinding everyone with its powerful searchlight. It scanned the top of the car park while the people below shielded their eyes and their candles and tried to continue with the vigil.

“We will never forget,” the person at the microphone yelled, “that the victims have names, have faces . . . We will take this night back . . .”

Jessie watched as the woman in the uniform finished throwing the flyers and disappeared. A few minutes later, she walked briskly out of the car park, right past three police officers. Even as it was happening, Jessie was rewriting the story in her mind. It was too odd. The woman must have been a police officer or something like that. She had no idea that she had just seen the British army’s last active soldier from the Second World War, still in her uniform, still defending the East End.

Jessie looked down at the flyers, which coated the street and were being read by thousands of people and filmed by dozens of television cameras. They read

THE EYES WILL COME TO YOU

TERMINUS TERIMNUS

Men would be angels, angels would be gods. —Alexander Pope, “Essay on Man”

33

WE WERE SITTING IN THE POLICE CAR ACROSS THE street from Regis House. It was one of countless large office buildings in the City of London, maybe ten stories, made of grayish-white stone, full of offices. The front was mostly made of glass, with a large circular overhang in black metal giving its name and address, 45 King William Street. We had dropped Callum off at London Bridge station a few minutes before. Right now, he was making his way under the Thames via a tunnel.

“We’ll give him ten more minutes,” Stephen said, glancing at the dashboard clock. It was three forty-five.

Stephen looked out the window and surveyed the street. King William Street led up to London Bridge, and there weren’t many pubs or restaurants on this stretch. The street was deserted except for us. I watched the traffic lights change, the little man on the “walk” sign turn from green to red.

Once again, it was time to wait. All of London was waiting, silent, as if the population had collectively drawn its breath in anticipation. There wasn’t enough air in the car for me. Something was pressing on my chest. Fear. I tried to keep Jo’s words in my mind—fear couldn’t hurt me. It was a snake with no venom.

This was no snake. This was a thousand pounds of pressure.

“Remember how I said I had a boating accident?” Stephen said, breaking my train of thought. “It’s not true.”

He adjusted something on his tactical vest nervously.

“When I first met Callum and he asked me what happened, I started to tell him the story, which starts in a boathouse. But then I changed my mind. He just assumed I had a boating accident, and I never corrected him. I’ve said boating accident ever since.”

“So what really happened?” I asked.

“My family is fairly wealthy. They aren’t kind, or functional. We may have had a lot of things growing up, but a warm family life wasn’t one of them. When I was fourteen, my older sister died of an overdose. It appeared to be accidental—she was out partying in London. The autopsy showed she had large amounts of both heroin and cocaine in her system. She was seventeen.”

This was the kind of thing you should say something in response to, but given our circumstances, I felt it was okay to remain silent.

“She died on a Saturday. By the following Thursday, my parents sent me back to school and they went to St. Moritz on a skiing trip to ‘get their minds off things.’ That was how my family dealt with the death of their daughter. They sent me off, and they skied. For three years, I just tried to block everything else out. I studied. I did sports. I was the perfect student. I never let myself stop for one second to think about what had happened. Years of just blocking it out. Then, when I was in my last weeks of school and had been accepted to Cambridge, I realized it was the first time I really had nothing to do, nothing to work toward. And I started to think—all the time. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. And I got angry. And I got sad. All the things I thought I’d kept out of my mind, they were all there, waiting for me. I was captain of the rowing team, so I had access to the boathouse. One night in early June, I went in, got a rope, and threw it over one of the beams . . .”

He didn’t need to go any further. I got the idea.

“You tried to kill yourself,” I said. “You must have failed. Because you’re here. Wait. You’re not a ghost, are you? Because that would totally destroy my mind right now.”

“I didn’t fail,” he said. “I was interrupted in the middle of the process.”

He took the keys from the ignition and put them in a pocket on his vest.

“The thing they don’t tell you about hanging is how much it hurts,” he said, “and it’s not quick. That’s why it’s such a horrible punishment. The merciful hangmen knew how to break a neck instantly, which is humane. When you hang yourself, though, the rope slices into your neck. It’s agonizing. As soon as I did it, I could see what a mistake it was, but I couldn’t get the rope off. You can’t, once it tightens around your neck and your body weight pulls you down. You kick, you pull on the rope, you fight. I was about to give up when I saw someone walk up to me. Another student, but not someone I recognized. He said, ‘You can see me, can’t you?’ And he just sort of watched me, curiously. Then he put the chair upright and walked away. I got my feet back on the chair and got the rope from around my neck and swore never, ever to take my life for granted again, no matter how bad things seemed.”

A keening siren in the distance interrupted the conversation.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I accept what I did, and I won’t do it again. I don’t tell people mostly because . . . I can’t. I can’t tell most people ‘I tried to kill myself because I couldn’t deal with my sister’s death, but I’m okay now because I was saved by a ghost.’ ”

“No,” I said. “I can see where you’re coming from with that. But how did you get from there to this? To the ghost police?”

“Another thing they don’t mention—probably because it hardly seems relevant—hanging leaves some terrible bruising around the neck.” He adjusted his collar, as if remembering. “There’s no mistaking it. The next morning, I found myself called to the infirmary, where a psychiatrist was waiting to talk to me. I could have lied to him, but I was still pretty dazed. I told him exactly what I had seen. That afternoon, they transferred me to a private mental health facility where they medicated me and put me in therapy. Two days after that, someone came to offer me a job. She said that I wasn’t crazy. I was depressed, but I wasn’t crazy. And I was depressed for a good reason. She knew what had happened to my sister. What I had seen was real. I had an ability that made me rare and very special, and did I want to do something worthwhile with it? Did I want to make a difference? A week later, I was released from the hospital. I was taken to an office in Whitehall, where a different person explained the rules to me. I would be the first of a newly re-formed and highly specialized squad. Technically, I would be a police officer. I would be trained as such. I would be, to the outside world, a police constable. That’s what I had to tell everyone I was. In reality, I would be the commanding officer of a new police squad.”

Stephen squeezed the steering wheel so hard, his fingers went white. This was as close as I’d ever seen him come to an emotion.

“That’s how they used to recruit, you see,” he said. “They’d look through psychiatric records for high achievers who told a similar story—those who had had brushes with death at a young age and then reported seeing people who weren’t there. We were drawn from mental hospitals. I’m the last of that breed. Boo and Callum were tagged at A&E after their accidents. They were both talking about these mysterious people they’d seen . . . Both had been in accidents. Both were athletes. Both were street smart, if not academic. Both were from London and knew their way around. They were identified, and I was sent to recruit them. I’m the last of the mad ones.”

“You don’t sound crazy to me,” I said.

Stephen nodded and looked out the window at Regis House, then back at the clock.

“Three fifty-five,” he said. “Callum’s in by now. It’s time to go.”

Regis House was a building that should clearly have been locked at four in the morning, but the doors were open when we tried them. The lights in the lobby were on, and there was a security desk that looked like it was normally manned. The guard was ominously absent, the chair pushed back almost to the wall. We saw a half-empty mug of tea on the desk and a computer opened to the BBC news site. Stephen leaned over and looked at the screen.

“Last updated a half hour ago,” he said.

I noticed a piece of paper on the desk, the following scrawled on it: “Take the lift down a level. Stairs are at the far end of the hall. Look for the black door.”

Neither one of us discussed the fate of the guard. There was no point. We took the elevator, then the stairs down into the physical plant of the building—the room with the heaters and pipes and all the heavy stuff needed to run a place of that size. In the far corner of the room, there was a black door. It had a few safety and warning stickers on it, but nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to suggest where it might lead. Stephen removed his reflective jacket and dropped it to the floor, then carefully tried the handle. The door opened. I felt a rush of cold air come through the crack.

“One question,” I said. “Did you tell me all that because you think I’m going to die?”

“No,” he said. “It’s because you’re doing something brave, and I felt I should too.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said.

Before I could hesitate another second, I put my hand on top of his and pulled the door open wider.

34

THE SPIRAL EMERGENCY STAIRS, MADE AROUND 1890, hadn’t been improved since then. A string of yellow work lights wound down and down and down, with no bottom in sight. Somehow, this twisting, descending string of bare bulbs made it worse. They didn’t produce that much light—just enough to show the old tile work, dirty and often missing in patches, and the rough and worn condition of the steps.

I stood there on the top step, my toes hanging over the edge, not ready to move. I could already feel the cold seeping in around my neck, freezing my hands on the old handrail. The air had a hard, mineral smell. The only warmth came from Stephen, who was right at my back.

Without my conscious effort, one of my feet moved, and suddenly I was going down the steps, away from the world, from everything that was safe. A few steps down, I heard the dripping for the first time. This got louder and louder as I went. The only other sound was a strange, faint whistling—the echo of air passing through from ventilation fans and air-conditioning units and the other tunnels that made up this vast network under the city. This was the true Underground. I started to get dizzy from the spiral, from the sameness of it all. Then the spiral stairs stopped and turned into a straight set of stairs, maybe twenty or twenty-five in all.

“Please come down,” said a voice. “Be careful on the last steps. They aren’t in very good condition.”

I froze in position. Now my brain remembered that it was supposed to be afraid. Stephen was still just one step behind me—he put his hand on my shoulder.

“No point in stopping,” the voice said.

He was right. I was so deep now that going back wasn’t an option anymore. This was the point where Stephen had to let me go on my own. He nodded to me, removing the flashlight from his belt and gripping it together with his terminus.

I took these last steps very slowly. They widened as I got nearer to the bottom, and they ended in what must have been the old entryway, where you bought tickets. The old ticket stalls were boarded up. Some of the tiling had been stripped away from the walls. There were a lot of modern safety notices stuck around, along with much older notices about smoking and nerve gas. Two arches opened in front of me. Pointing at each one was a crumbling cartoon picture of a hand, a little bit of the original Victorian decoration to direct the flow of traffic on and off of the platform. They probably looked nice at the time, but now they were unspeakably creepy.

I couldn’t see Stephen anymore—he was hiding just out of sight up the steps, waiting. I passed through the arch on the right and stepped onto the old platform. It was a large space, with a high vaulted ceiling. The sunken bit where the trains used to pass had been raised up to the platform level, so it was one large room. Part of the space had been converted into a two-level structure with a set of stairs. The rest was chopped up strangely. There were random walls and doorways and halls. The train tunnels were now dark passageways, leading on to more strangely shaped rooms in a place that wasn’t supposed to have any rooms. Heavy bundles of wires, a foot thick or more, ran along the walls and the edges of the floor. There were some posters left over from the days when the station was a bomb shelter, filled with slogans like CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES and cartoons of Hitler hiding under tables. There were notices about smoking and being courteous to your sleeping neighbors.

A figure emerged from behind one of the walls. Now I understood why people thought ghosts floated. They moved with a strange ease. It looked like they had normal arms and legs that made them walk and reach, but there were no muscles in those arms and legs—no weight, no blood, none of the things that gave ordinary humans their individual ways of moving.

Aside from his silent approach, Newman was disarmingly normal.

“Hi,” I said.

“Don’t stand there in the doorway,” Newman said. “Come through.”

“I’m fine here.”

Newman was carrying what looked like an old-fashioned doctor’s bag. I’d seen these bags. They were Ripper-style prop bags, sold at stands all over the city. He set it down on an old metal worktable and opened it up.

“Well done with your message,” he said. “I’m not sure how you managed it, but it was very effective. ‘The eyes will come to you.’”

He produced a long knife with a thin blade from the bag. He was still far away from me. I’m not good at measuring distances, but it was far enough that if he ran for me, I could still turn and make a break for the stairs. But he made no indication that he intended to run at me. He poked through his bag in a leisurely fashion.

“How many of them are there?” he asked.

“What?”

“Remember some time ago, when we met?” he asked. “When I threw your friend in front of a car? I asked you if you’d ever met anyone like us, and you told me that you knew some . . . I think your words were, ‘some weirdos at home’? You were lying, weren’t you?”

I didn’t reply.

“There’s no need to deny it,” he said. “I certainly hope you didn’t come down here alone. It would be terribly irresponsible to send you on your own. Whoever’s out there—why don’t you come out and play as well? We’re all friends down here.”

Nothing. Just the dripping noise.

“No?” he called. “Don’t want to? Look around you. Do you see this? This is the old headquarters. A good place for us—the Shades. Scotland Graveyard. Not a hint remains of what went on down here, all the work we did. When the government decides it no longer requires your services, it makes you go away. If you don’t come out of here, do you think you’ll get any recognition for your bravery?”

Still nothing.

“I know this place better than almost anyone. I know all the ways in. I didn’t see anyone come down with you, so I can only assume they are coming through the tunnel from London Bridge.”

He extended his arm to his right, toward one of the yawning openings into the dark.

“The other way in is the way you came, Aurora, right down those stairs. And I watched you. You came alone. Unless there are people on those stairs, waiting to make their entrance. Don’t wait too long, for her sake.”

“Hey!” called a voice from another part of the station. “Jack the Wanker! Over here! I want your autograph!”

Callum stepped out of the darkness of the tunnel, holding out his terminus.

“Ah,” Newman said. “You’re young. Makes sense, I suppose.”

“That’s right,” Callum called. “I’m a kid. Come see my toy.”

“Here’s something I know about your toys,” Newman said. “There are three of them. Are there three of you? I certainly hope so.”

“I don’t need any help,” Callum replied.

“Telephones,” Newman said, stepping closer to Callum. “Very good. We had to carry torches and Walkmans. They even tried to put one in an umbrella. Very cumbersome. The telephone—that’s very good.”

As Newman was turned away, Stephen made a dash from the steps, across the small ticketing room, and threw himself against the wall between the arches, right next to me.

“You seem keen,” Newman said to Callum. “It’s a good thing I have this knife. Which one of us do you think would win in the end? I can slash your throat as fast as you can turn that terminus on me. Should we try it and see?”

He whipped the blade in an arc in front of him and took a few more steps toward Callum, who didn’t move an inch.

“Oh, I like you,” Newman said, approaching Callum. “You’re a brave one.”

“Stop,” Stephen said, pushing me aside and stepping into the doorway.

“Here we go,” Newman said. He didn’t sound at all alarmed. “Two. One more, surely.”

“You can’t take both of us,” Stephen said. “Make a move for one, and the other will get you. You may be a strong ghost, but we’re still stronger.”

“The dead travel fast,” Newman said.

“Not that fast,” Callum said. “Believe me, I can outrun you.”

“He can,” Stephen confirmed.

“Well then,” Newman said, with a smile. “I suppose I’d better give myself up.”

“Just put the knife down,” Stephen said.

“You know . . .” Newman stepped back a bit, toward the twoleveled structure in the middle of the platform. “I did learn something very useful during my time down here—”

And with that, darkness—a darkness so absolute, my eyes had never experienced anything like it. My brain had no idea what to make of it. Now I truly understood where we were. We were deep underground. I had no sense of space, no sense of distance, no perspective at all. I couldn’t have found my way back to the steps. I didn’t have my cell phone on me—that had been taken away when they were tracing the texts.

“The location of the light switch,” he said. “Funny how frightening the dark is.”

His voice bounced around in all directions, off the curved ceiling, off the bricks and the tiles. He could have been thirty yards away, or he could have been next to me. Two tiny points of light appeared—the glow of the phones. After a moment, this was joined by a thin beam of light from Stephen’s direction, and then from Callum’s. The flashlights.

“Two lights,” Newman said. “Where’s the third one? Come out, come out . . .”

I saw Callum’s flashlight beam swing around wildly.

“Where’d he go?” Callum yelled. “You see him?”

“Just keep your terminus out,” Stephen called to him. “He can’t go near you. They’re more powerful now than they used to be.”

“Is that a warning for me?” Newman said. “I still see only two of you. There must be more.”

“There might have been a larger squad if you hadn’t murdered everyone you worked with,” Stephen replied.

“It never had to happen that way. I never intended to kill anyone. It was all very unfortunate.”

“Murdering five people you worked with was unfortunate? Taking on the role of Jack the Ripper was unfortunate?”

“A means to an end,” Newman said.

I was pretty sure Stephen was trying to make him talk to get a sense of where he was, but it was still impossible to tell. The acoustics sent the sound of his voice in far too many directions. Stephen reached over and grabbed me, putting his arms around me. He maneuvered us both over to the wall, then slipped from behind me and pushed the terminus into my hands.

“Hold this,” he whispered. “Keep pressing one and nine. Do not stop. Stay against the wall so he can’t get behind you.”

I wanted to ask him what he was doing, but I was too afraid to speak. I heard him move away, then there was silence. Nobody said a word. A full minute went by, maybe more, with nothing happening at all. I dug my fingers so hard into the number pad that I could feel my nails slicing into it. It provided a small ball of light around my hands, a glow extending six or eight inches at best.

The lights suddenly came back on. My pupils contracted in shock, and it took a moment before I could see clearly. I was against the wall by the entryway arches. Callum was flat against the opposite wall, where the platform area was. We stared at each other.

“Stephen!” he yelled.

“Here,” Stephen said quietly.

Stephen was speaking from inside the ticket area, just behind me. The noise didn’t bounce around so much in there. And from the calm way he spoke, I had a terrible feeling that something very bad had happened. Callum came running in my direction, and I slowly peeled myself away from the wall and looked through the arch.

Stephen was standing on the bottom step, where he had thrown the switch on a set of emergency lights. He was holding his right arm, up near the shoulder. Newman stood a few feet away from him, casually leaning against the old ticket booth.

“Stephen?” Callum asked.

“Someone,” Newman said, “was going to go for the lights.”

“Get him,” Stephen said quietly. “Just get him.”

“What the hell is happening?” Callum said.

“Allow me to explain what’s going to happen,” Newman replied. “Your friend has just been injected with an extremely large dose of insulin. Within a few minutes, he will begin to experience shakes and sweating. Then comes the confusion. The weakness. Then breathing will become difficult as the body begins to shut itself down. The dose I’ve given him is fatal without treatment, but easily reversible with a simple injection. I happen to have a syringe ready to go. I will trade it for all three termini. Give them to me, and he lives. Or we stand here and watch him die. And it won’t take long. You won’t have time to run up those steps and call for help. All three, now.”

“Callum, get him,” Stephen said again. But he already looked pale and was gripping the railing for support.

“You’re a nutter,” Callum said. There was a tremble in his voice.

“The real Jack the Ripper was insane,” Newman replied. “No question. What I want is rational. The terminus is the only thing in the world that can hurt me. If I have them, I have no predators. I have nothing to fear. We all want to live without fear. Now put it down and kick it to me. Both of you. And whoever else is out there.”

“Why don’t you kiss my arse?” Callum snapped. “How about that for an idea?”

“How about you think of your friend’s welfare?”

Callum shifted the grip of his terminus.

“We came down to finish this,” Stephen said. “Just do it, Callum.”

“You kill me,” Newman said, “you kill him. Your choice.”

Callum glanced over at me.

“No surrender?” Newman asked politely. “Maybe you want to be in charge? Maybe that’s why you’re willing to let him die.”

“Callum!” Stephen said. “Rory! He’s right there! Do it.”

“No,” Newman said, pointing at Callum. “This one . . . I understand him completely. He won’t let go of that terminus, not for you. Not for anything. I understand. It makes you feel secure, doesn’t it? It gives you back your sanity. It gives you control. The sight is a curse, and the terminus is the only cure. I have sympathy for you. I do. That’s why I’m here. That’s all I want too.”

There was no sarcasm, no little smile. I think he meant it, every word of it.

“All of this,” Newman said. “The Ripper, this station . . . all of it was just my way of trying to draw out the squad. I developed a plan that brought you to a place I knew well. I always knew there’d be more of you than of me, more than I could fight off. So I developed a plan in which I could get what I needed and you could all just walk away. He doesn’t have a lot of time, Callum.”

Newman leaned against the ticket booth and considered us both. I realized that I was holding up my terminus as well, my fingers poised on the one and the nine. I had done it unconsciously. Callum and I were trapped, unable to move forward.

“I see the way you look,” Newman said to Callum. “The way you hold on to that terminus for dear life. Did one of them get to you, too? Is that how you got the sight? Several of us had experiences like that. We were always a little different, a little more intense. I had my accident when I was eighteen. I’d been given a secondhand motorbike as a gift for getting into Oxford. It was 1978. I was at home, in the New Forest. Lots of dirt lanes to ride on, nothing but ponies in the way. Best summer of my life. Exams done, future ahead of me. It was a perfectly clear evening, the sun still out around nine o’clock, height of June—and I was riding back home from visiting my girlfriend, coming down a stretch of the road I knew perfectly well. Then suddenly, something swung at me, knocking me off the bike. I went flying backward, the bike into a tree. And when I looked up, there was a boy standing over me, laughing. My father’s friends happened to be coming by on their way to the pub, found me and the crashed bike. I told them about the boy. I pointed at him. He was still laughing. They didn’t see him, and I was taken off to the hospital. The doctors assumed, quite reasonably, that I’d been on the bike when it hit the tree and had suffered a head injury.

“I started seeing people—people that no one else could see. I was involuntarily admitted to a mental hospital for observation for a month. You all know the feeling, I’m sure. You know you’re not insane, and yet the evidence that you are seems overwhelming.”

I could tell Callum was listening very carefully to all of this, shifting his gaze between Stephen and Newman.

“As the summer went on, I realized that I had a decision to make. I was either going to remain in this hospital, or I was going to get on with my life. I decided the best thing to do was lie, tell the doctors I couldn’t see or hear them anymore. They assumed I was recovering from my injury, and I was released. I decided, because of my problem, to become a psychiatrist. I was a medical student at Oxford, and when I was done there, I went on to St. Barts. St. Barts is in the old body-snatcher district. If there’s one place you don’t want to have the sight, it’s in the old body-snatcher district, because that place is thick with them, and they aren’t pleasant. But I finished my training, took my exams, and qualified as a psychiatrist. My first position was with the prison system, working with young offenders. It was good work for me—dealing with people who were young, misunderstood, angry. It was a good place to learn about evil. About fear. About what happens to people who are isolated and confined from a young age. And, it might not surprise you, I encountered four teenagers there who had our sight.”

Stephen was trying to keep himself together, but he had to sit down on the steps. Callum too was struggling, but the things Newman was saying . . . I knew they resonated with him.

“Then one day a man came up to me in the street and asked me if I’d like to put my abilities to good use. I still don’t know who he was—someone quite high up in the Met or in MI5, I suppose. It turns out they had started reviewing files at psychiatric institutions to see if anyone was reporting a very specific set of delusions—reporting that they could see ghosts after a near-death experience. A brilliant way of recruiting, really.

“I was taken to Whitehall, to a small office, and the Shades were explained to me. They knew what I was. They liked that I had worked in the prison system. They liked everything about me. They gave me the one thing I had wanted since my accident—a weapon. Something to protect me against these things I was seeing. They gave me some control over my life. The day I became a Shade, I was truly happy for the first time since I was seventeen. I’ll bet it was the same for you.

“I knew we were doing the jobs of bin men, cleaning ghosts off Tube platforms and out of old houses, but I didn’t care. For the first time in my life, I was happy. But I couldn’t help my nature. The others—they were drawn from ordinary police stock. I was an academic. I was a doctor. A scientist.

“There used to be a form of treatment for schizophrenics called insulin shock therapy. The patients would be brought in over the course of several weeks and regularly put into insulin shock, going deeper and deeper each time. Eventually, they’d be put into daily comas and brought out again after an hour or so. Not a very pleasant process, and the results were debatable. But I saw another use for the procedure. I devised a series of experiments to test different areas of the brain, to try to determine which one caused people to develop the sight. But to do this, I needed to re-create the conditions under which the sight develops. Namely, I had to bring the body into a state that mimicked the onset of death. Insulin shock therapy did just that. Paranormal neuropsychiatry, and I was the only person in the world qualified to practice it.

“My status as a Shade gave me unrestricted access, and they already knew me as a doctor. So I went back to the places I had worked before. My idea was simple. I would take the young people I’d met who had the sight, and I would say I was giving them experimental therapy. Getting insulin isn’t difficult, nor is the process of putting someone into a diabetic coma. It’s a bit of a risky procedure, but done carefully it causes no lasting harm. And I would be working on youths in the prison system, people already considered irredeemable. I performed my work for two years, taking the same subjects down about a dozen times each. I also conducted physical and psychological examinations.

“No one knew about this research of mine,” he continued. “I had planned on revealing it only when I had a clear result, at which point I would certainly have been given a proper lab and resources to continue. Finding out what controls the ability to see the dead? That’s a valuable asset. So I still did all of my normal duties—removing ghosts from buildings, getting trains working, all the mundane things they had us do. In my spare time, I did my real work. I had just located a fifth subject, a young girl. I began the process with her. To this day, I’m not sure what went wrong. I took her down—and she didn’t come back up. That’s when the powers that be discovered the work I’d been doing. They should have thanked me, despite the mistake. They didn’t.”

I was convinced now that Newman was telling us the truth. He may have been a murderer, and evil, but he was also honest. At least he was right now.

“The trouble with joining a secret government agency is that they can’t really fire you. And they couldn’t exactly put me on trial either. No . . . the whole thing had to be very quiet. I was removed from this station, my powers stripped, and my terminus was taken away. I came down here that day to talk to my fellow Shades, and to take a terminus. I needed it. I couldn’t go back to the way it was before, having nothing to protect me. I brought the gun because . . . I had to get them to see sense, to give me one. But they wouldn’t. They just wouldn’t cooperate. I suppose they didn’t think I’d shoot . . .”

“Callum!” Stephen said weakly.

“You can let him die,” Newman said, “or you can save him, right now.”

“Let me see it,” Callum said. “Let me see the syringe.”

“I can’t do that,” Newman said. “Not until you each set your terminus down and kick it over to me.”

“You could be lying.”

“But you know my history now. You know why I killed. You know what I want. I want you to save him. I want to protect those with the sight. I just also want to protect myself. There is absolutely no reason we can’t all walk away from this.”

Then he looked right at me.

“Aurora,” he said. “You’ve been exceptionally brave, and you’re not even on the squad. You’ve risked your life to save others. I swear to you—if you set that down and kick it to me, I will be as good as my word. Give it to me.”

Stephen put his head down. I think he knew what I was about to do and he couldn’t watch. I couldn’t watch him die. I slowly put the terminus on the filthy floor and gave it a kick. It landed more or less by Newman.

Now that I’d surrendered, the entire burden was on Callum. He looked as sick as Stephen. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, as if preparing to make a dash. His body was ready, but his mind was not.

“Now you, son,” Newman said.

“Don’t call me son! Don’t you speak to me.”

Newman closed his mouth and raised his arms to the side, making himself a wide and open target.

“You decide,” he said. “I accept my fate. If you can live with the death of your friend, I can accept my end here. It’s been a noble fight for all concerned.”

Stephen could no longer plead. He had slumped against the wall and his eyes were half closed. Callum raised himself up on the balls of his feet, knees flexed. He was going to do it. I was sure of it.

And then he just opened his hands and let the terminus go.

“Kick it here,” Newman said quietly.

Callum delivered a perfect side-of-the-foot kick, sending it right to Newman. I’d never seen anyone that agonized. He rubbed his hands over his face and held them there in a prayer formation.

“Give us the medicine,” he said.

“When I get the third one,” Newman said.

His demeanor had changed also. His eyes had widened and there was an energy about him—he looked alive.

“The third one isn’t here,” Callum replied.

“Liar!”

It was a piercing yell, with an echo.

“It’s not here,” Callum said again, pulling his hands away from his face and sighing. “But if you save him, I’ll take you to it.”

“Oh no,” Newman said. He began to pace. “He will die, do you understand? And it will be your fault. Do you hear me? Your fault!”

Newman was yelling to the third person he still believed was crouching in the darkness—maybe in the stairs, maybe in the tunnels. He snatched up the two termini at his feet and began to pace, looking through the archways, looking up the steps, searching for the last Shade. Stephen was going to die for nothing unless . . .

Unless someone could talk Newman down, someone he could believe. Someone who held no threat. Someone he’d talked to before. Someone like me.

“I’ll take you,” I said.

35

THERE WAS A SOUND FROM THE STEPS, ONE SMALL groan from Stephen as he heard me say these words. Newman stopped pacing and stared at me, a wild look in his eye. He went back to the ticket counter and smacked both of the termini down, hard, then cracked open their cheap casing like two plastic Easter eggs. He ripped out the wiry innards, plucking the diamonds from each one, and pushed the empty, broken phones to the floor. Once this was done, he retrieved his knife, which was sitting there on the counter. He crossed the room in a few long strides and came right up to my face.

“Are you lying to me?” he asked, digging the point into my chin.

“No,” I said through clenched teeth. It was hard to talk. Newman pressed the knife even harder, forcing my mouth closed. I felt the tip of the blade slip into my flesh, digging a small hole. Up close, he had a rotten smell that burned the inside of my nose. He no longer looked completely in control of himself.

He twisted the knife once, then grabbed me by the hair and dragged me across the room toward the ticket booth.

“Reach in there,” he said, pointing the knife at some old boards that sealed off the old ticket window.

The boards gave when I pushed at them, and I was able to get my hand into the opening, though I couldn’t see what I was reaching for. What I felt mostly was grime and cobwebs, and I was certain I was thrusting my hand into a place that had long been a nest for rats and mice. I felt what seemed like pencils, and some little rock-like things that were probably petrified rodent turds, but then I hit something smooth and thin and plasticky. I carefully pulled this out of the opening. It was a syringe, capped and pristine, and full of something.

“Take the cap off and inject him,” Newman said.

“Where?”

“In the upper arm.”

I approached Stephen, who looked up at me with a sweatslicked face.

“Don’t do this,” he said. “Don’t let him have it.”

I pulled the cap off the needle end and jammed it into Stephen’s arm. It took a lot of force to get it through the sweater and the shirt and his skin. It didn’t go in all the way on the first try, so I had to keep pressing down to get into the muscle.

“Sorry,” I said.

The plunger was equally hard to depress, but I eventually got it down, and whatever was in the syringe was now in Stephen. As I pulled it out, Newman put me in a choke hold and held the knife up to my eye.

“Stay exactly where you are,” he said to Callum. “If I so much as think I hear you following, I’ll slice her open.”

I had been alone with the Ripper before, but he had never had me before. When Jo touched you, it felt like a gentle breeze. The Ripper felt like he had the contained wind strength of a hurricane—or at least a pretty serious storm, one that could rip off a roof or pull up a tree. He dragged me backward up the steps until we reached the spiral section, then pushed me ahead of him.

“If I don’t get my terminus, I won’t hold myself back,” he said. “The girl with the long hair, your friend in the window? The boy with the curly hair? They’ll be scrubbing the walls for weeks, trying to get the blood off. And what I will do to you will be even worse. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said. I was crying a little, but I wiped my face and started the climb. I stumbled frequently as we went up, and I’d feel the knife tap the middle of my back. Once we got to the basement, he locked the access door, sealing Stephen and Callum inside. He allowed me to walk on my own, knowing that his threat kept me tethered.

“Where is it?” he snapped as we got into the elevator.

“It’s at Wexford,” I said.

“I will lead, and you will follow.”

It was eerily quiet outside. No cars. No sirens. No people. Just the Ripper and me, stepping out into the dark. He turned sharply when we stepped out of the building and headed toward the river. The building was very close to the Thames, and King William Street continued straight on to London Bridge—one continuous sidewalk. Newman walked to the middle of the bridge, and I stayed with him, fighting every impulse to start running and never, ever stop.

The Thames was well illuminated, lined with buildings and landmarks. This was the main alley of London, and all the lights were on tonight.

“Hypnos,” he said, holding up one of the diamonds. “It has a faint gray hint to the flaw.”

He held up the other for comparison.

“And this is Thanatos. A similar color, but slightly more greenish if you look at it. Persephone’s flaw is distinctly more blue.”

I could barely see the diamonds at all. The wind was blowing in my face, and I was much too frightened to process anything that detailed.

“They’re all slightly different in their effect,” he explained. “Hypnos is the fastest to take effect. Thanatos is a bit slower to take action, not by much. And Persephone, the one we will go and get now . . .”

He palmed the two diamonds and closed his fist around them.

“. . . was the one I carried. Quite powerful. That’s why I preferred her. Plus, it’s a lovely name—Persephone. The goddess of the Underworld. Dragged down to hell, then dragged right up again.”

Newman shook the two diamonds in his fist like they were dice, and then he drew his arm back and threw them. They vanished in midair before dropping into the river below.

“Two gone,” he said. “One to go. Come along, Aurora.”

He turned back and walked exactly the way we had just come, back down King William Street. East London is old and confusing, full of tiny streets and bends and turns, but his stride was purposeful and sure and quick. We walked right through the center of the London financial district, past the disappointed remains of Ripper parties, all waiting for that one last body. We wove through crowds of people, one living person and one dead person. In the dark, no one noticed the knife making its way along the city streets, held by no one. Or if they did, they would put it down to a trick of the eye, or a reflection, or too much beer.

I almost had to run to keep up with Newman, and my thoughts were going even faster. Callum would try to follow us, but he would have to get out first, and he would make sure to get Stephen to safety. So he was way behind me. Boo would be awake and on alert, and Jo was still on the lookout somewhere in the building. But Boo was also in a wheelchair. I was taking the Ripper into my home, and the only person who could fight him off was helpless.

But I was still going, still following, because there was no other way.

Wexford was still somewhat awake. The lights were on in some of the windows. The line of police had thinned out. Now there was one car and no actual officers were in sight, but there were a lot of people passing through the square as the vigil ended.

“Where is it?” Newman asked as we reached the green.

“In my building.”

“Where?”

“Someone has it. I can go in and get it and bring it out to you.”

“Oh, I think we’ll go in together.”

I tapped my card against the reader by the door, and it beeped. I heard the click as the door opened. Only two people were left in the common room. Charlotte was one of them, asleep in the chair closest to the door. The other was Boo.

“Hello, Rory,” Charlotte said, waking up with a yawn. “Still awake?”

Boo naturally fixed her sights on Newman.

“It’s her,” Newman said. “From the night we took a walk. She’s one of them?”

In a second, Boo had her terminus out and up, pointed in his direction. Newman flicked the knife so she could see it and held it at the right side of my neck, the point digging a small hole into the flesh.

“The others are alive for now,” he said. “Ask Aurora. I’ve kept my word. In exchange, I will have that terminus. You’ll drop that to the floor or she will be the first to go. Then I’ll do this one in the chair, and then I’ll do you.”

“You feeling all right?” Charlotte asked Boo.

Boo held up the phone and kept her fingers over the one and the nine, but she didn’t press.

The pressure on my neck increased, and I felt a trickle of blood run down the side.

“You’re in a wheelchair,” Newman said. “You have no options.”

Boo hesitated for another moment, then released it to the floor.

“You dropped your phone,” Charlotte said. “Really, are you all right?”

“Shut up, Charlotte,” Boo said, not taking her eyes off of me or Newman.

Charlotte turned around in her seat to see what was going on. She could make no sense of it, me standing so stiffly, Boo throwing her phone around. She got up and reached for the phone, which caused Newman to lurch forward. He grabbed a lamp from the side table and smacked it against Charlotte’s head as she bent over. She made a little cry of surprise, and then he hit her again, and again, until she fell to the floor and was still. He gingerly took the terminus from her hand.

“There,” I said. “You have it. I told you.”

“So you did,” he said.

I had no idea what came next, and I’m not sure he did either. He stared at the terminus in shock. There was blood coming out of a gash on Charlotte’s head. I had no idea if she was alive. Newman watched the news for a moment, mesmerized by the footage of the police cars trolling the streets, still looking for him.

“We’re left with a situation, aren’t we?” he said. “Our agreement was I got the terminus, and your friend Stephen was allowed to live. I’ve honored that. But I’ve started a project—a great project—and that project needs to be completed. Saucy Jack must finish his work.”

“But . . .”

“Aurora,” he said patiently, “it’s much too good a show to end. And really, you always knew. You didn’t run from me—you faced me. We were always going to finish this.”

This didn’t upset me as much as it should have. It felt more like a dream. I knew precisely what he meant. Maybe we were always going to finish this. Maybe he was the person I’d always imagined by my side in England—a star-crossed pair, the slayer and the victim, tied together by fate. Or maybe I was just tired of running from him, tired of feeling that knife.

“Why?” Boo said.

“Why?” Newman said. “Because I can.”

“But what will it do?”

Newman pointed to the television behind him.

“This story,” he said, “it’s captured imaginations. I chose Jack the Ripper for a very specific reason. Fear. Jack the Ripper is one of the most feared figures in history. Look at all of these people obsessed with him. It’s been over a hundred years, and people are still trying to figure out who he is. He’s every figure in the dark. He’s every killer that got away. He’s the one who kills and never explains why. In the grand scheme of things, he didn’t even kill that many people. You know what I think it is? I think it’s the name. And he didn’t even come up with it—a newspaper did, based on a fake letter.”

“The name of the Star,” I said.

He smiled and nodded, looking genuinely pleased.

“The name of the Star,” he repeated. “Very good! The Star newspaper. Of course now, there are much more effective means of delivering news—constant news, instantly updated. I am the story. I am the star. I am in control.”

Newman had never seemed crazy to me before that moment, but something had peeled away, revealing the raw energy underneath. He had what he wanted, and he had nothing left to fear.

He was going to kill me.

I experienced a kind of tunnel vision, a hollow sound in my ears. I could see only him. He was flicking the knife, casually slicing into the top of one of the chairs.

“Will you at least leave Wexford?” I asked.

“It’s a reasonable request.” He shrugged.

“Rory!” Boo said. She tried to wheel over to me, but I put up my hand.

“Not here,” I said. “Please. Not in front of her.”

“Where then?”

“There’s a bathroom down the hall.”

I was saying these words as though they made sense.

“As good a place as any,” he said. “I’ll follow you this time.”

There was no point in saying good-bye to Boo. I just nodded and walked out of the room and into the hall. I couldn’t hear Newman behind me, but I could feel his presence. I opened the bathroom door and stepped inside. He followed and locked it behind us.

The slash came as soon as I turned around to face him. It was so fast that I didn’t even have time enough to look down and see what the knife was doing to me. My shirt instantly filled with blood. I didn’t feel anything. I just stared at the increasingly large red stain all over my front. I watched it lengthen and widen. I couldn’t feel any pain, which seemed odd.

Standing up was suddenly an issue. My body was cold all over and my legs shook. I started to slide down the wall. As I sank down, my new angle provided me with a very good view of the blood pooling in my clothes, so I resolved not to look at that ever again. I focused on Newman, on the studious calm of his face.

“I’ll tell you something interesting,” he said, tapping the tip of the knife against the sink. “You changed my plan. What I wanted was to draw out the squad, to spot one of them. Instead, I found you. It was so much easier having a target, someone to speak to, someone for the Shades to focus on. So I’m going to reward you. I was holding a terminus when I died. My fingers were on the buttons. I suspect—I have no proof, but I suspect—that it had something to do with the way I am. I not only returned, I returned quite strong. And I was the only person in that station to return. I’ve always wanted to know if these things are connected. I’ve cut you, and now you’ll bleed out. I had to do the abdomen. You would have lost consciousness and died within moments of my slashing the neck. I avoided the femoral artery as well. That’s a good cut.”

He backed up to the far wall and bent down and slid the terminus across the floor to me.

“Go on,” he said. “Pick it up. Use it on yourself. Hold it as long as you can.”

I took my hand off my abdomen and grabbed for it. I tried to find the one and nine, but there were spots in front of my eyes, and my fingers were slippery. Maybe I could get up. I decided to try. My hands, however, were too slick with blood. They skidded over the tiles. I had no grip—and moving made it worse. Moving made it hurt, a lot.

“Don’t struggle,” he said. “You’ll bleed faster. Just rest and press the buttons. It’s your best chance, Aurora. Let’s find out what it can do. Let’s see if we can make you into a ghost.”

Something was happening to the door. The door was moving. No, the door was growing—the door was growing inward . . .

I had to be hallucinating.

No, the door was growing inward, in strange lumps. Then the lumps became things I recognized. The top of a head, with a hat. A knee, then a leg, a foot, a face. It was Jo, forcing herself through.

Even Newman didn’t appear to expect this—some World War II woman soldier to come through the door.

“How the hell did you do that?” he asked. “It would have taken me ages to get through a door like that.”

“Experience,” she said. “And willpower. It’s not pleasant.”

Jo was closer to me than Newman was. She got to my side at once and plucked the terminus from my hand.

“I believe you took this from a friend of mine,” she said, holding it up. “I understand you also threw her in the path of a car.”

Newman stepped back toward the stall. He was trying to remain calm, but his composure was slipping.

“Who are you?” he said.

“Flight Sergeant Josephine Bell of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.”

“I don’t think you know what that does,” he said. “You should be careful.”

“Oh, I think I know precisely what it does,” Jo said.

There was no hesitation in her movement—it was swift and even in a way that no living person could manage. In the next moment, she was in the corner with Newman. I remember the light. Something like a tornado formed in the middle of the bathroom, and the stall door flew open. The floor shook from the force. There was a noise too—a rushing sound that was soon drowned out by the shattering of the mirrors above me. They blew out powdered glass in one massive cloud. It seemed to hold itself in the air for a moment before falling. And the smell—that sweet, burning smell—it filled the room. Then the light faded, and they were gone. Both of them.

36

AT HEALING ANGEL MINISTRY, COUSIN DIANE reads people’s auras. She says the auras are the angels who hover behind you, who protect you, and that you can tell the kind of angel it is by the color. She has a chart. Blue angels deal with strong emotions. Red angels deal with love. Yellow angels deal with health. Green angels deal with home and family.

The ones you want to watch out for are the white light angels. They’re at the top of the chart. The white light ones come when big stuff happens. If Cousin Diane sees a white light angel behind someone, she tends to check the newspaper for articles about accidents and obituaries.

“White light,” she’ll say, tapping the article. “I saw the white light, and you know what happens then.” And what happens then is that someone gets hit by a bus or falls into an old sewage ditch and dies.

I was seeing white light now, everywhere, soft and bright and complete.

“Crap,” I said.

In reply, the light faded just a bit. I wasn’t dead. I was pretty sure of that. Of course, it was possible that I was dead, and I just had no idea. I didn’t know what dead felt like.

“Am I dead?” I asked out loud.

There was no reply, except for the quiet beeping of some machine, and some voices. Things came into focus a little more sharply. There were edges now where wobbly blobs had previously been. I was in a bed, a bed with rails and white sheets with a light blue blanket on top. There was a television on a mounted arm that swung over to the side of the bed. There was a tube coming out of my arm. There was a window with a green curtain and a view of the gray sky.

The curtain next to me snapped back. A nurse with short blond hair came over to me.

“I thought I heard you say something,” she said.

“I feel weird,” I said.

“That’s the pethidine,” she replied.

“The what?”

“It’s a medication that takes away pain and makes you drowsy.”

She grabbed the IV bag that I now saw hanging over me and examined the level of its contents. After finishing her examination of the bag, she turned to my arm, checking the bandage tape that was holding the IV tube in place. As she leaned over me, I noticed there was a silver watch pinned to the front of her scrub shirt—not a normal one, like a wristwatch, but a specialized piece that looked like a medal. Like she was a soldier. Like Jo.

Jo . . .

It all started to roll back into my mind. Everything that had happened in the bathroom, the walk across London, the station. It all felt very distant, like it had happened to someone else. Still, a few loose tears trickled from my eyes. I didn’t mean to cry them. The nurse wiped my face with a tissue and gave me a sip of water through a straw.

“There we go,” she said. “Take a nice sip. No reason to cry. Nice, slow breath. Don’t want to upset your stitches, now.”

The water had a calming effect.

“You’ve had a rough night,” she said. “There’s a policeman here to speak to you, if you’re feeling up to it.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I’ll send him in.”

She left me, and a moment later, Stephen appeared in the doorway. All of the things that identified him as a policeman were gone—the jacket, the sweater, the hat, the belt of equipment, the tie. All he had left was his white shirt, which was streaked with dirt and full of wrinkles and sweat marks. He was pale to begin with, but now there was a distinct blue-gray undertone to his skin. Now I remembered. It came back in pieces. The station. The needle. Stephen on the ground. He’d been dragged back from the point of death, and it showed.

“We were sent to the same hospital,” he said.

He came to the bedside and looked me up and down, assessing the state of things.

“The wound,” he said quietly, “it didn’t penetrate your abdominal cavity. I’m sure it hurts quite a bit, but you’ll be all right.”

“I don’t feel it,” I replied. “I think I’m on some awesome drugs.”

“Rory,” Stephen said. “I don’t want to put pressure on you in this condition, but they’re coming.”

“Who?”

No sooner had I said this than there was a crisp knock on the door. Without waiting for a reply, a man walked into the room. He had a youngish face and a head of what seemed to be prematurely gray hair, and he was dressed in plain but well-tailored clothes—black overcoat, blue shirt, black pants. He could have been a banker or a model of some idealized traveler like I’d seen in the airplane magazine. Somebody expensive and polite and almost deliberately forgettable, except for the gray hair. Another man followed him—older, in a brown suit.

The gray-suited man gently shut the door and came around to the side of the bed closest to the window, where he could address both Stephen and me.

“My name is Mr. Thorpe, and I am a member of Her Majesty’s security service. My colleague represents the government of the United States. Forgive the intrusion. I understand you’ve both had a difficult evening.”

The unnamed American man folded his arms over his chest.

“What’s happening?” I asked Stephen.

“It’s all right,” Stephen said.

“We have some business to finish to clear this matter up,” Thorpe continued. “We require assurance that this matter is at an end.”

“It is,” Stephen said.

“You’re quite sure, Mr. Dene? Were you present?”

“Rory was.”

“Miss Deveaux, can you say without question that the . . . person . . . known as the Ripper is no longer with us?”

“He’s gone,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “I saw it happen. Jo took the terminus and . . .”

“And what?”

I looked at Stephen.

“They’re both gone,” I said.

“Both?” Mr. Thorpe said.

“Another . . . someone we work with.”

“One of them?” Mr. Thorpe said.

Just the way he said it made me hate him.

“The threat has been neutralized,” Stephen said evenly.

Mr. Thorpe sized us both up for a minute. Before, someone like him would have scared me to death. Now, he was nothing. A man in a suit, living and breathing.

“You must understand . . .” Mr. Thorpe bent down to speak to me. He’d overdone it on the breath mints. “ . . . that it’s not in your best interests to discuss what happened to you tonight. In fact, we must insist that you do not. Not with your friends, your family, any religious counselors or mental health professionals. The latter would be most detrimental to you personally, as your account would be interpreted as delusional. Furthermore, you have become involved with an agency covered by the Official Secrets Act. You are bound by law to remain silent. We think it’s best that you remain in the United Kingdom for the time being, while this affair is being sorted out. Should you choose to return to the United States, you will still remain bound by this law, due to the special relationship between our two countries.”

Mr. Thorpe looked to the man in the doorway, who nodded back.

“You must realize talking about this won’t help anyone,” Mr. Thorpe said, softening his tone just a bit in a way that felt very deliberate. “The best thing you can do is return to school and continue with your life.”

The brown-suited man took his phone from his pocket and started typing something in. He walked out of the room, still typing away.

“Constable Dene,” Mr. Thorpe said as he straightened up, “we’ll be in touch, of course. Your superiors are very pleased with your performance in this matter. Her Majesty’s government thanks you both.”

He didn’t waste any more time on good-byes. He was gone as quickly as he had arrived.

“What just happened?” I asked.

Stephen pulled a chair over to my bedside and sat down.

“The cleanup is starting. They have to create a story the public can handle. The panic has to end. All the loose ends have to be tied.”

“And I can never tell anyone?”

“That’s the thing about what we do . . . We can’t tell anyone. It would simply seem insane.”

For some reason, this is what did it. This is what made all the fears of the last days and the last hours come to the surface. I let out a sob. It was so loud and sudden that Stephen actually startled and stood up. I began crying uncontrollably, heaving. I don’t think he knew what to do for a moment, it was such an onslaught.

“It’s all right,” he said, putting his hand on my arm and squeezing a bit. “It’s over now. It’s over.”

My wailing drew the attention of the nurse, who snapped the curtain back.

“All right?” she asked.

“Can you do something to make her comfortable?” he said.

“Are you finished with your questions?”

“We’re done,” he said.

“It’s been four hours since her last dose, so that’s fine. Give me a moment.”

The nurse went away for a moment, returning with a syringe. She injected its contents into a bit of tubing coming off my IV line. I felt a tiny rush of something cool coming into my vein. I took a few more sips of the water, gagging and coughing a bit before I could get them down like a normal person.

“Nasty wound,” the nurse said quietly. “I hope you catch whoever did that.”

“We did,” Stephen said.

After a minute or two, I felt myself slowly calming, and I had a strong desire to close my eyes. The tears were still running down my face, but I was quiet. Stephen kept his hand on my arm.

I heard my door open again. I thought it was the nurse until I heard Callum say hello to Stephen and ask if I was okay. I managed to extract myself from the gooey pull of the druginduced sleep. Callum was pushing Boo’s chair. As soon as they were over the threshold, Boo took over, wheeling herself up to me and clonking into the side of my bed. Her eyes were solidly red and her face was streaked with the remains of her eye makeup. She grabbed my hand.

“I didn’t think you’d come out of that room,” she said.

“Surprise,” I replied.

“I went into the toilets after they took you out. I saw the mirrors and the window. I smelled the air. And Jo . . .”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I told her where you were,” she said, fighting to keep her voice steady. “I saw her go in. That’s what she’s like, you know?”

Some heavy tears ran from her eyes. We all had a silent moment for Jo. Callum put his hand on Boo’s shoulder. I had a feeling he was thinking about the fact that he was the only one out of us that had been unhurt. Stephen was barely upright, Boo was unable to walk, and I was flat out in a hospital bed. But he may have been in the most pain.

“We found the terminus as well,” Callum finally said. “Boo managed to get it out before it was bagged up as evidence. It doesn’t work anymore. I tried it. It’s not just the battery in the phone. Something’s happened to it.”

He reached into his pocket and produced a diamond. It had gone a strange smoky shade, like lightbulbs do when they’ve blown out.

“One terminus down,” Callum said. “Poor Persephone.”

“Where are the others?” Stephen said, rubbing his eyes. “God, I’d forgotten . . .”

So had I. They didn’t even know the worst of it yet.

“He threw them into the river,” I said.

Two tiny diamonds somewhere in the Thames. One tiny diamond filled with smoke.

“That’s us finished then,” Callum said quietly.

“It’s not,” Boo said, dropping back into her chair. It almost got away from her, but Callum steadied it in time.

“No terminus?” he asked. “No us.”

“There was a squad before the terminus,” Stephen replied. “There will be one afterward. The Ripper is dead, and we’re all still here.”

The drugs were creeping into the edges of my thoughts again, but it was warmer and more pleasant now. Everything started to go a bit slower, and things were running together. The tubes were a part of my arm. The blanket was a part of my body. But I don’t think it was the drugs that made me think that I was a part of the “we” now.

37

WHEN I WOKE AGAIN, IT WAS DAYLIGHT. I WAS uncomfortable. My stomach was itchy.

“You were trying to scratch at your stitches,” someone said. The voice was American, and very familiar.

I opened my eyes to find Stephen, Callum, and Boo were gone. In their place, I found my mother.

“You were trying to scratch at your stitches,” my mom said again. She was holding my hand.

“Where did the others go?” I asked. “Did you see them?”

“Others? No, honey. It’s just us. We got on the first train. We’ve been here since this morning.”

“What time is it now?”

“It’s around two in the afternoon.”

I desperately wanted to scratch at my stitches. She steadied my hand again.

“Dad’s getting a coffee,” she said. “Don’t worry.

He’s here. We’re here now.” My mom sounded so . . . Southern. So soft. So out of place. My mom was home. This was an English hospital. She made no sense in this context.

My dad joined us a minute later, bearing two steaming cups. He wore his slouchy dad jeans and Tulane sweatshirt. My dad never went out in the Tulane sweatshirt. They both looked like they had dressed in the middle of the night, in whatever they could find.

“Hot tea,” he said, holding up the cups. “It’s just wrong.”

I smiled a little. We were iced tea drinkers, all of us. We’d joked about how disgusting it would be to drink our tea hot, with milk. That is just not how we do it. We had iced tea with every meal. Unceasing rivers of iced tea, even for breakfast, even though I knew that unceasing rivers of iced tea will stain your teeth a fetching ecru color, like old lace. I liked mine disgustingly sweet, too—so extra dental care points there. Iced tea, my family . . .

“Dad,” I said.

He put down the cups and they both just stood there, looking upset. The only thing I could think was that this is what people must see at their own viewings, when they’re stuck in their coffins. All you can do is lie there while people stand over you and mourn. It was a little much to bear, and my memories were coming back faster and faster. There were things I needed to know—I needed updates.

“Can I see the news?” I asked.

I don’t think my mom loved the idea, but she swung the television over and got the remote out from where it was tucked on the side of the mattress. The news station was, predictably, running the Ripper story. The bold words at the bottom of the screen told me everything: RIPPER DIES IN THAMES. I got the gist of the story fairly quickly. Police had been tracking suspect . . . suspect spotted at the Wexford School, just blocks away from the Mary Kelly murder site from 1888. The school, the location of the fourth murder, was speculated to be the intended site of the last murder as well. Police intervened when suspect tried to break into building . . . suspect ran . . . suspect jumped into Thames . . . body pulled out of Thames by divers . . . evidence confirms suspect was involved in all murders . . . name not yet released . . . police confirm the terror is over.

“The police kept the details about what happened to you out of the press,” my father explained. “To protect you.”

They had done exactly as Stephen said—they’d made a story that people could handle. They’d even put a body in the water for the police to fish out. I watched the footage of the divers bringing it up.

I turned the television off, and my mom pushed it to the side.

“Rory,” she said, smoothing my hair back from my forehead, “whatever happened, you’re safe now. We’ll get you through this. Do you want to tell us about it now?”

I almost laughed.

“It’s just like the news said,” I replied.

That answer would hold water for a while—certainly not forever, but for a few days, while I recovered. I fluttered my eyes a bit and tried to look extra tired, just to steer them away.

“You’re supposed to stay here for a few more hours at least,” my dad said. “We have a hotel room for the night, where you can get some rest, then tomorrow we’ll all go to Bristol. You’re going to love the house.”

“Bristol?”

“Rory, you can’t stay here, not after this.”

“But it’s over,” I said.

“You need to be with us. We can’t . . .”

My mom gave a terse head shake, and my dad nodded and stopped talking. Silent communication. A united mental front. That was a bad sign.

“That’s for now,” my mom said carefully. “If you want to go home . . . we can do that. We don’t have to stay in England.”

“I want to stay,” I said.

Another silent communication—just a look this time. Silent communications meant that they were serious and it was a done deal. I was going to Bristol. There was no fighting this one, really. There was no way they’d let me out of their sight now, not after I’d been slashed open in the school bathroom. I would be watched carefully for a while, and if I appeared in any way bonkers because of this, we would be on a plane back to New Orleans in a minute and I would be in a psychologist’s office the minute after that.

Which was all really undesirable right now. England was my new home. England was where the squad was, where I was sane. This was all too complicated for me to figure out right now.

“Can I have another shot?” I asked. “It hurts.”

My mom hurried off to find someone. She returned with a new nurse, who gave me another injection into my IV. This was the last, she told me. I would be given some painkillers to take with me when I left.

I spent the afternoon drifting in and out of sleep and watching television with my parents. There were still a lot of Ripper roundups, but some stations had decided it was okay to start running non-Ripper-related programs. Normal life was taking over again on midday television—trashy talk shows, and antiques shows, and shows about cleaning. English soap operas I couldn’t understand. Endless commercials for car insurance and strangely seductive commercials for sausages.

Just after four, I saw two very familiar figures in the doorway. I knew they would come eventually. What I didn’t know was what to say to them. Their version of reality and mine had diverged. There was formal handshaking with my parents, then they came to the bedside and smiled slightly fearful smiles—the kind of look you give when you have absolutely no idea what to say.

“How do you feel?” Jazza asked.

“Itchy,” I said. “Kind of high.”

“Could be worse,” Jerome said, trying to smile.

My parents must have realized that my friends needed a minute to say whatever it was they wanted to say. They offered teas and coffees all around and excused themselves. Even after they were gone, the awkward silence reigned for a few moments.

“I need to apologize,” Jazza finally said. “Please let me.”

“For what?” I asked.

“For . . . well . . . it’s just . . . I didn’t . . . Well, I believed you, but . . .”

She collected herself and started again.

“The night of the murder, when you said you saw someone and I didn’t. For a while I thought you made it up, even when the police were around you last night. All along you were a witness—and then he came after you. I’m sorry. I’ll never . . . I’m sorry . . .”

For a second, I was tempted—I just wanted to spill the entire thing, start to end. But no. Mr. Thorpe was right. I couldn’t do that, ever.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I would have thought the same thing about me.”

“Classes are still canceled,” Jerome said. “But we were stuck there until they chased the news people away. It’s a circus. Wexford, site of the final Ripper attack . . .”

“Charlotte,” I said suddenly. “I forgot Charlotte. Is she okay?”

“Yes,” Jerome said. “She needed some stitches.”

“She’s acting like she was as hurt as you,” Jazza said in disgust.

Charlotte had been beaten over the head with a lamp by an invisible man. I was prepared to give her a pass.

“You’re famous,” Jerome said. “When you get back . . .”

Something in my expression made him stop.

“You’re not, are you?” he asked. “They’re taking you out of school, aren’t they?”

“Is Bristol nice?” I asked them.

Jerome exhaled in relief.

“It’s better than Louisiana,” he said. “That’s what I thought you were going to say. Bristol is reachable by train.”

Jazza had remained quiet through all of this. She took my hand, and she didn’t have to say a word. I knew exactly what she was thinking. It wouldn’t be the same, but I was safe. We were all safe. We’d survived the Ripper, all of us, and whatever happened now could be dealt with.

“There’s just one thing I wish,” Jazza said after a moment. “I wish I could have seen her get hit with that lamp.”

38

SO MY UNCLE WILL HAS THESE EIGHT FREEZERS UP IN his spare bedroom. It took a lot of effort to get those freezers up the steps, and I think he had to reinforce the floor. He keeps them filled with every kind of provision you can imagine. One is filled with meat. Another with vegetables and frozen dinners. I know one has things like milk and butter and yogurt. I think he even has frozen peanut butter in plastic jars, and frozen dried beans, and frozen batteries because he read somewhere that freezing them makes them last longer.

I don’t know if you’re supposed to freeze things like peanut butter and batteries, and I know for certain that I don’t want to drink three-year-old frozen milk, but I know why he does it. He does it because he’s lived through a dozen or more major hurricanes. His house was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. He barely made it out alive. He escaped out of one of the windows in an inflatable raft and was picked up in a helicopter. He lost his dog in the flooding. So he moved closer to the rest of us and bought a little house and filled it with freezers.

Of course, when hurricanes come, the power goes out, and what he’ll probably have are eight freezers filled with rapidly decaying old food, but that’s not the point. I don’t know what he saw when the waters rose around him, but whatever it was, it made him want to get eight freezers. Some things are so bad that once you’ve been through them, you don’t have to explain your reasons to anyone.

I was thinking about this as our big black cab pulled into the Wexford square, bumping up along the cobblestones in front of Hawthorne. I could have let my parents go and get my things for me—I could have left London and never looked at the place again. But that felt wrong. I would go to my room. I would get my own things. I would face this place and everything that had happened here. I might get stares, but I didn’t care.

Anyway, I could tell from a quick look around and a check of the time that that wasn’t going to be an issue. It was seven in the morning on a Saturday. The lights in Hawthorne were mostly off. Aside from two people crossing the green and walking toward the refectory, I saw no one. Everyone was still in bed. There were two news vans around, but they were packing up their equipment. The show was over.

Claudia opened the door as we approached. I would leave as I had arrived just ten weeks before, with Claudia in the doorway, waiting for me.

“Aurora,” she said in her softest voice, which was the same kind of voice most people used to bark orders over malfunctioning drive-thru microphones. “How are you?”

“Fine,” I said. “Thanks.”

She introduced herself to my parents with one of her mighty, bunny-crushing handshakes. (I’d never seen Claudia crush a bunny, to be fair, but that’s the approximate level of pressure.)

Claudia had been fully briefed on the situation, and mercifully, she wasn’t going to belabor things.

“There are boxes upstairs,” she said. “I’d be more than happy to help you.”

“I’d rather do it myself,” I replied.

“Of course,” she said, with what I took to be a nod of approval. “Mr. and Mrs. Deveaux, why don’t you come through to my office? We’ll have some tea and a little chat. Aurora, you take as long as you need. We’ll be right here if you need us.”

“Remember,” my mom said, “no lifting, no bending.”

This was because of my stitches. My wound wasn’t that bad—just a flesh wound, as they say—but I still had a large trail of stitches across my body. I’d been given a set of instructions on how to move around for the next few days while it all healed up. I hadn’t actually seen my wound yet—it was under lots of bandages and tape. But from the size of the bandages, and from what I could feel, it was about a foot and a half long. I would, I was assured, have a wicked scar that ran from just under my ribs on the left side to the top of my right thigh. I’d been ripped by the Ripper. I was a walking T-shirt slogan.

Hawthorne really felt empty during the day. I could hear the heat whistling in the pipes, and the wind outside the windows, and the creak of wood. Maybe it felt more empty than normal because I was leaving. I was no longer part of this place. There was the familiar smell of my floor—the leftover sweetness of shampoos and body washes floating out of the steam of the showers mixed with the strangely metallic smell that always emanated from the dishwasher in the kitchenette. I touched the doors as I walked down the hall until I reached our room.

The promised boxes were stacked on my side of the room; some were piled by the closet, and more were on the bed. It looked like Jazza had started the packing process—some of my books had been carefully packed into one box on my desk, and my uniform shirts and skirts had been carefully folded and placed in another box.

I wasn’t here to do any heavy packing—I was here only for a few personal items and some clothes for a few days. I decided to do it as quickly as possible—a handful of underwear from the top drawer, my two favorite bras, some sweats, the contents of my small dish of jewelry, and my Wexford tie. The last item I clearly didn’t need, but it was a symbol of my time here. I would have my tie. I shoved all of these things into a small bag. The rest of my Wexford life would come later—the books I hadn’t finished reading, the labels I never used, the sheets and blankets and uniforms.

The last thing I took was the ashtray shaped like the lips from Big Jim’s. I put this on Jazza’s bed, along with a few Mardi Gras beads. I took my little bag and left our room.

I walked down the Hawthorne stairs for the last time. On the last step, I hesitated. I stared at the flyers on the bulletin boards and the recently filled pigeonholes full of mail. Claudia’s voice was fully audible, even though her office door was closed. She was telling my parents about hockey opportunities in Bristol.

“ . . . once her injuries are healed, of course, but the padding does cover quite a lot . . .”

I turned in the direction of the bathroom. I could leave now and never see that room again, but something drew me toward it. I walked down the hall. I reached out and ran my hand down the wall. I passed the common room, the study rooms . . .

The bathroom door was gone. From the way the hinges were bent, it looked like it had been smashed down. The glass of the mirrors was completely gone; only the silver backings remained. There was also a crack in the floor—a long one, at least five feet, and maybe a quarter of an inch wide at points. It ran jagged from the center of the room in the direction of the bathroom stall, breaking every tiny tile in its path. I walked along it, up until the point where it slipped under the door. I pushed the door open.

There was a woman standing there.

Maybe I still had some of the painkillers in my system or something, because I should have jumped or screamed or registered some surprise. But I didn’t.

This woman was old. Not in age—she looked like she was maybe twenty or thirty or something, it was hard to tell—but in time itself. She wore a rough blousy shirtdress.

Over that, she had a heavy, rust-colored skirt that went to the ground, and over that, a stained yellow apron. Her hair was as black as mine and was drawn away from her face with a scarf. But it wasn’t just her clothes that told me she was old—it was the way light reacted to her. She was there, she was solid and real, but there was a strange cast about her, like she was standing in a fog.

“Hello?” I said.

Her eyes widened in terror and she backed up into the corner, squeezing herself between the toilet and the wall.

“I won’t hurt you,” I told her.

The woman pressed against the tiled wall with her hands, which were worn and red and marked with cuts and strange patches of black and green.

“Seriously,” I tried again. “It’s okay. You’re safe here. My name is Rory. What’s yours?”

She seemed to understand this, because she stopped clawing at the wall for a minute and looked at me unblinkingly. She opened her mouth to speak, but only a rasping sound came out. A slow hiss. It wasn’t an angry hiss. I think that was just what her voice sounded like now. It was a solid conversational start.

“Do you know where you are?” I said. “Do you come from here?”

In reply, she pointed to the crack in the floor. Even the act of pointing to the crack distressed her again, and she began to cry . . . except she couldn’t cry. She just heaved and made a noise like air slowly leaking from a bike tire.

“Aurora?” Claudia called. “Are you down here?”

I had absolutely no idea what to do about this situation. But the woman was clearly distressed, so I did what I had seen Boo do—I reached out to her to try to calm her down before Claudia came into the room and this conversation was over.

“Come on,” I said. “It’s okay—”

As soon as I made contact, I felt a crackle, like a static shock. I couldn’t move my arm. Something was running through it, something that felt like a current, something that made me stiffen in position. I had a feeling of falling, like a lurching elevator dropping between floors. The woman opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say anything, there was a rush of air around us and a roaring noise.

And then, there was the light—impossibly bright and filling the senses. It consumed us both. A moment after that, it blinked out. I fell backward, stumbling through the open doorway of the stall and just managing to catch myself before I fell over.

“Rory!” That was my mother’s voice, urgent. Claudia was saying something as well. My eyes were still adjusting. I could just make out shapes at first—the stall door, the window, the pattern of the tiles. The smell was already there, sweet, floral, almost like a scented candle. The unmistakable smell of a ghost departed. And as my eyes came back into focus, I saw that the woman was gone. I looked at the empty space, then at my hand.

“Rory?” my mother said. “What happened? What was that noise?”

That was not a question I was prepared to answer.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I HAD THE IDEA FOR THIS BOOK ONE VERY HOT SUMMER’S DAY IN London. I shoved everything else aside and worked on it like a mad working thing. I talked about it a lot. I dragged people to dark alleys in the East of London to stare at walls and sidewalks. I made some of the same people watch hours of footage taken from the driver’s compartment of a Tube train (“Hey! This one is forty-five minutes of driving the Northern line tunnels! Grab a snack!”) I have depended on the following people in various ways, and they are all owed thanks.

First, to my agent and friend Kate Schafer Testerman—there is no me without Kate. I will always fondly remember how you answered e-mails about this book while you were in labor, and I asked you why you were answering e-mails while you were in labor, and you said you were bored and between episodes of Buffy.

To Jennifer Besser, my editor, who believed in this book from the word go—I don’t think the term “fairy godmother” is out of place here. To Shauna Fay, who is always there with a helping hand. And to everyone at Penguin for all of your support.

To my friends Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier, Robin Wasserman, Holly Black, Cassie Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, John Green, Libba Bray, Ally Carter . . . who read drafts, walked me through plot problems, and talked me off ledges. (Not that I was ever going to jump, but like a cat, I find myself in high, precarious places sometimes.) You are wise and long-suffering, and I am lucky to know you all. Believe me, I know it.

Andy Friel, Chelsea Hunt, and Rebecca Leach all served as advanced readers. Mary Johnson (RN, CSNP, MOM) served as the medical consultant and got very used to me calling up and starting conversations with things like, “So, say I was sawing off a human head . . .”

Jason and Paula allowed me to marry them in the middle of all of this, and went with my idea of rolling a twenty-sided die in the ceremony to determine the success of the marriage.

And thank you to all my online friends who listen to my ramblings every day as I merrily roll along.

Without all of you, I’d be nowhere. Or, I’d be somewhere, but it would be the wrong place.