This one, for years, had pretended to be a comely young man, luring the desperate and the curious to their demise. It had left the corpse of a wealthy merchant’s daughter in a London ruin, and Jack had seen her remains. The dark mass Jack’s father had exorcised had murdered her—the spirit had been a young man until his father had invoked poetry and flung silver dust into its face. Jack, who at sixteen had resented being left behind and had followed his father from the inn room to witness the exorcism, had been hiding and had watched the young man break apart into a living shadow. Chasing the spirit now, Jack wished two things: that he hadn’t worn so many talismans, which jingled faintly whenever he moved; and that he still had his Rambler bicycle, because he really could have used it for this. Not more than an hour ago, his father had driven the creature from the city ruin, hoping to trap it in the spirit bottle he’d bought with the merchant’s money. The London night was silver with fog that muffled the sounds of noisy pubs and horse-drawn carriages.
