“We don’t plot,” Vincent told his granddaughter. “We conspire.”

  Franny threw back her head and laughed.

  They ate their lunch of slightly stale sandwiches and chips, and soon half an hour had passed. Gillian turned to gaze through the window, unsettled. There was a violet sky now that the storm had passed, and yellow light pooled as it shone through the window. The world seemed incandescent to Gillian; she could see layers of time and space and possibilities that hadn’t been there before. As a girl Gillian couldn’t escape the petty jealousies she felt when it came to her sister’s talents. She’d wondered why she had nothing other than her beauty, which, frankly, she found boring and would have traded away in exchange for Sally’s abilities in a flash. The situation wasn’t helped by Sally’s pathetic longing to be normal. When they were young, Gillian would often stand alone in the wavering heat of summer, naked, deep in the woods where no one could find her; she would close her eyes and try her best to make magic, standing still as flickering dragonflies alit on her shoulders and arms. There was a shadow world, but she seemed the only one in her family who was refused entrance and she feared that beneath her fragile beauty, she was ordinary. She had tried and tried, appealing to the other world until she had throbbing headaches, all to no effect. In the end, Gillian would tread back to the house on muddy paths, her face hot with disappointment, unable to cast even the smallest enchantment.

  It was only now, in a worn leather booth of this pub, that the edges of everything softened and she could see a glimmer of the souls of those seated around the tables and the bar. This world was framed by the other world, the one that could only be accessed by those who possessed the sight. She had a vision of her sister walking down an alleyway with water rising on either side of her, and glittering silver fish swimming over the cement, and bells ringing. There was no mistaking a prediction of love. She looked into her teacup and an image of Sally flared as she knocked upon a door, her heart in her hand.

  What was happening to Gillian here in London, and what on earth was taking Sally so long? Gillian had a sinking feeling when she thought of Sally navigating the world of left-handed magic. Despite her cool exterior, Sally was more vulnerable than she’d ever admit, and far more caring. On the night their parents had died, Sally had told Gillian to go to bed, then she had gotten out from beneath the covers and tiptoed through the inky darkness of the near-empty house to the living room. The world had altered. They had no parents and the night had been filled with shadows, so Gillian had scrambled out of bed to follow her sister. There was Sally in the dark, sobbing.

  Thinking of that moment, Gillian now interrupted Franny and Vincent. “I’m afraid Sally’s not safe.”

  They turned to her, unhappy to be drawn away from their conversation, but softening when they saw the worry in Gillian’s face.

  “Don’t be silly,” Franny said. “We’re in London. What on earth could go wrong?”

  * * *

  Professor Ian Wright had taught at Oxford and at the University of St. Andrews, and although he’d been a great favorite with his students, he’d been let go from both positions because of his unorthodox teachings. He was now within days of finishing his life’s work, The History of Magic. He was actually at the point of copyediting, a time-consuming endeavor he had little choice but to accomplish, for the book was scheduled to be published by an American press in Illinois the following year.

  Initially, he’d been wildly excited about coming to the end of this huge project, but that pride had evaporated into a strange sort of despair. He had spent his thirties and forties on the manuscript and the years had gone past much too quickly. As he reached the end of two decades of working on his book, which had grown to over a thousand pages, a monster he had no wish to slay, he felt the unique sadness of completing a task that had been set out when he was young, when time had seemed endless. He was still handsome at fifty, exceedingly so, with dark hair and dark, liquid eyes, and an obvious sexual power, but despite his good looks, he had no vanity, and even as a younger man, he’d barely glanced in a mirror. You never knew what you might find gazing back at you from the glass, especially in his line of work.

  There were those who insisted that there were no demons in the world, but Ian knew otherwise. Take a turn to the left and you’d find darkness everywhere, in corners of rooms you’d walked through every day, on the streets late at night, in the hearts of men you thought you knew, and in your own heart as well. Then you had to choose. You were on the Crooked Path or you weren’t, or, if you dared, as he did, you walked the line between left and right, hoping you wouldn’t fall to your knees.

  At present, Ian wore his hair long because he never had time to get a haircut and it nearly reached his shoulders, though he wore it pulled back with a leather band. He usually threw on a black jacket, a white shirt and black jeans, except for the times when he took to the street at five a.m. to run through the first gray light of morning. His work was risky, and he took chances; his daily runs provided a block of time when he was thinking of nothing but racing through a sleeping city. He’d started running not for health, but because he’d had a life of crime and knew what it was like to be trapped inside a cell. All that was long ago. He was still ashamed of his behavior, but not of what it had taught him. Some things stayed with you, the joy of throwing yourself into the world after you’d been caged, of going as fast as you could and not stopping for anything, not even red lights. Running still made the world seem like a dream, as it had back when he was fifteen and too alive to take heed of danger.

  His office on the mews was composed of two small rooms, one more cluttered than the other. The first chamber held his desk, which he sometimes used as a dining table, along with a hot plate, a small refrigerator and a closet that had been made into a pantry, which mostly stocked whiskey, rice, and tinned food. In the second, smaller room there was a single bed. His mother, Margaret, who had always doted on him, had made the coverlet, hemming the cotton sheets with blue thread. Ian was fairly certain she’d folded some lavender and sage inside the blanket’s batting that caused him to dream of home. When it came to magic, his mother was always elusive, unwilling to share her secrets regarding the Nameless Art. What you learn yourself will suit you best, she had told him. Be a man who knows how important books are.

  In fact, he’d become a collector and there were books in a jumble everywhere, crammed onto shelves and stacked wherever there was space, a table, a chair, a bureau. A person could hardly see the good Persian carpet anymore. Some of the books were quite valuable. He’d had several break-ins lately, and he’d taken to padlocking his door when he went out for the evening.

  It was Ian’s goal to one day wrestle his library into proper order, arranged and shelved by author and subject, but that day had yet to come and he relied on his memory when looking for a reference. He had books so dangerous they needed to be kept under lock and key in a dusty cabinet, including a rare copy of The Key to Hell by Cyprianus, composed at a school for the Dark Art in Germany in the eighteenth century, and Agrippa’s Third Book of Occult Philosophy, written in 1510, and the famous Icelandic book Rauðskinna, or Red Skin, which contained some of the darkest magic imaginable, the name taken from the color of the cover.

  Many people believed black to be the color of magic, in fact it was red. A red moon, a red mark on the skin, red boots, a red heart, red love, all added up to red magic, the strongest there was. It was said that when Red Skin’s author, Gottskálk, died in 1520, his book was buried with him, but if that was true, then there had been grave robbers, or perhaps the book itself refused to be destroyed and crawled out from the earth. Ian had gotten hold of the book on a trip to Reykjavík, exchanging an immense amount of cash, his savings as a matter of fact, to a man who refused to speak except to tell him Eg vorkenni þér. I pity you. That pronouncement didn’t frighten Ian one bit. It was better for him to lay claim to the text than to let it serve the purposes of someone who wished to do evil in the world. That was why he was on this wavering line that had become his life. He walked the left to protect others from it, all the while knowing that when you walk a path for too long it can easily become the direction you have taken. He worried about that, but didn’t every man occasionally have dark thoughts? Weren’t all souls finely calibrated mysteries?

  Sometimes the cupboard holding the most lethal of the texts rattled, the books inside raging against being locked up and kept in the dark, though it was for their own good and the good of others. Ian hushed them, and when he was exhausted and had been working and drinking too hard, he called out for them to shut the hell up or be shredded, not that he’d ever do such a thing. Books were everything to him. They had saved his life. And yes, he supposed his mother had something to do with that as well, for she’d been the one who had opened that world to him. Don’t think you know everything, when you know so little. Stop wasting your time and read this.

  Fortunately, most of the volumes in his collection were more well behaved then the ones in the dark cabinet. Little Albert, which contained homey spells that would catch fish and rabbits, along with healing charms and ways to render oneself invisible. The Dragon Rouge, a French Grimoire that listed enchantments and ways to keep evil at bay. And of course, The Magus, written by the British occultist Francis Barrett, which at the time of its publication in 1801 was a comprehensive compilation of magic of all kinds, the copies coveted, covered with black cloths in bookshops, the very text Vincent Owens had found when he was a boy who broke his mother’s rule that he must never go downtown.

  Control and removal of black magic was Ian’s day job; he was quite good at it and was often called in to old estates, haunted houses, homes in which hexes were prevalent. On a high shelf, he kept a collection of small glass bottles that glowed green and blue and inky black, all containing the evil he had collected on these outings. He’d been in the department of religion and philosophy once upon a time, but hadn’t much cared when he was released from both prestigious universities where he’d taught. There had been too many department meetings, too much responsibility, and too many reprimands—he needed to make a living beyond the occasional lecture given in drafty halls.

  The notice in the window was difficult to see because the glass needed washing and there was ivy growing up from a patch of dirt beside the door, but for those who were in need of help, the desperate and the distraught, the placard was perfectly evident. Ian had grown up with magic, not that he’d been happy about it at the time. His mother had always been a practitioner of the Nameless Art, and all the while Ian was growing up he’d wanted nothing to do with the masses of herbs drying in the rafters and the tinctures his mother had concocted in their kitchen or the people in town who seemed to both fear and revere her. Needless to say, none of his schoolmates were allowed to come play at their house, and, anyway, his mum, Margaret Wright, had thought play to be a ridiculous waste of time. They were outcasts, and Margaret couldn’t care less. Ian, on the other hand, spent his early days in a fever of resentment, morphing from an unruly child into an uncontrollable teenager. Their neighbors made the sign of the fox when he lurched past, a gesture meant to protect them from evil and black magic. Go fuck yourself, Ian would shout at them when he was all of eleven years old. He held up two other fingers in response, the ones that would have been chopped off had he been a robber long ago so that he could not use his bow hand. Everyone knew his meaning. I’ve still got mine, whether or not you like it. People continued to tell him to piss off even when he had grown to be as tall as a man. By the age of fifteen he was handsome enough so that his neighbors’ daughters stared at him with longing, all the more interested when their parents threatened to lock them in their rooms if they dared to have anything to do with Ian. Although these girls promised to avoid him, many were quick to break their vows to stay away, their hearts shattered in return for their defiance.

  Growing up in Essex, Ian had felt perched at the end of the world, a landscape of marshy fens and forests and fields. He’d longed for a different life. He wanted a father, brothers, the comradery of other men. At the very least, he wanted a kitchen with an electric stove and room of his own, for their cottage was small and he’d slept on the couch. He left home at sixteen, abruptly storming out after an argument with his mother about some trivial matter, some chore he’d neglected, and it had taken years before he got back on track. He was nearly thirty by the time he went to university, and it was a miracle he made it there. As soon as he was on his own, he joined up with petty criminals, becoming a thief early on. Perhaps it would have been better if someone had chopped off two of his fingers; it might have turned him away from larceny. As it was, he was good at crime, almost unnatural in his abilities as a robber. He thought he recalled his grandmother mention they had a distant ancestor, someone in the far-flung past, who’d been an outlaw and a horse thief who had thrown in his lot with a player from the London theater with a bad reputation, so perhaps robbery was in Ian’s blood. Sometimes he’d take the money and return the wallet to a pocket or purse before it had been noticed missing purely for his own amusement. He was cocky and full of himself and he’d enjoyed his risky, wild life until he’d been arrested.

  It had happened in his own hometown when he’d come for a visit to see his mum out of guilt. A good deed had changed his life, for better and for worse. An old policeman named Harold Jenner, who’d caught him shoplifting from the market when he was a boy, and had been fool enough to let Ian off with nothing more than a stern talking-to, now nabbed him once more, this time for lifting a wallet.

  “I’m doing this for your own good,” the officer had told him when he apprehended Ian.

  He’d wound up doing eighteen months in prison. Much like a crow, he’d stupidly held on to bits and pieces of what he’d stolen, a collector not of books back then, but of incriminating evidence: purses and backpacks, wallets and jewelry, all of it in a messy pile in a rented room on a bad street in London, there for the cops to see when they came to cart him off. Three weeks after he was released, he was back again. He felt like an addict, out of control, unable to stop himself from taking what he imagined he was entitled to, not yet understanding that no one is entitled to anything other than his freedom and the choices he makes.

  It was in prison that he found his way to magic. For one thing, his mother visited, bringing books for him to read, and what had previously seemed like far-fetched nonsense now was quite fascinating. The first time Ian’s mother had come to see him he’d glared at her defiantly when she handed him the first book of magic. She’d meant for her gift to both console him and educate him. That first text she brought him was de Laurence’s Oracle Mystery of Life and Destiny. Lauron William de Laurence, who’d lived between 1868 and 1936, was a book pirate and a plagiarist, a rogue and a thief, but also a magician. It was beginning reading, but Margaret thought her son would appreciate the author’s character. Ian had snorted a laugh as he looked through the chapters. “Hidden Treasures.” “Recovering Stolen Goods.” “Lucky Numbers.”

  “This is pure shit,” Ian had said to his mother. More than ever he found himself at the mercy of his rages, which grew worse in the gloom of his cell.

  Margaret didn’t intend to give up on her son. As a boy he had loved to catch eels in the fens, but he’d always let them go. Margaret had known there was hope for him then, for he’d always freed anything he’d trapped, watching the eels whirl away into the deep water as if he were contemplating the clouds in the sky.

  “When you’re ready for real magic, let me know,” Margaret had told him, resolute when it came to matching a cure to the person in need, leaving the book behind despite his complaints.

  He was ready by the time the following visit came around. “I could read a bit more,” he told her.

  She next brought The Magus.

  “Looks like crap,” he’d said, scowling.

  “Maybe it’s too complicated for you,” Margaret had said to get a reaction. Ian had accepted the challenge and had been reading ever since.

  “Do your time and learn what you can,” Margaret had told her boy and for once in his life he’d listened. That was the good luck. That was what saved him, those books. He celebrated each text he completed by getting a tattoo from a pal who used ink from broken pens and straight pins held over a match to sanitize them, more or less. Luckily, the fellow was a true artist who did quite good work. At the end of his time served, Ian was covered with ink, nineteen tattoos in all, and every one told a story. His chest was inked with a series of images, and his arms were sleeves of magic. On his left forearm there was a lion, there for courage, and on the other forearm was a serpent biting its own tail, the symbol of the universe. On his right arm a glass bottle had been inked, so delicate and shimmering it seemed real enough to break. Inside the glass, a man and a woman wrapped around one another, the marriage of opposites, love eternal, love of my life. The sleeve of tattoos on his left arm began with the hand of alchemy; above each finger floated a sun, a star, a key, a crown, and a bell. In the palm of the hand there was a fish. On his torso, a dragon, a magic circle from The Book of Solomon, the triangle of elemental fire, a demon trap with a scorpion in the center with Hebrew letters surrounding it, skulls and pentacles, intricate images that twisted around each other in a single shade of blue. On his back, between his shoulder blades, there was a crow with its wings spread, each feather carefully wrought, each taking an hour of pain to perfect. Ian sometimes imagined the crow to be his other self, the person he’d become in his cell, the creature who flew above the building when he closed his eyes. He wanted freedom so badly he couldn’t even feel the sensation of a hot needle pricking through his skin. There were times when he thought of himself as a book that was being written with blue ink printed on his flesh. The images could not be removed or reversed, and he was glad of that. They heralded who he was, a tribute to the books he’d read that had set out the path for the rest of his life.