I nodded. “I have to collect a few things. Wait here. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

I went back to the house and collected my silver chain. I also filled my left pocket with salt and my right with iron. Then I took a small portion of cheese for the journey.

When I returned to the crossroads, to my fury, the girl was no longer there. I paced up and down for a while, but there was no sign of her. After five minutes I lost patience. Had she been telling me lies, playing some sort of joke? I wondered.

I glanced around, gave a snort of disgust, annoyed with myself for trusting her, and prepared to leave. I would go back to the house, grab some sleep, and search for the creature in the morning. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a movement. I looked around, and suddenly the girl was there. She seemed to step right out of a tree trunk. So the ability to be “invisible” was one thing she hadn’t been lying about. . . .

No doubt she hoped I’d comment on her sudden reappearance, but I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction, so I simply gave her a curt nod.

“What do they call you?” I asked.

“My mam calls me Jennifer, but I prefer Jenny.”

I was stunned; my heart pounded. I tried to keep the astonishment from my face as I remembered where I had heard that name before. I must have failed, because she gave me a curious glance.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You look like somebody just walked over your grave!”

I ignored her and looked straight ahead. “Lead on!” I said. “But warn me before we come in sight of the tree.”

As we walked, I remembered how a dark mage had once conjured up in my mind a vision of a possible future—one where the house at Chipenden stood abandoned and derelict, with no spook working from it. I’d walked up to my bedroom, and there on the wall, where all the apprentices, including me, had scrawled their names, was a new addition:

JENNY.

It suggested that a girl apprentice had once been based there. It seemed very odd—as far as I knew, there had never been any female spook’s apprentices. Since then I’d thrust the image from my mind, assuming that it was just one of the mage’s tricks. But now a girl of the same name was asking to become my apprentice.

Was this simply coincidence?

Jenny had used that old County saying, too—I looked as if someone had walked over my grave. It seemed sinister in view of what I knew. I would never have abandoned the Chipenden house like that . . . not unless I was dead.

The future is never totally fixed. It changes with every decision we make. I’d no intention of doing so, but if I were to take on this girl as my apprentice, would it hasten my death and result in the house being abandoned?