He had smiled at her, then stumbled and nearly knocked over Percival, Anna’s stuffed snake. He was obviously drunk, and Lucie preferred her own company to that of an inebriated Matthew, which hurt her heart and made her want to shake him and ask him why he couldn’t treat himself better. Why he couldn’t see himself the way her brother saw him. Why he was so determined to harm himself and harm James in the process.

As Lucie made her way down Percy Street, a few snowflakes chased each other lazily in the glow of the gaslights, the streets empty and quiet at this hour. London wrapped in snow was a hushed promise of a city, gas lamps strung like a chain of pearls across the sky. Lucie snuggled deeper into her astrakhan coat. At her waist clinked the daggers and seraph blades she’d brought with her tonight. One could never be too careful.

After walking a few blocks, she took out her gloves. She had to admit it was cold, despite the heat rune she’d put on before she left the party. It had been awfully warm inside Anna’s apartment, and as the evening wore on, things had become ever more riotous as the crowd danced and drank and flirted, Anna perched atop the soundboard of the piano, watching them all with her La Gioconda smile. Thomas’s sister Eugenia had danced with Matthew, tossing her long dark hair. At one point Lucie talked briefly to a wide-eyed mundane girl who proclaimed the party the wildest she’d ever attended, and asked Lucie in a rather astonished tone if everyone present were bohemians.

Lucie considered replying that they weren’t bohemians, they were vampires, werewolves, and demon hunters, but she didn’t want to shock the poor girl to death. “Yes,” she’d said. “Bohemians.”

“Goodness,” the girl had exclaimed. Later Lucie saw her kissing Anna in a window seat and decided the bohemian lifestyle must have grown on her.

The snow began coming down harder as Lucie passed the silent, deserted bulk of the British Museum. It gleamed palely behind its railings, the stately columns of its entrance frosted all over with a thin layer of ice. A tickle started at the base of her spine. The feeling of being watched. Her breath puffed out in a cold white cloud as she spun around, her hand going to a dagger at her waist.

He was there, a dark shape against a background of white snow and ice-frosted buildings. The snow fell all around him but did not touch him—not his dark hair, or his perennial costume of white shirt and black trousers.

“You startled me!” she cried, her heart pounding.

Jesse smiled thinly. “Well, I am a ghost. I could have jumped out from behind the museum and shouted ‘boo,’ but I restrained myself.”

She had begun to shiver. “I thought you didn’t want to see me again.”