When Lexy came down the stairs five minutes later, she was wearing her best pink tutu-style dress with matching ballerina shoes. Somehow this seemed like the wrong outfit in which to be spending the evening with JP. Lexy wished she had something that looked more grown-up, although she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because her parents seemed to be acting so much more like grown-ups themselves. Her mother was using her most serious voice, which was a couple of octaves lower than normal, and Lexy’s father, Marcel, had on an ironed shirt. An actual shirt, rather than a crumpled, long-sleeved T-shirt with some “amusing” yoga message on it such as Yoga Dad, There’s No Place Like Om or Shake Your Asana.

As Lexy reached the bottom of the stairs she heard her father laugh in the way he did only when there were other adults around and he’d just said something he found very funny.

“That’s if any of us survive Midwinter, of course,” he said.

Jupiter Peacock now laughed as well. The sound was loud and strange, like a bittern calling for a mate.

“Don’t scare our guest,” Hazel Bottle was saying to her husband.

“Oh, I’m not easily frightened,” said Jupiter Peacock. “But I must say I am a little unnerved by the idea of the world ending while I’m in the middle of my lecture. That would be most unfortunate indeed.”

“The world never ends when people say it will,” said Marcel Bottle. “I wouldn’t be too alarmed.”

So they were talking about the prophecy as well. It had been all over Mrs. Bottle’s Bun Shop that afternoon. There were often weird prophecies flying about nowadays, but most people ignored them. Of course, most people also thought that magic didn’t exist and there was no such thing as the Otherworld. Magical people, on the other hand, believed in everything, and took prophecies quite seriously.

Apart from this one. Even magical people thought this prophecy was a bit of a joke, as it had come from Madame Valentin. She’d been cleaning her crystal ball, she’d said, and it had gone off. The thing hadn’t functioned for years, and Madame Valentin had used up the last of her M-currency long before the worldquake. But suddenly the crystal ball had activated itself (this is not at all how crystal balls work, which was yet another reason to pour scorn on the whole story) and that was when Madame Valentin had seen it all unfold before her.

It was Midwinter, on the dot—this year that meant 8:12 p.m. on the twenty-first of December, which was this Monday evening—and the sky had gone pink, and then green, and then completely black, a black Madame Valentin had never seen before. There were hundreds of cats flying through the sky. And then . . . A massive explosion. The End.