You don’t experience a bomb blast so much as remember it afterward. It’s like a bad edit or a record jumping a groove. On one side of the moment there is music and laughter and romance and on the other—not pain, that comes later, but a stunned incomprehension. A tangle of dust and splintered wood, a splash of white and red that becomes a man’s dress shirt, tables overturned to reveal bodiless legs and headless bodies, a trombone minus its slide standing upright on a table as if left there by a musician while two men in khaki uniforms stared blindly at it—killed by the blast wave.

And then noise and shouting and the taste of blood in Simone’s mouth.

My blood, I realized—I’d bitten my lip.

It was Simone who pushed me away.

“How old am I?” she asked.

“I make it a shade short of ninety,” I said, because there’s just no stopping my mouth sometimes.

“Your mother was right,” she said. “I am a witch.”

I found I was swaying and my hand was shaking. I held it up in front of my face.

“She was right,” she said. “I’m not a person, I’m a creature, an abomination.”

I tried to tell her that she was definitely a human being and that some of my best friends were functionally immortal. I wanted to say that we could work it out, but it came out as a series of wah sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go and talk to my sisters.” She gave a bitter little laugh. “Only they’re not my sisters, are they? I’m Lucy, we’re all Lucy Western.”

She turned and ran out of the coach house. I heard her heels clanging down the spiral staircase. I tried to follow but toppled slowly onto my face instead.

“THAT WAS not the most intelligent thing you’ve ever done,” said Nightingale as Dr. Walid shone a light in my eyes to make sure my brains were intact. I’m not sure how long I’d flopped around on the floor of the coach house, but as soon as I’d gotten enough muscle control to use a phone, I’d called Dr. Walid. He was calling it an atonic seizure because, even if he didn’t know why it had happened, it was important to give it a cool name. I’d been hoping that I’d have a chance to come up with a plausible explanation before Nightingale arrived, but he came in just behind Dr. Walid.

“I had to be sure she was related to the Café de Paris case and not the Strip Club of Dr. Moreau,” I said. “I mean, she’s not a chimera like the Pale Lady. In fact, I think she’s an accident.” I explained about Miss Patternost and her musical shapes.

“You think that their ‘shapes’ acted like forma?” asked Nightingale.