“Ladies,” he said, “I realize your true nature may have come as a shock and right now you’re a little confused.” He was speaking softly but I heard his words with unnatural clarity. Part of the seducere? I wondered. Nightingale and I were going to have to have a long chat about this sometime soon.

I’d reached the edge of the roof, so I turned and put my foot up on the railing as if I were about to climb over sideways before plunging to a horrible death. It also gave me an opportunity to see what Faceless was up to.

He was still chatting up the girls. “I know you believe that you are cursed,” he said. “Forced to satiate your unnatural appetites by draining the life force of others. But I want you to think outside the box.”

I still couldn’t see his features, but I’d done a bit of reading since Alexander Smith had given us a description of his face or, more accurately, hadn’t. Victor Bartholomew, possibly the most boring magician who ever lived, named it vultus occulto—which even I knew was pig Latin—and had devoted an entire chapter to the subject of countermeasures, which, typically for Bartholomew, I could boil down to one sentence—“Keep looking really hard and sooner or later you’ll see through it.” So that’s what I did.

“What if,” said Faceless, “—and I throw this out to you as a hypothetical—what if it was all right to feed on people? What is feeding off people anyway but good old exploitation? And we’re perfectly happy to exploit people, aren’t we?”

I glanced over at Simone. She and her sisters had stopped holding one another and were regarding Faceless with the same polite interest one might give to a visiting dignitary in the hope that he gets on with it and shuts up soon.

Ha, I thought. Tyburn would have them genuflecting by now.

“This notion that we’re all equal is so intellectually bankrupt anyway.” As he spoke I blinked a couple of times, and suddenly I could see his face. Or rather I couldn’t, because it was hidden by a plain beige-colored mask that covered his whole head. It made him look like an unusually tasteful Mexican wrestler. I think he may have sensed that I’d pushed through the disguise, because he turned to look at me.

“Are you still here?” he asked.

“I wasn’t sure whether I should go headfirst or feetfirst,” I said.

“Do you think it will make a difference?”

“Statistically, you’re more likely to survive if you go feetfirst.”

“Why don’t you jump?” he said. “And then we can see.”