‘You are NOT!’ he shouts, with a pop of smoke, rushing over to me. ‘Stella, you are not useless. You are exactly who you should be. You are brave, and bold, and wilful, and kind – you are the very best of fae!’

‘I don’t see how that can possibly be true.’

‘Perhaps you don’t yet,’ he concedes, his amber lamp eyes glowing up into mine. ‘Just take my word for it. There are other, more pressing things to worry about, if worrying is what you have your heart set on.’

‘Like?’

‘The fact that you left the boundary unshielded!’

‘Not for very long!’

‘Shadows are fast,’ he says. ‘Who knows what they might have heard, or seen.’

‘But they couldn’t get into the house because of the bells at the door. And we didn’t say anything very special, did we?’

‘We can only guess what they might have picked up on,’ he mutters. ‘Something’s bothering me though. What if . . .’ He stares at the window. ‘What if there’s still one here . . . in the garden? We could have locked it in by mistake when you sorted the charms out earlier.’

‘We should go out and check!’ I say, scrambling off the bed.

‘That’s just what I was thinking,’ he says drily, jumping to my shoulder.

‘But how do you get rid of a shadow?’ I whisper, as we head down the stairs.

‘Kill one?’

‘No. Send it back to the forest!’

‘You don’t want to send it back; it’ll go running off with all our secrets,’ Peg says. ‘The trick is for it to not go back, Stella.’

‘I can’t kill something!’

‘It isn’t a creature, a living thing,’ he says. ‘It’s created out of night itself – a product of fear.’

‘Then how do I even do anything to it.’

He sniffs. ‘I don’t know. I’ve avoided them as much as I can. Perhaps I should have made a study of them instead.’

‘Why aren’t you allowed in there, Peg?’ I ask.

He stares at me for a few moments.

‘Not all things can be so easily spoken of,’ he says, winding his tail through his fingers. ‘It was a misunderstanding. A silly thing that I haven’t had the time to fix.’

‘So you’re not going to tell me?’

‘Not now, no,’ he says. ‘Come on – let’s sort this shadow.’

I blow my breath out and shake my head at him, and then we creep through the kitchen, and I shove on my boots and open the back door as quietly as I can, trying not to alert Nan to what we’re doing.

The garden is creepy at night. I light the lanterns that swing from iron hooks on the outer stone wall of the house, and the moon is high, but there is still so much darkness. Peg is a sharp-clawed bronze bat on my shoulder, and we dance between the light patches, scouring the empty air for signs of a shadow that shouldn’t be there.