‘I think he just likes Nan.’

‘Who’s Nan?’ asks Tash.

‘My grandma. She’s a ghost.’

There’s a stunned silence.

‘You mean . . . ghosts are real?’ whispers Wren. ‘Like, she talks and everything? Can she move things? Is she bound to your house? Ooh! Could you bring her to school?’

I stifle a laugh at the thought of bringing Nan to school.

‘You didn’t know that ghosts were real?’ I ask.

‘We still don’t know they’re real,’ says Tash.

‘No!’ says Wren. ‘My parents always said they were legends; just stories told to children to teach them lessons about things.’

‘Well, humans do that about the fae,’ I say.

Wren laughs, but Tash sniffs and looks at her long, pointed nails. I bite my lip to stop myself from saying anything else stupid.

‘Don’t worry about Tash,’ says Wren. ‘She’s not great with new people. She’s not great with old people either, to be honest – but she does get easier with time.’

Tash stalks off and gets into a fierce debate with someone on the other side of the room, gesticulating out of the window.

‘What’s that about?’ I ask.

‘It was a bad night in the forest,’ Wren says. ‘Something’s shifted, and nobody really knows why. No disasters, exactly, but the nights are so long now that it’s winter, and even the daylight is just murk. The ivy on the trees has grown so thick, it hardly lets any light through. More of them are getting sick.’

‘Is Yanny OK?’

‘Strictly under house arrest,’ she says. ‘And I don’t expect he’s happy about it!’

‘It was my fault.’

‘It wasn’t.’ She frowns. ‘From what I heard, you just made sure he got home safe. I heard you dealt with the shadows pretty well yourself . . .’

I sigh. ‘I don’t know about that.’

‘But we know you have some affinity with the shadows – Rory told us.’ says Tash, ‘which seems pretty strange to me.’

The room instantly feels darker and colder. Wren rolls her eyes and tries to brush it aside, and Principal Ashworth comes in and starts waffling about Safety in the Modern Human World, but the feeling stays, and it isn’t only Tash who looks sideways at me after that. It’s a huge relief to get out of there and downstairs, where Zara is waiting for me.

‘Why does everyone look so glum?’ she whispers, tucking her arm through mine and leading me off to tutorial.

‘It was a difficult night in the forest, apparently,’ I say. ‘And they all think I’m some kind of evil shadow-bending sprite creature, so that didn’t really help.’

‘A what?’

‘Something Tash said . . .’ And Rory, whose coldness I can’t forget. The way the shadow drew close to me last night, before I sent it away.

‘Don’t listen to her,’ Zara says. ‘There’s nothing evil about you. Speaking of which, I wondered . . . Mum’s working a late shift tonight – maybe I could come to yours?’