Oke read her look immediately and wanted to explain but couldn’t think of a way around it. He knew Dahlia had a crush on him—he taught enough undergraduates to recognize the signs—and she had obviously known he’d been invited to the party along with everyone else from the Quaker meetinghouse and had hovered in the freezing cold waiting for him to walk past so they could “accidentally” arrive together. Now Carmen would think he was even more of a creep than she did already, sneaking up on her in the hall of mirrors, which he deeply regretted, and that, having crashed and burned, moving straight on to the next girl who worked in a shop in the same street.

This was more or less exactly what Carmen was thinking. Well. At least she knew it really had just been about the voucher. She sniffed and tried to look dignified, which is quite tricky when you’re wearing a purple velvet cloak.

“Cor, you were with Blair Pfenning, weren’t you?! Is he here?” said Dahlia.

“He’s in LA,” said Carmen, bullishly sounding as if she knew his schedule. It was a ridiculous piece of showing off—who exactly was she trying to impress?

Oke relaxed. Right. So she was seeing that other guy. Okay. Fine. Not that he was terribly interested in Dahlia, but he’d hated upsetting Carmen. But he was being ridiculous to think that she was thinking about him at all. The people who dated the Blairs of this world and those who dated the Okes very rarely interacted. He told himself very strongly to pack away those feelings.

“Dahlia,” said Bronagh, “come here, I have a present for you.”

“Wow!” said Dahlia happily, for whom this was turning into an excellent evening. Oke nodded to Carmen, then followed her too, naturally curious. Carmen hugged her glass like she didn’t care and looked around the party. As well as the alternative-looking crowd, it was also full of your typically successful-looking Edinburgh women: glossy, perfectly dressed, slender, and well-off. She was half surprised not to see Sofia among them; she would fit in right away, which wasn’t exactly what you would expect from a dark little occult shop at the bottom of Victoria Street.

“Who are all these women?” she whispered to Mr. McCredie, who was in deep conversation with a very short man with a very long beard all the way down his front and gold-rimmed spectacles.

Mr. McCredie gave a sideways look around the room. “Oh, those are those glossy working-mother types, always perfect, never a hair out of place. Bronagh told me about them. She says they’re all witches. No other way you could conceivably ‘have it all’ apparently.”

He went back to his conversation while Carmen frowned. This was all too strange for words. Although if it were true, it would explain a lot.