Not this week or next. Not ten years from now. But at a distant point in a future they could not yet imagine, when they had put away the games of childhood and were weighted down with the responsibilities of middle age. When the memory of what happened next was buried under faded fancy dress costumes and decades of dust.

In the mouth of the candy cane–striped booth positioned at the back of the shop, the puppets swooped and whirled on their strings, and the children clapped and smiled at one another.

The show was almost at its end when the last puppet appeared. The grand finale. But there was no cheer of encouragement, no high, excited voices. Instead, the children fell silent and watchful.

This puppet was not carved from sycamore like the others. Its body was a loose formation of silk and lace scraps from a Victorian mourning costume, hemmed with black feathers, all glossy iridescence. When its strings were manipulated, it seemed to fly.

But this did not interest the children. They were staring at the puppet’s head. Not a face made shiny with beeswax or carved into a leer or with ruddy cheeks, but something much darker than that.

The decapitated head of a carrion crow.

Its eyes were fixed open, two brown buttons pressed into a headdress of feathers, its beak like the curve of a hook. A glimpse of ragged edges where the head had been torn from its body.

Two of the children exchanged glances. A nervous giggle slipped from another. The dolls in their boxes high up on the shelves looked on, glee in their painted faces. The tin soldiers seemed to stand up straighter. The whole shop paused to draw in breath.

And so no one noticed a small girl—the youngest of the group—back away from the puppet theater with its dead crow’s head and limp feathers, stumbling over her best shoes, finding her way to a storeroom that should have been locked.

No one saw her scramble between the old boxes and piles of dust sheets, tears wetting her face, or stopped her from squeezing through racks of fraying costumes, spiderwebs catching in her hair, until she found herself crouching behind a deep, wooden chest, curiosity driving her to open it.

No one noticed her at all.

Until the screaming began.

1

Now

Every killing has a taste of its own. I expect you didn’t know that.

Young women are sweetened with hope, less astringent than their older selves, who reek of experience, bitter as sorrel leaves.

The boys—yes, they remain boys until they have earned the right to be called men—are seasoned with bravado, but lack piquancy. As the life ebbs from them, they taste of metal and shyness and tears.

The older generation are oversalted with loss and grief. They have absorbed the hurts of lives that have been lived, storm-battered but surviving. They do not accept death. They fight against the injustice of a thief like me.