Dedication

For Harry, who has rescued me too many times to count

PROLOGUE

In a stone courtyard at the edge of the woods, a ghost with glowing red eyes floats back and forth past the windows of Saint Ignatius Hospital, waiting for a baby to be born.

In the decades that he’s been haunting this place, the ghost has seen it all: visitors and patients coming and going, the hopeless cases, the lucky people with small complaints. He’s kept his glowing eyes on the hospital doors in peacetime and during terrible stretches of war. He’s seen more babies born than he could ever count.

So when cries drift out through the far west window of the maternity ward, and then relieved laughter, and another set of cries, the ghost knows exactly what it means: a particularly rare event, a miracle magnified. The other ghosts in the courtyard go about their business as usual, unnoticing, but the ghost with the glowing red eyes floats to the window for a glimpse.

Only, then something else happens that the ghost does not expect. Something that, in all the years he’s haunted the stone courtyards of Saint Ignatius, he’s never seen.

The night, all at once, becomes still. A silence falls over the woods; the dark sky—already moonless—dims. An owl calls to the stars and then goes quiet. A cat consults with a mosquito, eats it, and then scampers off in fear. Leaves whisper to each other a little lower than before. Sensing an approaching darkness, knowing the signs of the presence of a witch, all the ghosts of Saint Ignatius flee—zipping off through walls and into woods, vanishing in the night. All except one… who hides… and watches.

Slowly two women emerge from the edge of the trees.

The first looks sad and mournful, with a forgettable face, and hands that reach through the air as if grasping for something that isn’t there. Strange, translucent moths flutter behind her, and a faint cloud of dust, as if she’s just stepped out of a closet full of antiques. The other is far more frightening—with empty powder-blue eyes, the pupils like pinpricks, smudged all around in dark purple circles. She smiles with a hungry mouth full of sharp teeth. From around her neck dangle pocket watches, too many to count.

While the sad, grasping witch flicks a wrist and drifts in through the slowly opening doors, now obscured in a kind of misty haze, the blue-eyed witch waits. The night waits. The animals wait. The air waits. Nurses, doctors, patients coming and going—none of them notice two witches in their midst. The living remain blind to them, as they always are.

Finally, silently—the sad witch emerges through the doors, this time with something bulging under her cloak.

“Is it done?” the second witch asks, and the meek, empty-looking one nods.