The beast had been tamed.

Silence descended in the courtyard. It was as if I had been swimming underwater and my head had finally broken the surface. All the tension in my back and shoulders melted away, and I slumped forward, trembling all over. As I caught my breath, Anne Naylor drifted close to me – as close as she could come without touching my face. Every hair on my arms stood on end.

‘She won’t hurt you any more.’ I couldn’t raise my voice above a whisper. ‘I promise.’

I thought I felt a small glow in the æther. Anne brushed past my aura, turning my skin to ice, and slipped quietly out of the courtyard.

‘Don’t try binding her, Jaxon,’ Eliza said. ‘You’re going to lose too much blood.’

‘Yes. Thank you, Eliza,’ was the curt reply.

Nick crouched beside me and grasped my arms. My eye sockets felt tighter, my jaw too stiff to move, and my vision was furred with black around the edges, but I could still just about see. Spots of ruby dotted the paving stones around Jaxon’s shoes and veined one of his arms. I looked up to see him wiping the blade of his knife with a silk handkerchief.

‘Done,’ he said, his eyes on the docile spirit. ‘Not the Metyard we wanted, but I suppose it is a Metyard.’

‘Maria won’t bargain with you now,’ I rasped. ‘She wanted Sarah, not Sally. So we’ve lost Anne, too.’

His face was blank. ‘Yes.’ He beckoned to the spirit. ‘Maria and I are old friends – we may be able to come to a new agreement. If not … well. I’m sure we can find some way to make this day something other than an abject waste of time.’

As he walked into the den, Sally followed. I was drained, weighed down by the sense that he was disappointed in me, but relief spread through my chest. Let Anne Naylor return to the resting place she had chosen for herself. Let her be still. Perhaps she wouldn’t scream now, knowing that her pursuer was gone. That was a victory, I supposed.

It just wasn’t the victory Jaxon Hall had hoped for.

In the den, it was as if nothing had happened. I washed the blood off my face and changed into a new shirt. Jaxon asked me to kindly make him a black coffee and get back to work on the rent, which I did, but no sooner had I sat down than I succumbed to exhaustion. My head dropped on to the desk, and I knew no more.

When I opened my eyes, I was in my own room, and it was dark. In the moonlight, I could make out a moth on the open window.