“Edward has the will, so he knows exactly what’s in it and has the power to act on it.” Jamie’s breath fogged white between them. “About a month before Ian sent you that message, Edward rang saying he hadn’t been able to get hold of Lillian for months and he was concerned. We tried telling him she was somewhere with no phone service, we said she was busy, we pulled just about every excuse out of a hat, but it didn’t fly with him. He sent us a formal letter informing us that he’d be here on the twenty-sixth of December and he expected Lillian to be here, too. If not, he’d report her as missing and us as covering up that fact.”

“Okay,” Mika said, still bottling every wild, painful feeling up as tightly as possible. “Maybe I’m wholly lacking in moral fibre, but I actually get all that. You couldn’t let anyone find out Lillian was dead before you figured out a way to keep the girls, and you can’t let Edward find out she’s dead now because you’ll lose the girls and he’ll be able to report you for committing a crime. And you can’t let him report her as merely missing, either, because that’ll lead to the police pretty much camping out here, which will in turn lead to them most likely finding Lillian’s remains and will probably end up exposing the girls’ magic to boot.”

“That’s pretty much it.”

“The part I don’t get,” she said, and her voice cracked as all that bottled anguish threatened to explode, “is me.”

“We were out of ideas,” Jamie confessed. “Then Ian saw your videos. We’d already been talking about how restricted the girls’ lives were and how little they knew about their own power, so the part about needing a tutor was true. But the timing of Ian’s message to you was because of Edward. We hoped you’d able to help us. Ian thought that if we could just get you here, then maybe, once we’d gotten to know you and knew we could trust you, we’d tell you the truth. And maybe you’d be able to disguise yourself as Lillian to get Edward to back off.”

“Which explains why Ian was so keen to find out if I could glamour myself,” Mika remarked rather bitterly, the sense of betrayal almost too much to bear. Had there been an ulterior motive in every conversation she’d ever had with these people she’d grown to love?

“Mika—”