Olivia ran down the stairs. Her vague suspicions had coalesced, the message from her dreams loud and clear. With a quick glance to check that nobody was about, she pulled herself into human form and grabbed her coat. Draping it across her shoulders, the briefest sop to modesty, she sprinted barefoot out onto the grass, her breath clouding before her face in the dark, her skin burning and freezing. High above, the moon gla...

The turning of the moon marked time. Olivia didn't return to Peter's Cross until the autumn, and even then she did so reluctantly, skirting around the graveyard so she could walk up to the vicarage by road, considering it well worth the extra shoe leather if it kept her out of sight of Eli and Verity. Her dread at the thought of unpreparedly running into Eli had obvious roots, crossing his path had never done her any good...

Lost in miserable contemplation, Olivia had no concept of how far the journey took her. High hedges and the grasping bare branches of trees lined the lanes, all alike. Once in a while, signs of habitation loomed and passed, clustered cottages or solitary houses on long stretches of empty road. White signposts marked placenames that Olivia only half-knew, and Grace had fallen silent, concentrating on the way ahead. The lit...

Putting on her coat, feeling for the reassurance of the small slip of paper in her pocket, Olivia walked out into the early twilight and down to the phone box. She could only pray that Grace might still be with her friends, and she breathed a sigh of relief when the cheery voice on the other end of the line told her to wait just a minute. "What happened to you?" said Grace, skipping the pleasantries. Olivia cringed: she'd...

Olivia woke with her cheek pressed against cold hard earth, painfully aware of every bone inside her flesh, the awkward arrangement of jaw and skull bones, string of aching vertebrae, arm and leg bones loose at the joints. She decided against standing up just yet. Fragments of last night's memory slotted into place. The bright round moon, Eli, tall sharp-scented pines. This morning seemed equally disjointed. A roof overhe...

Imogen knew she had to take some of the blame. Eli had returned to the village to see her, but she'd soon grown jealous when he spent so much time with that pretty girl in perpetual mourning black. If Imogen was honest with herself, she'd jumped at the chance to share a hurtful piece of gossip about that pretty young thing. She hadn't known what Eli would do but the girl had deserved it. It was fitting that she knew now w...

Olivia came home much later than she'd intended, surprised to see lights in the windows. She ran up the path to the front door, splashing in the puddles, singing cheerfully to herself as she hung up her wet coat in the hallway. It had occurred to her that Reverend Milton might not be much help if all he did was talk and Verity refused to listen, so straight after work she'd met with Grace at a cafe by the train station. G...

It had taken Imogen about half an hour to make up her mind to tell Eli what she'd heard, longer to find him, and even longer to wait while he went to confirm for himself what she already knew. Typical man, couldn't take a woman's word for anything. Rather than argue with him, she occupied herself indoors. Since she couldn't imagine herself on speaking terms with Verity any time in the foreseeable future, she ought to spen...

Verity came storming out of the kitchen, and Imogen melted into the darkness behind the door, breathless and silent. Unseen, she watched Verity stomp off up to the attic and Olivia climb wearily back to bed. Too weak to stand, Imogen sat down on the floor of the hallway. Verity had everything: youth and beauty and a baby. A perfect healthy baby that she didn't even want, that she planned to throw away! Deep in thought, Im...

With the awful business of the full moon out of the way, a fortnight passed uneventfully. Olivia settled into her job at the library (with profuse apologies for her earlier absence) and continued work on the house. Still, thoughts of Giles's death tormented her. She should have gone to see him when Grace had asked. She could have made a difference. She lay in the dark, neither asleep nor truly awake, the cold crush of gui...

Olivia woke face down in the slush of dead brown leaves. The slats of grey light filtering through the bare trunks of the trees suggested mid-morning at that time of year. As she sat up, shivering, every muscle in her body stiff and aching, she realised with a sinking horror that she was naked but for a patchy covering of black mud. She had no memory of the night before beyond a few broken fragments: the dark in the woods...

As the full moon approached, the second tea party came and went, with Olivia putting in a perfunctory appearance. Grace had been absent, and Olivia had been preoccupied with her work on the house. She'd started the week with good intentions, picking up where she'd left off with her campaign against her wrecked bedroom. She'd already wrenched up the old carpet, aired out the unpleasant mix of wet dog and incontinent cat, t...

The following day, Olivia woke up just enough to call in sick: flu, so sorry. She wanted to lie down and die. Instead she padded to the bathroom, grumbling and berating herself for allowing Verity to lead her off to the vampires' den and forcing her to choose between sleeping in a nest of monsters or walking through town alone after dark. Verity shouldn't have left her alone with the vampires, but then perhaps she shouldn...

Grace had assured Olivia she'd be no more than twenty minutes away by train, but the house was lonelier for knowing she wouldn't be coming back. Olivia listened to it echo every step she took as she paced up and down the hallway. More than once she thought about getting out of the house and going for a long walk or even a run, but without Grace for company she couldn't muster any enthusiasm for the idea. When she couldn't...

There was one place Olivia hadn't even considered when choosing a bedroom to call her own. Late the evening of the secret funeral, she stood before the door at the far end of the first floor hallway. She knew the house reasonably well from her childhood visits, when she'd been allowed to run free, mostly. She remembered trying to get into whatever lay behind this door a couple of times, but it had been locked for twenty y...