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...

Up at the top of the graveyard, close to the woods, a low wooden fence marked off a corner of pitifully small plots with far more flowers and messages, bright and jarring in contrast to the sombre graves on the lower slopes. A small procession headed towards them as sky darkened to a deep royal blue, moths looping and flitting in the twilight. Verity, at the fore, picked her way through the long grass, the green blades bo...

Even though Auntie Imogen had initially promised to stay out of the way of the clearing, she appeared several times a day 'to see how things are going' and it slowed the process considerably. Finishing clearing the first room was a cause for celebration, in Olivia's opinion. "But of course," Verity grinned. "Something to mark the occasion. Smile," she instructed, producing a camera from her handbag. Olivia frowned. "Doesn...

The following morning Olivia woke before dawn, readying herself for another run, looking forward to it in spite of herself. By eight o'clock, though, she was beginning to wonder what had become of Grace. She had to give up the idea and get ready for work, and she was just grabbing her coat when she heard a knock at the back door. "It's open, she called. "Did you oversleep? Grace?" Grace, her head held low, was near unreco...

Olivia's burst of enthusiasm quickly faded again. She'd planned to finish decorating the guest bedroom (her own bedroom, as she ought to start thinking of it) but that prospect became daunting when she looked more closely at the full extent of the damage. Instead, she moved on to the next door along the corridor. The door wouldn't budge, and she stood there rattling the handle and poking about in the lock with various key...

On the Monday, Olivia started her job at the library as planned. She might have been apprehensive but after the turbulence of recent events the library gave her a rock to cling to. Olivia spent the day dealing with pleasantly dull people and things she could easily understand, surrounded by books and order. She made tea for the two librarians, a middle-aged married couple equally quiet and patient and received polite than...

Getting everyone into one room was like herding cats. Grace had disappeared into the kitchen to chat with Auntie Imogen and clean up the mess Verity had made, and Siobhan had followed. Hoping for scraps. Siobhan had the dirty, hungry look of a stray, and though Olivia did her best to dismiss that uncharitable thought, she found she didn't much want the company of a zombie. The ghosts came and went, with their poor sense o...

Imogen was flitting from room to room, chatting giddily with Lizzy and the other household ghosts, when she encountered the first of her guests. She found him snoring in a chair in the corner of the drawing room, where he'd been for who knew how long. "Oh," she said, flatly, having been deprived of the little thrill of meeting her first guest at the door. "Am I to take it this is the illustrious Theo?" she asked Verity, w...

The hour of the tea party loomed large on the horizon. Olivia had contemplated hiding in her room for the duration of the event, but she ventured downstairs to see how the preparations were coming along, at least. Auntie Imogen had worked herself up into a flutter of happy nerves, rushed off her feet with a hundred last minute details to attend to before her guests arrived. She might have been slightly disappointed in Oli...