Chapter 23
Molloy stood in the snow, the cold biting at her lungs like air dragged through a frostbitten forest. She stared up at the front porch of the house she hadn’t set foot in since retrieving Alice all those years ago.
The townhouse at Doughty Street in Bloomsbury, belonging to Franklin Liddell, loomed, its red brick facade dulled by years of soot and the neglect of remaining vacant.
Iron railings framed the front steps, scrollwork now choked with ice.
Above her, a second-floor bay window bulged outward.
She could almost see Alice as a girl, looking out from behind the dark glass.
This place was only a block from the Darling townhouse on Guilford Street—one of the many reasons why Molloy had had to keep Alice and Wendy isolated from each other in separate wings at Pastoria House.
Bracing herself, Molloy climbed the steps, boots crunching against a thin crust of ice.
The cast-iron boot scraper beside the threshold was still there, half-buried in snow.
She ran a gloved hand over the brass knocker—a lion’s head, its mouth in a permanent snarl.
Taking a steadying breath, she sifted through the large key ring fastened to the registry book.
Molloy counted her blessings that whoever had raided her office hadn’t taken the keys—or the addresses. Without them, she’d have no chance of finding Alice, though this address was one she knew by heart.
Her breath misted in the air as she stepped inside. The house felt like a ghost of itself, its walls stained with the vacant outlines of paintings long removed. Silence pressed in around her, thick and heavy.
In the parlor, she found what she was looking for.
The enormous mirror stood bolted to the wall opposite the fireplace, unchanged since the day Franklin had installed it under her direction.
Molloy stopped before it, her fingers curling at her sides as she recalled the sorrow in Alice’s eyes the last time she passed through it—only to return and find her entire life upended. Gone.
A tear slipped down Molloy’s cheek. She brushed it away, steeling herself. Then, with a steadying breath, she pressed a hand to the glass.
Solid.
The mirror had not been accessed. A relief—but also a complication. Alice hadn’t been brought here. The search was only beginning.
Molloy opened the leather-bound registry book and exhaled. So many homes. So many buildings. Each one a mark of registered portal activity.
“Blast, blast it all!” she cursed in the face of what lay ahead. There were so many portals to check, and what if she were out of time? What if Alice didn’t survive? If only she had stayed and listened to what Alice was trying to tell her!
Molloy shook her head. That type of thinking wouldn’t find Alice. Marker’s body in the closet, Wendy’s and Alice’s ransacked files, were sure signs: the forces Tattypoo had long tried to shield Alice from had found her.
In Oz, there were endless portals. The only way she could narrow the search would be to rule out from where in London she left, and where that portal was opened to. “Start from the beginning and go until you reach the end,” Molloy instructed herself, trying to steady her nerves.
Molloy flipped to the beginning of her list, then drew her wand from the hidden pleat in her skirt. The pearl tip crackled as she carved a large circle through the air, sparks hanging suspended for a moment before the center of the ring shifted, revealing a snow-dusted street in East London.
Her next stop.