Chapter 2
I clean the kitchen before I do anything else.
The pot's dented where it hit the floor last night; I set it back on its hook regardless, sweep up a shard of glass from a bottle I don't remember breaking, wipe the table down until the wood shows through the grime of last night's dinner.
My father is upstairs, sleeping off whatever's left of him.
I found him at dawn slumped against the bottom stair, and I did what I always do — got my shoulder under his arm, walked him the rest of the way up, put him to bed like he's the child and I'm the parent, which, in every way that matters, is exactly what we are to each other now.
I don't look at him while I do it. I never do, on mornings like this. Some kindnesses are easier to give a person when you can't see their face.
By the time I unlock the shop's front door, the sun's climbed high enough to burn the last of the mist off the harbor, and I have exactly one goal: get through today.
The Tin Heart doesn't have real windows, not the kind that show you the street outside the way an ordinary shop would.
Years ago — before I was old enough to remember it happening — my father had the front glass treated, some old trick with silvering and a particular slant to the pane, so that from inside, the glass swallows light instead of throwing it back.
You can see out. The street sees in. But stand close and look straight at it and you'll find nothing looking back at you — no ghost of your own face hovering over the display of dolls, no accidental mirror to catch you unaware while you're meant to be working.
I've never asked him why he had it done that way.
I've always suspected, somewhere under the drink and the grief, some part of him understood exactly what I'd need before I ever needed it.
It's the only kindness this building has ever given me without my having to ask twice.
I spend the morning setting up the front display — new stock from Aldridge's, the wire and pigment and glass eyes I fetched yesterday, now sorted into their proper drawers — and I've just finished arranging a shelf of restored porcelain dolls, their faces gleaming and whole again under my hands, when the bell above the door rings.
Six women walk in.
They move together, in step, like something choreographed rather than accidental — long black dresses, high-collared, decades out of fashion in a way that makes even my own wardrobe look almost modern by comparison.
Veils cover them from crown to collarbone, a fine black lace patterned with skulls and roses, thick enough that I can't make out a single feature beneath.
"Hello, Ophelia Sorrell," they say. Together. One voice out of six mouths, layered and strange, like an echo arriving before the sound that made it.
I stay very still behind the counter.
"Do you welcome us," one of them asks — alone, this time, though I couldn't say which, then another finishes — "to The Tin Heart?"
I find myself staring, and for one unguarded second I realize I'm actually looking at them — at the shapes of their veiled faces, the place their eyes should be — and nothing happens.
No flicker of glass, no accidental reflection.
Just black lace and, beneath it, when one tilts her head just so, skin so pale it looks bloodless, and hands folded at their waists with nails grown long and dark as claws.
"You're welcome," I manage. "Were you — looking for a toy?"
"Curious," they say, all six at once, and then, one at a time, the words passed hand to hand down the line like a coin:
"Your aura—"
"—has been displaced."
"Fractured."
"Would you like us to read your palm?" Together again.
"I don't — I don't understand," I say.
"We work for The Midnight Menagerie," the nearest one offers, and something in her voice makes the hair along my arms rise. "We are the six who speak as one. We do not simply tell fortunes, Miss Sorrell. We help mend them."
One of them produces a folded paper from the depths of her sleeve and presses it into my hands before I can decide whether I want to take it. I open it slowly.
The poster beneath is a thing of dark, deliberate beauty — a great black gate wrought in iron, moths and ravens worked into the metal, and beneath it, in curling silver script:
THE MIDNIGHT MENAGERIE
Every night is Halloween. Come find out what you've been missing.
"I've heard of it," I say, folding the poster carefully back along its own creases, as though handling something that might bite. "Everyone has. I've never gone."
"We can help with that," they say, in unison, and it lands less like an invitation and more like a verdict.
"Help — how?"
"Necessity," one murmurs, "makes strange bedfellows."
"And ours," says another before the next finishes, "is a sacred duty."
"To set every woman free," they finish together, "from the fate of pain."
Something cold moves through my chest. "What pain?"
"The kind a man inflicts," comes the answer, flat and certain, from somewhere in the middle of the group, and none of them elaborate further, and somehow that's worse than if they had.
"If you ever wish your fate changed," they say, all six together, the words falling perfectly in step, "come to The Midnight Menagerie."
Are they witches?
Am I being invited to be a part of a coven?
Well, if any town could have witches, it would this.
One of them turns without another word and drifts toward the far shelf — the one holding the antique music boxes my father carved decades ago, before his hands forgot how to make anything but a mess — and lifts one down.
Dark lacquered wood, a ballerina worked into the lid in faded gilt, small enough to fit in two cupped palms.
She sets it on the counter before me.
I check the little tag tied to its base. "Eight pounds."
She presses the coins into my palm — cold, every one of them, colder than coins left in a drawer have any right to be — and leans close enough that I catch the ghost of something like old roses beneath the black lace.
"He'll come looking for you," she says, quiet, almost gentle. "Don't be afraid of what you see when he does."
And then they're gone, the six of them moving as one toward the door, the bell singing once behind them, and the shop is silent again except for my own too-fast breathing.
I stand there a long moment with the poster still in my hand, staring at nothing. What was that?
The rest of the day crawls past, slow and grey, the kind of afternoon where the clock seems to lose interest in moving forward at all.
I've nearly convinced myself the coven was some strange, elaborate joke — Goth Weekend performers, early to the season, looking to unsettle the odd girl at the toy shop for sport — when the bell rings again, and I look up, and the whole temperature of the room changes.
He's tall. Taller than the doorway seems built for, dark hair pushed back from his face, the kind of build that fills out a coat properly rather than hanging off it.
He's not dressed for a place like this — no tweed, no wool, none of the practical, faded things Whitby men wear into a shop that sells cracked porcelain and old tin toys.
His coat is black, expensive, tailored close, and there's something about the way he moves through the doorway — unhurried, utterly certain — that makes the whole shop feel smaller the moment he's in it.
I don't look at his face. I've trained myself well enough by now that it's almost reflexive — my eyes catch somewhere at his collar, the line of his throat, and slide away before they can travel any higher.
But I feel him. The same cold, deliberate weight I felt on the street yesterday evening, the same prickle at the back of my neck, and my hands go very still on the counter as I tell myself, firmly, it's a customer. It's only a customer.
He doesn't speak. He moves along the shelves unhurried, one hand trailing along the edge of a display case, and I keep my eyes down, cataloguing invoices I've already finished cataloguing twice, aware of him the way you're aware of weather about to turn.
Long minutes pass before he finally approaches the counter. He sets something down — the music box, the same dark lacquered ballerina piece the veiled woman handled not four hours before, though I could have sworn I'd shelved it back exactly where it belonged.
"Just this," he says. His voice is low, unhurried, faintly amused in a way I can't account for.
I ring it up without lifting my eyes past his sleeve. "Ten pounds."
He pays in exact coin, no more, no less, as though he already knew the price before he asked. I wrap the box in brown paper, tie the string, my fingers faster and clumsier than they should be, and slide it back across the counter.
That's when I see it. In his other hand, half-hidden by his coat sleeve — a camera, old-fashioned, leather-bodied, the kind you wind rather than switch on.
My heart slams once, hard, against my ribs.
He says nothing else. Takes the parcel. Leaves.
The bell rings behind him, and I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding, my shoulders dropping an inch, my hands finally unclenching from the edge of the counter.
And then I hear it.
Music. Faint, tinny, unmistakable — a slow, waltzing melody drifting from somewhere behind me.
I turn. The shelf where the music box sat is not, in fact, empty. A second one, identical, dark lacquer and faded gilt, sits exactly where the first had been — closed, and playing, though nothing should be turning its mechanism at all.
I cross to it slowly, my pulse a drum in my ears.
I know this box. I know its trick — the little oval mirror set into the underside of the lid, the one that pops free the moment the lid lifts.
I've handled a dozen just like it over the years, and I know precisely how to hold one so the mirror faces away from me, toward my own shoulder, safe.
I do that now, turning the small brass lever at its base, over and over, waiting for the mechanism to wind down.