“Here we are. Home sweet home,” Mary Jane said brightly as she turned a tight corner into a tiny al ey. The buildings on either side of the street were dilapidated, with boarded-up windows and, in some cases, huge holes in their outer wal s.
She pushed her shoulder against a door and let Cora and me step inside.
I blinked inside the dark foyer of the hovel that Mary Jane cal ed home, taking in the uneven ceiling, the sloped floor missing half its boards, and the endless strands of cobwebs glimmering in the darkness.
“Shh.” Mary Jane put a cautionary finger to her lips as she crept up the staircase—if it could be cal ed that. The banister had been ripped from the wal , and several steps had rotted away. The ones that remained were off-kilter, and it seemed a miracle—or magic—that the entire house hadn’t col apsed.
At the top of the stairs, Mary Jane opened a thin door.
“I’m home!” she announced grandly.
I blinked. In the center of a room was a fire, ringed and contained by concrete slabs most likely stolen from the street. A skylight was directly above it. The glass must have fal en out long ago, leaving only a gaping hole that offered a view of the cloudy sky. Around the fire sat two boys and one girl, al no older than eighteen. One of the boys, the youngest, looked like he was only twelve. The room smel ed of mildew and damp. I coughed.
“Mary Jane!” The youngest boy sprang up and wrapped his bony arms around Mary Jane’s waist. She smiled fondly and ruffled his blond hair. “You’re home! I thought the Ripper got you!”
“Don’t be upset, Gus. I’m home now. But it’s al thanks to Stefan here. If it wasn’t for him, I would have been hacked to pieces,” Mary Jane explained.
“By the R-r-ripper?” Gus asked, stuttering in fear.
“Worse than that,” Mary Jane said. “Stefan and Cora, this is Gus, Vivian, and Bil y. My family. Jemima must be in another room,” she said, making a short introduction to the group sitting around the fire. I wondered whether Mary Jane would tel them I was a vampire. I wondered if they, too, knew just by looking at me.
“What’s worse than Jack the Ripper?” the girl, who must have been Vivian, asked in disbelief. Her lilting voice held an Irish accent similar to Cora’s. Cora perked up, but didn’t speak.
“A vampire,” Mary Jane said simply. At the word, the orphans al turned to stare at me. Gus’s jaw dropped, and I wondered if, like Mary Jane, they immediately knew my true nature.
“While I was on my way to meet up with you lot last night, I got taken from the streets and brought down to the docks,” Mary Jane explained. “Luckily, Stefan here saved me before my attacker could do any real damage.”
“Yes, but why was Stefan there in the first place?” the older boy asked, rising to his feet and glaring at me. “He’s a vampire, too, you know.”
I stepped forward, turning my palms to the air as if to show I had nothing to hide. “I am a vampire, it’s true. But that vampire, Samuel, kidnapped my brother. He’s evil, and he’l stop at nothing to get what he wants. And what he wants includes Mary Jane. I was only able to wound him, and he’l be back. Soon.” My gaze flicked between the witches. I knew I had to somehow convince them that Samuel was a worthy enemy—one we needed to work together to defeat.
“So why are you here?” Gus asked. It was clear from the tone of his voice that his terror had turned into mistrust. He was wearing spectacles, and the flames reflected in them gave his moon-shaped, pimpled face a vaguely sinister sheen.
“Because we need witches on our side to fight Samuel,” I said simply.
“What if we say no?” the older boy asked, crossing his arms and stepping up toward me as if he were chal enging me to a fight.
“Bil y!” Mary Jane said sharply, putting her hands on her hips and glaring at him. Then, she turned toward me.
“Sorry. As I’m sure you know, we don’t trust vampires as a rule. But you’re different than most. We just have to adjust.”
“If you saved Mary Jane, then I trust you,” Vivian said shyly. She looked about fifteen years old and had long curly brown hair that fanned over her thin shoulders. The irises of her eyes were so dark her pupils seemed to disappear into them.
“Vivian helps with our spel s,” Mary Jane said by way of introduction. “She reads everything, then she works out how to say it.”
The girl nodded proudly, a flicker of a smile crossing her face. “I do,” she affirmed. “Mostly I’m successful, but I’l admit there are stil some improvements I could make.”
“She set the last place we lived on fire,” Gus piped up.
“I did not! It was just a little hole in the floor. Gus, stop being dramatic.”
“Wel , whatever spel s you can do would be a huge help,” I interrupted before the conversation turned into a verbal sparring match. “We know where Samuel lives. We know he’s the culprit behind the Jack the Ripper kil ings. And we know that something Mary Jane did staved him off. Now al we have to do is figure out how we can strengthen that spel and find a way to catch him off guard.”
“What did you do?” Gus asked Mary Jane suspiciously. I noticed he was wearing newspapers tied to his feet instead of shoes and I wondered how badly off the orphans were.
Couldn’t they use magic to procure clothes, or did some code of honesty prevent that?
“Wel , that’s just the thing, Gus. I don’t know. He attacked me and threw me to the ground, and I kept thinking of the magnets Vivian had shown us a while back,” Mary Jane explained as she sat and warmed her hands by the fire. I noticed Cora hugging her body tightly. I heard the wind whistling around the room and could see Mary Jane’s breath as she spoke. I nudged Cora, urging her to stand nearer to the fire, but she stayed at my side.