Page 1 of The City of Stardust

Prologue

IN PARIS, Achild goes missing.

A baby, to be more precise. One minute he is in his pram, making chubby fists while his mother wheels him around a grocery shop. For a moment—just a moment, she will insist afterwards—she glances away to examine her shopping list, certain she’s forgotten something, but unable to recollect what. The next, he is gone, whisked away by sure, confident hands. By the time his mother looks back at the soft place where her baby used to be, the perpetrator has vanished. In the heart-stopping seconds between her realisation and the scream that wrenches its way past her throat, she catches an unusual vanilla scent in the air.

In Vienna, the child is two and visiting an art gallery for the first time. She is lulled by a song that sounds like a memory from the womb, like a melody she has never heard, and yet has been hearing all her life. While her parents pause to admire a painting, she slips through a crowd of tourists to waiting arms and vanishes forever. There are phone calls to the police, then accusations and a lawsuit. The detectives dutifully check the security camera footage, only to find that it’s irretrievably corrupted. Someone mentions a woman who smelled like vanilla, but the detail goes ignored and the child remains lost.

In Prague, it’s a boy with eyes the colour of grey sea glass. He mumbles in his sleep, one amongst so many in this orphanage. A woman wearing a vanilla scent approaches him with her calculatinggaze and her sure hands, her conscience untroubled by the crime she is about to commit. She can already see his life without this intervention: unremarkable, unloved, possibly traumatic. A life where there are no heroes or last-minute rescuers. No fairy-tale parents to whisk him back home, a prince mistaken for a pauper. In Prague, he will live and die a nobody.

But wheresheis going, he will be more than anyone will ever know.

She leans over his bed and whispers, “I hear you singing, little dreamer. And I come to answer the call.”

Marianne Everly is walking into a thunderstorm.

It’s a night that promises only disaster: lashing rain that rattles against the windowpanes as though the house itself has committed a crime; bruised clouds flashing with white fury; ominous puddles hiding their treacherous depths. It would be better, Marianne reflects, if she could have waited until the morning, with the sun and goodwill chasing at her back. But she can’t ignore the song thrumming through her bones, or the whisper that the time has come to say goodbye to her rambling house and its occupants.

Her brothers’ silhouettes frame the doorway, their expressions unreadable. Guilt, grief, anger—they have already run the gamut, and all that remains is the steady certainty that there is no turning back now.

Aside from the house, she’s leaving behind so little. A silk-bound book of fairy tales, the edges fuzzy with wear. A pair of bracelets that glitter with unusual lustre. An ancient and useless sword with a dulled edge, passed down from one fusty ancestor to another.

A daughter, too, if she wishes to be thorough.

Against the shadow of the house, her daughter’s light is on, though she was fast asleep when Marianne pressed a farewell kiss to her forehead.

For a moment, Marianne pauses, her gaze trained on the bright window. Maybe she hesitates because despite everything that has led to this moment, the call of her child is almost stronger than the call of elsewhere.

Then again, maybe not. Perhaps she’s throwing off the mantle of motherhood with relief, shedding a load she never wanted to bear.

Watching her in the rain, it’s hard to say.

The darkness closing in on her, Marianne Everly takes a worn key from around her neck, turns it in the air—and vanishes.

A curse can be many things. A wish left out to spoil in the sun, putrid and soft, leaving behind only calcified desire and oxidised envy. Or a poisoned chalice, a mistake tattooed across an entire family tree, with every generation promising,vowingto never sip until they do. Sometimes, it’s a deal and bad luck conspiring like old grifters closing in on an easy mark.

For the Everlys, it begins with stardust.

PART ONE

CHAPTER

One

YEARS FROM NOW, this is what Ambrose Everly will remember.

Not the rain sheeting down the windows, squeezing through every neglected gap, filling the Everly house with soft plinks as water drips into various bowl-shaped objects. Nor the white flash of lightning, which promptly short-circuits the electricity and sends him rummaging through the cupboards for candles and a book of matches. But the unbearable stillness, as though the house is holding its breath, waiting.

So Ambrose is almost relieved when someone bangs on the door like a thunderclap, though it’s short-lived. It can’t be anything but mere coincidence, but his gut still tightens as he pads down the long, dark hallway, past the ancestral portraits who eye him with glum indifference. So few people know that the house is even here, let alone feel welcome enough to knock. He opens the door, uneasy.

At first all he can see is the gloom, rain guttering from the roof’s overhang. Then the world is briefly illuminated by a flash of lightning. A man in a leather jacket stands on the doorstep, soaking wet. His gaze is hidden behind tinted sunglasses, even though it’s pitch-black outside. Behind him, a violently orange sports car sits in the driveway, sleek and predatory.

“You changed the locks,” the man says.

“Gabriel?” Ambrose says, and then again because he can’t quite believe that the man standing in front of him isn’t an apparition.

“We need to talk, little brother,” Gabriel says grimly.

Ambrose doesn’t move. He sucks in a deep breath, trying to make sense of the scene in front of him. This should be impossible. Itfeelsimpossible. But here’s his older brother, gracing the driveway as though he’s never been away, even though it’s been over two years. Only the car is different, but it still carries all the hallmarks of his brother’s taste: ostentatious, loud, ugly beyond belief. A flashy middle finger to the world.

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