Page 77 of Breaking the Dark

Jessica takes a picture of that as well and stumbles from the chapel. She needs Wi-Fi so that she can translate the Latin. She needs to get back to the hotel. As she hurtles down the cobbled pathway toward the high street, she almost collides head-on with Elliot, the boy from the pharmacy.

“Sorry,” says Elliot.

“No. My bad. Listen. Malcolm told me what you did yesterday. Sending the drone. Calling the cops. I wanted to thank you.”

He shrugs. “You’re welcome, I’m glad you’re okay. What happened to you over there?”

“Can’t discuss it, I’m afraid, it’s an ongoing case.”

“Oh,” he says, looking disappointed for a moment. Then he perks up. “Oh, hey, your drone! Do you want it back?”

Jessica smiles. “No, Elliot. Please keep it. As a gift. I think you might actually have saved my life.”

He peers at her, curiously. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Just about. Heading home soon. But listen, what do you know about this? I just saw it in the little church up there.” She shows him the pictures. “Know anything about these dead kids?”

“Er, no. Can’t say I’m familiar with this one. My mum would probably be able to help you, but obviously she’s—”

“In Turkey. Yeah.”

“But I can tell you what that means,” he says, pointing at the Latin words engraved around the image.

“You can speak Latin?”

“Well, sort of, I got an 8 in my GCSE.”

“Er, okay.” She passes him her phone. “Admiranda? What does that mean?”

“It means, like, ‘in wonder’? Wonderful? Something like that. And adolescentia is ‘adolescents’ or ‘children,’ and then semper means ‘always’ and bella is ‘pretty, beautiful’?”

He beams at her, then looks back at the screen. “My guess is that it says, ‘Oh wonderful children, be forever beautiful.’”

PART THREE

TWENTY-NINE

THE SIGHT OF the Manhattan skyline from the back of a cab soothes Jessica’s soul.

The sun has just set, the sky is a faded denim blue with streaks of gold, and the lights of the buildings across the river glimmer through the damp night air like armies of fireflies. She is home, but she feels alien. Everything hurts. Even her eyeballs ache. She touches them with a fingertip and flinches.

Her time in Essex feels frayed at the edges. Random images scroll through her head, shreds of disconnected thoughts. Somewhere in her fractured mind lives the answer to what is happening in the Old Farmhouse, who Debra is, what she’s done to Grace, and maybe even what she’s done to Amina and Audrey. The lost hours at Debra’s house have blown out all the proportions of her life; the missing chunk of consciousness has distorted everything. More than anything in the world she wants to know what happened to her between the moment she jumped from the window with Belle and the moment the police arrived, when she finally managed to break the spell. There is only one person who can help her now, and it’s one of the last people in the world she wants to see.

The cab pulls up outside an imposing forty-plus–story apartment block overlooking the Hudson River. Jessica pays the driver and hits the intercom by the front door. “Hey. It’s Jessica Jones. I need to see her now.”

Through the intercom, an officious voice: “I’m sorry. It’s Sunday. Madame Web doesn’t—”

“I’m sure she doesn’t. But this is an emergency. I need her now. She’s psychic, she must’ve known I was coming.”

After a moment the intercom buzzes and the latch of the door clicks. Jessica takes the elevator up to the thirtieth floor and bangs the door of 30-D with a heavy fist. The door cracks open slightly and a woman eyes Jessica superciliously.

“No need to thump like that,” she says, widening the gap so that Jessica can walk in. “Madame will be with you shortly.”

The apartment gives her chills; dark and gloomy, lit by candles and dirty bulbs, the ceilings loom twelve feet high, the windows are covered with shutters painted the color of old blood. There’s a smell in here, a smell of soil and abandoned places. A sharp chill cuts through the stagnant air, and there, sitting dead center of the biggest room in the apartment, surrounded by teetering candelabra and dozens of overgrown plants, is Cassandra Webb, stiff in her wheelchair. The woman turns Jessica’s stomach—the yellow pallor of her skin, black-shaded eyes, the sharp point of her chin, the look of sour resentment that warps her face.

“Jessica,” a voice with an ancient crack in it says. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here again.”

“Yeah, I can assure you that I was not expecting to be back. Not after what you did to me last time.”