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Prologue

The Charmed City

It was known as the Enchanted Hour.

The sliver of day just before the clubs and bars and dance halls turned out their revelers. But after the factory workers and shopgirls had risen for another day.

The maids, cooks, footmen, and butlers had already hurried through predawn streets to get to their posts. They waited, as the sky lightened, for their sleepless employers to stumble home, discarding shoes and bow ties that their staff would tidy up behind them.

The lumbering delivery trucks had made their rounds, with their clinking glass bottles of milk, tightly bound stacks of newspapers, and cooling loaves of bread. But the sleek taxis and grand town cars still idled sleepily.

Yesterday was forgotten, but it wasn’t quite today. Before the upper half of the city slept and after the lower half rose.

But the undying things in the woods never slept. They watched. They watched as a sleepy maid hurried to the back entrance of a white marble home, stumbling a little as she tucked her hair under her white cap. They wondered if she might lose her footing and cross out of the borders of daylight. They wondered if the footman shaking a cigarette into his palm might lean against a tree and come within reach.

And they wondered at the sight of the dark-haired girl, appearing and disappearing between the gaps in the grand houses. Walking alone through the streets in stockinged feet, her dress still dancing in the rising sunlight. Looking like the whole city belonged to her alone.

Because one day, it might.