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talks about the days when them sisters of yours called the shots. They got things done proper, he says. Times was better then.’
    Her words gave the six-year-old Glory a tingly feeling inside. She knew that once upon a time Auntie Angel had been the big sister of the famous Starling Twins, and that was one of the things that made her special. Because Lily and Cora Starling didn’t just look as alike as two peas; they were identically powerful witches too, and their coven had as good as run the East End during the 1960s and 1970s. Glory had heard the stories of how they went to parties with film stars and had their pictures in the papers, and only did witchcrimes that helped people. But the Inquisition got Granny Cora in the end, and Great Aunt Lily died of a broken heart, and Glory’s mum Edie went and vanished three Christmases ago. Being a Starling girl was a dangerous business.
    Auntie Angel patted Glory’s hair. ‘Maybe those days will come again. Fae runs thicker than blood, quicker’n water . . .’
    . . . and wild as wind.
    That was the final part of the proverb, but Auntie Angel had left it out. People generally did. Fae runs wild as wind. It was the most troublesome aspect of witchwork, not being a hundred per cent certain of which way the fae would blow. Where it would go, and to whom.
     
    Thinking of this, Glory – fifteen now, and tough enough to take on any number of scabby skinhead boys – felt a chill creep into her day. She still dreamed of the white-tiled Burning Court, of the witch on the pyre with the locked mouth and the frozen scream. And she still said the same prayer, night after night. To God, just in case there was one, and also to Mab and Hecate, witchkind’s guardian spirits. So far none of them seemed to be listening.
    Granny Cora and Great-Aunt Lily had turned witchkind at the age of thirteen. Her mum Edie had been the same. Was her time running out?
    She shook her head impatiently, sending the gold hoops dancing. Candice Morgan, Lily Starling’s twenty-three-year-old granddaughter, had only got the fae last year. Auntie Angel’s arrived when she was nineteen. Most witches, she knew, had to wait until well into their twenties. She had plenty of time . . . The problem was, the younger you were when the fae developed, the stronger it tended to be.
    For Glory wasn’t planning on being just any witch. Her fae would be her fortune, and her coven’s too.
    Cooper Street, like the coven which took its name, had seen better days. A run-down Victorian terrace, it was one of the few survivors of a Blitz bombing raid that had flattened most of its neighbours. The houses behind it were modern boxes of cheap brick; in front was the murky sprawl of the Rockwood Estate. Other nineteenth-century leftovers had been snapped up by city workers on the hunt for period charm and the edgy cool of an East End postcode. Cooper Street, however, had resisted the trend towards gentrification. Peeling paintwork and grimy windows were the order of the day. Only one house, Number Six, boasted a smartly-painted door over a well-scrubbed front step – Auntie Angel’s step.
    The coven owned Numbers Seven and Eight too. Doors knocked through walls and an eccentric arrangement of stairs and hatches had made the three separate, small houses into a rambling warren of one. That wasn’t to say there weren’t territorial divisions, though. The ground floor of Number Six was Auntie Angel’s lair, with Glory and her dad, Patrick, living in the top of the house. Number Eight was home to Joe Junior, the coven boss (his late father, Joe Braddock, had married Auntie Angel after his wife, Mary, died) and his son, Nate. The middle house, Number Seven, was the coven’s official HQ. The upper floors were used for storage or else as dormitories for passing cronies and contacts, while business took place in the basement. The lounge functioned as a general common room.
    This was where Glory was headed. She planned on spending the