Free Lockwood & Co.: The Creeping Shadow by Jonathan Stroud

boots tapping on cold marble. Then into the conference hall, where tall windows looked out over the snarled traffic of the Strand, and daylight glinted on the glass pillars of the Fittes collection. There they were, safe behind silver-glass: nine legendary psychic objects from the first days of the agency. The tiny Frank Street coffin; Gödel’s metal arm; the bones of Long Hugh Hennratty; the Clapham Butcher Boy’s terrible serrated knife….At night, trapped ghosts moved colorfully within the pillars; now everything was monochrome and still.
    Three people stood beside the column dedicated to the Cumberland Place haunting, studying the bloody nightgown it contained. And now my heart
really
began to hammer, and my nerves started to fail me. I felt far worse than I had during the pursuit of Emma Marchment’s ghost two nights before.
    Whatever dangerous assignment Penelope Fittes was proposing,
this
was the part I dreaded. My first meeting with my ex-colleagues: Lockwood, George, and Holly Munro.
    I confected what I hoped was a relaxed and confident smile. I walked toward them as they turned.
    Lockwood, of course, I’d seen already. But this was different. The previous day, he’d been a guest in my house, asking for my help; he’d been at least as uncomfortable as me. Now
I
was the outsider, and he was back in his accustomed position as leader of the company. The awkwardness was suddenly all on my side. Still, he looked relaxed as I approached; and I was grateful for it. He gave me a welcoming grin. “And here she is! Lucy—it’s good to see you.”
    He wore his slim, dark suit; his hair was swept back and, I thought, subtly gelled. He was making more of an effort than usual. I hadn’t seen that attention to detail before.
    For me? No. Penelope Fittes was far more likely.
    “Hi, Lockwood,” I said. With that, I turned to George.
    Four months had passed since I’d set eyes on him: George Cubbins, Lockwood’s second in command—amateur scientist, researcher extraordinaire, and committed casual dresser. That morning, like most mornings that I remembered, he was doing things with a stained T-shirt and saggy pair of faded jeans that defied both taste and gravity. As I could have predicted, he hadn’t made the slightest effort to scrub up. In the elegant confines of Fittes House he stood out like a wart on a wedding day, a thistle in a salad bowl. Some things hadn’t changed.
    But others had, which startled me. George seemed thinner and, I thought, more careworn. He looked older, too, with harder lines around the eyes. How had this happened in only four months? It was true that agents saw a lot of things, and saw them often. We used up our youth pretty fast sometimes. But I’d never thought George would be prey to that. Seeing it gave me a sharp pang.
    “Hello, George,” I said.
    “Hello, Lucy.” As he said it, I watched his face. I wasn’t waiting for a grin. You didn’t get those with George. His face was similar in shape, color, and texture to a cold milk pudding; and it had the same range of expressions, too. But if you looked closely, you’d see clues to his mood—a twitch of the mouth, perhaps; or his eyes, deep beneath the surface of his spectacles, shining when he was happy or excited. If he pushed his glasses up his nose in a jaunty manner, that was a good sign, too.
    But did we have any of that today? No.
    He was pretty upset about it,
Lockwood had said.
    “Nice to see you,” I said. “It’s been a while.”
    “Hasn’t it?” said George.
    “Funnily enough, we were just saying how nice it would be to see
you
, Luce,” Lockwood said, clapping George on the shoulder. “Weren’t we, George?”
    “Yes,” said George. “We were.”
    “Yes, and Holly was looking forward to hearing all about your freelance work,” Lockwood went on. “Who you’ve been working with, how you got along with them. You even did something with the Rotwell group, didn’t you, Luce? I hope you’ll tell us about