The Accidental Afterlife of Thomas Marsden by Emma Trevayne

other. Some say they’re kind, gentle creatures, with great magic powers for healing and whatnot.Like doctors, but without the leeches, you know. Others say they do dark magic and lie to humans or steal from them. Some say they steal babies from their cots, leaving faery children, changelings, behind in their place. You’d think if there was any truth to it, more people would get it right. Or at least agree on some of ’em.”
    Indeed, you’d think so, thought Thomas, but he didn’t say it aloud.
    Faery folk. Old ones.
    Broken.
    It couldn’t be.
    â€œDo they look like regular people?”
    â€œSome think so. Gracious, what an ’orrid thought, that they could be walking around with us folk never knowing.”
    The street blurred in front of Thomas’s eyes.
    He shook his head. If it’d been a show he was after, he perhaps hadn’t paid the fortune-teller enough, even with leaving her every last coin he had.
    â€œYou look white as a ghost, Tom.”
    Lots of people believed in ghosts. Thought they haunted graveyards and houses, unable to rest, forever. Why couldn’t they exist? Thomas never felt alone in graveyards, always watched, always heard. And if they could, then . . .
    Dawn was beginning to pinken the sky. Another hour ortwo and the market would be setting up. Secretive dealers in stolen goods weren’t the only people who never closed up shop. Charley declined to join him, wishing to run off instead to spend his newfound riches on who-knew-what. Likely better not to ask.
    â€œDo something for me, would you?” Thomas felt inside his satchel, drew out two more of the coins, and held them in front of Charley’s wide eyes. “Give these to Lucy and Silas for me. Tell them . . . Tell ’em I’ll be back soon as I can.”
    Two coins, because that was what Silas always let him keep from the graves. Charley took them, nodding. He knew the rules too. The coins would make it to Lucy’s purse or Silas’s grubby fist. Charley skipped away. Thomas walked slowly until an aproned woman stopped him.
    â€œHungry, lad? Look as if you could use a square meal or four.”
    He still was, even after all the sausages.
    Thomas chewed his fifth piece of bacon, elbows on an oily slick countertop, happily aware there was no Lucy to tell him to mind his manners. As if there’d ever been anyone to impress at supper. She’d always made him behave as if the queen, bored of Whitstable oysters on fine china, was coming down to slurp a bowl of watery stew.
    â€œâ€™Nother egg, please,” said Thomas, sliding paymentacross the slick counter before the jolly woman in her stained apron could ask for it.
    He ate that one, and another after it.
    A great tiredness began to over take him, but there was no time to sleep or place to do it. Soon enough, he’d find somewhere. Could go and stay in the poshest hotel in all of London if he liked.
    The first shouts of Finest spuds, won’t find cheaper! were filtering from the market. Thomas slid from his chair and looped the satchel across his body, ready to hold tight as he crossed the square to the golden curtain that beckoned like the sun.
    Early though the hour was, the market was already crowded with housewives and pickpockets, charwomen and children. They blocked his way as they bent to look at carrots or pocket watches, but Thomas slipped around them, eyes peeled for the golden flash of brightness.
    It wasn’t there.
    It wasn’t anywhere.
    â€œâ€™Scuse me,” Thomas shouted, pushing his way through a gaggle of chattering women and around a very portly man smoking a pipe to a stall piled with ancient, moth-eaten rugs. “Was there a fortune-teller here yesterday?”
    â€œSearch me.” The stall keeper slapped his hand down, then coughed as a cloud of dust from one of his rugs billowed up into his face.
    Thomas walked around the market twice, and a third