The Little Book of Lost Hearts (extract)

Chapter One

Chapter One

If you’re a fan of myths and fairy tales, especially the darker ones, you’ll probably know all about the evil intentions of those who steal hearts in order to control the person the heart belongs to.

I mean, literally steal it. Reach into a person’s chest and scoop out that heart in a magical sense that means the person still breathes and exists, but their will, their essence, their very life force, is somewhere else. Perhaps locked in a casket somewhere, until it’s needed.

Their physical body can only die if the heart is destroyed, too. Sometimes the wicked extract their own hearts in a desperate bid for immortality, hiding it away like an insurance policy. But that’s straying into Horcrux-like territory, and that’s not where I want to go with this. Definitely not.

My name is Antoinette Ellis. I’m thirty-four years old, and my heart was lost a few years ago. Not in a romantic sense. That’s an altogether different sort of ‘lost’. I’m talking about the fact that it’s presently walking and talking and living outside my body, in the shape of an eight-year-old girl called Tabitha.

No, I’m not a ghost. I didn’t donate my heart within the sterile confines of an operating theatre. I’m very much alive still, and so is she. Tabitha is my niece, and she isn’t evil, because none of this was her fault. She was as much a victim of circumstance as I was.

Two-and-a-half years ago, she was staying with her parents in a small hotel in a ramshackle backstreet in Morocco. One night – starless and ill-starred, in my nightmares at least – there was a fire. Tabitha was the only survivor. The child pulled out of the smoke and flames. “The Little Miracle”, as she was dubbed by the press back home. And she was a tiny thing in those days.

It’s only in the last year that she’s shot up. Tall and skinny, all-limbs, like my rangy late brother-in-law. She has my sister’s eyes, though. That deep amber that no one ever forgets. Mine, on the other hand, are instantly forgettable. A bland hazel. Wishy washy. They can’t decide if they’re predominantly green or brown so insist on being a sludgy in-between sort of colour, but in the palest possible way.

I lived in London back then. The summer my sister and her husband died. Now I don’t. It’s as straightforward as that. I moved back to Fools Castle and into my deceased grandparents’ old house, Blackthorn Cottage, swapping city life for rustic, because Fools Castle can’t be considered anything else. It’s small. A small village on the western edge of Cheshire, drowsily nudging Wales. Small in size, in outlook, in spirit. There is indeed a castle of sorts, so maybe, as its name suggests, it’s also full of fools. And in all probability I’m one of them.

The day the ‘oddness’ began was mid-November, a Wednesday. My job was to organise people. To do all those admin tasks they never got around to doing themselves. Wednesdays and Thursdays were spent up at the Castle.

I was using the main computer in one of the turret rooms converted into an office, firing off a few emails in response to fan mail. Not mine, of course. I don’t do anything exciting enough to earn myself any devotees.

All around me, pinned to cork boards, were printed colour illustrations. I knew they were scanned from the originals by the artist himself and sent up from London via email. The recipient would print them off and plaster them over the walls – for added inspiration. A new set of pictures for each book. Writer and illustrator working in harmony.

This new collection looked intriguing. Steampunk faeries with fluorescent green hair, and black-hooded creatures with fangs that were far more… fangy than any vampire’s. After I’d been distracted enough, my gaze drifted to the laptop on a smaller desk to the left. Glancing over my shoulder, checking the door behind me was closed, I slid my swivel chair to the side, the castors bumping over the uneven, polished wood floor. I flipped open the laptop and booted it up.