She ran to the table, picked up the lighter, and tried to make it work. Nothing happened. She went to the clock, which had stopped; and to the television set, which remained lifeless when she switched it on. Connor followed her circuit of the room, feeling guilty and baffled. Angela dropped into a chair and sat with her face in her hands, huddled and trembling like a sick bird. The sight of her distress produced a painful churning in his chest. He knelt in front of Angela.

“Listen, Angie,” he said. “Don’t cry like that. I only wanted to see you again—I haven’t done anything.”

“You touched my stuff and made it change. They told me it would change if anybody but a client used it… and it has.”

“This doesn’t make sense. Who said what would change?”

“The suppliers.” She looked at him with tear-brimmed eyes, and all at once he became aware of a perfume so exquisite that he wanted to fall toward its source like a suffocating man striving toward air.

“What did you…? I don’t…”

“They said it would all be spoiled.”

Connor tried to fight off the effects of the witch-magic he had breathed. “Nothing has been spoiled, Angie. There’s been a power failure… or something…” His words trailed away uncertainly. The clock and the television set were cordless. He took a nervous drag on the half-smoked cigar and almost gagged on the flat, acrid taste of it. The sharp sense of loss he experienced while stubbing it out seemed to obliterate all traces of his scepticism.

He returned to Angela’s chair and knelt again. “They said this stuff would stop working if anybody but you touched it?”

“Yes.”

“But how could that be arranged?”

She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. “How would I know? When Mr. Smith came over from Trenton, he said something about all his goods having an… essence field, and he said I had a molecular thumbprint. Does that make sense?”