"I honestly couldn't tell you," Harry admits. "I had been here for barely three months at the time and it was... a bit unsettling. I had come from a place with storms not unlike it."

And yet he had walked through the whirling snow to get to Zoe, worrying about her alone in her flat in the dark. The power had gone out so many times in his own flat that he had hated to think of her alone without light or heat. He remembers even now how horrible that had been, the way the cold got into the joints of your hands and made them feel as if they were made of stone.

"It wasn't just the weather," he adds. "There was something up at the chateau on the mountain that brought it in. Some kind of... darkness."