I took a deep breath and looked more closely at the witch.

As I stared, she changed back, returning to her previous shape: the snakes became hair; her eyes no longer bulged; the boils melted back into the flesh. It had all just been some sort of magical illusion . . . and for a moment I breathed a sigh of relief.

But then she was running at Tom, shrieking at the top of her voice, “I’ll take your bones! I’ll gouge out your eyes! I’ll drink your blood! I’ll flay you slowly until you scream and writhe. I’ll strip the meat from your skinny ribs and boil up your brains to make a broth! You’re mine, young spook! I’ve a use for every tasty inch of you, and the soft flesh of the girl will be my sweet dessert!”

The witch clutched a long blade in each hand and looked like she knew how to use them. Suddenly I was scared again. Those blades could slice me to pieces. Once she’d dealt with Tom, I would be next. My breath caught in my throat, and my heart began to hammer.

At first Tom didn’t react. He just stood there, waiting for her to get closer. I wondered what his plan was. His mind seemed blank . . . either that, or my gift wasn’t working properly. Was it because I was scared and couldn’t concentrate?

At that moment, the moon came out from behind a cloud.

Despite my fear, in those seconds I saw something really strange.

I saw Tom’s shadow cast by the moon. It was impossibly big, stretching over the witch and right up the wall of the cottage behind her.

Distracted, I missed seeing Tom cast his chain, but it now formed a helix, hovering in the air and gleaming in the moonlight. Then it fell perfectly over the witch and tightened around her body and across her mouth so that she collapsed to her knees.

“That’s why you need to practice,” Tom said, turning to smile at me. “It comes in very useful at moments like this.”

We left the witch there and went into the cottage to see what had happened to the child.

As we had feared, little Katie was dead. And we found the bones of other children, too. The sight made me so sick that I almost wrenched my stomach inside out.

I could have killed that witch. I could have stabbed her with her own blades. That’s what I really wanted to do.

And I knew then that, in the right circumstances, I was capable of killing someone.

How could she have done this to little children? I wondered. She didn’t deserve to live another second longer.

Tom dragged Bibby Longtooth back to Chipenden, still wrapped from head to toe in his silver chain, and together we dug a pit for her in the eastern garden. This time he did most of the work, sending me down to the village to engage the services of a blacksmith and a stonemason. It was probably for the best; I was so filled with rage that I couldn’t bear to look at the witch.