She pulled it out. Dacre Shanks’s key. They’d tried it and it hadn’t worked, but that had been out there, on the other side of the boundary. She was in Desolation Hill now, where the key had been made. If there was anywhere it’d work for someone who didn’t have a damn clue how to use it, it was here.

She jammed it into the lock of the bedroom door and the image of another door, a door of dull metal, flashed into her mind with such startling clarity that it momentarily filled her vision. She turned the key, only dimly aware of what she was doing, then turned it again, and pulled it from the lock as she opened the door. She stepped out, not into the corridor of the house she was in, but into a concrete cell about the size of a modest living room. The door slammed shut behind her. It wasn’t the wooden door she’d opened. It was metal. The one she’d seen in her head.

And in the centre of this room was a Shining Demon.

Chapter 32

ASTAROTH HAD BURNED FROM within, turning all but a few jigsaw patches of his skin translucent. His brother was not so hellishly ethereal.

Naberius was on his knees in a circle, his wrists bound by short chains set into the floor, the manacles scratched with a hundred tiny symbols. Like his brother, he was hairless. Like his brother, his eyes were black. That was where the similarity ended. His dry, cracked skin was the colour of ash, and a paleness seeped from those cracks to bathe the cell in a weak, restrained light.

He looked up at Amber without surprise. It was as if he had only been trapped down here 20 minutes, not 200 years, such was the placidity of his features.

She opened her mouth to speak, but could think of nothing to say.

Instead, he spoke. “Release me.” His voice was soft. “Release me from these chains.”

Amber was strong. She was confident. In demon form, she was nothing like her old self. And yet here she felt all those familiar doubts and insecurities rising to the surface. Down here she was weak, despite her horns. Down here she was pathetic. “I … I can’t,” she said.

“You shall be rewarded. The chains bind me. Release me and I shall grant you your deepest desires.”

Amber stepped backwards to the door. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and that’s all she could think of to say. She turned, slid the key into the dull metal door, and screwed her eyes shut. She focused on a door she knew well, she pictured it in her head, and she turned the key twice and took it from the lock and she opened the door and stepped through—

—into her bedroom. In Florida.