The cellar was large and wide and clean. Also soundproofed. To their left, there was another set of stairs leading up to a door, presumably to the house itself. On the wall to their right, an array of shackles hung. There was no child down here.

Virgil gritted his teeth. “You don’t have another kid, do you?”

“I have misled you,” Moreno admitted. “I have my rules, you see. It is the town that decides which child shall be sacrificed. If I were to arbitrarily choose another, why would they bother to vote in the future? The process is important to them. The process is everything.”

Virgil and Javier stood shoulder to shoulder. Javier made a whimpering noise, but stayed standing. His right leg was shaking so badly that Virgil worried it might pop off his hip – a not unlikely scenario, it had to be said.

“So now you’re … you’re just going to kill us?” Virgil asked.

“Now I’m going to chain you up,” said Moreno. “And at precisely eleven twenty-four I will come back down and take you to Naberius.”

“Okay …”

“And then he will kill you.”

Chapter 38

BENEATH A BLOOD-RED SKY, Amber stepped from the trees into a clearing, the golden leaves crackling under her feet. Balthazar turned to her, his shock of black hair falling over his ice-blue eyes, the sun catching his cheekbones, sharp as blades. Tempest, the woman beside him, was pale, her bronze hair long and tousled, her lips full and her green eyes wide. They clung to each other like the lovers they were, their features perfect, their passion barely contained, and they stood there while the trees stopped swaying and it all went quiet and Amber blinked, saw that she was not in a forest in Montana at all, but merely looking at one, and she stepped back, a peculiar kind of fuzziness working its way between her thoughts. It was a picture – no, a poster, an In The Dark Places poster – on a wall. On her wall, in her parents’ house in Florida.

Amber looked round. Wesley Sterling, the Nightmare Man, stood by her old bed, holding a speargun. It was hot. Bright outside. She was already sweating. That was odd. She looked at her hand, at her small pale hand. Ah, that explained it. No longer a demon. She smelled something cooking. Did she smell it, though, or did she just think she smelled it? Did it matter? Not really. She left her bedroom and walked down the long, long corridor to the kitchen. Much longer than she remembered. Her parents were here, in the kitchen, as was her demon-self. They parted and she walked between them, climbed on to the table and lay with her head beside the salad bowl, waiting to be eaten.

Her dad put his arm round her demon-self. “I much prefer you when you’re like this,” he said. “You’re the daughter we always wanted.”