“Don’t blame the idiot,” said Bill. “We can be very convincing when we want to. He just gave a ride to some folk from out of town who’ve been caught up in all this madness … He was rescuing us, weren’t you, Warrick?”

“You don’t talk to me,” Warrick said, hunkering down and wrapping his arms around Two protectively.

Bill laughed, then looked back at Milo and the others. “Give us the key. That’s all we want. We don’t even want Amber anymore. You’re nothing to us now, sweetheart. Just hand over the key and we’ll let you get back to whatever it is you’re doing.”

“We don’t have it anymore,” Amber said.

“I feel I have to warn you,” said Kirsty, twisting Kelly’s arm so much that Kelly cried out, “our patience is not to be tested here.”

Betty smiled. “Things are, as you can probably tell, somewhat fraught between us right now. And the Hounds have breached that handy invisible wall that had been keeping them out, did you know that? You did? Oh, that’s interesting. Have we … have we stumbled into the middle of some kind of plan? Bill, darling, I fear we may have inadvertently become a monkey wrench in the works.”

“That is regrettable,” said Bill.

“Very,” said Betty. “But taking all that into account, I’m sure you can understand when we ask if we could just skip the part where you deny you have the key, and get right to where you give it to us. If we could do that, that would be peachy. Otherwise, we’re going to start killing your friends. You seem to have a lot of them, for once.”

“If you hurt anyone, you get nothing.”

“We’ll start with the ones you’d hardly miss,” said Bill. “This old-timer only has a few years left in him, anyway.”

“I’m not with them,” Jesper said quickly. “I can help you, I can—”

Bill shot Jesper between the eyes.

Linda cried out and Ronnie cursed and Jesper’s corpse toppled over backwards and hit the ground.

And Amber, staring at the body as the blood leaked out on to the dirt, felt a curious sense of regret, that she hadn’t been the one to kill him.

Bill pointed the gun into Ronnie’s face. “This one now? You don’t seem too upset about that guy. Would I get more of a reaction if I were to shoot this one?”

“Or maybe we’re taking the wrong approach,” Betty said. “Maybe we should start with the youngest.” She pressed her gun against Austin’s head. “Now,” she said happily, “will you please give us the key?”

“We don’t have it,” said Ronnie. “It was stolen.”

Amber nodded. “Stolen from the car, Betty, I swear to Christ.”

“We’re not lying to you,” Linda said.

“So who has it now?” asked Kirsty.