Cole’s mom stayed on the lawn. She wasn’t shouting anymore. She just stood there, not even looking at the fight. Her head was raised slightly, and cocked to one side like a dog listening to a sound in the distance. She turned, then, and Austin could see her smiling face. Her eyes were closed. Her arms were out to either side. She looked like she was waiting for God to reach down from heaven and pick her up. Austin realised the hair on the back of his neck was standing up. There was something in the air, a charge, and it was building. Intensifying.

Then something rippled.

Austin couldn’t tell what it was. It wasn’t the ground, not really, and it wasn’t the buildings, it was the space around him, around them all. The space rippled, just for a moment, just for an eye-blink, and the whole town rippled with it, and Austin recognised the sensation. He felt it every year when he was down in the panic room. This was the feeling that preceded every Hell Night.

It was beginning.

Cole’s mom laughed. It was a short, sharp laugh, cut off by a cry of pain. Her spine arched and her hands splayed and her legs snapped rigid. Her skin deepened to a rich yellow in the street light, and she grew taller while her hair lengthened and knotted. Her T-shirt tore as a ridge of white bone jutted sharply from her shoulders and along her arms. The angles of her face were sharper now, her brow more pronounced, her jaw wider. She laughed again, a laugh of pure joy, and Austin saw her teeth, packed into her gums like a shark’s.

Austin watched this transformation and almost missed what was happening to the street. The road cracked and the grass grew, turned coarse and wild, briars sprouting like weeds. The houses creaked and groaned – the creaks of Cole’s house sounding like screams to Austin’s ears – as they lengthened and narrowed and twisted. Street lights and house lights alike turned orange and red and flickered like flames.

There were real screams now, screams and shouts and laughter, and demons were emerging from houses up and down this street.

Chapter 47

AMBER WAS DYING.

The pain had simultaneously faded into the background and regrouped to jab at her with every beat of her heart. A whole lot of blood that she needed to stay inside her body was now on the outside. It was drenching her clothes and dripping to the snow-covered ground. It was smearing on branches and splashing on leaves. She was cold. She was so cold that she would never complain about the heat again. Her fingers were numb. Her head was light. She was dizzy. And even though she was dying she was aware of one thing: Hell Night had begun.