He shook his head. ‘Leave it.’ Then he turned toward Pete, and riveted him in place with a stare. ‘Now, for you. I think it’s best you were never here. I’d just leave you to burn with the rest, but you are Jesse’s friend, after all. She wouldn’t appreciate that. So here is your story: you were home, sleeping. You don’t know anything about this entire affair. In fact, you drank too much. When you do make it home, that’s precisely what you’ll do: drink too much. I’d like this to be as accurate as possible.’ Pete sank down against the van’s wall, next to Liz, staring straight ahead. He and Liz were both in some sort of limbo, held there by the power of Myrnin’s mind. It was unsettling how powerful he was right now.

‘Shane,’ Myrnin said, and her boyfriend turned face forward.

‘If you try to mess with my head, Count Dickula, I’ll rip your throat out,’ Shane said. There was a tense, trembling flatness to his voice that Claire didn’t remember ever having heard before, but he was probably just as freaked out as she felt right now. ‘And don’t you even think about touching Claire. I mean it.’

‘Drive,’ Myrnin said. He didn’t seem ruffled. He didn’t even, truthfully, seem to pay attention to what Shane had said. Claire hesitated, looking from him to the blank, zombified stares of Pete and Liz, and finally scrambled up to take the passenger seat of the van. She belted in just as Shane hit the gas.

‘Just so you know, I didn’t drive just because he made me from the power of his mind,’ Shane said. ‘I did it because the sooner I can get him out of here, the better I’m going to feel.’ He hesitated, and reached over to take her hand as he steered the big van over the rutted gravel road. Claire sighed in relief at the touch of his warm hand, and the feeling of safety it gave her to be in contact with him again. ‘Are you okay?’

She laughed. She couldn’t help it, and it had a distinctly crazy edge to it that earned her an alarmed look from him. ‘Okay? No. No, we just left a whole bunch of dead people back there, Shane. Dead people.’

‘I’m aware of that. But they were kind of trying to kill us hard and ugly. You don’t really think they’d have let us get out of there alive, do you?’