Happy and Natasha joined hands again, and concentrated. The Wolf cried out angrily, but no-one was listening to it. There was a sharp, cracking sound, and flecks of frost flew on the air as the frozen head turned slowly to look at Kim. The murderer blinked once, and his eyes cleared. He looked at Kim and tears started from his eyes, only to freeze before they were half-way down his cheeks. He worked his mouth, amid more harsh, cracking sounds, and Kim drifted forward to stand over him, to hear what he had to say.

“I’m sorry,” he said, in a voice full of all the pain and tiredness in the world. “I’m so sorry.”

The thick layer of frost covering his body exploded out from him as he stretched suddenly and forced himself up onto his feet. Great cracks appeared, in his clothes and in his frozen flesh, but he ignored them, all his attention fixed on Kim.

“My name is Billy Hartman,” he said slowly. “I never meant to kill you. Never meant to kill anyone. It was like a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from.”

“I gave you what you wanted,” said the Wolf. “What you dreamed of. Don’t say you didn’t.”

“We don’t always want what we want in dreams,” said Billy. “They’re just dreams!”

“Humans are so complicated,” said the Wolf. “You can’t even tell the truth to yourselves.”

“You don’t understand us,” said JC. “You never did. You may be realer than us, but we’re still more than you are.”

Billy glared at the Wolf’s head, able to face it at last, in the last few moments of his life. “You lied to me. Used me!”

“That’s all you’re good for,” said the Wolf.

Billy turned his head away, dismissing the Wolf, and studied Kim with his sad, betrayed eyes. “What’s it like, being dead?”

“You’re closer to death than I am,” said Kim, not unkindly. “I’m stuck here. I was going to do so many things . . . and now I never will.”

“I know,” said Billy.

“It’s hard to know what I feel about you,” said Kim. “Finally having a name and a face to put to my murderer . . . doesn’t really make any difference. You were used by the Wolf, like me . . . but you, at least, had some choice in this. I can’t forgive you.”

“That’s all right,” said Billy. “I don’t forgive me either.”

JC stepped forward. “You want a way to get back at the Wolf? Make it pay, for everything it’s done to you and Kim and everyone else?”

“There’s a way for me to put things right?” said Billy.

“No,” said JC. “What’s done is done and can’t be undone. But I can give you a chance to defy the Wolf and save the world from what it wants to do to us.”