“I can’t have you jumping out the door while I’m driving. You’re unpredictable, as you so helpfully informed me earlier.”

She felt the now-familiar heat and rage begin to simmer insider her, as if her body knew what it was doing. She wanted to burn this thing off of her.

“You won’t be able to melt it.” Kester continued, his voice bland. “It’s immune to hellfire.”

If she had to be manacled to get her to this trial, maybe it wasn’t something she really wanted after all. Now that she thought about it, trials weren’t generally fun events. The phrase “trial by fire” popped into her mind, and she felt a sudden desperation to rip herself free from the car, to tumble into the road and sprint through the dark fields. Suddenly, the impending homelessness she’d been fretting about earlier no longer seemed as daunting as this nightmare.

She glared at him, her pulse racing faster. “Can you at least tell me if I’ll get to keep my soul?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. It depends how you do.”

Great. With her heart thrumming, she scanned the car’s interior, searching for weapons. It was upholstered in deep red leather, intermixed with chrome and instruments the color of gunmetal. The GPS was off, but Ursula could see that the speedometer read 160 kilometers per hour. They were flying down the M4. Even if she managed to free herself, her body would shatter when she flung herself from the car.

“Aren’t you going a bit fast?” she asked, her mouth dry.

“We’re in a hurry. Besides this is a Lotus. It’s not made for driving slow.”

Another pop song blared on the radio—Hugo Modes, warbling in a falsetto… The sound grated, the banality of the music such a sharp contrast to her rising fear. The band crooned on, and she could hardly think straight.

But maybe a sense of normalcy could save her right now. Maybe if she got Kester to see her as a person instead of just his victim, he’d empathize with her. Wasn’t that what they told the parents of children who’d been kidnapped? Show the human side, tug on the heart strings.

She had the strangest feeling that Kester didn’t have a human side, but it was worth a shot. She’d only just turned eighteen, and she wasn’t ready to die before she’d had the chance to do anything with her life. She took a steadying breath. “Hugo Modes. What’s his band called? The Four Points?” She nodded at the radio, trying to keep her voice steady. “I suppose you like boy bands.”

“I wouldn’t call them a boy band,” he snapped. “They play their own instruments.”