Fin looks up. The cigarette gives off just enough light for him to see the face of the man who has sworn to make his bloodline suffer and die. Wrapped up in himself, he chews on his cheek. Stifles his cries as he fastens bloody fingers over the head of the nail and begins to slide it free of flesh and bone.

‘All these years,’ spits the man. ‘Putting myself back together, setting my bones, patching my skin, trying to clean the corruption from my blood. All these years of healing, of waiting, of letting Papa Teague forget, to feel safe, to believe himself absolved and redeemed. They weren’t expecting me, boy. Thought they were free. But the devil doesn’t forgive, boy. The devil comes for payment. And the price is going to be … everything …’

In one fluid movement, Fin slides the nail free and grasps its bloodied head in his left hand. Lashes out and feels it strike home. The nail plunges into the fleshy leg of his abductor like a fork into succulent meat.

A shriek of pain, the sound of flesh hitting flesh, and then Fin is wrapping his head in his hands as the sounds of violence, of skin on skin and bone upon bone fills the cold, gritty air.

He hears curses and grunts and the clatter of metal hitting the concrete floor. Looks up through the pleached branches of his arms and sees two black shapes, fighting like the shadow of flames. Sees the man who took him, hacking down, hacking down, a wooden club in his right hand, striking again and again at a big, spread-eagled figure on the floor.

The rush of panic, the sudden understanding of what he is seeing.

‘Dad!’

And then Aector McAvoy is reaching up and closing his palm around the face of the man who took his boy, and is running him back towards the wall and slamming his skull against the reinforced metal, again, again, and dropping the limp, waxwork body onto the floor.

And then Fin is looking up as his father shines a light in his face, and stares at the bruises and cuts and the ugly wounds and welts, and tears run down his cheeks and into his bloodied beard, and he gathers him up in arms that tremble and holds him so gently that even if he were made of cobwebs and dew, he would not come apart.

‘He said he was going to make you choose …’ whispers Fin. ‘He said …’

And then Fin is clattering back to the floor as the devil fastens his arm around McAvoy’s neck and begins to squeeze, clinging to him as if riding a wild horse, and McAvoy is falling forward, on his knees, eyes bulging, bloodied teeth bared, grasping behind him, smashing him back into the wall, tongue sticking out from the wet blackness of his open mouth, hand scrabbling in the pocket of his coat.

Fin looks up just as his father smashes the white tube into the face of the man on his back. The cylinder squelches, hideously, into the hollow eye-socket. There is a scream, and then the sudden white hot flame, the hiss and squeal of white-hot fireworks and sparks, shadows dancing, flecks of fire skipping on the air with the flakes of gritty snow.