“I never would. You gave me the opportunity to stop this endless fighting. I sent my essence out into the world and found this boy. It’s taken twenty years, but my Followers have sacrificed and performed the rituals, and we have wedged the door to the Other Side open again. Now I have a chance to tip the scales, to alter the rules. I have the chance to end it all. Permanently. Thanks to you. And I’m willing to offer you a reward.”

“Like what?”

“There are other worlds than this one,” Colchester says. “You know that. You want to leave this world and find another, I will not stop you. I will even hold the door open for you. I’ll have the power to do it.”

Eric thinks about that. He’s always known that he could — in theory — bend his way into an entirely new existence with his abilities. Now that they are working again, and with the raw power that the boy represents, and Colchester’s knowledge, he could go anywhere. He could find himself a perfect world. His idea of Heaven. A place where he is immortal, all-powerful, or merely rich and famous with a supermodel wife. He could have literally anything.

He could be happy there.

Eric looks at Colchester warily. “What do I have to do in return?”

Colchester smiles as if Eric is finally getting the right answers on a game show. “All magic comes with a cost. You know that. The price of power for you: your three friends. You deliver them.”

“For what?”

Behind the innocent blue eyes, Colchester gives him a look as cold as any reptile’s. “You already know the answer to that. Magic requires a sacrifice. Your friends are special. They’ll be enough.”

Eric knows this is the part where he is supposed to tell the evil mastermind to go fuck himself. Where he is supposed to say he’d die before he would betray his friends.

But he doesn’t. It doesn’t leap from his throat the way it’s supposed to.

Colchester senses his hesitation. “Or you can say no. You can try to stop me. We can fight it out right here. It will save me the trouble of tracking you down later.”

The boy’s body begins to glow, and he hovers a few feet off the ground, so they are eye to eye. Eric can feel the ground rumble, like a fighter jet is about to take off nearby. He has been outmaneuvered completely. This is Colchester’s seat of power. He can do almost anything here.

He could certainly kill Eric.

Which isn’t to say Colchester is invincible here. He’s locked into the body of the boy. If Eric kills the child, Colchester dies too.