‘Raphael Winter!’ I said, with a mock gasp. ‘Are you really going to enter someone’s domain without a warrant? How shocking!’

‘Someone’s dead,’ he reminded me. A muscle throbbed in his jaw. ‘And someone tried to hurt you yesterday.’

Barry started waving at me. ‘Ivy! Get over here! We’re starting!’

I sighed. This contestant malarkey was becoming irritating. ‘Time to go. I’ll try to get hold of Belinda’s vial so we can find out for sure whether she’s involved. It’ll be better if she doesn’t know what we’re up to just yet. If she is our necromancer then she has a hell of a lot of power. We don’t want it unleashed unless we’re sure we can contain it.’

Winter smiled. ‘I’m glad to see you’re being sensible for once.’

‘I’m sure it won’t last. Not unless there are more necromancers around. Anything to do with dead bodies scares the bejesus out of me.’ I shivered.

‘Be careful.’

I gave him a hard look. ‘You too.’ I stretched up on my tiptoes. ‘I can’t have my hero getting into trouble for breaking and entering,’ I whispered in his ear.

Both corners of Winter’s mouth crooked up.

Chapter Sixteen

We were walked through the challenge by Morris Armstrong, alongside our producers. The other two teams of contestants looked considerably worse for wear; the last team to arrive sported weary expressions and several bruises. When I caught one of them muttering about how sore her legs were after marching up a mountain, I allowed myself a satisfied smirk. Unfortunately Mike was too busy flexing to hear her.

Previous challenges on Enchantment had been guided by location and this was no different. To begin with, there was the excruciating obstacle course to complete. Armstrong pointed out the rope swings, a precarious-looking balance beam and the marshy mud pit. Once those had been traversed, we were supposed to assemble a Celtic knot to unlock a box and reveal a magic wand. When the wand was pointed at the finish line, with the not-so-immortal words of ‘Enchantment commands you’, our names would be revealed in puffs of multi-coloured smoke.

‘Of course,’ Armstrong said with a knowing wink, ‘there are layers of magic built into this challenge which will not be revealed to you beforehand.’

I nodded, unsurprised. It was typical for there to be few magical demands put on contestants in the early stages for the simple reason that few of us could perform any spells of consequence. However, the show was called Enchantment; there had to be magic of some form or another to satisfy the watching public.

I didn’t really rate my chances of winning. I wasn’t fit and I knew that it would take me far longer than anyone else to get across the obstacles. Even Lou would probably be faster. And it didn’t seem particularly wise to exert my own magical abilities too far after the events of yesterday. Despite both my and Winter’s suspicions that my exhausted hallucinations had been caused by something nefarious, I couldn’t discard the idea that I’d simply cast too many spells. I had to be careful. After all, who knew when another real zombie would appear?