Main Street ended at the petrol station and between there and the motorway was nothing but a handful of houses and fields, and miles and miles of darkness.

Cat knew this stretch of road well, though she had never walked it alone at night before. Granny lived out this way and every spring and autumn the two of them would head off on long walks searching for different leaves and flowers. Sometimes they would even walk as far as Cullane Wood, though Granny had never taken her all the way up to the fort. Now she knew why.

They passed by Granny’s house, an old farmhouse she had lived in with Granddad for almost fifty years. It was normally filled with light and laughter, but now it sat dark and empty. Granny had been alone in that house when she had her heart attack. Cat wondered if she had been frightened. She hesitated for a moment, overcome with the urge to go inside, find one of Granny’s bobbly old cardigans, curl up on the couch and forget all about fairies and changelings. Instead, she took a deep breath and kept on walking. She knew the turn-off for Cullane Wood wasn’t far.

‘Be careful,’ she whispered to Shane. ‘The path ends here so we’re going to have to walk along the edge of the road from now on.’

By some miracle, no cars passed by and for that Cat was thankful. Clonbridge was still small enough that everyone knew everyone else’s business. She had no doubt that if some busybody spotted her and Shane walking alone on a darkened road without even a reflective vest to keep them safe her mam would hear about it before the night was through.

They had only walked a few hundred metres when they found the sign for Cullane Wood and followed it onto a winding country lane bounded on both sides by hedgerows and old stone walls. Cat fumbled through her backpack and dug out the torch. She clicked it on and a pathetic blue-white light sputtered forth, illuminating the road directly in front of them and not much else. If anything, it actually made the shadows surrounding them seem deeper.

Cat and Shane hadn’t said more than a dozen words to each other since leaving the house, which was fine when they were still in town and busy trying to avoid detection. But out here on a lonely country road it was different. As the silence stretched out between them, Cat became aware of just how dark it was. If she looked behind her, she could still see a faint glow of light coming from town, but in front of her, everything was black. The branches of the hedgerows seemed to reach out like raking claws and every sound made Cat jump. She wanted to say something, anything, to cut through the awful quiet.

‘My granny told me a story about the Dalys once,’ she said, nodding back toward the old farmhouse that guarded the mouth of the lane like a sentinel.