"Don't get too attached to him." Ugly hoisted me under his arm and carried me toward the house like a roll of fabric. "Death'll get what he wants out of him then send him back to the sewer."

"What information is that?" I spat.

"Stop moving," Ugly said. His arm tightened around me and I thought he'd cut me in half.

"You're hurting me!" I wriggled and kicked out with my bound legs, but connected with nothing but air.

"Calm down, lad," Seth said. "Co-operate and you will not be harmed. Fight and it will not go well for you. Death doesn't like it when his orders aren't followed."

"I don't have to follow his orders. He's not my master."

"Yet he will get what he needs from you nevertheless. He's good at that."

I gulped at his ominous tone as much as the promise in his words. I imagined the man they called Death extracting my real name from me with the use of medieval torture devices. He probably kept them in the dungeon. Surely a place as grim as the one we were now entering had a dungeon, with walls so thick that no one would hear my screams.

"What you shivering for, boy?" Ugly said, hoisting me higher on his hip. "It ain't cold."

"This is uncomfortable," I told him. "Can't you put me down and let me walk?"

"No," Seth said.

"Where are we?"

"Lichfield Towers."

"Are we still in London?"

"Yes. Highgate."

I knew Highgate had some big homes, but estates of the scale of this one weren't common. I could picture only two that I knew of, both behind high fences and rows of trees. Now that I thought about it, the front gate had looked familiar. We weren't too far from the cemetery.

Knowing my location buoyed me somewhat. If I did escape, finding my way back to Clerkenwell wouldn't be too difficult. The first thing I'd do when I returned to our basement Hell would be gather my few belongings and find a new place to live, somewhere where nobody knew me. Somewhere far away from Stringer and his gang.

I got to see very little of my surroundings, facing downward as I was. The floor tiles in the entrance hall were mostly covered by a crimson Oriental rug and the walls were paneled in dark wood. Ugly carried me up a grand staircase, his footfalls deadened by a carpet runner. Despite being daytime, the lack of windows meant it was dark in the stairwell without the chandelier lit. We continued up and up, Seth following behind us. We passed many doors, all closed, until we finally reached what must have been the highest room in the central tower.

Seth slipped past us and pushed open the door. The room was larger than I expected, with more furniture than I'd seen in one place for a long time. Still, it was bare compared to my childhood room in Tufnell Park. It contained only a small bed, a dresser, table and chair. There were no knickknacks on the table or dresser, no pictures adorning the deep red walls, and the bedspread was plain gray. Yet I loved the room. Once Ugly and Seth left, I would be alone inside four walls for the first time in an age. It was a luxury I'd feared never to experience again.