Hal stood over Jay, screaming, ‘Yeah, I know! It was me!’

  I patted the air where Hal’s shoulder was and said, ‘I know, buddy, but it wasn’t his fault.’

  ‘But he says he still wants to kill you,’ Derek pointed out. ‘So let’s leave him here and lock him in before he manages to do that. The demons’ll be rising by now. We have to get there to stop them.’

  ‘No, we can’t leave him,’ I argued, rummaging through the Toolkit and putting my hands on the ropes, as well as the new phone Hamish had given me. ‘For one thing he’s a vampire, so he’ll be able to vaporize himself out through the vents or the cracks without a bother. For another … we need him on our side. But not to worry. I have a way to reprogram him.’

  I tossed one of the ropes around Jay, binding his arms to his torso as I bent down, opening up Hamish’s app and holding my phone in front of Jay’s face. ‘It wasn’t a vamp who compelled you. That was a mind-controlling computer called Elvira – or her robotic body, anyway. So you have to look at this for two minutes and you’ll be right as rain.’

  ‘No problem,’ Jay agreed. ‘Only …’ A hungry look entered his eyes, and his fangs began to elongate. ‘I don’t think these ropes can hold me for too long.’ Even as he said it, I could see that he was managing to loosen the ropes. Fluff him and his super-strength, anyway.

  I cast a worried look at the ghosts in the room. ‘Help me out here, lads. Hold him down while I rewire his brain.’

  Hal growled out a ‘Gladly,’ while he and the others sat on top of Jay.

  Jay coughed. ‘Who are you talking to, Katy? I feel a weight on my chest. What is it?’

  Jude chuckled. ‘Only a few dozen ghosts or so. Now be quiet, darling, will you, and do as Katy says?’

  Jay nodded obediently, focusing on the phone. ‘Are you absolutely positive that this will work?’ he asked, his eyes wide and staring at the bright numbers and symbols which flashed across the screen.

  ‘Sure it will,’ I said. ‘Y’know, presuming I’m right and Fiona’s wrong, and Hamish is still on our side.’

  ‘Who’s Fiona?’ Jay wondered.

  I shook my head. ‘Never mind. Just keep staring.’

  He did as I ordered, and I resisted the urge to cross my fingers. I knew Hamish was on our side. No matter how many people the Old Ones and their minions might think they’d set against me, I knew exactly who my friends were.

  The app let out a beep, signalling that the reprogramming was complete. Jay moved his eyes from the phone and blinked at me. ‘Oh my stars, Katy.’ Fear crowded his features. ‘We have to get out there. I’ve held you up way too long.’

  All around him, the ghosts let out a series of sarcastic claps. ‘Well, duh!’ cried Hal. ‘Give the vamp a prize for stating the obvious!’

  29. The World and My Mother

  As we headed out of the room via the window, Aunt Jude and I were able to use magic to transport ourselves to the ground. Jay, on the other hand, transformed himself into a bat, staying high above us and out of sight until we needed him.

  I think it was that moment that cemented my certainty that I would never date a vampire again. Well, that and the fact that I also didn’t want to be with someone who could have dated my mother, aunt or even my grandmother in the past.

  I shoved my irrelevant thoughts aside and concentrated on what was happening all around me. Jude had tried to use my wand to make the two of us invisible for a little while but she was weakened and all out of confidence after months of solitude.

  We journeyed over the mansion’s long lawn in the dark, walking towards a hedge that had parted into a portal, with a host of ghosts by our side. There were more spirits with each second that passed, and judging by the weapons some of them carried, they were hunters like Jude and me.

  It was just like my dream, only backwards (and with a lot more violence, thanks to the ghosts and Jay fighting off the mansion’s guards along the way). Thankfully, I had the sort of friends who believed in dreams. And that was why, when I approached the hedge, I knew that they’d be waiting on the other side.

  ≈

  I had my very own portal in my office and used it on a daily basis – the Other Door, placed there by Ned’s ex-boyfriend, Guillermo. But the portal through the hedge was nothing like the one that the Púca had created. The leaves and branches were parted into a circular shape, but we couldn’t see through that circle to the other side. We could see a thickness in the air – and it felt thick, too, as we cautiously stepped through and scurried straight into the shadows.

  We found ourselves in a different garden, miles across Dublin: this was the very back of Angelica’s garden, a secret spot behind her trees and bushes, the resting place of the Old Ones.

  Hundreds of warlocks and members of the Not-So-Strange Society were clustered around an old stone arch – the archway that I’d dreamt about. Beneath it there was a circle of rough soil.

  The vapour in the enclave was thicker than ever, which meant it was also more powerful than ever. Under its influence, I could see some of the members of the Not-So-Strange Society asking valid questions like: ‘What am I doing here?’ and, ‘Is that blood she’s pouring onto that soil while they sing weird songs?’

  And the answer to the second of those confused but valid questions was yes. At the bottom of her garden, right below the stone arch, Angelica stood on the disturbed soil, pouring blood from a jug while Bartholomew and his less-confused followers sang:

  ‘Time to rise now Old Ones

  Our faithful sing you home

  Time to rise now Old Ones

  Make our world your own.’

  Jude and I remained flat against the hedging until the time was right. She might not have been able to do an invisibility spell right now, but she’d done something just as good – it was as though she’d pulled the shadows around us to shield us from view. With the guards on the other side having already been dealt with by Jay and the ghosts, not a single one on this side looked our way. They were all too busy either watching the ritual, or feeling befuddled by the strength of the vapour.

  Angelica, Barty and most of the others didn’t seem to have noticed it yet. They were shielded by their most faithful, right beneath the arch. And among those most faithful of followers were Cullen, my uncle, and Peter Müd.

  ‘It has to be a woman,’ Jude whispered. ‘Who pours the blood sacrifice, I mean. I’m not sure if it qualifies as irony or not – I always get mixed up on that. Either way, it seems like a cruel joke to me.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I admitted. ‘Angelica is such a strong, competent woman, so why would she want a world ruled by demons and warlocks? Without her, none of this would be happening.’

  ‘It would, actually,’ said my aunt. ‘Kieran and Angelica had a lot of conversations within my earshot. Usually arguments. You see, my son believed in a world run with the Old Ones’ ideology even before he knew they existed. When he started working as a hunter, he didn’t go about killing supernaturals willy-nilly just because they were supernatural. But he didn’t protect the innocent from the evil, either. Instead, my son grew to admire the old-fashioned hierarchy of the magical world. And while politicians were working hard to root out those horrible old ideas, he found some friends who believed as he did – that the world needed order. When he befriended Bartholomew Shannon and heard about the Old Ones, he was over the moon. Angelica knew them both, because they moved in the same dubious circles as she did. But judging by the conversations I overheard, she hates both men equally. When she discovered they planned to murder her mother and sister, she knew she couldn’t fight them – certainly not Kieran. He is a formidable hunter, to say the least. So she agreed to work with them and become the acceptable face of their project. They’d needed her all along, truth be told. Her talents with the dead, her knowledge of the enclave … They told her they had no choice but to kill her mother, but they’d spare her sister as long as Angelica made sure Ned never learned about the Old Ones.’

  ‘So she banished Nedina senior’s ghost,’ I said.

  My aunt nodded. ‘Of course as the months went by she became just as enthralled by the idea of the Old Ones as the rest of them. But to begin with, she really just bargained for her sister’s life.’ She hung her head. ‘I am so ashamed of the things Kieran has done. I didn’t even tell his father or Harry or Eva how bad he was – no doubt they knew, even so. I thought I could fix him. I thought that since I made him, it was my job to fix him.’

  She brushed away a tear. ‘But it would be wrong of me to blame him entirely on Angelica’s current state. I kept in touch with her mother on and off, so I know that even when she was a child she had a mean streak. But this – what she’s doing now – it only began because she wanted to save her sister’s life.’

  I clapped a hand to my heart as sympathy rushed through me. Sure, Angelica had done a lot of damage (and according to Cleo she’d even killed her own familiar) but if she loved her sister, she couldn’t be one hundred percent bad, could she?

  My aunt tapped my arm urgently and pointed to the soil beneath the archway. Angelica had run out of blood to spill, and the earth was moving beneath her feet. ‘So what’s the next part of your plan?’

  ‘It’s to get through this with a little help from my friends.’ I pointed to the bushes on the other side of the archway, the ones which bordered Angelica’s garden, watching as they parted, and a stronger-than-ever green mist snaked its way through. ‘And I think they’ve just arrived.’

  ≈

  Clarissa and three Moon werewolves were the first to appear. Clarissa sprayed venom everywhere, dousing the followers in a sticky-looking substance that seemed to render them immobile. Go Clarissa! As for the Moons, they howled, snapped and snarled, fighting like wild beasts as they picked off the guards and followers who tried to use magic to send them away.

  Ned marched onto the scene with Cleo by her side and dozens of Cacklers around her, trailing a putrid mist of canal vapour in her wake (she looked terrific, if I do say so myself – though she probably didn’t smell it). I could see hair that looked like Martha’s under one of the Cacklers’ hoods, so she had clearly been freed from my uncle’s house.

  The fight began in earnest, and Jude and I rushed into the fray. My aunt was livelier than she had been so far, and I wished I could take the time to watch her. When I did catch a glimpse of her in battle, she was using knives, ropes, and even a wand she picked up from a fallen foe.

  And if I couldn’t take the time to fully appreciate my aunt’s fighting skills, I definitely couldn’t take the time to peek through my Aurameter. I dearly wished I could, because I knew that the magic I’d see would be amazing. I could feel the spells though, and see their effects, as more and more of the Old Ones’ followers were taken down.

  Jay was no longer a bat, but considering how wildly he fought, it was yet another confirmation that I would never see him the same way again. It could have been his hours upon hours of killing zombies in video games that prepared him for this, but I doubted it. Jay had lived a long life, and I didn’t even know the half of what he’d done over the centuries.

  Dolly was fighting almost as furiously. She and Clarissa were the surprises of the night. Because they were bakers I’d assumed they were such gentle souls, but they really could battle with the best. It was hard to keep focused on them as they moved so quickly, but the damage they left behind was undeniable.

  We’d all agreed beforehand not to kill anyone if possible – most of these people were hypnotised either by Angelica and Barty’s efforts or by Elvira, after all. But while Jay, Dolly and the werewolves were managing to hold off from doing any actual murdering, there’d definitely be some bruises and broken limbs when this was all over.

  No matter how well we were doing in the battle though, it soon became clear that those very closest to the stone arch – Angelica, Cullen, Müd, Faster, Kieran and Bartholomew – were being protected by far more than just their guards and followers.

  Every spell that went their way bounced right on back to the sender. I finally took a moment to look through my Aurameter and saw it: the dome-like shape of their boundary spell, covered in thick, strong warding spells. It would have been beautiful if it weren’t so irritating.

  As yet another of Ned’s spells failed to land beneath the arch, those protected by the wards began to realise what was happening outside of it. With so many of their followers gone, they could now see what was going on outside their boundary. Their eyes turned to me, Jude and Ned, and they sent the force of their rage our way, throwing spell after spell at us. They were pretty murderous about it too, because the word ‘Marbh’ was being uttered over and over as they pointed their fingers our way.

  ‘Death spells. The cheeky so-and-sos,’ muttered Jude. ‘None of them are managing to touch us, though.’ She cast a look at Ned and the Cacklers. ‘Down to you lot, I take it?’

  Elspeth, Fiona and Martha gave little bows, while Ned only gave me a small smile of acknowledgement, her eyes – like mine – firmly on the soil beneath the arch.

  ‘You can’t stay in there forever, son,’ said Jude, moving her attention to Kieran. ‘None of you can. You know what happens now – it’s the same thing that always happens. The hunter takes the Old Ones down.’

  Kieran shook his head at his mother. ‘Not this time, Mammy. I learned well from you. I know exactly how a hunter works because I am one. I’ve thought of everything.’ He gave a second sad shake of his head. ‘You should have stayed in your room, Mammy. I won’t be able to protect you now.’

  Jude just blinked at him, while the Moon wolves rushed the barrier, growling in frustration as they couldn’t get near.

  While Kieran kept trying to engage his mother in pointless conversation, Ned, me, and many of the others kept our eyes on the prize, although, seeing as they were a bunch of horrible demons, maybe I should refer to them as the booby prize.

  And it wouldn’t be long before the booby prize arrived, because all along my spine, up the back of my neck, my skin began to tingle and my hairs began to prick. There was a sudden tremor beneath my feet, becoming a rumble that all of us could hear.

  ‘It’s happening,’ said Ned. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘She was born ready,’ Jude replied as she squeezed my hand.

  The tremors and rumbles amplified as the soil beneath the archway shifted in earnest. We all watched, rapt, as the Old Ones began to rise: first, they were disparate bones, thrusting up and moving through the air; next, those bones fused together into four separate forms.

  The four forms flickered and for a moment I saw it, finally: the shapes I couldn’t quite discern at the centre of all of those fountains. I understood now why I’d never been able to see them properly. Eyes like mine, like all of ours, weren’t ever supposed to focus on beings like this. These four forms were the things at the corners of our eyes. The shadows flitting at the edges of the room. The quivers that ran up and down our spines. These four creatures were demons, and they were real, and we were never supposed to look at them too hard – they didn’t want us looking their way, because to look at them, and truly see them, was to know them for what they were.

  And since I knew they didn’t want me to look directly at them, I stared – I’m contrary like that.

  Horned and gnarled, they soon entered the next phase of their rejuvenation, becoming tall, elegant, suited men – men with faces that would have been handsome, were it not for the ghastly smiles they wore.

  Their new form wasn’t static, though. I could still see their real selves, endlessly shifting and moving beneath their outer shells. I could also see the truth in the darkness of their eyes: they were dead eyes, inhuman eyes and, just as in my dream, they chilled me right to my bones.

  In my dream, these very men had been encircling me. And now, even though they were safe behind a boundary and metres away, it still felt that way. All of their intent was focused on me, and I didn’t like it one little bit. I shook my discomfort off – cheeky old geezers weren’t going to affect me. Well … not much, anyway.

  Bartholomew gave me a baleful glare. ‘I see you’ve gotten a bunch of your friends to somehow break you out and to fight your battles for you. That’s very brave of you. But you do know that it’s pointless. For one thing, you can’t get within an inch of us. We’re shielded by the power of the Ice Crystal.’

  As soon as he spoke, my uncle, Müd and Cullen rushed out from beneath the arch, pushing Bartholomew, Kieran and Angelica with them.

  Somehow, Kieran managed to wriggle away, but Clarissa’s sticky venom (coupled with the pure strength of Jay, Dolly and the werewolves) kept Angelica and Bartholomew in place until my aunt and the Cacklers could bind them.

  Bartholomew spluttered in his bonds. ‘I don’t …’ He looked in puzzle at my uncle and Müd. ‘You … but … you’re on our side.’

  Faster smirked. ‘You think I’d work with you shower of muppets? Not on your nelly. I was just waiting for the right moment to give you all a good shove back into the real world. And as for Moody …’ He grinned at Peter and pulled out the phone I’d given him. ‘We found a way to undo the damage you lot had done to him with your magical robot, so stick that in your hookah and smoke it!’

  Kieran had been dancing around in a battle of spells with Ned and some of the Cacklers, but he paused to say, ‘Speaking of magical robots, I’ve just summoned one of those. So enjoy your freedom while it lasts, idiots – because Elvira has the power to control the entire world.’

  He’d barely gotten the sentence out when the robot appeared. Her make-up was more vampy than ever, and she wore a wine-red evening dress with a plunging neckline.