He straightened up. ‘But you can’t push it from here. You need to go back there. Use those abilities of yours. Do something spectacular. And then it’ll all be over.’
I gritted my teeth. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
His smile widened further until it was nothing but teeth. ‘Wrong,’ he said, then he drew back his foot and a jolt of pain snapped back my head.
‘Come on. Come on, wake up!’
My body and brain roused together. There were hands on my shoulders. I lunged forward, brushing them off and grabbing for whoever had touched me.
My hands found Billy’s windpipe and forced him backwards into the snow. Billy had been the hardest boy in my school once upon a time. Back when I’d been trying to stop Caddie and Raggy Maggie, he’d even stuck a knife into my stomach.
And now here he was, pinned beneath me, his eyes shimmering with panic, his breath stuck halfway down his throat. My hands twitched. I could squeeze, pay him back for the years of misery he’d inflicted on me. I could squeeze, and I could keep squeezing.
But Billy had changed. Or maybe Billy had stayed the same, and I was the one who was different. Whatever, he wasn’t a threat to anyone any more. He’d helped stop the Beast. Impossible as it seemed, he and I were on the same side these days.
I relaxed my grip, then removed my hands from his throat. ‘Sorry,’ I said, my voice hoarse. He gave a bug-eyed nod in return and gingerly rubbed his throat.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he croaked, and we helped each other up out of the snow.
The body of the Beast still lay motionless on the ground, its blood pinkening the snow around it. I forced myself to think of it in those terms – an “it”, a “thing”, because the reality was too terrible to consider. I didn’t want to remember what – or rather who – the Beast had once been.
But it had saved me, and that told me the person it once was had still been in there somewhere, buried deep down beneath the scales and the claws and the slavering jaws.
The other beast, the one that had started the whole nightmare off, was nowhere to be seen. We’d killed it, the three of us together – Billy, Ameena and me – but now it was gone. It was no great surprise. I’d learned from Mr Mumbles that if you killed anything from the Darkest Corners when it was in the real world, it was reborn back over there.
That monster still lived, but there was no coming back for the one who had saved us all.
Ameena was sitting in the snow, staring at nothing, her head shaking ever so slightly left to right. She’d discovered she wasn’t real, that every memory she had was false. She was “a tool”, my dad had said. A tool my terrified mind had created to save me from Mr Mumbles. With just a few choice words, he’d shown her that her entire life was a lie.
I stood over her, no idea what to say. What could I say? How could you help someone who didn’t really exist? In the end, I said the only thing that came into my head.
‘Hey.’
She blinked, as if wakening from a dream. Her head stopped shaking and tilted just a little. Her dark eyes peered up at me from behind a curtain of darker hair. She breathed out a cloud of misty white vapour.
‘Hey.’
‘You OK?’
She shook her head again. ‘Not great. You?’
I shrugged. There was a throbbing in my jaw where my dad had kicked me. Another addition to go along with all the other aches and pains throughout my body. ‘Been better.’
A piercing scream came from the direction of the police station. The screechers – the zombie-like things that had once been the people from my village – had been driven back by the battle of the Beasts. Now they emerged cautiously from streets and alleyways on all sides, their black eyes gazing hungrily upon us.
‘Screechers,’ Billy whispered.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I see them.’
They were at various stages of mutation. At first we’d thought they were all just zombies. Then we’d discovered that this was just the first stage in a transformation that would eventually see them become like the Beast itself.
Some of those that moved to surround us now were still shuffling on two legs. Others crawled through the snow, their shapes barely recognisable as human.
‘What do we do?’ Billy asked.
‘I don’t know.’
I could feel Billy glaring at me. ‘You don’t know? What do you mean you don’t know?’
‘I don’t know, Billy.’ I squeezed the bridge of my nose, trying to ease the headache that spread out from there. ‘It’s been a bit of a rough day.’
‘Well, it’s going to get rougher if we don’t do something,’ he pointed out. He looked around at the screechers. They were still approaching slowly, eyeing the fallen Beast, not yet realising it was dead. The moment they did, there would be nothing to hold them back.
I turned to Billy. ‘And what should we do?’ I asked him. ‘Because I’m open to suggestions here.’
‘We run,’ Billy said. ‘We can run.’
‘Run where, exactly?’
‘The church,’ he said quickly. ‘We can hide in the church.’
I shook my head. ‘No, we can’t. It’s full of screechers. They’d—
Billy pushed past me, panic flashing across his face. He made a dive for Ameena, but she was too fast. I turned to see her sprinting away, running straight for the closest group of screechers.
‘Ameena, stop!’ I cried, but she didn’t slow. The screechers ahead of her began lumbering more quickly, teeth gnashing as they staggered forward to intercept her.
‘What’s she doing?’ he asked. ‘Is she trying to get herself killed or something?’
The realisation hit like a hammer blow. ‘Oh, God,’ I whispered. ‘She is. That’s exactly what she’s trying to do.’
Taking their cue from the others, the rest of the screechers began to pick up the pace. Their screams and howls filled the air as they began shambling and leaping and bounding towards us and towards Ameena.
I heard Billy whimper. ‘We’re going to die. We’re going to die!’
‘We can’t die,’ I said. ‘If we die, then he gets away with it. He gets away with killing my mum.’
A jolt of electricity buzzed through my scalp. I knew that using my abilities was playing right into my dad’s hands, but what choice did I have? If I died, he got away with it.
And there was no way he was getting away with it.
I closed my eyes. The blue sparks I saw whenever I used my abilities shimmered behind my eyelids as I raised both hands and let my imagination take over.
There was a whumpf as a circle of snow swirled up into a blizzard around us. It hit the screechers like a solid wall, battering them back, buying us some time.
Ameena stopped running. She didn’t turn to look at us, just sank down on to her knees and stared straight ahead. I set off towards her, pulling Billy behind me.
‘Come on, help me get her,’ I said. ‘We’ll take her to the church.’
