My eyes boggled. Mr Stabby was in his human form, but that didn’t make his sudden appearance any less bizarre. Then it all made sense.

Victoria had used his knife to kill Marian.

They’d been working together this whole time.

“Hey, kid,” he said as he helped himself to slices of beef and loaded his plate with mustard. His multiple voices speaking at the same time were still there, but muted, as if he’d dialled them down.

“Ethan, sit down,” Victoria chided me. I’d jumped up when Mr Stabby walked in. My fists were clenched, my heart rate pounding, ready for battle. Realising my erstwhile enemy was not about to attack me, I slowly sat down again.

What else was I supposed to do?

“Where’s Dee?” I asked him.

“Dee?” the demon asked between mouthfuls. “Oh, you mean the genie? Yeah, she’s downstairs.”

‘She’. Very funny. I ignored the sarcastic reference to Dee’s less than stellar fighting abilities.

“Is Dee okay?” I insisted.

“Sure,” the demon shrugged. “Little crack on the noggin, nothing more.”

“Another little mystery of yours, Ethan,” Victoria commented. “Hanging out with a djinn in your spare time. I’m sure your story will be fascinating when we unravel it.”

More taunts, more smirks. I ignored her. I had more important things to consider. Dee was alive. Jess was alive. My friends were here, somewhere. Which meant there was hope. We could get out of this mess.

“We haven’t been introduced,” Mr Stabby said. He reached out a hand across the table. “People call me Balthazar.”

“Of course they do,” I muttered, ignoring the outstretched hand. Balthazar shrugged it off and went back to his plate.

“So when are we doing this?” Balthazar asked Victoria between mouthfuls.

“Soon,” Victoria promised.

“Why?” I half shouted.

“Why what, Ethan?”

“Why let me go to pick up Marian and then send Mr Stabby - Balthazar - after me?”

“It was his choice to go chasing after you. He thought you might reconsider and decide to take Marian to Section 13, which would have complicated things no end. I knew you wouldn’t, but from our side, it was a win-win situation. Either you’d bring us Marian, or he would.”

“You were working with him all along.”

“Helping them along, yes. We’ve been their sponsors, I suppose. How else do you think they were able to infiltrate Section 13, or know where to look for the files we needed?”

“The files that were useless in the end,” I said.

“Indeed. How did you work out who the other two cursed ones were, by the way?”

I kept silent. Either this was another one of Victoria’s games, or she didn’t know about the mysterious hacker. There was nothing to gain by saying anything about him.

“As interesting as all this is,” Balthazar commented. “We had a deal. Time to keep up your end.”

Victoria glanced at her brother, and I knew what was coming next.

It was the tiniest of conspiratorial glances, the faintest of smirks. The same looks that I’d had directed at me as Victoria had revealed herself.

Once you’ve seen someone’s true face, once you’ve seen the lies and deceit and how they operate, you can never unsee it. I’d seen Victoria for what she was. Seen her brother. Seen through both of them. I might not have known what game they were playing, but I knew how they played. With manipulation, deceit and lies.

I looked at Balthazar tucking into his plate of food and almost felt sorry for him.

The Pryces had what they wanted.

Balthazar was their next chump.

You’ve been played, I thought.

“We need to wait,” Victoria said.

Balthazar stopped shovelling food into his mouth.

Yup, here it comes.

“What do you mean?” Balthazar replied. “We agreed it has to happen tonight. As soon as the last cursed one was disposed of.”

“There are too many tests to run,” Victoria said. “We’ll have to postpone until we can be sure.”

The expression on Balthazar’s face was a mirror image of the shock I’d displayed an hour earlier. He was a little faster on the uptake than I’d been, but that didn’t make any difference now.

“We had a deal,” Balthazar repeated with a growl.

“We did,” Victoria said, “A deal which you spectacularly failed to deliver on. It was Ethan here who finished your part of the bargain.”

Shock and anger swept across Balthazar’s face.

He stood up, shifted into his demonic form.

Vincent barely moved a finger or said a word. A bolt of light shot from his hand and pinned Balthazar against the far wall. Balthazar shouted obscenities at the Pryces. Vincent snapped his fingers, and Balthazar’s mouth jammed shut.

“Such melodramatics,” Vincent sighed. Victoria giggled.

“Take him away,” Victoria said. Vincent snapped his fingers again, and Balthazar fell to the floor, unable to move. He was lifted out by two of the security guards.

I hadn’t moved a muscle in the meantime.

“Is he dead?” I asked.

“Good heaven’s no. There’s far too much valuable data to be gleaned from him.”

“It’ll wear off shortly,” Vincent added.

“What was your deal with him?”

Victoria looked at me with a coy smile. “Oh, Vincent, I believe Ethan is trying to get us to talk. Clever boy.”

“Quite. He had a point though,” Vincent said.

“Ethan?”

“No, Balthazar. We should press ahead tonight.”

Victoria looked as startled as a kid in April who’s been told it’s Christmas tomorrow.

“I thought we needed to do more tests?” she said.

“No, I’m fine. The power is more than enough, Vicky...”

“...don’t call me Vicky, dear.”

Vincent smiled, then his voice became more urgent.

“We need to act tonight before anyone realises what’s happening. No-one can stop us, not this early on. Not the government, not Section 13, not the Red Council. If we take all the magical energy now, before it scatters back into our world, no-one will be able to do anything to prevent it. We can take control of everything.”

“You think you can pull all the energy from Arcadia tonight?”

“I know it. And it has to be now, while it is still spilling back into the world. All the power has been locked away for seventy years. Now it’s ready to explode back into our dimension. This is a onetime event, Vicky. There won’t be another chance at this for us or anyone else. By tomorrow or the day after, the tidal wave of magical energy will have settled down. We either take it now or not at all. All it will take is one little portal and boom. We can be gods, the two of us together. Immortal, all-powerful, filled with all the magical energy in existence. The world will tremble beneath our feet. Reality will bend to our wills.”

Victoria clasped her hands together in front of her face, her eyes filled with wonder.

“Do you think we could be coronated?” she asked, returning to a playful tone.

It was as if this was all one big game to them.

“I don’t see why not. I will be king and you will be queen. Everyone will bow before us. If they don’t, then we’ll...hm, I think I prefer the term erase them to killing. Much less messy. Would you like the crown, dear?”

“Actually, I prefer gods, now I think about it. King and queen just sound so prosaic.”

“Gods it is then,” Vincent nodded. “There will be no rules for us, Vicky. Nothing we can’t do, no law of magic we can’t rewrite. No law of reality we can’t rewrite. We will have no limits at all.”

Victoria nodded, smiled, then pouted as a sudden whimsical thought crossed her mind.

“Shall we be cruel or kind deities?”

“We will be whatever we need to be.” Vincent replied.

Victoria sat back, satisfied with the answer. Their insanity had been dialled way past eleven as they switched between manic, power-hungry scheming and terrifyingly flippant asides. Their eyes gleamed with madness. In her imagination, Victoria was already unwrapping all the shiny presents under the unexpected Christmas tree. Imagining the one thing she truly wanted: absolute power. Absolute control. Reality dancing to the whims of her and her twin brother.

No limits whatsoever.

That was what it had been about all along. Victoria and Vincent were returning magic to the world so they could take it all for themselves. Transcend their mortality, just as they had transcended morality a long, long time ago.

Knowing what they were now, I couldn’t imagine anything more horrifying than all that power in their hands. Worse still, I had put everything in place to let them do it. I’d brought the last cursed one straight to them.

“Vincent, are you absolutely sure?” Victoria said.

“Completely. And if we don’t act now, and fast, we won’t get another chance.”

“You’re totally crazy,” Victoria said with admiration in her voice.

“You know it, toots.” Vincent winked at her.

“You’re both crazy.”

Victoria looked at me, her eyes dull. I was no longer of any interest to her.

“I’d almost forgotten you were here,” she said. She waved across to three of the soldiers. “Lock him up with all the others.”

This time, she wasn’t joking.