We convince Lily that Lina is Ava's dog. It feels like a sick thing to do, but what else were we supposed to tell her? We have no idea what happened. Sefu was the one who called Ava. Lina's body was found in her house. They think it was recent. Suicide. For obvious reasons, we think otherwise. Despite everything that's already happened, it's as if this has made it all finally feel real. This isn't a joke anymore.

The six of us are huddled in the master bedroom trying to unravel what the hell has happened, but the reality is we have no idea. There's no sign of Lina's spirit, so she's either lost with poor memory of her life, or passed over. To which side, we don't know.

It's not even eight o'clock when we all head to bed. I don't think it's tiredness, not in the traditional sense. More like mental exhaustion. The additional inconvenience of having to have picked broken china from the bottom of my foot earlier doesn't help my mood.

I put my phone onto charge before falling onto the large mattress, and pull the thick duvet over me. Despite being the master bedroom, all that fits in here is the double bed and built-in wardrobe. We have an en suite, so that's a bonus.

I pull the duvet over my head, and hide myself underneath it with a huge groan as if that's going to make everything go away.

"Do you think she's passed over?" Carmen questions as she joins me underneath the covers.

I turn my body to face her. The bedroom lamp is switched on, illuminating her sharp cheekbones. I shrug. I don't know. I have no idea. All I know is that if it wasn't for me, she wouldn't be dead. Regardless of whether she ratted me out or not, she'd still be alive. I can't think like that. I know I can't, but it's really damn hard not to. How many people have to die on my behalf before this ends?

"Felix, don't feel bad. Please, she might well be the one who--"

"It's just a lot," I interrupt.

My eyes are locked into Carmen's honey-coloured ones as her hand finds mine under the covers. What if she didn't rat me out? What if she's innocent in all this, and Connor's spirits, or Connor himself, murdered her because she wouldn't give him what he wanted?

I close my eyes for a few seconds. This is how he'd want me to react. I can't give him that. I won't. Without moving from underneath the duvet, I pull Carmen towards my chest, and she nestles her face into my neck. I think we all just really, really need a good night's sleep. Sadly for me, I don't get that.

I wake up at around three in the morning. I don't think anything startled me awake, I just woke up. The cabin is deathly silent. Carmen's breathing heavily beside me, and I try falling back to sleep, but it's useless. After ten minutes or so, I give up and leave the room. When I emerge into the living area, the television is on. Annabel lies on the long sofa as she watches a shopping channel.

"Since when did ghosts need hoovers?" I question.

"For God's sake, Felix!" Annabel yells as she sits upright, and whips her head around to face me. "Way to scare the shit out of me!"

I shrug as I approach her, then fall onto the armchair. "You do it all the time."

"Mine is always accidental," my sister bites back. Sure it is. "And shut up. There's literally nothing else on."

It must be shit to never need sleep. Really boring. I've discussed it in length with Annabel in the past, and she says it doesn't faze her. I guess she doesn't really know any different.

"You okay?" Annabel asks as a man starts screaming about having one-hundred calls on the TV.

I shrug. Annabel sighs. She goes to speak again, but I shush her. I think I need time alone. I tell her this as I stand back up and spot Dad's hand-me-down jacket lying over one of the dining table's chairs. I pull it on, and mutter something about getting some fresh air to Annabel. When she goes to follow me, I tell her to stay. She hesitates, but lets me leave via a set of glass doors leading to the side of the cabin, and I'm surprised to find it's not too cold.

As I step onto the decking, I follow its wooden path towards the back of the cabin. The view is extraordinary. I've never seen the stars look so vivid, and the back of the cabin faces farmers' fields stretching as far as the eye can see. There are animals wandering around them, most of which are sheep, but they're few and far between. I guess most are asleep. The night is still, dark. Peaceful.

"Darkness isn't always menacing," a voice whispers, and it takes me a moment to realise it's echoing from the back of my mind.

I push it away. I'm not in the mood for these clowns right now. As if I ever am. I'm amazed it's taken them this long to break through. After everything that's happened over the past twenty-four hours or so, I thought I'd be way too weak to keep them at bay. At least this one wasn't a scream. That's always a bonus.

"We can tell you what happened," another voice murmurs.

I hesitate, but shake my head. Bad idea, pal. They're probably bluffing, anyway. How could they know what happened to Lina? They might not even be talking about that. I shut my eyes, and go to build the wall in my head back up, but not before another voice slips through.

"It was her. She revealed everything to Connor."

Do they really know?

"We do really know."

I swallow, then clench my jaw. The voices are distorted, and barely audible inside my head, but I can just about hear them clearly enough to make out what they're saying. I keep my eyes closed as the words slowly become clear.

There are some shrieks in the pool of banished voices, but the calm ones are bulldozing through. I'm engulfed in the darkness, and it's tearing at my body, my insides, my head. I resist the need to pull away, and instead, open my eyes to focus on something that'll distract me from the unpleasantry of it all.

I turn my attention to one of the sheep in the nearest farmers' field, and the voices are becoming clearer. I feel drunk, light-headed, woozy.

"The bitch didn't tell him about your memory. She chickened out," a voice explains. "Stopped at your location. She didn't have the balls to say any more."

I harden my focus on the puffy animal in my direct line of sight, but the dark, heavy feeling of the banished is pressing down on my chest. I've got no idea what death feels like, but it must be this. It can't be any worse than this.

"She should have, if she wanted to stay alive. She should have told Connor you had your memory back, that you've been getting to grips with us, that you're better now."

No, then he would've found me. He would've known not to send the Tracker to give me a false vision.

"It wasn't false," another voice says in a husky whisper. "He's not all bad. He cares."

The heaviness is suffocating me now, and I'm focusing so hard on the sheep ahead of me that it's making me dizzy. How can anything feel this dark, this heavy? The sensation is growing and growing, and it's about to peak, and it's going to kill me. It's literally going to kill me.

Except, it doesn't.

Suddenly, the feeling vanishes, and everything is clear. Crisp. Warm. Amazing. Perfect. Why was I so worried? Nothing can kill me. My eyes are still on the sheep as I start laughing. I'm practically cackling. That was so stupid. Why was I being so stupid? I'm a goddamn genius, invincible.

The sheep starts to scurry across the field, and it's so pathetic. I watch it, and imagine its insides, its organs, just churning away to keep its heart beating, its brain active. Stupid thing. I think of its lungs, inflating and deflating as if its life has any worth, its little brain's neurotransmitters keeping everything ticking like clockwork, its intestines twisting and bending out of shape as the animal writhes in pain while its brian bulges in its skull, its heart beating faster and faster until--

"Felix, what the hell are you doing?"

I blink, and the invincibility is pulled out from underneath me, and I'm standing on the decking of Carmen's wooden cabin in the middle of a dark, late May night. The sheep is yelping a few hundred yards away in the field, crying in pain, and Annabel's figure stands in front of me with a look I don't recognise on her face.

What the--What did--Was that real? I can't--I didn't--How is--

"Felix?" Annabel tries again.

I focus on her pale face as she watches me, still with that same unrecognisable look in her icy blue eyes. It's something between confusion and fear. The sheep is still making chortling sounds in the distance, but less so.

"It wasn't me," I say a little too loudly. "I mean, I--I don't know, it just started making weird sounds."

How did I even--No, it can't have been me. I didn't do that. I wouldn't do that. How would I even do that? I don't have any way of--Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Telekinesis. Can it do that? Can telekinesis let me do something like... like that?

"I didn't know--I don't know what was wrong with it," I say through a stammer.

"You didn't see anything attack it? Maybe it was a fox," Annabel offers, and I catch the fearful look in her eyes disperse a little. "I could literally hear the thing over the TV, it was horrible."

I shake my head. "I dunno, it just started... I dunno, freaking out."

Annabel nods slowly. "You should get back to bed," she says. "I think you're kind of exhausted, or... or, I don't know, something. You look really ill."

I nod. She's right. Maybe that's all it is. Maybe all this is in my head, maybe I didn't really do that. I'm probably just a bit delusional from the tiredness, and the stress. Yeah, it's probably just stress-induced something or other.

I follow Annabel's advice and head back inside the cabin, then make my way towards the bedroom Carmen and I are sharing. I don't even register myself getting into bed, and I must be shattered because when I wake up hours later, I realise I forgot to take my jacket off.

When I do wake up, the sun is illuminating the room via the small window to our left, but Carmen is fast asleep. Was last night a dream? What the hell was that? It can't have been real. What's wrong with me? I try not to think about it as I quietly get out of bed.

I pull my phone off charge and head towards the living area, but as I go to check the time on my phone screen, I freeze in the cabin's hallway. I have two missed calls and a voicemail. From Lina. Shit. I flicker my eyes up to look at the time. It's a little after eight. Is everyone else still asleep? As I near the living area, the sound of the television seeps into my ears, but when I enter, it's just Annabel.

"Hey, you feeling bett--What's wrong?" She manifests herself from the armchair to a few feet in front of me.

I don't say anything, just hold my phone out for her to read Lina's missed calls and voicemail notification.

"Shit. They're from the night of the fireworks. Have you listened to the voicemail? Why did she call you? Did she want to warn you?"

"I haven't listened to it yet," I mutter as I move past my sister to pull up a seat at the dining table.

Annabel manifests herself into the seat opposite. I take a breath, swipe the voicemail notification, set my phone on loudspeaker, and stare at it in my hands. Annabel's eyes are glued to the thing. I wait impatiently as a robotic woman with a neutral accent informs me I have one new message, and three saved messages. I'm bouncing my leg underneath the table, and I swear my heart is going to explode all over the rest of my internal organs at the rate its beating. I take a sharp breath as the voicemail from Lina begins to play.

"I am sorry!" it begins, and Lina's voice sounds muffled, as if she's forgotten she's speaking into a phone. "I--I am sorry, I did not--I--You must leave, he knows. He promised me, he--I do not know, I should never have said anything. I am so sorry. It was so inviting, so... so wonderful, it made anything seem possible."

She doesn't say it, but she's referring to turning dark, and I wish I didn't understand it as well as I do. I really wish I didn't.

"He knows where you are! I did not tell him anything else, I promise--I don't--I--" Lina pauses, her breath heavy. "A spirit came to me, it told me things, amazing things! I just had to tell him, to get them, I just had to tell him where you were and I would achieve them--I--It's not--I am sorry! I realised it was wrong, but too late--I--Please, Felix, leave the city! He knows nothing else!"

The line cuts off, and it's silent again. It was her, after all. As selfish as it is, it makes me feel better. Less guilty that she's dead. Should I take her word for it? Is that really all she told Connor? I lower my head to my hands and sigh. It must be. He can't know I've got my memory back, not if he sent that Tracker the night before last. Maybe Lina is telling the truth--was telling the truth.

I run my hands through my hair, again and again, and the voicemail has ended, but my heart is still racing.

"Felix? Hey, it's okay." Annabel's voice is melodic.

I can't breathe. No, not now. I'm over this shit. I don't need to be freaking out. There's no reason for me to have a goddamn panic attack right now. My mind is racing through Lina's advice on how to deal with this, except I don't want to be thinking about her, but I don't know what else to do. I'm pulling at my hair as my leg bounces more and more underneath the table, and Annabel is talking, but I can't hear her.

No, I won't let this beat me.

I lift my head from my hands, shut my eyes, lean my head back against the wooden panels behind me, and focus on my breathing as if it's the only sound, only feeling in the entire world. Slowly, my heartbeat starts to calm, and my breathing returns to that of a normal, functioning human being.

"Sorry," I apologise to Annabel as I open my eyes. "Ignore that. Analysis, thoughts, insights?"

Annabel stammers a little, then a small smile appears on her lips. "That was really quick, seriously, good job," she says, to which I shoot her a thumbs up. "I guess it's all pretty self-explanatory. Lina ratted you out, pussied out, tried to warn you, failed, then died."

I roll my eyes. "Well done, genius. I mean, do you think she did actually... y'know, end things herself, or did something of Connor's get to her?"

Annabel tilts her head as she clicks her tongue. "I'm not sure. It would be pretty ironic for your psychiatrist to commit suicide, and we know Connor's goons aren't the type to hesitate slaughtering someone."

"We can't know, not really," I mutter. "Not sure about you, but these past forty-eight hours or so have made me want to play with traffic." I pause. "Granted, that would be a lot less effective for you."

Once the others are awake, I spill all. Ava still hasn't told her family that we're actually in Wales, and not in England, so I suggest Lina's message is a clear sign that she can trust them. Still, she decides against revealing our location, though she seems a little chirpier. Silver linings, I guess.

As everyone discusses Lina and what her involvement means for us, I melt into the fabric sofa and think about last night. I can't get my head around it, nor do I know if I want to get my head around it. Did I really do that to the sheep? Maybe it was the banished, maybe they did something. I nod to myself. Yeah, it could've been them. I don't know how, but it could have been. I repeat this possibility in my head over and over again, but no matter how many times I say it to myself, I'm never quite fully convinced.