More tears tumbled down Tink’s cheeks. With the palm of her hand, she wiped them away, creating smudges in the sand dust. She sniffed and took a breath.

  ‘You have to cross the dunes when you’re sixteen.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Sam said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re a Lorimer. It’s part of the tradition, the rite. Every eldest son of a Lorimer, when they reach the summer of their sixteenth year, must cross the dunes and reach the sea. Crap! I can’t believe you don’t know any of this.’ Tink bit her lip and cast an anxious glance at the door.

  ‘You’re not making any sense. I don’t have to do anything. I’m just a boy from London.’

  ‘There’s a story, a really old one. We all know it; we’re all part of it. Alaric the woodcutter's son.’ Tink searched for a spark of recognition in Sam’s face. She found none and went on. ‘He made a deal to save his father and defeat the wyrm, Sugnar, and trap her. He hooked the horned serpent and with a line of rope spun from the silver of moonlight tied to the shaft of his axe, which he buried in the dunes, just below the surface. When Sugnar came for him, she was snared by the moonthread which was tied to the navel of the world in the roots of the world tree. This trapped Sugnar and stopped her harrowing the land or escaping back to the sea. For that, Alaric and all his descendants became Lorimers, lords and protectors of Hernshore and its woods. But to keep the great wyrm imprisoned and renew the luck of the Lorimers, each first born son and his father must cross the dunes when he comes of age.’

  Sam half-slumped, half-sat down on the side of the bath. ‘And that’s what this is?’ He spread his hands to indicate everything that had just happened to them.

  Tink nodded, shaking free more tears.

  It was a bit much to believe that he was an unwitting pawn in a magical legacy which had nothing to do with him other than the accident of his birth. The pang of annoyance at Michael that this was his fault was unsurprising, but it hardly registered against what Sam had experienced in the last five minutes. There had been the expanding sink hole in the playpark and its accompanying earthquake cracking the back of a road in an English country town. The sandstorm, containing figures veiled by the swirling dust, and a wave of sand pursuing them to this abandoned squat. There were other little things too. At the beach house he’d felt drawn to the dunes and the way they appeared to be moving. In the park, there was that little girl who vanished, and yes, maybe she had simply wandered off, but there was that uncanny sense of menace that went with it all. He tried and failed to stretch his disbelief to write everything off as natural phenomena which they had been unlucky enough to get caught up in. This left the implausible possibility there was something in what Tink was saying.

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  Adrenaline continuing to pump through his veins, Sam bounced up off the side of the tub. ‘We can’t stay here,’ he said, taking a focused interest in their surroundings.

  Tink sniffed. ‘We’re trapped, and it’s my fault,’ and she tried to hold back a sob.

  ‘Hey, come on. Cry later.’ It sounded harsh, but Sam said it softly, touching her forearm. It wasn’t because he was feeling kind and certainly not brave. If there was something Sam had learned about himself in the last year, it was that he was a coward. That’s what motivated him. Whatever this was, however crazy, he didn’t want to die. He wanted to run away and Tink was his best chance of achieving that goal.

  Sam offered his hands and helped Tink to her feet. She turned her head up to him, smiling. Not callow and light-heartedly, but the opposite. A smile far too old or maybe too serious, too knowing. It was like joking with the hangman. Sam’s mum used to joke like that, but the hangman was too grave a fellow to laugh at tragedy.

  Tink girded herself, swallowing back her fear. ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘Erm... well...’ Being so scared you wanted to run away wasn’t exactly a plan. Sam searched their surroundings. ‘We should check if the sand is getting upstairs.’

  He moved towards the door. If nothing else, it would confirm that this was more supernatural than an earthquake shifting the dunes. He didn’t think it was likely, and yet there was a piece of him that hoped it was true. When he reached for the weak chrome bolt, he came to a sharp halt. The world was not as it had seemed, and all the magic of childhood which life had made him shirk through his teenage years would be real again. It wouldn’t be found only in movies and books. It would be part of his life, and as scary as being a small child was, it was a time when anything seemed possible. Anything. A time when mothers never died, and heroes always survived.

  Heart pounding, Sam reached for the modesty bolt. Fingers about to touch it, the door twitched against the lock. They both jumped. Sam retreated a step and bumped into Tink. The door jounced in its frame again. Adrenaline surged, thundering like a torrent through his heart, piquing his senses. He searched for a way out and found their single option: the slender, frosted window over the bath. Tink saw it too. Unspoken, their minds were made up. They were even turning that way when the bathroom door shuddered violently in it frame and a gout of sand washed through the crack at the bottom, spreading out like an unwelcome mat.