The demon wanted Deacon Brodie’s Heart badly enough to risk making me go fetch it for him. It was an order I wasn’t in a position to refuse.

And therein lay the rub. It was not a Harry Potter type cloak of invisibility so the owner could get up to jolly wheezes after everyone else had gone to bed. No, it was a deadly weapon that in the wrong hands could cause untold destruction. And the taloned grasp of this particular monster definitely counted as the wrong hands.

Yet another triumph in the Rose Garnet book of What The Hell Am I Going To Do Now.

And then of course there was the small matter of where I was going to find it. It wasn’t a body part of the good Deacon’s, no, it was just a talisman he’d owned and then lost. But the association with him had persisted as the Heart had passed from owner to owner down the centuries. By now, it could literally be anywhere and this was the sort of gallows humour that the demon was good at: bring me an impossible prize and I will let you live.

He looked at me pupils narrowed again to golden slits, shadows chasing wildly across the walls. I fancied I could almost here them scratching at the walls.

“One heart coming up,” I sing-songed moronically, starting to stumble over bodies and debris, desperate to cross the threshold and run as far away from my own personal demon as I could get.

For now.