"I bet you didn't think this was how you'd be spending your summer," Thelma remarked to Leon as they strolled through the trees, each of them brandishing a branch they'd collected en route and sharpened to a point.

"I was thinking of going to Ibiza," recalled Leon, a touch of nostalgia in his voice.

"This is pre-Ella, I assume."

"Yeah, well, somehow I don't think fun in the sun is quite her thing."

"Hoping you might get laid, were you?"

He shrugged aimlessly, not bothering to deny it.

"Well, that's one way of losing your cherry, I suppose."

Leon shot her a glare. "Thelma!"

"Don't 'Thelma' me. As if it was such a deep dark secret. You'd have been better off going to Soho and just paying for it, you know. Probably would have got shut of it sooner. People go to Ibiza for the clubs, not the sex."

"And what did you think you'd be doing? Package holiday to the isle of Lesbos?"

"Oh, like I haven't heard that one before." Thelma trailed her branch along the ground, a studied sort of casual. "Actually, I was planning on doing something with Cassie."

"Pre-the whole ghost thing."

"And after. She was a witch, remember, like Ella. She could see and hear me as clearly as you can." She stopped, stabbing the branch into the ground, feeling hot tears prick at her eyes as she imagined what it would have been like.

"Probably would have really pissed her off, me haunting her at home as well as at school. Or wherever she would have gone...other relatives, maybe. You know her mum was a mental patient?"

He nodded.

"It didn't matter where she went, though. I just wanted to be with her."

What Leon made of this confession, Thelma wasn't sure. She found herself avoiding looking at him, feeling embarrassed at baring her soul to him, not really sure why she had. Maybe the End of Days was like PMT for ghosts or something. She'd never been much of a deep thinker, always preferring to let her mouth do the talking, but suddenly she couldn't stop thinking – what had come before, what was likely to come after, what might have been.

It was making her head hurt. Not to mention turning her into a emotional wreck.

"But instead I'm stuck here with nothing else to do but watch you and Ella slobber over each other every second of the day."

She grinned as she watched Leon getting to grips with the image, cheered up hugely by the look of abject horror on his face. Thelma Bates, the peeping phantom. If that didn't put them off, nothing would. It was better than a bucket of cold water.

"Oops, sorry – haven't dampened your rampant libido, have I?"

Leon made a face at her as she retrieved her branch and they continued walking.

"Don't worry, Thelma. There's bound to be a hot lesbian ghost out there somewhere you can get your own rocks off with."

"There already was..." She sighed, feeling a pang of regret. It still hurt to think of Maya's raven locks and sweet Irish accent. More than that, it hurt to think how Malachi had tainted their short time together. He'd killed Maya on a whim so he could use her as a tool to manipulate Thelma, and it had worked exactly as he'd planned. Thelma had betrayed Ella and Leon on more than one occasion in the hopes of salvaging her last chance to find happiness. But it had all been for nothing. Malachi was still wreaking havoc on the world, and Maya was gone forever, caught in the crossfire.

Just like Cassie.

"Ella killed her," she finished, not entirely sure which of the women she'd loved and lost she was referring to.

"You'll just have to turn straight then."

"Hey, I might be dead but I'm not that desperate."

Leon whirled around suddenly and impaled a nearby bunch of leaves that were rustling gently. Thelma peered over his shoulder as he removed the stick from the ground, but there was nothing stuck on the end of it except a clump of soil. He shook it off, frustrated.

"Thelma, this is hopeless!"

"There's got to be something we can kill."

"There's nothing alive in these woods," Leon protested. He gestured around them. "We've been out here for hours. Have you seen or heard anything?"

"Just you and your big mouth."

He ignored the jibe. "Usually in the woods you get those weird flying insect things—"

"Ooh, thunderbugs – I hate them."

"No insects. No animals. Not even any birds singing. There's nothing here except us. It's like we're in the twilight zone or something."

"Leon, you're starting to creep me out."

"This is starting to creep me out," Leon said. He took his branch and flung it away from him with a grunt of effort. It flew across the clearing and hit a tree before sliding uselessly to the ground.

Thelma tutted. "What was the point of that? Now we'll have to go and fetch it."

"We'll get another one."

"No way. My teeth are still hurting from sharpening that thing..."

She tucked her own stick between her wings and trotted off in determined pursuit of Leon's. He trudged after her despondently.

"Hey, come on, Leon. It'll be okay."

"The world as we know it has gone up in smoke, Thelma. How can that possibly be okay?"

"You got back with Ella?" she offered hopefully.

"Yeah, I know, but..." He sighed. "It's just weird, you know – this End of Days thing. We've got no idea what it really means, or what's going to happen."

"My guess," Thelma said, "is that at some point there's going to be a bloody big battle."

"You're not helping."

"Well, I don't know what to expect any more than you or Ella do! I've never lived through the apocalypse before, have I?"

"Is that really what this is?"

Thelma softened a little, seeing fear on his face. He'd grown up so much recently that sometimes she forgot he'd once been a normal, obnoxious teenager with nothing more to worry about than raging hormones and a non-existent sex life. Hell, sometimes she forgot that she'd once been that too – taking out the obnoxious bit, of course. But now school was out for the summer, and she was dead, and he was in love with a five hundred year old witch.

Sometimes weird just didn't cut it.

"Try to look on the bright side. At least you won't have to take your A Levels now."

He grinned. "True."

"And you don't have to be worried that being with Ella is keeping you from leading a normal life. No such thing as normal anymore."

He looked at her seriously. "I've never worried about that."

"I know, but she has... It's different for her, Leon. It was her world you were getting involved in – her fight."

"Well, now it's mine. Ours," he amended.

Thelma frowned. "There was me thinking we wouldn't be doing any fighting. Since we don't have a side and all."

He looked a little confused at that, but didn't question it. "We can't just sit in the woods and do nothing."

"Speak for yourself, mister. I've got all of eternity to wait here and see who kicks whose butt in this battle."

Leon rolled his eyes, apparently thinking she was joking.

"Malachi's not going to come looking for me. And he probably thinks Ella's dead. He sent you – all right, evil you – to kill her; it's not as if he ever came to check you'd done it. He's not going to wonder where you are, either. He probably didn't even notice when we cut you loose, he's got that many other souls to suck..."

"There are just so many things wrong with that image," Leon muttered.

"You said it yourself," Thelma continued, a desperation she hadn't realised she felt rising with every word, "it's not going to make any difference who wins. If that's true, there's no point in us getting our hands dirty, is there?"

He looked at her sceptically. "What do you suggest we do instead?"

"Find somewhere to hide out until all this is over. Preferably somewhere with a well-stocked fridge."

"You're not serious."

"Well, why not?" She stared him out for a second and then looked down, wringing her hands. "I feel like we're in limbo right now, Leon, and I know we can't go back but I'm not sure I want to go forward, either. We might not know what's out there waiting for us, but I know this much – it's nothing good. And if nothing good's ever going to come out of this war, then I don't see much point in fighting it. What would we be fighting for?"

He opened his mouth to reply, but she didn't wait for the answer and bent down to retrieve the stick instead. But by the time she'd picked it up and turned around again, he still hadn't spoken. He was staring at the tree ahead of them, his mouth still hanging half-open.

"Thelma, why are there funny marks on the trees?"

"I think they do orienteering round here. The scouts used to camp out in these woods every summer." She held the stick out to him with one hand on her hip. "You didn't answer my question."

"Not those kinds of marks. Look – it's like someone's scratched some kind of symbol into the bark."

Thelma turned around and squinted at the tree, which was etched with deep furrows in the shape of an elongated Z. "Oh yeah..."

"Some of the other trees we passed were the same," Leon said as he went closer, intrigued. "Didn't you notice?"

She shrugged but followed him to get a better look. "People are always scratching things into trees."

"Not like this they're not."

They stared at the odd etching in silence for a second.

"I wonder what it means," Leon said. He lifted a finger as if to trace the sinister looking outline, to Thelma's alarm. She smacked the branch she was holding down on his arm and he pulled back instantly, grimacing.

"Jesus, Thelma!"

She folded her arms, unrepentant. "Didn't your mother ever teach you to look and not to touch?"

"We can't just ignore it. It might be important."

"For God's sake, Leon! For all we know it's something to do with this end of the world thing, some mystical mortal zapper that'll copy your DNA and then kill you dead!"

He raised an eyebrow. "Thelma, you're overreacting."

"Or maybe it's a deadly fungal disease. Do you know? No! You don't!"

He stepped back from the tree, his eyes blazing.

"Well, at least I'm taking an interest."

"No, you're trying to get yourself killed. Great idea, Leon. Almost as great as that other one you had. You know, the one about contacting Mephistopheles so he can hand our heads to Malachi on a silver platter..."

He snatched the branch off her. "I don't see you coming up with any better ideas."

"What would be the point? According to you, what we do doesn't matter anyway because the outcome of this End of Days crap is already predetermined."

"According to Mephistopheles," Leon corrected.

She scowled. "Whatever."

"And he didn't say it was predetermined. He said there were dark days ahead whichever side won."

"Oh, well, that's all right then, isn't it!"

He sighed and pushed his hair back from his eyes. "Thelma, this morning you were itching for us to go back to Medenham and do Malachi in. I don't understand what's changed."

"Well, for starters, the bloody book decided to desert us, didn't it?"

"That doesn't mean we should sit around doing sod all for the rest of time."

"Plus we're stuck out here with no idea what's going on outside, absolutely no idea what to do next, and not a sausage to eat. Quite literally... And I'm scared, okay? I'm scared."

The word reverberated around the thicket of trees for a long moment.

"You're a ghost," Leon said eventually. "It's not like you're going to die."

"You might. So might Ella, if someone hits the right vein." She paused, swallowing hard, trying to make him understand. "Everyone I love has left me. I don't want to lose the two of you as well. And if we get involved in this, there's a very good chance I will."

He stared at her, hard. She flashed him a half-smile.

"I might not want to shag you, but it doesn't mean I don't care."

Leon grinned playfully. "Thelma, I'm touched."

"Actually, I think that's Ella's job."

"Look," he said, choosing his words with care, "I don't like this any more than you do. But we're involved in it, whether we want to be or not."

She sighed, still struggling with it. "I guess so."

"And like I said. This is our fight now, too. It's not just about Ella, or about Malachi, or any of that warriors of destiny crap. The whole world's at stake. I've got family out there, friends, and I want a say in what happens to them. I mean, Tom died because of this shit..."

His voice trailed off, leaving the details unspoken: that it was him who'd killed Tom, beheading him after being duped by Malachi into believing he'd joined the ranks of his incubi. Yesterday he'd lashed out at Ella for it, blaming her for making him feel so inadequate that he was prepared to murder his best friend to prove he was worthy of her love. Today, Thelma wasn't sure if his reticence was down to the fact that it was too painful to talk about, or because there was simply no point in going over it.

"Even if us doing something doesn't make a difference," Leon said quietly, "it'll make a difference to us – because at least we'll have tried. Don't you get that?"

"I suppose."

"Doing nothing isn't an option anymore."

"Which kind of begs the question – what other options are there?"

He thought about it for a second. "Well, it all comes back to Malachi, right?"

"Right."

"Then we need to find a way of getting to him."

Thelma shrugged. "Same way as you get to any evil dictator."

"Bomb him into submission?"

"Cut off the source of his power."

Leon twirled the branch idly, maintaining a deliberate silence. Thelma got the distinct impression that she'd fallen straight into some kind of trap.

"Oh, come off it, Leon. I can't go into their dreams and unplug all his groupies. I might have forever, but I don't have that long."

"But Malachi works by exploiting people's deepest desires, doesn't he?"

"Well, yes, but—"

"Then maybe we need to figure out what his deepest desire is. If granting everyone else's desires brings them under his control, then maybe—"

"We can do the same to him." She grinned, loving the idea of Malachi having his own strings pulled for a change; imagining the possibilities. But the smile faded away as quickly as it had appeared.

"It'll never work, though."

"Why not?"

"He's bound to have protected himself against something like that. A spell, maybe, or some kind of potion. There's no way he'd want me poking around in his grubby little head, even if I could get close enough to do it."

She folded her arms. "Next."

"How does mass murder grab you?"

Thelma didn't like the sound of that. Leon had never been exactly chopper happy; Ella might have been wielding the axe with abandon around Medenham, but for him it was strictly a spectator sport.

Until Tom.

A shiver ran down her spine as she wondered if it wouldn't have been better for him to fall apart than to get all gung-ho about it. It occurred to her suddenly that maybe it wasn't all it seemed. Maybe this was just his way of dealing with it, or more likely with the poisonous prospect of having to kill again. He was putting it out there so she would tell him her opinion of it without ever once straying onto the messy subject of how he felt about it. It really was so very male.

She didn't want to give him false hope. Slaughtering enough of Malachi's followers so he was weak enough to kill was not going to be easy, in more ways than one.

"The three of us against hundreds of soulless zombies?" she said. "A, those aren't good odds, and B, I'm assuming you've never seen 'Night of the Living Dead'?

Leon raised an eyebrow at her. She rolled her eyes, offended.

"Oh, please. I'm dead, not undead. Admit it, Leon. You're just clutching at straws here."

"Well, you wanted options," Leon reminded her, not looking discouraged. "You might not like any of them, but that doesn't mean we don't have them."

Feeling a ray of hope break through the gloom for the first time, Thelma narrowed her eyes and pointed a finger at him. "Ella was right. You are clever."

He beamed. "She said that?"

"She was bleeding to death at the time. I wouldn't read too much into it."

He nodded agreeably, but the smile that still tugged on the edge of his lips made it clear the comment meant more to him than he was admitting. Being Ella's equal had been such a big deal to him. Annoyed by the constant kissing as she was, it had warmed even Thelma's cynical heart when Ella had finally got down off her high horse and accepted him as such. Even if it had taken the threat of dying to make her do it.

She was on the point of making a smart remark about how the shift in the balance of power between them was going to affect their sex life when something caught her eye.

"Oh my God, Leon!"

He followed her gaze down to his shoes, the toes of which were stained with bright red blots. As they watched another droplet landed, spreading another scarlet spiral across the scuffed white leather.

Frowning, Leon put a hand to his head to feel for the mysterious injury.

"If I don't get you back in one piece, Ella's going to kill me," Thelma said, anxiously stuffing her knuckles into her mouth. She removed them again, to quell the urge to chew on them. "Well, you know what I mean."

"I haven't cut myself," Leon said, confused, as he finished patting himself.

"You must have. It can't be me, and it's not like it's..." She glanced overhead, almost too scared to look. "...raining blood."

She squeezed her eyes shut as the fear came flooding back, trying to keep it all out, praying that her apocalyptic imaginings weren't about to come true. Until she remembered how unlikely it was there was anyone listening to her prayers at the moment – and until she heard Leon's voice.

"It's not raining," he said grimly. "It's the trees. They're what's bleeding."

Thelma opened her eyes through outstretched fingers and watched as the blood oozed out through the symbol scratched on the bark of the tree in front of them. Leon stepped backwards, trying to make it look casual, but quickly abandoned the pretence. He shook the offending foot frantically, screwing up his face in disgust.

"It's like they're hurt," Thelma realised, both repulsed and fascinated.

"Is that possible?"

"It's the End of Days. Anything's possible."

"A book that unwrites itself is one thing," Leon said as he removed his shoe and wiped it on the grass, "but trees that bleed? That's just not natural."

"No, it's not," Thelma agreed. Suddenly the quip she'd been about to make about Leon and Ella's relationship, about how the balance of power between them had shifted, rose again in her mind. And when she remembered something else, something Peggy Launceston, full-time Egyptologist and part-time Medenham ghost, had said to her, realisation dawned.

"It's unnatural, Leon. Of course! It makes perfect sense!"

He frowned as he slipped the shoe back on. "It does?"

"Don't you see? The natural order was already disrupted – that's why I'm here. Now Malachi's destroyed it completely. There's no balance anymore, not between natural and unnatural, between good and evil, between anything. And they don't want there to be."

Leon looked around uneasily, as if the ground was going to open up and swallow them any second.

"Hearts and minds of men my arse," Thelma scoffed. "The greedy bastards want more than that. They want the lot – and this war is not going to stop until one of them gets it."

"So...everything's all up for grabs?"

"Everything and everyone. I mean, for God's sake, they're even fighting over the trees..."

On any other day it might have been funny. But as they stared at the tree in front of them, still dripping eerily, in a way nature had never intended it to, Thelma had never felt less like laughing.

"First blood," she said softly.

"To Malachi's side, I suppose."

"What makes you say that?"

"It's obvious. He was the one who started all this, wasn't he?"

"Yeah," Thelma recalled tactlessly, "he always was good at scoring."

Leon shuffled his feet. "We should get back to Ella."

"Aww. You really can't bear to be parted from her, can you?"

"Well, we haven't found what we came looking for, and if the trees are anything to go by, I'm not sure I want to."

"Me either," Thelma agreed, idly imagining them being chased through the woods by a giant squirrel with big sharp teeth. Or maybe something really frightening, like a wild boar that was looking for the ghost who'd eaten all its relatives. She swallowed nervously. "I really don't want to be someone else's dinner."

Leon frowned at her. "Eh?"

"So," Thelma said, cursing her overactive imagination, "I guess we'll just have to figure out what to do next on empty stomachs."

Plucking her unused spear out from between her wings, she looked at it mournfully, fondly imagining what might have been impaled on it and then roasted on the fire ready for her consumption. Some kind of rodent, perhaps. They did say everything tasted of chicken, after all, and that would have been the next best thing to pork...

"Which way is it then?"

"Back the way we came."

Thelma turned around and peered at the cluster of trees ahead of them, stretching into the distance as far as she could see. "I don't know, Leon. It all looks the same to me."

"Don't worry," he said. "I know exactly where we're going."

"Let's hope so," Thelma muttered as Leon strode ahead of her, full of confidence. She tossed her branch into the dense foliage and followed, her fingers firmly crossed that there would be no ghost-eating pigs lying in wait for her.