None of the fuses appeared to have blown. She flipped the main breaker to OFF, then back to ON, but the house remained as dark and silent as a mortuary. Janet swore again, and flew to the front door. The overhead electricity wires wound up the road from Waddington village, and regularly got snarled in the branches that loomed out over the road from the trees on both sides.

Let’s hope it’s that, she thought, as she pulled on her coat. As long as it’s not the bloody substation again. Last time that blew it was a week before they got everything sorted.

Janet opened the front door and looked up at the telegraph pole that stood at the edge of the road. There was nothing obviously wrong, and she sighed as she trudged down the path; she was going to have to walk the two miles to Waddington, checking it as she went. The last time she rang the electricity company to report a fault the audibly bored operator had questioned why she hadn’t already done so, and she had no intention of giving them the chance to be snippy with her again.

She unlatched the gate and set off down the road. She walked briskly, her supernaturally powerful eyes raised towards the sky as she followed the electricity wires. As a result, she almost didn’t notice the van parked in the lay-by at the crest of the hill.

Janet’s first thought was to keep walking. A stationary vehicle was not an unusual sight in this part of the world, where the woods and back roads afforded people the kind of privacy that had become all too rare in the modern world, and she had learnt through bitter experience that people who parked in the darkness were usually not keen on being disturbed.

But something about the van made her pause. Its internal lights were on, and she could still feel the heat of its engine, which meant it had not been stopped for long, but she could hear neither voices nor the sounds that accompanied other things that might be happening inside the vehicle. She stared at the van for a long moment, then flew slowly across the lay-by and peered through the driver’s side window. The key was in the ignition, but she had been right; there was nobody in the van.

It was empty.

Janet frowned. It made no sense; poaching was still prevalent in the woods, as was trapping, and badger baiting, but if whoever owned the van was intent on illegal activity, why would they leave the key in the ignition?

Somewhere to her left a branch snapped.

She turned, surprised by the heat that had risen behind her eyes. The woods were full of noise, particularly to ears as sensitive as hers, but the sound had been different from the usual rustling and whispering; it had sounded more solid, more deliberate.

It had sounded heavy.

Janet stood in the lay-by, her eyes glowing softly, her senses heightened, her heart accelerating, and made a decision. She would turn back, and sort out the electricity tomorrow. She would walk the road to Waddington as soon as the sun set, and not a minute before. Because all of a sudden, she just wanted to get home. She wanted to get home as quickly as possible.

Snap.

She froze. This one had been further away than the last, she was sure of it, but she had heard something else, something that was unmistakably not natural.

Out in the darkness of the woods, she had heard a muffled laugh.

Fire roared into Janet’s eyes. She didn’t know why she was suddenly scared; she was old, and strong, and she knew this part of the world better than anyone else alive. But the fear was there, and it was real; it twisted in her stomach like an eel. She backed slowly away from the van, which now seemed somehow malevolent, hulking and dark and out of place. The gravel beneath her feet gave way to the smooth surface of the road, and she turned back the way she had come, towards home.

Snap.

Janet leapt into the air and flew along the road, her eyes darting left and right, searching the dark trees for whoever was moving between them. She would never usually display her condition so publicly, but in that moment, she didn’t care; she wanted to be safe in her kitchen, lighting candles and laughing at herself for being so easily spooked.

Her house loomed into view. Janet rose higher into the air and flew straight towards it, ignoring the gate and the wall and the path to the front door. She sped round the house, her heart pounding, and wrenched open the back door. She dived through it, and flung it shut behind her. Before it slammed into its frame, she heard a noise that sounded close, so close.

Snap.

Janet hauled open the drawer beside the stove, and pulled out a handful of thick candles. She struck a match and lit them; each one took several tries, as her hand was trembling. She could see perfectly well in the dark, but the pale yellow light of the candles calmed her, ever so slightly, as she took the phone down from its cradle on the wall. She lifted the handset to her ear, ready to call the police, knowing it was silly but not caring in the slightest.

Nothing.

The line was dead.

Janet stared at the phone, frozen where she stood. In the distance, she heard a Sentinel rumbling down towards the runway, but for once she paid the approaching plane no attention. She didn’t know what was happening outside her house, but she was now horribly sure that she was at the centre of it.

Footsteps crunched quietly down the path outside her front door as another branch snapped, so close that it must surely have been inside her garden. And there was something else: a low hissing noise, like gas escaping from a split pipe. Janet stared at the kitchen window, paralysed by terror, in the candlelit gloom.

Snap.

The sound unleashed something inside Janet; anger exploded through her, burning away the fear that had gripped her, and she strode through the house, her eyes blazing.

This is ridiculous, she told herself. Cowering in your own home like a child. You should be ashamed of yourself. You march right out there and you make whoever is doing this regret it.

She threw the front door open, a growl rising from her throat. The roar of the Sentinel’s engines was rising behind the house, partially deafening her as she strode out on to the path, her glowing eyes searching the darkness.

“Who’s there?” she shouted. “This is private property! Get away or you’ll be sorry!”

Nothing moved. Beyond the gate, the road and the woods were silent and still. The Sentinel was almost down, its engines screaming, its landing lights casting bright, artificial daylight across the house and its gardens.

“No?” she bellowed, her voice barely audible over the thunder of the landing plane. “Not willing to show yourselves? I thought as much!”

Janet turned back towards her house and felt her heart stop dead in her chest. The door had swung shut as she shouted at nothing, and there was something there, something white and dripping. She took a half-step towards it, the fire in her eyes fading, the Sentinel shaking the ground beneath her.

It was a wolf’s head, crudely sprayed on to the door with white paint.

A black-gloved hand pressed something soft and damp over her mouth and nose. Janet’s eyes flared red as panic and a pungent chemical smell filled her; she tried to move, to free herself, but her limbs felt like they were made of lead. Her mouth worked silently against the cloth, screaming for whoever was holding her to let her go, and her head swam as the plane screeched down on to the runway and thundered away into the distance.

Then her panic disappeared, drifting back into the darkness it had come from, and Janet was suddenly warm and calm and tired, more tired than she had ever been, so tired that she could no longer keep her eyes open.