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he told me,’ Rachel said. ‘I know, I know,’ she added, seeing the expression on Jay’s face. ‘I have no idea how he’s lasted this long. Listen, I was hoping that we could stay here for an hour or two, but we have to get him to Stirling now. Hunters or no Hunters.’
    ‘Rach, I hear you, but you know as well as I do that even the Doc can’t help you if you get stung. No one can.’
    Sam groaned, his face contorting as a fresh wave of agony swept through his body. Each breath was excruciating. He was vaguely aware of Rachel and Jay’s voices, but they were muffled, sounding like they were coming from somewhere distant. He felt himself slipping away from wherever those voices were coming from as the last of his strength faded and the world turned black.

4
    Eighteen Months Earlier
    ‘Come on, Sam, time to get up.’ Ellen Riley rolled up the blind in her son’s bedroom, filling the room with sunlight.
    Sam groaned in protest, pulling the duvet over his head.
    ‘It’s Saturday,’ he moaned. ‘Can’t I just stay in bed?’
    ‘You promised me that you’d tidy your room this morning and if you don’t do it now you won’t have time before going to the cinema with Ben. So, it’s your choice – you can stay in bed if you want, but I’m not taking you to his house until you’ve got this room sorted.’
    Sam lay in bed, listening as his mother went back downstairs. He stuck his head out from under the duvet and looked around. Yesterday, it had seemed like a pretty good deal, but now, in the cold light of day, it didn’t feel like quite such a reasonable arrangement. His bedroom looked as if a highly localised but extremely powerful tornado had passed through it. Video games were piled up, discs out of their cases, dirty clothes lay scattered on the floor, a pile of discarded comic books lay next to the bed and countless dirty mugs and glasses covered every flat surface. It was, even by his elevated standards, a spectacular mess.
    ‘This is going to take hours,’ he groaned to himself.
    He climbed out of bed and staggered across the landing to the bathroom. He turned on the shower and stepped inside, the torrent of hot water washing away the last of his morning drowsiness. He ran his fingers through his wet hair and felt the five-centimetre-long scar that ran across the back of his skull. He had no memory of the surgery that the scar was a relic of but he understood its significance. Since he was little he’d suffered from epilepsy and the device that had been implanted in his skull was to control the neural electrical storms which caused it. He’d had no seizures since and, although the procedure had been experimental at the time, it appeared to have been a remarkable success. He had to go for occasional check-ups, but otherwise he barely even knew it was there. His parents had told him about it just over a year ago and explained that he’d been extremely lucky to be one of the first people to receive the implant. Everything had been fine up until recently when he’d started getting really bad headaches that seemed to always start around the same area as his scar. His parents had been very worried and they’d taken him for a scan, but it had turned out that everything was OK. He’d just needed to take some anti-inflammatory pills and the headaches had faded away. He hadn’t had a headache for a couple of weeks now, but that didn’t stop his parents fussing over him.
    Sam threw on a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt before heading downstairs to get some breakfast. He passed his older sister coming up the stairs.
    ‘Morning, midget!’ she said with a grin. ‘Are you actually getting slightly shorter every day or is it just me?’
    ‘Very funny, Jess,’ Sam muttered, ‘but still not as funny as you getting dumped by Greg.’
    ‘He didn’t dump me,’ Jess snapped back. ‘It was a mutual decision.’
    ‘That’s not what he’s telling everyone,’ Sam said, grinning to himself.
    ‘What do