Uncle Max was doing his best to make a horrendous racket. “I’m not leaving until that monstrous woman has explained herself,” he shouted loudly, banging his fist against the open door. “She took a potshot at my nephew, and I intend to tell the police! Do you hear me? She’s not above the law, you know!”

He leaned toward the butler and shouted over his shoulder, up the stairs. “I said, YOU’RE NOT ABOVE THE LAW, YOU KNOW!”

“Sir, as I said before”—Gerard put his hand to Uncle Max’s chest and tried to push him back onto the doorstep—“Madame Cutter is not at home at present.”

“Don’t you touch me!” Uncle Max held up his fists and started boxing the air to show that he meant business. “I might be an old man, but I can still throw a punch.”

“Please, sir, calm yourself.” Gerard held up his hands.

A scream sounded from the kitchen.

“CALM MYSELF?” Uncle Max shouted.

Gerard looked over his shoulder at the door to the kitchen and then back at Uncle Max.

Millie screamed again, and Gerard took a step backward.

There was no choice: Uncle Max drew his fist back and threw a punch that connected with the butler’s jaw and sent him flying backward.

“OUCH!” Uncle Max hopped about, waving his fist. He hadn’t hit a man for at least twenty years. He’d forgotten how much it hurt.

The butler was out cold on the hall floor. “That’s for clobbering my nephew,” Uncle Max said, stepping into the house to check that the butler wasn’t seriously hurt. “Sorry, old bean. You did save him, too, I know that,” he whispered to the unconscious man. “You’re going to have a sore jaw and a lump on your head when you wake up, but I suspect it’s better she finds you this way.”

Leaving the front door wide open, Uncle Max went back out onto the doorstep as Darkus appeared around the side of the house. Max ran to his nephew and relieved the beetles of their heavy human cargo, pulling his brother onto his broad shoulders.

“Run, lad. Get the car open.”

Darkus ran ahead, and the beetles followed him like a storm cloud.

They reached the car and gently laid Bartholomew down on the backseat. Darkus covered him with a blanket. In the morning light, his dad looked deathly pale.

The beetles piled into the trunk.

Bartholomew Cuttle’s eyes flickered open.

“Max?”

“Listen to me, Barty.” Uncle Max leaned in over Darkus’s shoulder. “We need to get you to a hospital, but first there are two children who need protecting from Lucretia Cutter. Can you hold on?”

“Yes.” Bartholomew smiled at Darkus. “I’m okay now.”

“Good. We need to get back to Nelson Parade,” Uncle Max said, getting in behind the wheel. “Hurry!”

He revved the engine as Darkus slid into the passenger seat and slammed the door.

As they drove away from Towering Heights, Darkus looked back and saw a flood of dark shapes like giant ants sweep across the white gravel of the driveway, stopping at the gates.

 

 

Lucretia Cutter stepped out of her car, her chitin feet clicking as they struck the pavement, the sound deadened by the dense black fabric of her skirt. Her head swung from left to right and back again. Something wasn’t right.

Ling Ling, her chauffeur, hurried around with her canes. She took them, adopting a pose of fragility, but barely leaned on them as she lurched across the road.

“Craven,” she barked at the man in the gutter, “explain.”

“They attacked us,” he bleated.

“Who did?”

“The beetles.”

“Where’s Dankish?”

“Inside.”

“What’s that stench?” Lucretia Cutter recoiled.

“Poo,” Craven whispered.

Humphrey lumbered out into the street, with Pickering still strapped to his back and a broken Dankish clinging to his ankle. The men were covered from head to toe in biting, scratching beetles. As Humphrey reached the curb, the Goliath beetle dropped to the ground and gave a commanding screech. All the beetles scurried and flew down the drain by the side of the road, swift and fluid as water.

“Stop them!” Lucretia Cutter swung round. “They’re escaping!”

As the beetles disappeared down the drain, Lucretia Cutter bounded forward and swiped at the Goliath beetle with one of her canes, knocking it over onto its back. Its legs pawed at the air. Lifting her arm high, she hammered her cane down onto its abdomen, piercing its armor and killing it dead.

“Get up, you fools!” she barked at the men on the ground, lifting her cane and shaking it for them to see. “They’re just beetles!”

From his position inside the Laundromat, Bertolt choked back tears at the sight of Goliath impaled on Lucretia Cutter’s stick, and a surge of anger exploded in his chest. “They are not just beetles!” he murmured, grabbing his detonator board and flicking down another switch. “For Goliath.”

Lucretia Cutter stumbled, dropping the cane with the skewered beetle as a third explosion rocked the street.

“What is happening?” she shouted angrily. Spinning around, she realized there were clusters of people on the pavement watching her. The wail of sirens rose in the distance, and the number of concerned people gathering around Lucretia Cutter was growing.

A news van drove up the street and screeched to a stop. A blond girl in a smart suit scrambled out, clutching a microphone. Hot on her heels was a bald man carrying a camera.

“Emma Lamb from News Desk BBTV,” the girl called out as she ran toward Lucretia Cutter.

Ling Ling moved into a defensive stance between her boss and the cameraman, ready for a fight. The crowd surged forward to look at the enigmatic woman standing in the middle of the road.

Three police cars drove up one end of the street and two fire engines approached from the other. Emma Lamb ushered her cameraman forward to capture the scene.

Lucretia Cutter inhaled deeply through her nose to calm the rage that was building up inside her. She leaned her head to the right until her neck made a crunching noise. “Humans,” she hissed as an ambulance arrived behind the fire engines.

 

 

Bertolt slipped out of the Laundromat and into the street, merging with the crowd.

“And this is for kidnapping Darkus’s dad,” Bertolt whispered, flicking his last switch.

The final explosion dropped the shop ceiling on the ground, carrying the weight of all the floors above. It made a deafening boom that sent the boards flying off the front of the Emporium and caused a mushroom cloud of dust to rise up into the sky above the building. Everyone in the street screamed and scurried backward as a red-and-black metal sign with MR. GAMBLE’S EXOTIC PIE SHOP scrawled on it came flying out of the building and embedded itself into the roof of a police car. The screams became wails and gasps as the crowd stared at the place where the Emporium had stood. A series of hanging walls and toothless stairs was all that was left inside the empty brick shell.

There was a minute of stunned silence. Then a ripple of murmurs and anxious shouts were accompanied by more gasps as a girl in a red tracksuit stumbled out of the rubble. It was Virginia, smeared with dirt and covered in dust.

She locked eyes with Bertolt and winked. Then:

“Help me!” she cried, and fainted.

Three firemen came running forward, followed by the cameraman. A blanket was wrapped around Virginia’s shoulders and she was carried out of the ruins of the building. As she passed Humphrey and Pickering, she pointed and started screaming hysterically.

“It was them! They kidnapped me!” she cried, and then pretended to faint again.

“Wait! What? No!” Pickering cried, confused. “We kidnapped a boy, but he disappeared.”

Two police officers marched over and slammed handcuffs onto his wrists.

“This is a mistake—it was a boy, it was a boy!” Humphrey protested. The policemen shoved him into the back of their van and closed the door. “I’ve never seen that girl before in my life!”

 

 

Lucretia Cutter stood frozen in the midst of the chaos, holding on to her canes and staring at the girl who had clambered out of the rubble. She carefully studied the people around her, but none of the faces were familiar.

She could feel unseen forces working against her.

An old mint-green car pulled up behind the fire engine, and a boy got out of the passenger seat. Lucretia Cutter’s mind whirled, synapses firing messages back and forth as she tried to make sense of what she saw. She recognized the boy; he was Novak’s companion, the one who had inexplicably escaped from her house yesterday.

A man she faintly remembered from her past—a man who’d stood taller when she’d last seen him—scrambled out of the driver’s seat of the car and opened the back door.

“No!” she screeched with rage as she saw Maximilian Cuttle lift his brother up and help him to stand.

All three of the Cuttles turned to face her, defiant.

“How . . . ?” Lucretia Cutter choked.

“It’s over, Lucy,” Bartholomew Cuttle said in a voice as strong as stone. “I should have put an end to this before you became toxic with power and greed.”

She snarled, her face contorting with hate.

But Bartholomew Cuttle only smiled. “I’m going to bend heaven and earth to stop you,” he said. “I will tell the world who you are, and when they see the truth, all of humanity will rise up and sweep your abominable empire off the face of this planet.”

Darkus looked at his father with shock. He’d never heard him sound so angry and serious.

Lucretia Cutter looked scornfully at the man she’d kept imprisoned in her cell for six weeks. Barking out a humorless laugh, she raised one of her canes, flicked down a trigger from its stem, and pointed it at Bartholomew Cuttle’s heart.

“NO!” Virginia screamed, struggling to get away from the fireman holding her.

“NO!” Bertolt cried, hurling himself forward, crashing into Lucretia Cutter’s legs just as Darkus flew across the hood of the car, pushing his father to the ground.

A shot rang out as Lucretia Cutter fell.

“Dad?”

“Hellfire!” Uncle Max scrambled to his feet.

“Darkus! Darkus, are you okay?” Bartholomew grabbed his son. “Oh no! NO! My boy!”

Darkus sank into his father’s arms, gripping his shoulder, blood oozing between his fingers.

Uncle Max turned and shouted, “MEDICS, HERE! NOW!”

Lucretia Cutter’s head hit the road, her trademark sunglasses bouncing away across the tarmac. Covering her face with her hands, she kicked viciously at Bertolt, who was clinging desperately to her legs.

Virginia saw an enraged, hissing Baxter fly at Lucretia Cutter, stabbing between her fingers at her naked eyes with his sharp horn.

Lucretia Cutter made a hideous sound, part scream, part hiss, as if she were burning.

And then there was a lithe body in black, springing in, grabbing Bertolt around the waist and tossing him aside. Ling Ling whirled around gracefully, kicking Baxter away from Lucretia Cutter’s face, dropping down and windmilling her arms under her boss’s armpits and lifting her effortlessly onto her back.

Before anyone could figure out what had happened, the ambulance crew had surrounded Darkus, and Ling Ling was running to the car with Lucretia Cutter.

“Stop her!” Virginia cried out. “She’s a murderer!”

But no one was listening. She watched, helpless, as Ling Ling deposited Lucretia Cutter into the passenger seat of the car, slammed the door, slid around the hood, and disappeared into the driving seat.

With a thunderous roar, the engine inside the mechanical scarab revved, and the car climbed the pavement, circumnavigating the emergency service vehicles and disappearing up Nelson Road.