I can't sleep. Not after that. It takes several minutes for my breathing to even slow down.

I grabs Marks of Demons and flick through it, but not even that can calm me down this time. I slow down when I get to page 113, studying each word closely as I have a million times over the past week, desperately hoping that there's something I'd missed before, something that could help us. There isn't, of course. Nothing's changed. Just the same frustrating lack of information.

Nothing to help.

I shove the book away and grab my blue sketchbook from the bedside table. But I don't draw in it, not tonight. Not any night until we get home. No more drawing; I can't get distracted any more. I have to stay focused on Jamie and Marty. I tear past the pencil drawings of sad-eyed anime and shadowed portraits and dark, winged figures until I get to a blank page. Then I start writing. Writing plans, endless plans for what we could do next to save my brothers. After about half an hour I stop, and reread my words. There are two and a half pages of frantic, scribbling handwriting that I can hardly read. Each idea is more ridiculous and unrealistic than the last.

Seized with sudden anger, I fling the sketchbook as hard as I can at the bare, white wall of my room. No, not my room. The room I'm borrowing.

Then I realise that my throat is still dry and aching from the screaming and crying. I scrub hard at my face with my sleeve to get rid of the last of the tears, then throw off my stiflingly hot duvet. I need some water from downstairs. Maybe I'll be able to think better after I have some.

The house is eerily quiet as I walk downstairs. I've never known it to be this still, this quiet. With ten noisy children in one house, it's difficult to even get a word in. At night, it feels like a completely different place. The house is a stranger when it's cloaked in darkness, the air unfamiliar when it isn't humming with the sound of ten different voices, or the radio, or the discord of Teddy's ukulele. It makes me shiver.

I finish my water and begin to make my way back upstairs. But this time, there's something that catches my eye, something that wasn't there before. A thin slit of light is visible in the darkness, from behind a door that's open slightly. I don't even remember whose door it is in the dark. Before I even think, I'm opening the door wider, standing in the doorway. What I see makes me smile at last.

The bedside lamp is switched on, bathing Teddy's room in light. The yellow walls make it even brighter, and I have to squint as my eyes adjust. It's like walking right into a field of sunshine after several hours in a cellar. Teddy's curled underneath the patchwork duvet, his hair rumpled across his pillow, his eyelashes flickering a little. Crouched next to his bed is Jude, his long blonde fringe standing up comically. He's whispering to Teddy under his breath, so quietly that I can't hear the words, and his hand is resting gently in his hair, stroking it back, lulling Teddy into peaceful oblivion. As I watch, Teddy's eyes slide slowly closed, and his breaths fall into an easy rhythm. Jude hesitates for a second, then leans forward to kiss his forehead. As his hand brushes Teddy's cheek, I notice a silver ring glittering on his middle finger.

When he turns around to leave, he stops short at the sight of me in the doorway, beaming like an idiot. His cheeks stain faintly with pink.

"Shut up."

I hold up my hands in surrender, still smirking. "I didn't say anything."

"He woke up," Jude says defensively. "I heard him shouting in his sleep, and I thought I'd... He'd been having a nightmare."

"Is he okay?" I look anxiously at the slumped figure on the bed.

"He's fine now. We should probably leave him to rest now," He starts to stand up, then glares at me suddenly. "If you tell Eclipse, you're dead."

I laugh, but then cut myself off. Remembering, all at once, what I should be doing. Planning strategies and escapes and break-ins.

Jude gives me a weird look. "Have you been crying?"

"No," I fire back, a little too quickly. "I couldn't sleep."

Jude stares at me a little more, then stands up. "Yeah. Me neither."

He switches off Teddy's lamp and we stumble blindly back into the corridor. I head towards the general direction of next flight of stairs that lead up to my room, clumsy in the dark.

"Uh... Night," I say to Jude.

There's a moment's pause, then-

"Wait," Jude says, and I turn back to look at his shadowed silhouette, standing in front of his bedroom door. "Since we both can't sleep... Do you want to hang around for a while? I want to show you something."

Once again, I can't stop the corner of my mouth quirking upwards. But... I shouldn't. I have to focus on my brothers. I have to think of a plan.

But it's almost as though he's read my thoughts.

"Maya. There's nothing any of us can do, not right now. You'll go insane trying."

I hesitate, then I move towards him. I can hardly see him, but I imagine him smirking at me in the darkness. Then we go inside his room, and he fumbles around for a light switch.

It isn't until the light flickers on that I realise that I've never actually been inside Jude's room before. It's the only room in this house that I haven't seen, in fact. The light is so dim that it's easy for my eyes to adjust. The room doesn't make much of a change from the darkness, because the majority of things in here are black. Black painted floorboards, black curtains, black duvet... Mostly black walls. 'Mostly', because one of the walls is painted bright pink- the only flash of colour in the room.

"Teddy did that when I first came," Jude says sheepishly, looking already as though he's regretting letting me in here. "For a joke. I was going to repaint it, but... I dunno. Never got round to it."

"Right," I smirk. He aims a punch at my arm, which I dodge. "What did you want to show me?"

Jude hesitates. "Never mind. It was a stupid idea."

"Seriously? Come on, tell me!"

Jude pauses again, then shrugs. His shoulders are stiff, as though he's moulded suddenly into a stone statue.

"I don't know anything about you," I say. "I know about everyone else. You know, what it was like for them before they came here, and how they got here, and everything. But you're a closed book, Jude Leyden. You don't talk about yourself."

Jude folds his arms, and his fringe falls over his eyes like a curtain. I suddenly regret saying everything I just said. How is it any of my business, what Jude's life was like before? If his story is anything like anyone else's, he probably doesn't want to talk about it at all. And he shouldn't have to.

"I-I'm sorry," I stumble clumsily over my words, trying to backtrack. "I- You don't have to say anything. Not if you don't want to."

"No..." Jude pauses again. He looks up at me momentarily. "No, it's fine. You're right anyway."

He kneels on the floor and reaches under the bed. He pulls out a tattered, bulging leather book and shoves it at me.

"Here you go," he says, his voice still slightly reluctant. "Everything stupid and embarrassing you could ever know about me in one book."

"Oh, no way," A grin spreads across my face as I catch the book. I vaguely remember Eclipse mentioning something ages ago about Jude having a diary that washed up on the beach. "I can read this?"

"Actually, no," Jude reaches out to snatch the diary back, but I hold it out of his reach, laughing. I turn through the pages; every single one is full of scrawling writing, and little doodles of yin yangs. I turn onto the first page, which only has two lines of writing on it, and start to read.

"Mum says I should keep a journal, so I can-"

"Maya, don't read it out loud!"

"So I can 'embrace my thoughts' or whatever. Personally I think it's stupid. So I probably won't write in this book again." I look up at him, still giggling, and flick again through the pages and pages of handwriting. "Right. Sure."

"Shut up, everyone's asleep," hisses Jude, but he's chuckling too. He lunges for the book again. "Right, we're done, this was a terrible idea-"

"Wait, wait, no! Okay, I'll stop!" I say in a loud whisper. "Come on, I've literally only read the first of January-"

"Fine." Jude sits next to me and we turn the next page together, reading silently. The amount of writing gradually gets longer each day, more enthusiastic.

"How old were you here?"

"Thirteen, I think," Jude rubs his forehead, groaning. "Ohhh Goddd, this is so embarrassing. I was trying so hard to be edgy!"

"Teddy would think it was adorable," I smirk. "Has he seen this?"

Jude scowls at me, looking panicked. "Maya, if you show this to him, I will kill you. No kidding, I will actually kill you."

"Alright, alright!" I turn to the back of the book, and read the later entries. I end up reading a page from the 7th of November. I read the first line and freeze, my laughter dying away slowly.

"Which one are you reading?" Jude leans over my shoulder. "...Oh. Oh."

Today, I finally came out to my parents.

I've wanted to for ages, but today I actually did. It was probably the most scared I've ever been, but in the end I just did it. Sat down with Mum and Dad at the kitchen table and said it. I'm gay.

I don't know why I was so scared. They were really great about it. Dad told me that he'd pretty much already guessed. And Mum just said she was proud of me and that she loved me no matter what. Normally if they'd said stuff like that I would've been embarrassed, but not today. We didn't talk for a while after that, just hugged. But that was fine, for once.

I thought maybe my parents would react like people did at school. Not everyone does it. Actually, most people don't, but I've heard the names some of them use for someone like me. I didn't want Mum and Dad to do what Tristan did.

I look at Jude slowly. "Who's Tristan?"

He smiles bitterly. "He was my best friend when I started in year seven. That didn't last long. He ditched me as soon as he found out."

"God," I whisper. "Jude, that's awful. I'm sorry."

"Don't be," he shrugs. "Some people are just idiots. I learned not to be bothered by it, after a while."

"Your parents sound amazing, though."

The smile softens, shrinks, but this one is genuine and sad. "Yeah. I didn't notice that often enough at the time, but they were."

"I just assumed, I don't know. That your life back in the real world must have sucked, and that's why you chose to stay here. That's what happened to everyone else, right? Eclipse and her dad. AJ in the orphanage. The twins living with horrible foster parents. Jordan living on the streets... And Coby won't even talk about his..."

"Yeah," Jude sighs. "It was nothing like that for me. I would've gone back, but... I missed the deadline. By about a day."

"You're joking," I stare at him in horror. "You were trapped with the Feallan for a month?"

Jude nods unhappily. "I was in one of the cells.It was the worst time of my life. I had no idea what was going on.  I thought I was going crazy." He smiles a little. "When Teddy and Eclipse came bursting into the cells to let me out after all that time, I thought I'd finally lost it."

"I can understand that." I think back to my own escape from the Feallan castle. That wasn't even two weeks ago, but it feels like two lifetimes have passed since then.

"They took me back to this house, and they helped me onto the boat right away. And I thought that this was it, that I would finally be home... But nothing happened. Nobody could understand it. That was when we first realized that there actually was a deadline in this place, before the portal or whatever it is closes. It'd never happened before it happened to me. I was the first person to ever miss it. And the last."

"I-I'm so sorry," I say again, seeing his grey eyes glaze with tears. He brushes them away, and I don't bring it up. I know he'd hate it.

"I think about my parents all the time," he says softly. "What they must've gone through when I never came home... That's why I've become so obsessed with this job. I have to get it right, every time. I don't want what happened to me to happen to anyone else. Ever."

I hesitate. "A-Are... Are you happy here?"

He turns to stare at me.

"Yeah. Yeah, of course I am. I miss my parents a lot, but... I dunno. This is my home now." He runs a hand over a crack in his bedroom wall. "This place isn't exactly perfect, but I live with some of the best people I've ever met. I got pretty lucky, I guess. Took me a while to see it, though."

He looks over at the pink wall. "I didn't come out of my room for ages, at first. Didn't talk to any of them. Every day they would talk to me through the door, but I just ignored them. One day though, Teddy finally came in. He was carrying tins of paint, and he asked if I wanted to paint the walls so I could feel more at home. Before, the walls were completely blank, but he helped me make them feel more like they belonged to me. He was the one who made me come out of this room."

"Is that when you realized?" I ask, half out of curiosity, half out of wanting to steer the conversation onto a safer subject. "That you liked him, I mean."

Jude finally laughs again. "Oh, no way. We are not going to have a conversation about feelings right now."

"We kind of already are," I point out.

"That's true. Ugh."

"Come on!" I prod his arm. "Is that when you realized? Is that when you realized? Seeing Teddy with pink paint all over his fingers, smiling at you? And then, romantic music started playing in the background-"

"Leave Teddy's stupid ukulele practice out of this."

"I was thinking more like violin music. I bet it was like some sappy romance movie."

"Shut up, shut up, shut up," Jude prods me back. I'm pretty sure he did it way harder than I did to him. "It wasn't then, anyway. It took me a while to realize that, too."

"When, then? Just tell me!"

"Haven't we done enough soul-searching for one day?"

"Never. Come on, Jude, please-"

"Right, right, fine!" Jude throws his hands up in defeat. "It... It was when we got back from a Hellhound job. It wasn't a particularly serious one, so it was just me and him. But it was one of my first ones- I hadn't completely gotten into the swing of it yet, and I managed to injure my leg pretty badly. Teddy managed to get me out of there, but he was pretty shaken up, I think. He kept babbling and apologizing... Then he used his magic to heal me. It was the first time I'd ever seen him do it. It was awesome. But he actually seemed... Scared. He couldn't look at me. And then he asked me... He asked me if I was afraid of him, for being who he was."

I sigh sadly. "He really doesn't get it, does he?"

"No. No, he doesn't," Jude scowls at the pink wall. "Then I made him look me in the eyes and told him if he ever said anything like that again, I would literally punch him."

"Very romantic," I snicker. He pokes me hard again. "Ow! Jude!"

"Shhh!" he hisses. "You deserved it. Anyway, that's when I realized just how much I meant what I had said. I hate the fact that he thinks that stuff about himself, because to me... Anyway. That's when I knew. I never admitted it, though."

"That doesn't matter," I tell him. "You're terrible at hiding it."

"Hey!"

"You are! The only person who didn't know was Teddy. The most oblivious person in the history of the universe."

Jude smiles reluctantly. "Eclipse got that right, didn't she? She was right about a lot of things. God. I hate it when Eclipse is right."

I laugh. Then I close the diary gently and hand it back to him. "I'm glad we talked."

"I'm not. If I'd known this was going to turn into a deep conversation, I wouldn't have let you in."

"Oh, shut up." I grin at him, then stand up to leave. It feels like the conversation has drawn to a close.

"Wait, Maya," Jude hesitates again. "Have you ever thought about... I dunno. Staying here, when we save your brothers?"

The question shocks me into silence. So does the answer. Because yeah. I would be lying if I said I hadn't thought about it. I've thought about it quite a lot, actually. Every time Teddy makes hot chocolate, or I nearly break my neck on the steps leading to the beach. Every time I see the sunset through the windows- at home, if you look through the windows, you can hardly see the sky at all because of all the buildings. Every time I hear the racket everyone makes in a morning that drives everyone insane. Every time I fall asleep in a room that isn't mine, a room with blank walls, I think about it.

"You know I can't."

Jude raises an eyebrow. "Really? Why not? Maya, face it. Your old life sounds like it sucks, too. Your stepdad is an idiot, you and Marty have to basically raise a seven-year-old on your own. All that as well as getting through school every day, which is hard enough for a normal teenager. Besides, if you stay, you get to miss GCSEs. I'm pretty sure that's the best offer you can get."

I give him a sideways look. I forget, sometimes, that Jude knows what he's talking about here. I forget that he knows the real world just as much as me. He fits so easily into this crazy world of demons and magic that it's easy to believe that he's lived here forever.

"My brothers aren't safe here," I insist. "Look at them now, Jude. Trapped with some of the most dangerous demons in this place. When we get them out, I want them to be as far away from here as possible."

"This house is safe," Jude argues. "About as safe as it's possible to be."

"Yeah? Look at what happened to Teddy," I challenge. At the mention, Jude winces, looking away. "This place isn't safe. Not as long as the Feallan and the Neroes are here."

Jude flings himself back onto the bed, glaring at the ceiling. "Fine. Whatever."

I take that as a goodbye. As I'm walking through the door I hesitate, looking back at the figure on the bed. "I'm going to miss you, though. All of you."

Jude doesn't reply. I linger in the doorway for a second, then close the door softly, stepping back into the darkness.

Well, good. I can go back to thinking of a plan for Jamie and Marty.

Something is nagging at me, though. It takes me a second to figure out what it is.

The Marks of Demons book says that the Feallan take children for revenge. To corrupt the light souls of children as a way of making up for the way their souls were corrupted and cast out of Heaven. And that would make sense, I suppose- it would explain why they never tried to kill Jude, even when they had him trapped for a whole month. It would explain the cells and the room full of cages- If all they wanted was to kill, then there would be no point in holding captives. So I assumed that that was the reason they had taken Jamie: just another innocent little kid to twist into darkness.

But if that was true... If that was the reason, why was Jamie so important to them? After we escaped from the castle the first time, they doubled the security, making sure there was no way we could make it back inside. Why would they go to so much trouble over a couple of boys they had only taken for 'revenge' for something that had happened in the beginning of time?

If all they wanted was to make us become like them, why had they only tried to take Jamie and not me or Marty too? They hadn't meant to take Marty, after all. They only had because he had tried to save our brother. But, if there were three defenceless children in one room, why only take one?

And why did they try to kill me when I first arrived? Why have they been trying to kill me ever since then? Killing isn't what the Feallan do to their victims, after all. I know why they want to kill Jude and his family- because of how they've been meddling with their plans- but why me?

It doesn't make sense. My thoughts jumble together as I think them, weaving together into a web of confusion.

There must be another reason that they took Jamie. Something bigger, more serious than just revenge.

I close my eyes, trying to sort through my thoughts, then come to a decision.

I stalk down the dark corridor and up the stairs. I count the doors, making sure I'm standing in front of the right one before I knock.

The person I'm looking for opens the door right away. Almost as though they knew I would be there.

"I need your help."