Women Life Freedom 💚 🦁 ❤️

The book opens with John Gregory coming to Tom's farm to come and collect Tom and get payment for his apprenticeship. It's not cheap to apprentice a child as a spook, but all of Tom's older brothers have already been apprenticed to other trades, including his eldest brother, Jack, who is going to inherit the farm and has a heavily pregnant wife named Ellie. Tom's mom wants him to be a spook, and it's her way or the highway. It's also not an option to get Tom apprenticed to other trades because people are only willing to take on so many children from one person, so his dad's on board with it. It's also worth noting Mom wanted seven sons with a seventh son just so boy number 7 could be a spook.

Also, being a spook is dangerous. Spooks have been killed by witches and occasionally boggarts. It's also a near guarantee that you'll remain single despite it being a very necessary and lucrative job in this world. Part of it is just the whole dealing with ghosts and witches. Another part is religious. Early in the book Tom and John Gregory are walking to Gregory's house they walk by a priest, who makes the cross at them. Tom says he's never seen someone make the cross in such an exaggerated fashion as that priest did. Said priest happens to be the spook's brother, and they don't get along well.

The Spook gives his apprentices a trial by having them stay in a haunted house overnight to confront their fears. He has the apprentices stay on for a month to decide if they want to be a spook, and then he takes them on permanently afterward. Tom is pretty apprehensive about being a spook, especially when he learns how many of John Gregory's previous apprentices quit within the first month, quit after that, or died while training. Out of 30, 10 died in the process. But he decides to stick it out after his mom pushes him to (see the first paragraph) and also because of one of his dad's wise sayings. He has the attitude of I don't like it, but someone has to do it and there's not many other options for me anyway.

The first few chapters just take the time to set up the world the story is set in and Tom's relationships with his family members. We learn that the Spook himself has a boggart as his housekeeper and said boggart likes to be complimented for its cooking and doesn't like having anyone arrive early for breakfast, as Tom learns the hard way. If the boggart decides to visible, it takes the form of a ginger tomcat. We also learn that Tom's brother Jack likes to roughhouse a bit and is kind of apprehensive about the whole spook trade, and this is a huge reason why their relationship deteriorates over the series. We actually see the first signs of their relationship slowly breaking down in this book. His wife Ellie is a bit more laid back, but if I remember correctly, she's also apprehensive. Tom's mother is known to be the best midwife in the area and she always predicts a baby's sex correctly. Tom describes her as being from a far away land and that she still has a lilt in her voice when she speaks English. She says Ellie's baby is a girl and she is correct. She seems to have the power of clairvoyance, and we do find out in a later book that she is a witch herself, but we'll get there. Her and Tom are very close, which is another thing that drives a wedge between him and Jack. She taught Tom to speak Greek when she wouldn't teach any of her other sons the language. She also pulled him out of school and homeschooled him when the teachers tried to change his left-handedness. Dad has many sayings, all of them wise. Tom tends to refer back to his father's sayings multiple times throughout this book when he's trying to think of what to do in a tricky situation.

What kicks off the chain of events in this book is that a girl named Alice shows up at the Spook's house and gives Tom three cakes. She asks Tom to give one cake each night to a witch imprisoned in the Spook's garden. See, John Gregory keeps three witches imprisoned in his garden. He imprisons them with iron bars, salt, and some water since those are some of witches' kryptonite. The witch Alice wants Tom to give the cakes to is Mother Malkin, a witch who was known to have murdered pregnant mothers and their babies by having her son Tusk crush them to death. She was eventually apprehended by the Spook. While there is an option to eat the witch's heart raw to ensure she doesn't come back, the Spook doesn't because it's gross. It's also possible for a witch to come back from the dead by possession or through leaving her bones behind. This means a dead witch has to be buried upside down so that she can't resurface. Alice does offer him information about the Spook that he doesn't have. Including how the Spook's last apprentice Billy Bradley died.

Alice, I would personally argue, is the most important character in the series. Many of the decisions she makes are what drives the plot or kicks it off. She's also a good example of the misogyny problem this series has. We do see a lot of overt misogyny from the Spook's advice to Tom to not trust women (spoiler alert: he's a hypocrite and we will touch upon that in a later book, and while the details are fuzzy, what I do remember makes this even worse than just that), yes, and from other characters as well. People tend to brush this stuff off as being historically accurate even in fantasy settings where there is not much of a reason for that misogyny. Doesn't help these books were published in the 2000s. Sometimes it's just a conversation of why is this particular form of misogyny there and does this work have the right to have it there? And how are the female characters treated by the narrative itself? How does it treat their character development? Do we see the female characters' inner thoughts and worlds? These questions can help us determine if a work has the right to depict misogyny from its characters, and yes, that includes historical novels and historical fantasy works such as this one.

Speaking of which, there's another form of misogyny in the books, and it's how the female character arcs are treated. Alice's character development builds up to her being on the good guys' side and her being close to Tom since she's the only friend his age and Delaney just shits on that in book 13. And in the sequel series where Tom has a female apprentice (who is the very first female apprentice to ever exist, too), said female apprentice gets shit all over by the narrative as well. It's not exactly different from how shonen manga treats its female characters. No issue completely rewriting female characters' arcs in ways that are so left field that it's obvious the writer cared more about getting a one up on the reader than actually telling a good story.

Anyway, shout out to this Goodreads reviewer:

What, did you think their relationship was going to remain platonic? This is another way Delaney shits all over Alice's narrative in book 13. We spend such a long time with Tom and Alice, watching their relationship develop, and the way Delaney ties this up in book 13....we'll touch that when we get there. Side note: If it makes anyone feel better, Tom doesn't realize he loves Alice for another 8-9 books, but how that happens would mean some major spoilers. This little tidbit makes what happens in book 13 so much worse.

Back to the story: Tom promises Alice he'll give the cakes and since the Spook decided to head off for a job because Tom is brand new at it, there's no one stop him. But he does stop at the second cake when he realizes Mother Malkin's iron bars keeping her in the pit are bent now. So he stops. But it's already too late.

Mother Malkin is a blood witch. These witches drink on blood for their power and they kill in the process of doing so. Her granddaughter, Bony Lizzie, is a bone witch. Bone witches use thumb bones for their magic and getting the thumb bones requires either killing someone or gravedigging. Alice is Bony Lizzie's niece, though we later find out there is more to their relationship than meets the eye. That's for another book. Both Lizzie and Malkin are notorious for their strength and cruelty. It's the stuff of local legend, and when the Spook realizes they are back, he springs into action.

This isn't to say Tom is useless. When he realizes Mother Malkin's escape happened at the exact same time a toddler disappears, he springs into action. He notes Malkin leaves a silver trail behind her and uses that to track her and the child down. The child survives without being hurt. Tom manages to strike some deals with the house boggart in exchange for help from it, so that ensures that the Spook's house can't be broken into. Tom ends up killing Malkin in the process and watches her go downstream in a river.

After the Spook comes back from his job, Tom runs into Alice, which turns out to be a trap because Lizzie and Tusk, who I mentioned as Malkin's son and is with her, are pissed and decide to use Tom as a sacrifice. Alice saves him and John Gregory successfully tracks both of them down. He kills Tusk while saving them and captures Bony Lizzie. After speaking with Alice and Tom and concluding the former to be innocent, he decides she's better off living with relatives who aren't evil. He sends both of them to Tom's house so his mom can help Alice out.

This concludes the first part of the book. The second half happens at the family farm, and I can't lie, I've grown to sympathize with Jack more than I did when I was young. Tom's job as a spook's apprentice kind of puts him and his family through the wringer.

So the baby is born, and it happens to be right on the night Tom killed Malkin. Tom is filled with anxiety over Malkin possessing someone at the farm, though Tom's mother and Alice point out a baby is the last person to possess if Malkin wants revenge. Kind of obvious when you think about it. Tom has a book about possession written in Latin, which he doesn't know but Alice does. She translates it for him. According to Alice, the ideal candidate would be a hot tempered and physically healthy man. Jack fits the bill. Alice is a potential candidate, and Tom finds her performing a spell with a mirror late at night with Mother Malkin's reflection in the brass candlestick nearby and there is the silver trail that heavily signals Malkin being on the farm, so Tom breaks the mirror and wakes everyone up and pisses Jack off. It's worse because that mirror was a family heirloom. Tom has the sense not to say anything to Jack after this. Ellie is doing her best to be understanding only to get pissed with Tom when she learns there might be an evil witch near the house with a newborn baby in it. She wants Tom's mom to take care of it.

So knowing now that Alice was doing a spell and might be lying to him, he decides to act on his own. Over the night he hears all these sounds in the house and just runs out of the house and to the pig section of the farm, where the pigs are being prepared for slaughter. The pig butcher is there. Alice has also followed after him. She was using the mirror to figure out where Malkin is on the farm specifically, but Tom is reluctant to trust her. He does remember that salt and iron works against boggarts, so it might work against a witch possessed body. So he gets some salt to lure her out.

The salt doesn't lure her out. She just reveals herself and it was the pig butcher she possessed. We learn that because it looks like Mother Malkin just tried to kill Jack right in front of Ellie (Jack survives) and is holding Ellie's baby. Malkin is using her power to draw Tom to her and Tom isn't able to resist. Alice saves the day. And realizing what has happened has made Tom choose to commit to being a spook for good. He throws salt and iron at the pig butcher and he becomes unpossessed. It also severely weakens Mother Malkin, and it's enough for Alice to try and kill Malkin by burning her, but Tom is stupid and stops her despite this being valid self defense. This rightly so pisses Alice off.

Luckily for Tom, Mother Malkin heads towards the pigs and gets eaten by them. They also take the heart raw so there's no concern about her coming back from the dead for good. We also see how Ellie's relationship with Tom changes because she isn't immune to the prejudices people hold against spooks.

Jack wasn't severely hurt. Just knocked out. And covered in pigs' blood. He gets a very rough night. Ellie is absolutely anxious about the baby. And when Tom's mom comes back, they all have the rough job of explaining what happened. The Spook comes to get Tom. Tom's pretty shaken up about the whole thing, but he still decides to stay on. The Spook is not a fan of Alice, especially because using a mirror is dark magic. He wants to put her in a pit. So he ends up talking to Tom's mom once he learns that Alice and the mom get along well.

Side note: I just have to note that Tom is so sheltered that when he hears the Spook being sexist he uses his mom as a counterexample to all of it. We never learn much about his sister in law outside of her also growing up on a farm.

Tom stays on one more night and talks to his mom about Alice. We learn that the baby that she went to deliver died along with the mother. It's the first time she's had both die. She takes a look at the Latin book about possession Alice translated for him. It is accurate. We also learn she somehow knows that the Spook used to be a priest. Tom's mother believes anything can happen with Alice. She could be good, bad, or worst, neither. After the conversation, Tom decides to have Alice go live with her relatives far away. Ellie puts down some boundaries after what's gone down and asks Tom to go for a different career. Tom doesn't want to and knows there is no going back.

We do get some answers from Alice about the child who was kidnapped and the blood cakes. The blood cakes were made from Alice's blood. Her blood has been used a lot for blood magic. The child was the only one who was kidnapped. This is what pushes Tom to finally send her off to live with her relatives. And he heads off to the Spook's house in Chipenden. He also gets a lot of information about what witches believe and botany from her on the way to her family's house. Alice holds his hand on the final night of the journey and tells him she's claimed him as hers now. She just knows they're going to meet again.

And so the book ends.

The Spook is planning to leave Chipenden for his winter house in Anglezarke, and Alice is not going to come along. He's planning to leave her with a non-witch family because he doesn't want Tom to make the same decisions that he himself has made. Another spook shows up to Chipenden, and it's one of the Spook's former apprentices. Not Bill Arkwright, as Tom initially assumes, but one named Morgan. We'll get to learn more about him as time goes on. He's got a letter for the Spook and when Gregory gets it, he immediately decides to head to Anglezarke. The pet boggart isn't pleased either, and Tom just straight up has no clue what is up other than Morgan just wasn't up to par and that Alice is going to be left with a farmer. Tom, as we see from the first page, is not gung ho about it, but there's special stuff that goes down in the winter in Anglezarke, so there is no choice but to go. The Spook also burns the letter, but fragments of it remain.

Tom brings up Meg to Alice the next day, but she says Meg went back home and her and the Spook broke up. So there's some more stuff going down with the Spook. Tom knows that Meg is a lamia witch, and feral ones feed upon blood. Particularly men.

Tom also knows that in the apprentice's bedroom that is currently his, all of the apprentices write their names on the bedroom wall. Morgan is the only who didn't.

Tom says goodbye to the boggart and as a thanks, we actually do get to see what is left of the letter. Morgan is threatening the Spook, but for what?

On the way to the winter house, they stop by Tom's family to collect the full payment for Tom's apprenticeship, and Father Ward's health has deteriorated even further. Jack is doing his best to keep a good attitude despite his feelings toward Tom. I think this is one of the few moments in the series where we see them get along with each other. His wife is pregnant again less than eight months after giving birth, and Mother Ward believes it's a boy. (I assume witches must have some form of birth control, because yikes). If I remember right, they miscarry after Jack gets put through the wringer again because of witches, but that doesn't happen in this book. So now Jack gets to pass the farm down. Tom does get to have a brief conversation with his dad where he says he's proud of him, and that is the last conversation with his father Tom has. His father dies not long after this.

Both Tom and his mother have the ability to sense if someone is going to die, and both of them sense it. They know through a strong smell. It can go away if the person gets better, but in this case, nope. I guess this is part of the package of being a lamia witch. Tom gets sent off not long after this with food and the payment for his apprenticeship.

There's another ancient God up in Anglezarke: Golgoth, the god of winter. Anglezarke is particularly prone to evil because it has other gods, but Golgoth is the big one here.

After surviving bad weather on the way there, Alice gets dropped off at the farm, which is not in good condition. It doesn't help that the farmers, the Hursts, are not very pleasant at first glance. They also had almost all of their sons die except for one, who turns out to be Morgan himself, and a daughter that drowned. So, very much not the happiest people around. Alice gets taken in because the Spook did a quite a bit of work for them getting rid of boggarts and never got paid, so offloading Alice onto them is the payment he's getting. As we later learn from Alice, Morgan is extremely cruel to the Hursts and visits quite often.

The house in Anglezarke is very depressing. It's down in a pit, where sunlight isn't accessible even in the summer, which makes this an even better place to stay. There's no one to clean up after the house other than Meg, who it turns out is being drugged by the Spook to forget that she's a witch. Remember when I said that this is just going to get worse?

Meg hibernates because of the drugging, and she's able to survive because she's a witch. Both domestic and feral lamias can go for months without food. She forgets that Billy is dead despite being fond of him. She doesn't seem to remember names because so many apprentices don't last long anyway. We also know that she's a good cook and tends to be methodical.

It doesn't help that she isn't the only witch in the house. Her sister, Marcia, is a feral lamia witch, and she has to stay in the cellar. There's boggarts and witches bound in the lowest layer of it. All are dangerous. Marcia is in one, and she was domestic when she got put into it. She's become fully feral after being in there for so long. Meg is not in on this otherwise she would not be happy, to state an understatement. The Spook drugs her because he doesn't want to put her in a pit.

I'll touch upon my own feelings about this when we get to the end. I have a lot.

There are two nearby villages where they could get food, including one where the Spook lived, but neither are particularly friendly, so that doesn't help. He instead gets his supplies delivered to him by a carpenter named Shanks. It's going to be a very unpleasant winter. The house is also on a ley line, and ley lines are what boggarts use to travel. A ley line is a line of power beneath the earth. Sometimes a travelling boggart can cause an earthquake like experience.

Nobody knows Meg is still around, and the Spook is intent on keeping it that way. Shanks sees her, and he's not happy but the money he gets from delivering the goods keeps his mouth shut. For the time being.

Meg is starting to figure out that something is going on despite her drugging. Tom finds her going to the cellar once, and that is enough for the Spook to increase her drug dose.

Meanwhile, in the attic, there's a desk with a pentacle around its keyhole. There's some important stuff in there. Pentacles protect magicians when they summon demons, and the desk has a grimoire in it. One that can be used to summon a god.

Remember Emily, the lady who was the Spook's dead priest brother's ex-fiance? She's dead. She has a role to play here. Morgan is actually the adopted son of the Hursts. Emily is his real biological mother, and she held him back somewhat from doing evil. Now that she's dead, all hell is about to break loose.

Golgoth, the winter god, lives in an ancient burial mound. He's lost power from not being worshipped, but if ever awakened, it's going to be a long cold lonely winter. Morgan's planning to summon him, but spoiler alert, he fails. But we'll get there.

Ever since he left the Spook, Morgan's become a necromancer who charges people money to talk to the ghosts of dead loved ones instead of sending the ghosts to the afterlife. Alice notes that he spends a lot of time talking to his sister's ghost near the lake where she drowned. He does the same thing to Tom's dad when we get there, and considering what goes down with the death of Father Ward, I don't blame Tom for being out of his right mind. But we'll get there.

Back to the story: There's a stone chucking boggart on the loose, and Tom and the Spook are going to take about a week to deal with it. And where the boggart ends up eventually is the farm Alice is at. Alice knows what's up with Meg and she rightly so does not stand for it. The Spook gets beaten to near death from the boggart and Tom has his sense of death activated. The only reason he doesn't die is because Alice has a bunch of potions ready for him. She's gracious to him in a way he doesn't deserve.

Morgan comes by for a visit after the boggart stuff goes down and chats with the Spook while he's still recovering. Tom eavesdrops and we know that Morgan wants something returned to him and that he's digging into a burial mound. And we learn that the Spook had a thing for Morgan's mother as well. Morgan holds how the Spook treated his mother against him.

We also know that strange noises come from Morgan's room, so Tom and Alice investigate. They don't find anything yet. Not long after, Alice moves in temporarily and gets along with Meg well. This isn't surprising at all considering they're both witches. I have to note that aside from feeling guilty a couple of times, Tom doesn't really seem to think all that deeply about what he and the Spook are actually doing to Meg here. Tom even says Alice has a bee in her bonnet about Meg, basically downplaying the opinion of another witch. Alice doesn't think it would hurt Meg to even remember some things about herself. Considering that Alice saved his life so many times already, perhaps he could take what she has to say seriously. All we know about Meg is that she was just very scary and pretty open about being a witch. Yet that is enough to justify her being drugged and her sister being put into a pit. But we'll get to that at the end.

Tom gets a letter from his brother Jack saying their dad's gotten sicker. He goes back to the farm and on the way, he runs into Morgan at a chapel, who tells him his dad died.

And it turns out to be the truth when Tom gets back to the farm. Jack sent it to the wrong address. Because of that, Tom missed the funeral and all his other brothers went home. Tom's mom just took flight after the funeral, so now it's Jack and his family. Another brother named James stayed over for sometime before going back, and from double checking on reddit, James and Jack are the only brothers of Tom we meet. We never meet the other four. What a wasted opportunity, honestly. Considering there's a total of 20 books in the entire series, of which thirteen are this arc, I feel like we could have met the other four.

Surprisingly, Jack inherited 99% of the farm instead of 100%. One single room in the house was left to Tom, and it's the same room where Mother Ward kept her silver chain. Jack wants to buy it from Tom so he can have all of the farm to himself, but Tom decides he wants to talk it over with his mother when she gets back and then decide. All of the emotions he's feeling are still fresh. He stays over at the farm for a week before going back to Anglezarke. Considering how much grief everyone's feeling, it checks out.

Jack basically is left in the dark about why Tom is allowed that specific room. He doesn't know how Mother and Father Ward met, and the room is on his property. And he doesn't know that his mother is a witch. On one hand, Jack is jealous of Tom to a gross extent because Tom gets a lot more attention from his mother, to the point where he was the only one taught Greek out of all of them (and Tom says Jack wasn't the only brother who had issues with this, which again shows how much of a lost opportunity not meeting his other brothers was), but on the other, he got put through the wringer because a witch Tom killed came back from the dead and went down to the farm when he just had a newborn child. And now that Father Ward is dead, one room on his property isn't left to him and he's completely left in the dark. I've grown to feel more sympathy for Jack now that I'm rereading these books as an adult. I've noticed a lot of readers don't because he is quite short tempered, but me....yeah.

When Tom goes back, he visits Alice now that she's supposed to be back with the Hursts. But he gets Morgan instead. Alice just yeeted because of how miserable she was with the Hursts. Morgan already knows the two of them were lurking in his room, but we don't know how he knows that. Morgan reveals that he uses ghosts stuck in the in between of life and the afterlife to charge people for the ability to talk to their dead loved ones. This is how we learn where the sounds in his room come from. Morgan summons his dead sister (she just wants to go to the afterlife) to bring the ghost of Tom's dad to manipulate him into getting a grimoire for Morgan. The grimoire is supposed to summon Golgoth, the winter god.

Both this book and book two examine the characters' beliefs in God and Christianity. I like this aspect because it allows the reader to see how they view the world around them and considering how much death there is involved in the job of being a spook, it makes sense that Tom and the Spook's belief in heaven and God would be examined. Spooks have to send ghosts into the afterlife, but John Gregory doesn't really believe in God. Tom isn't sure about it either, but he does think there exists something after death. This is the book where it becomes clear that Tom is agnostic. I find this quite believable considering spooks are isolated from the church, but as said before, they do deal with ghosts a lot. So this is a good aspect of them.

So Tom and his dad's ghost talk. Mother and Father Ward weren't exactly on the same page about the room, and if you recall from book two, we know that Father Ward is also in the dark about Mother Ward to a similar extent that Jack is. What's also interesting about this conversation is that none of Tom's brothers became a priest when it's the norm for large families to have at least one son become part of the church. Tom's dad is (was?) God-fearing, even if he couldn't make it to church because of his farm work and married a woman he knows doesn't believe in the same things he does. Father Ward was also not on board with Tom being a spook because of how dangerous and isolating the job is and also because it means he won't be buried in a church graveyard. Morgan basically uses Father Ward's faith against him in front of Tom. Tom tries to get his dad out of it, but fails. So he decides to talk to the Spook.

Meg recognizes him when he gets back. She usually confuses him for Billy, and this is a big sign something is wrong. And she remembers about his dad. Tom just doesn't realize it because he's so focused on getting his dad to the afterlife. The Spook is still sick, so Tom decides there's no harm in just giving Morgan the grimoire. He makes Meg's drug so he can do so with no distractions, but Meg already knows and she is very rightly so pissed. She locks him in the cellar. It's not hard to figure out what happened here that lead to Meg remembering. Meg was even willing to give Tom a chance to be better than the Spook. It was only when he tried to drug her that she gets mad at him. Considering everything, that is pretty amazing of her. A more feminist writer would've been more critical of the Spook, but again, these books were published in the 2000s.

Meg has released her sister from the pit but she does have her sister under control. She's already fed Marcia blood. It is implied from the chat she and Tom have that she's killed people, but she says most of them deserved it anyway. It's not really clear what's gone down with Meg and Marcia in the past.

Tom uses a visit Meg has with the Spook to free himself and get the grimoire. Meg does catch him, but he manages to flee the house. He goes to Andrew's new home. Alice is working for Andrew now. She likes Andrew a lot. She also doesn't feel bad for the Spook at all when she learns what happened.

The way Andrew can figure out how to make a key for the cellar is to see it himself. The three of them come up with a plan to get into the house to free the Spook. Tom stays overnight. And Morgan leaves a letter the morning after asking Tom to come see him. Interestingly, he signs it as Morgan G. instead of Morgan H.

So Tom does. They're at the grave of Emily Burns (remember when I said she's be important?), who is Morgan's biological mother. The Hursts are adopted family. Morgan claims he's Gregory's biological son, but honestly, it just doesn't add up at all. Not to mention, what we've seen of Morgan suggests he was just a bad apprentice, period, especially considering what happens at the end.

Morgan uses Father Ward's ghost to push Tom to get the grimoire from the desk, and Tom decides to cave in for good.

After Tom makes up his mind, Andrew, Alice and him execute their plan without a hitch. Tom and Alice rescue the Spook, and Tom goes back into the house by telling Alice he just has one unfinished task. He never comes up with a lie at all.

Back in the house, he runs into Marcia, the feral lamia witch. She's just feeding on birds at the moment. He gets caught by Meg while trying to escape. She's willing to just feed him to Marcia at this point. Tom just straight binds her with the chain. Marcia, luckily for him, is full of fresh blood and doesn't have the energy to feed on him, but it is somewhat hard for him to get it anyway. He puts Meg into a pit after the fact and since there's a storm outside, he decides to wait it out. He still doesn't have the grimoire because Marcia is on the loose.

Andrew and the Spook come to rescue him anyway. Marcia gets put back into the pit and the Spook decides to leave Meg in hers. Big ouch for her, honestly. Sure, feeding Tom to Marcia is harsh, but it's not exactly worse than what the Spook's done to her.

When Tom finally goes to get the grimoire, he gets caught by the Spook and another big confrontation occurs. The Spook says that Morgan is the son of a tanner and Emily Burns. Emily went for him just as much as he went for her, so they're both at fault. The tanner was a pretty shitty husband and father, so the Spook stepped up to help where he didn't. He even helped Morgan get a job with the Hursts. Morgan had an affair with the Hursts' daughter, and the Hursts were so against this the daughter eventually committed suicide. That's when he became the Spook's apprentice.

Morgan wants to raise Golgoth, and that requires a human sacrifice. He's already attempted it once, and that lead to his apprenticeship as a Spook ending. Golgoth sleeps in an ancient burial mound called the Round Loaf. Golgoth is where he gets his power from. He's gotten strong enough to use the dead like he did with Tom's dad.

When the weather gets better, Tom and the Spook get called to deal with a boggart, but it's a false alarm. They find the grimoire missing when they get back. We also learn that Morgan and Alice hung out together a few times as well. This isn't surprising because Morgan wants to get close to Gregory, and Alice is there to keep an eye on what's going on at the Hursts', which she does.

A little later on, Alice does tell them where they can find Morgan. He's likely to be in a church, summoning ghosts to talk to their loved ones and making money. He always does this on Tuesday nights. It's the same chapel Tom passed by on his way back to the farm.

Tom heads back to the Spook but gets caught by Morgan on the way. After we see Morgan do his dirty work of summoning ghosts at the chapel, he makes Tom dig into the Round Loaf and starts the ritual to summon Golgoth. That fails because Morgan didn't realize he had a fake copy of the grimoire with the spell done wrong on purpose, in the event he would try to do something like that. The original copy was destroyed so that no one could ever use it. Morgan gets himself killed in the process and Tom does have a very brief face down with Golgoth that he survives and the old god goes back to sleep. Meg, Marcia, and the Spook come to rescue him.

Meg's decided to take Marcia and head back to Greece. The Spook is set to see her off and Tom is left alone in the house for a while. Tom and the Spook stay until the end of April, when the Spook decides to take Alice back to Chipenden with him anyway.

Tom's mother wants him to keep the room. There's zero discussion about it beyond that. The room is a protected one that keeps whoever's in it safe from evil, but it does sap life from whoever's inside. Tom and Alice are young enough to not be impacted by this, but the Spook is old enough for it to kill him.

I think his sister in law Ellie is now in her second trimester, and considering that she miscarries in book four.....

Oh.

As for why Meg got drugged? Enough people were scared of her that it made its way to the sheriff, and Meg was at real risk of being hanged along with Marcia. So instead of just breaking up or Meg temporarily leaving, drugging Meg and putting Marcia into a pit was the way to go for him. The Spook says Meg was stubborn, but like.....come on.

Full rant time here:

I think the Spook being a hypocrite is a good thing. It also sets up a nice parallel between him and Tom. So there's a good plotline to develop here. What I don't like is how Delaney goes about executing this plot point. For one, the Spook is consistently given a sympathetic portrayal for what he's done to Meg. We do get some insight into Meg's side of the story, but not a lot. This doesn't even get into Marcia. We don't know how Meg herself felt about the situation with the sheriff and her possibly being hanged. We don't know if she had a different solution to that whole situation or not. And even after she's been drugged for years on end, it's strongly implied she still has affection for the Spook at the end of the book. This is part of a bigger pattern where male characters get offered leeway for things, both by the narrative and the readers, that they would never, under any circumstances defend a female character for. There's this one viral post going around about how fans simp for any basic male character but have deliberately piss poor reading comprehension when it comes to female characters (something that could also be said about how white vs black characters get treated in fandom, but I digress), and I think this could be said about how the narrative treats the Spook's choice to drug her as him being in a difficult position that few could understand, but again, other than Alice being really upset and Tom just feeling guilt a few times, there's very little acknowledgment of Meg's side here.

So what could have been done is that Meg could've chosen to leave the Spook's house for some time with the plan to come back, but because of how bad her reputation has gotten, the Spook and Meg decide to continue their romance through remote communication and by pretending they've broken up. This still works as the Spook being a hypocrite and the parallels are still there, but it now has the benefit of the Spook's sympathetic portrayal in this situation much easier to take, and it plays out the possible consequences of Tom and Alice being together in the future in a much better way. There's one scene in the book where the nurse comes to visit the Spook after he gets injured by the stone chucker and Alice also comes along and the nurse is incredulous at the idea a witch would help a spook. It's one small glimpse into the consequences of Tom having a relationship with Alice. And it avoids the whole drugging thing itself because at least Meg has a better shot at having her feelings here be acknowledged.

The book opens with a legend about the Wardstone, which serves as nice foreshadowing for what evil was defeated there and how it was defeated.

Alice is training Tom for catching witches. He's been beaten by Alice every time they practice witch hunting together, so the Spook works him way harder. Tom is almost 14 at this point, and he's been an apprentice for over a year. Both of them know they are going to Pendle to deal with the witches there, but they don't know when. The Spook wants Tom to get his mother's trunks from the farm so they know what's in there while he has a visitor of his own.

We do learn some interesting information. Witches have different scents to their breaths depending on what type they specialize in. Bone and blood witches have bad breath that smells like dogs while familiar witches have a breath that smells like flowers. Familiar witches also have the power of fascination, which they can use to control men. There's a sexual element to this as well, but it's a kid friendly sexual element. And we do see Alice use fascination a few times in the series. Glamour is when a witch makes herself look younger and more beautiful than she is. Alice also uses this. I've picked up on some rather sexual portrayals of the witches by the standards of children's books. We already remember how Father Ward met Mother Ward in the second book, as well as the Spook and Meg. This fourth book has some of that too.

There's three big witch clans in Pendle: The Mouldheels, the Deanes, and the Malkins. There's a lot of rivalry going on between the three, though the Malkins and Deanes are closer. The Mouldheels are known to have some practice in magic that isn't familiar to the Spook: Mirrors. They use them to predict the future. There's a possibility that a coven from each (a coven is a group of 13 witches) clan could get together and raise some real trouble. The Spook is aiming to prevent that. There's an upcoming summer sabbath called Lammas, which is when the covens can gather together to raise hell. This is one of the four sabbaths when their dark power is at their greatest. In the real world, Lammas is a harvest celebration. I wonder how that would've looked like in these books.

The Spook's visitor is a priest, Father Stocks. Stocks was once an apprentice of the spook before he decided he wasn't up to it. He has all the tea on Pendle. And here we see a continuing examination of the religious beliefs on the characters. And Tom very clearly being agnostic.

Tom and Alice are sent off to Jack's farm while Stocks and the Spook chat in private. We get little nuggets of information about Pendle from Alice, who notes that people turn their mirrors inwards so they won't be spied on by witches. Pendle, as it turns out, is a nasty place to be.

When we get to the farm, it's burned down. What's remaining of it is a mess, and the trunks are gone. As per the last book, we know Tom is the only one to have a key to the special room where the trunks were stored, but from what we gather, Jack, his brother, also had one. He made a special version of it for himself.

Alice sniffs out that the fire happened recently and that there were witches on the farm. She thinks they found out about the trunks using mirrors. Because the witches are evil, they couldn't enter the room and almost certainly made Jack open the door and give the trunks to them. Alice offers to head to Pendle alone to locate Jack and his family because they've been kidnapped by the witches. As I've said before, Jack goes through the wringer because of Tom's apprenticeship.

Tom meets with Jack's neighbours and learns they've already contacted one of Tom's other brothers, James the blacksmith. We never meet the other four. James doesn't get put through the wringer as much as Jack does, which is why Tom and James get along way better. We also learn from the neighbour that there was a wealthy woman seen at the farm with the witches, and that all signs point to Pendle being where Jack and his family are.

When Tom tells the Spook, it's still not clear how Jack was able to access a locked room. The Spook decides to set off sooner rather than later. Lammas, the upcoming sabbath, is set to take place August 1st, two days before Tom's birthday.

On the way to Pendle, Tom and the Spook find a scissors carving by Grimalkin the witch assassin. She has a pretty important role to play in the series overall. Put a pin as far as she goes.

They stay over at Father Stocks' place. Stocks thinks the witches are trying to release Satan out into the world. Literal Satan. Yeah. And what's keeping that from happening is that the Mouldheels aren't on board with the Malkins and the Deanes.

While Stocks and the Spook are doing some investigating, a strange girl shows up at the house and says Alice has a spell put on her so she can't travel far. Immediately, Tom knows something is off. Still, he wants to see Alice that badly. He's already falling in love with her. So he decides to go with her and see what's up. The girl's name is Mab. She introduces him to her younger sisters. It's obviously a trap. The girls are trying to play games with him, one of which is a version of truth or dare. This version involves kisses and promises on top of the truths and dares. When Mab tries to kiss Tom, the place where Alice marked him in book one turns painful. Alice claimed Tom as hers. This is an interesting part of the books because there's another sexual layer to it. Alice decides that she can have Tom to herself and marked him in the first book so that she's guaranteed an ally and companion.

The three Mouldheel sisters leave and Tom goes after them. On the way there, Tom comes upon the Witches' Dell, which is where all the dead witches go. Those dead witches claim a lot of victims, so Tom has to be careful. He does make it through with some careful thought. When we reach the village the Mouldheel clan runs, Tom finds Alice there bound and the Mouldheels in the middle of a ritual. Tom rescues Alice from a cottage covered in mirrors, and he realizes he's being watched. Alice has had a spell cast on her to keep her from escaping via walking, but there's nothing in there about being carried, so Tom carries her out of there. When they reach the Witch Dell, Alice chats with a dead witch she knew and sets them onto the Mouldheels. We get some more commentary on the possibility of a romantic relationship between a spook and a witch through her, who says it always ends in heartbreak.

We know from Alice that Jack and his family were kidnapped by the Malkins and are being held in Malkin Tower. She also has an aunt named Agnes Sowerbutts who is a benevolent witch. Spoiler alert: Delaney does jackshit with her, which is a shame, because there's a lot we could learn about benevolent witches through Agnes. Would've liked to have more of her around.

The Malkins created a seer of their own, Tibb, which is how they knew about the trunks. Tibb can also see into the future. Tibb is an ugly creature, but he is strong and scary. He was created when the Malkins and Deanes had a truce on Halloween and cooked a pig's head. When it was boiled, each member of their respective covens spat into the cauldron where the head was cooked thirteen times. Then the head was fed to another pig. Seven months later, the pig's belly was cut open and out came Tibb. Not a big creature, but very scary.

Pick your monster folks.

Alice was also how Mab found out where Tom was. We also know the Deanes and the Malkins have approached Mab multiple times to discuss something, but Mab turns them away. Mab is now the leader of the clan at age fourteen or fifteen. She's exceptionally powerful for her age.

Stocks has suggested going to the magistrate to buy some time. Only problem is that the magistrate, Roger Nowell, doesn't believe witches exist. Doesn't really care for spooks either. Sneaking around didn't end well for Alice, and there's a lot still to be learned, so this is their best bet. Stocks has connections he uses to help Tom out here. We do get a little scene where Tom and Stocks discuss God, and Tom concludes that everyone sees the world differently. Everyone sees how they can make the world a better place differently, and Tom decides that Stocks found a way to make the world better that worked for him, but not for Tom.

Nowell's house is run by Mistress Wurmalde, and right away, she proves to have made an impression. She's dressed more like court lady than a secretary, and she clearly likes her position. It's said she acts above it, in a sense. Tom realizes she's a witch when she sniffs him.

They have a really brief meeting with Nowell where Tom just gives the names and ages of his family members, and Tom senses Wurmalde may be watching him. He thinks that the only way Nowell could not believe in witches is that Wurmalde has to have bewitched him using glamour or fascination.

When Nowell, his constable, Tom and Stocks reach Malkin Tower, trouble hits. The witches throw the chamber pot stuff at them, so the constable decides to grab some soldiers to storm the castle. Stocks and Tom stay overnight with Nowell, where Tom mentions what he's figured out about Wurmalde, but Stocks, who has the same abilities he does, didn't sense anything. Tom decides he overthinks things. Later that night, he sees a coach leaving Nowell's estate, and he's curious if it's Wurmalde. Sure enough, it is her. And she has something with her that isn't human either. Stocks is out of it because of dinner, which may or may not have been poisoned, so Tom is on his own. He tries to escape only to run into her. He realizes she has a similar accent to his mother. So there's a connection between the two of them.

Wurmalde wants the keys to the trunks from Tom in exchange for the lives of his family, but Tom makes the decision to refuse because as painful as losing family members would be, giving over the keys would result in all of Lancashire County and beyond being in danger. The lives of many outweigh the lives of few, and in this situation, the few in question are Tom's brother Jack, his heavily pregnant wife, and toddler niece. And the conditions they are being held in are bad. Jack apparently has lost it while in captivity and Ellie delivered a stillborn. It's talked about as a miscarriage, but honestly, given how heavily pregnant she is at this point, better to call it what it is. All the while, Tom is wondering why she doesn't just take the keys from him since she's powerful enough to do so. He buys time by asking for a night and a day to make his final decision and is stubbornly insistent on it. Tom also knows Wurmalde has Tibb with her to keep on eye on him, but where he is is anyone's guess.

Wurmalde and Mother Ward are enemies, and have been for a long time. Wurmalde wants revenge on Mother Ward, and is happy to use her sons as means to an end. She also threatens to hand Tom's family over to Grimalkin, but as we later learn, Grimalkin, despite being an assassin, refuses to end a life without good reason, which is a really interesting character trait to add. It gives some really good complexity.

After the confrontation with Wurmalde, Tom rests in his room. Stocks is being tortured in his sleep. Tibb is also there, and he starts giving Tom a prophecy about his future: Alice will betray and die for him, his life will be sad, Tom listens to Tibb talk shit about his mother and defends her. Tibb also mentions a goat song, but that's for later. Tom gets Tibb to back off by telling him that what's in the trunk will kill him, and that gets him to back off for the time being.

Tibb fed upon Stocks during the night, and Tom decides to use the day to escape and get the Spook. He gets out through a window and ivy as rope, and heads to Stocks' house. Alice is the only one there. Brother James arrived and went off with the Spook. Once they get up to speed, Tom and Alice take off. Tom knows some of Nowell's servants are helping Wurmalde, so he trusts no one. Alice reveals Mab offered to release his family in exchange for the trunks, but Tom doesn't trust her. Mab figured out how to get in through Alice's dead witch relative. After an argument, the two hatch a plan: Get Mab's guard down enough to free Jack, Ellie, and Mary and retrieve the trunks for themselves. Tom feels weird about double crossing someone because his dad instilled a lot of black and white morals in him, but Alice is more realistic.

First things first, Tom and Alice break in to Nowell's house. However, when Tom gets to Stocks' room, he's already been murdered. He was set up by Wurmalde, and Nowell takes her side. Tom gets locked up despite there not being a lot of evidence against him when we really think about it. Wurmalde controls Nowell using fascination and glamour, which keeps him from being rational. It's implied that Nowell would have thought again before arresting Tom if he wasn't under Wurmalde's control.

The people working for Wurmalde are prepping for war, but not with the Malkins. There's an invasion south of the county, and there's a real chance it could come to them. Tom is taken with them as they are firing at Malkin Tower. The job is not going well because well, magic. Overnight, the soldiers camp out and Tom tries to escape only to realize a group of witches is coming. Everyone except Tom is knocked out because they ate poisonous food but he didn't.

The group of witches are the Malkins. Mab just wants to grab some blood for magic. She doesn't plan to kill anyone. Tom talks her out of it. Alice has been in contact with her and neither of them trust Wurmalde. It's an enemy of my enemy is my friend situation. Mab wants the keys to the trunks in exchange for Jack, Ellie and Mary. Tom plans to double cross her anyway. Granted, he has good reasons not to trust her, but a situation like this is one where he needs all the allies he can get. On the other hand, it's possible Mab would double cross him as well. And considering how little is done with Mab's character in the series, there's lots of lost opportunities. It's heavily implied Mab has a thing for Tom. On one hand, I despise love triangles and always have, even as a child (thankfully, adult books means they are easier to avoid), on the other, Mab could have been an excellent foil for Alice and Grimalkin. I will touch upon what should have been done with Mab's character at the end of this post.

Getting into Malkin Tower is HARD. Alice, Tom and Mab crawl through a tunnel under a burial chamber, and the tunnel is tight. Alice and Mab are kind of at it during the process. Kind of understandable, considering what Mab just put Alice through. And they don't know a lot about her.

After a messy journey to the cells of Malkin Tower, they find a torture chamber where prisoners are kept. This implies Jack was tortured. The soldiers have already restarted their attack when they find Jack, Ellie, and Mary, and all of them are in a bad state. Jack is the worst of all. He's been completely mute since they were abducted. Ellie is still scared enough of Alice and Mab that she refuses the former's comfort. Tom does wonder if going into Mother Ward's special room was what's done it to Jack because only he and Alice can be in there. Alice gives Jack a potion to help him, but only time can tell if it will be effective. All the while, the candle they have has gone out and the Tower in under attack by the soldiers. Mab suggest waiting the soldiers out so the Malkins will be distracted with them, and then making their escape. This would leave Jack, Mary and Ellie in the hands of the soldiers, but they do have a neighbour who saw what went down with the farm, and soldiers are safer than witches. It's pretty unlikely Mab will end up getting the trunks, and Tom would prefer the military having them over Mab.

When the time comes, all of them make their escape. They end up in the room where Mother Ward's trunks are. Mab is just about ready to open them up. The soldiers have already left, and so have the Malkin witches. Mab has already seen some of the future, and she knows that the soldiers will be off to war soon because there's an invader coming. They've already left because of that. Mab basically played 4D chess with Tom and Alice because of her fortune telling, and she has the rest of the Mouldheels coming to get the trunks. She also wants to drink the blood of Mary, Tom's niece, at Lammas so she her mirror future telling skills are even better. I quite like Mab, if you can't tell, but I don't blame Tom for betraying her anyway since I wouldn't be nice to someone who was happy to drink my niece's blood after my brother and sister in law just got put through the wringer. And Mab has the bargain Tom made with her about the trunks as leverage. So how does Tom double cross her?

Tom tells Mab he will give her the keys. Everyone else gets taken out of the tower except for him and Mab and her two sisters. When Mab and her sisters try to open the trunks, they can't. At least with two of those trunks, they can't. Clearly, Tom's mother placed a magical spell on them.

The trunk that they do open has Tom's mother's wedding dress, the shirt Tom's dad used to protect Mother Ward from the sun, and other things like diaries, potions, a lot of money, and so forth. Mab and her sisters are pretty disrespectful with how they treat this stuff too. There's also a letter in the largest of the books written to Tom, and the trunk that they just opened was meant to be the first to be opened. She wrote it in Greek so only Tom could understand what's in there. It's the same with the other books. We learn what's in the other two trunks: Mother Ward's own two lamia sisters, who've been asleep. They can only be opened in moonlight by Tom himself. And moonlight has to directly touch them in order for them wake up.

And I have to note that Jack and the other brothers have had more than a few witches living under their roof the whole time. Honestly, A+. Incredible, honestly. I love it. Mother Ward fucked up raising her other six sons just so Tom could be a good spook, and I support women's wrongs. Everyone loves Enji Todoroki, after all.

And Tom knows for sure his mother is a lamia witch. Just like Meg, who Tom still doesn't seem to realize that what happened to her was pretty fucking bad. But I digress.

Tom only discloses the part about the moonlight and bargains with Mab again to get Jack medical help and the rest of the family to safety. Mab agrees.

While they are waiting for moonlight, Tom gets some answers about Wurmalde from Mab. She just hits on Tom while answering his questions. Mab is not a fan of hers and thinks she has no business being in Pendle. She knows that Wurmalde wants revenge on Tom's mother. Wurmalde wants to raise literal Satan out of hell to get revenge on Tom's mother, so she's decided to use the Pendle witches to do so. Mab does not think bringing literal Satan out into the world is a good idea, and this is where we see some complexity with Mab. She has lines that she won't cross. Literal Satan is hard to control, and once he's out of hell, there's very little chance of sending him back. There is a chance with three covens instead of two, they might be able to control him and the witches that do raise him become more powerful. Mab's not willing to take the risks. Pendle is at least controllable as far as she's concerned.

Once the trunks are opened and Tom's lamia aunts wake up, Mab is pissed. She accuses Tom of betraying her, but if we remember, she was all too happy to kill Tom's niece for her blood. And part of her anger comes from having feelings for Tom as well. So this is what makes Mab decide to join up with the other clans and bring literal Satan into the human world. And somehow Tom is still a goody two shoes who takes what his dad taught him seriously, even when he has no reason to be nice to the people he's being mean too.

Tom starts thinking about what his dad told him in book 2. About how the sisters were domestic when they met Father Ward, but slowly shape shifted to feral when they were put into the trunks. And he remembers that his mother once told him people are neither fully good nor bad, but lean toward one way or the other and that she became good solely because of Tom's dad. He wonders if his mother was once bad herself. Spoiler alert: She was. But that's for another book.

Tom stays in the tower overnight now that the lamias are guarding it from the witches. He has the trunks in his hands, so all is good for the time being. He just needs to touch base with everyone else. Luckily, Alice, the Spook, and Tom's brother James have come to get him. It's been three years since the two of them have seen each other in person. Tom gets them up to speed. Jack, Ellie, and Mary are at an aunt of Alice's named Agnes, who is a benevolent witch. Unfortunately, Delaney doesn't do much with Agnes either. Again, another lost opportunity.

James has been able to get some allies from the non witching side of Pendle to help them out. After catching up, they decide to deal with Wurmalde first since the clans are likely to stop working together once she's out of the picture. Tom decides to leave his brother in the dark about Mother Ward and her sisters. James reveals that he had a chat with Mother Ward about Tom being a spook and she asked him to give Tom a hand with his spook's work if necessary. She also asked him to move in with Jack if need be as well. James seems happy to do it because where he works, there's not much anyway. Jack's state is bad, so moving in might make things a lot easier for his family while he's in recovery. James does play a semi important role in the series.

The plan for the morning is for Tom and Alice to head to Aunt Agnes', while James and the Spook deal with the non witches and find Wurmalde and Mab. Aunt Agnes is a nice middle aged lady. Jack has physically recovered, but mentally he hasn't. Alice thinks there might be something in the trunks that could help him. Agnes, on her request, uses the mirror to locate Mab. She's with Wurmalde and there might not be any changing her mind at all.

Tom and Alice take Jack, Mary and Ellie back to the tower for safety. The lamia witches are there, after all, and Agnes has no protection at her home (she's still alive at the end of the book, BTW). The Pendle witches are trailing after them throughout the whole trip too. And the clans' men as well. Once they get to the castle and the coast is clear, it's almost two days until Lammas. Wurmalde is top priority, so Tom and the Spook head off to deal with her first thing. They go to Nowell's house. Nowell's already been killed at this point.

Tibb, who is the size of a dog, is nearby. He's already incredibly weak. Creatures like him age super fast, as it turns out, and he's dying. But we do know that Wurmalde plans to sacrifice Tom to bring literal Satan into the world. Tom's mother was chained to a rock thanks to Wurmalde as revenge for not being evil. Mother Ward was immortal once, and gave it up to be with Father Ward. It was atonement for being evil. Sailor Jakey from England must have been special for an immortal to willingly give up her immortality to be with him. I don't know how I feel about Mother Ward being immortal instead of being an incredibly powerful run of the mill witch. On the other hand, there is a plot twist regarding her in book 6 that I dislike a lot for reasons I will touch upon when we get there.

After the Spook kills Tibb, they decide to head back to the tower. No one knows where Wurmalde actually is. Alice has figured out a potion from Mother Ward's trunks to help Jack recover mentally. Meanwhile, the villagers James met with have changed their minds about helping out with the witches. Too scared.

At night, the Spook, Tom, Alice and James leave Jack, Mary and Ellie in the tower guarded by lamia witches. They've decided to try again with the villagers using Stocks as being the one calling them. It does work to an extent since no one wants literal Satan out on the loose. That same night, everyone heads out for battle. Tom immediately loses all confidence once he sees the number of witches and respective members of the clans ready to witness the great coming of literal Satan into the world. Doesn't help that Grimalkin the witch assassin is there too. Remember me mentioning her earlier on in this post?

Thanks to some clever planning by the Spook, they are able to ambush the witches. Tom's lamia aunts join in on the battle last minute as well. One of them kills Wurmalde off unceremoniously, and honestly, BOOOO. I think Wurmalde should have just been allowed to have escaped by her author and been brought back for another book instead of being killed off. Especially because unlike Mother Malkin, the Bane, and Morgan, we don't learn all that much about her, period. How did she get into Nowell's house? How long has she been in England? When did her and Mother Ward become enemies? Those are questions I have.

Other than that, the battle with the witches is pretty cool. As it turns out, the witches already carried out the ritual to bring literal Satan out into the world. So they lost before they even began. The next best option is to head back to Tom's farm and hide in the special room his mother prepared for him and Alice.

On the way home, Tom runs into Mab and chews her out for bringing Satan into the world. Mab (who is about the same age as Tom, so 14 or 15) tells him she agreed to do it because she was upset Tom rejected her romantic advances and pulled the lamia in the box trick on her. Grimalkin is also following behind Tom. And the weather is all funky because Satan is now on the loose. The witches will only be able to control him for about two days at most, and after that, it's anyone's game.

Right when he's near the farm, Grimalkin catches up with him. Her teeth are filed to points, and she wears the thumb bones of her victims around her neck. She wears a skirt that's partitioned with each partition tied around her legs when she could just wear trousers. I don't understand this particular writing detail. Grimalkin seems happy to make Tom's death quick, but he decides to use the silver on him against her. Silver is a witch's kryptonite. So then Grimalkin uses the hard way against him, yet Tom manages to survive because time just slowed down. This is foreshadowing for another power Tom inherited from his mother. We don't learn exactly what it is until later.

Tom reflects a bit on what it means to be pure when he's in the room. He notes Mab is said to always keep her word despite being on the side of evil and Grimalkin having a code of honour despite being an assassin. He's in the room for two days and reflects on what Satan being in the world means, and what exactly is the purpose of life if everyone ends up dead anyway. This is baby's first taste of morality and philosophy outside of the black and white binary, which is fine considering who the target audience is.

Just when he decides to step outside the room, the ghost of Stocks shows up. Stocks is unable to get to the other side despite being a priest/spook. He's feeling like there was no point to his life anyway. Tom sends him to the light by getting him to think of a happy memory. And I think this is how Tom decides what the point of his life is.

After sending Stocks to the other side, he leaves the room. It's now his fourteenth birthday (August 3rd, BTW). The weather has gone back to normal. Alice and the Spook have come to get him. The house is completely damaged from Satan trying to get Tom, but the room kept him safe those two days. A whole bunch of damage was done now that Satan is on the loose. And that also means the witches are going to get more powerful. Satan is able to shapeshift too, and that makes everything so much worse.

The three of them stay at the farm to do some cleaning up around the farm, and while Tom chats with Alice about his birthday, he remembers Tibb talking about a girl who would grow into a woman who would love him, betray him, and then die for him. It could be either Mab or Alice, which makes the fact Delaney does so little with Mab's character all that much worse. He chooses to leave Alice out of the loop as far as what Tibb says.

In the epilogue, Jack is recovering mentally, and James has moved in with him, Mary, and Ellie. Ellie's still uneasy about the whole thing. There are gangs kidnapping people for war. The Spook likes to send apprentices off for six months to train with another spook, and Tom's time to do that is coming pretty soon.

This last section of the book is told from Alice's point of view, which is great. Tom is the only person she really cares about. Her parents were always fighting and had only been dead for three days when Bony LIzzie came to get Alice. Alice is pretty indifferent about the deaths of her parents and even notes how strange it is to not be upset. Alice initially was going to stay with Aunt Agnes, but Lizzie just up and took her. We do get to see certain events of the story from her point of view. We also do see her meeting up with Aunt Agnes. And we get to see Mab kidnapping Alice and her being questioned as well. And we learn about Tom's rescuing of her. At the end of her section, she says she would gladly die for Tom. I think this was supposed to be foreshadowing, but for reasons that I will dive into in the later books, this doesn't quite follow through.

Final thoughts:

Wurmalde is supposed to be immortal. The fact that she gets killed off so easily is garbage. So far, both Mother Malkin and Wurmalde, female villains, get killed off easily while the two male villains we've had aren't. It just lowers the stakes in a bad way when an immortal character gets killed off so easily. As I've said before, I would've let Wurmalde escape and then have her be brought back for another book. Having her escape wouldn't have affected the overall plot anyway, and it would also be a good opportunity to expand upon her background a bit. And we'd be able to get more info about Mother Ward as well. Then the story can kill Wurmalde off. And it should be way harder to kill Wurmalde off as well.

Mab should have had a redemption arc of sorts. Ideally, she would have a come to earth moment realizing how stupid it was to agree to bring literal Satan out into the world because a boy rejected her advances and decide to ally with Tom to make things right. At the end of the series, she takes over Pendle and sets about fixing it. We never really get that with Mab, which is a disappointment. I would love to know how she became the clan leader at such a young age, for one.

Agnes should have also made more appearances because we don't meet a lot of benevolent witches in the series. How does a benevolent witch fit into Pendle and the wider outside world? How about having her ally with Tom as well? I would bring Mab, Wurmalde, and Agnes back for another book and then build upon them further so that Mab and Agnes can help fight against Satan.

Other than killing Wurmalde off too easily, I think this fourth installment is excellent. The stakes are crazy high, Mother Ward just got more complicated, Tom knows there's a lot about her he doesn't know, war is coming up, Satan is on the loose, and the good guys lost, which builds tension well for me. And Tom has an assassin chasing after him now, too.

When Tom, Alice and the Spook return back, the Spook's house has been burned down. The invading soldiers mentioned before have made it up to Lancashire, and they overwhelmed the boggart. So now that creature is gone, and there's only one surviving book. Why wouldn't the Spook put the copies Alice made in a safe space? Why not take them to Anglezarke?

Also, the witches in the garden have fled. Now you would think that they would hunt those witches down and kill them because there's war and the last thing we need is a bunch of witches who brutally murder people on the loose. Nope. They decide to head to Bill Arkwright's mill. I guess this isn't a bad idea, but it is established that there are still civilians in the area, so why not get rid of at least one of the dangers that faces them?

Side note: Delaney's tendency to load the reader with redundant information is annoying.

They never end up reaching the mill and join a bunch of people fleeing to head to the Isle of Man, a four or five hour trip from Lancashire County. It's referred to as the Isle of Mona here. They don't have spooks over there, and they have something called bugganes. This is a demon that hangs around ruins, usually manifests itself as a black bull or hairy man but can take other forms too. It can communicate inside people's heads, and this is a sign it will kill them within days. To avoid that, it has to be killed first, and only directly through the heart. Immune to salt and iron. Can only be killed when fully materialized.

Honestly, this creature sounds pretty cool.

They don't get a warm welcome when they get there, and Alice is just thinking they should've gone to Ireland (spoiler alert: They eventually do). Meanwhile, we learn the Manx have their own ways of testing for witches. Already, we've got some more worldbuilding, the most important component of fantasy, here than we did with Book 6. And the worst part is Book 6 is based in Greece, so there is no excuses for the piss poor worldbuilding as far as the Greek spooks go.

So the Spook gets into a fight with a yeoman on the Isle, and the three of them have to go into hiding for the time being until they can get to Ireland. The Spook has noticed how close Tom and Alice are being, and he's trying to keep them apart. The Dynamic Duo still try to figure out a way around it. Tom gets sent to town to find a ship to Ireland. Alice quietly tags along.

So they end up in a tavern and run into the captain of Mother Ward's ship in that last book. Turns out all the ships carrying Lancashire's refugees have been seized by the local authorities, so they are shit out of luck. While they are in this tavern, the local authorities show up with an abhuman creature called Horn. Abhumans can only be offspring of Satan and a witch, so this is interesting. Horn has the ability to detect if someone has darkness or evil in them, and naturally he detects that in Alice and Tom. Again, stuff like this should have ended up in that Greece book.

Side note: I googled up the Isle of Man and holy shit there's so much interesting history to it. None of the positives of Manx history made it in. This ties back to the chauvinism Joana Payne was discussing. There are currently efforts to revive the Manx language like there are with Scots, Gaelige, Cornish, etc. In the 1600s, much of the Isle of Man would have been native speakers of Manx, whereas nowadays 2% of the population there speaks the language as their second one. Again, there are attempts to revive it undergoing.

So the two of them get taken in. They meet a bird witch at the prison named Adriana, and she tells them that witches are tested by being put into a barrel with spikes and rolled down a hill. There is a way to survive, but surviving means getting fed to a buggane at Greeba Keep. Usually, there are large crowds coming to watch the rolling, so the three of them are going to be tested at the crack of dawn.

Horn also comes in to chat with Alice for a bit. Since abhumans are children of Satan, he sees Alice as his sister and is pretty cordial with her. Alice does not reciprocate. Again, this is a really good opportunity to do some interesting stuff with abhumans.

All three survive. Alice does it by faking her death and then uses that to ambush the yeomen. This helps both Tom and Alice escape, but Adriana is not so lucky. Tom still has a stick up his ass about Alice using dark magic. I do not like how little character development Tom goes through in these books. At this point, there should be some payoff for the setup in the earlier books for dark magic users not being all bad and Tom realizing the Spook is kind of a piece of shit. Honestly, if I were adapting these books, I don't think much would have to be changed about the Spook in order to portray him as abusive.

So anyway, Tom and Alice find the Spook, the captain, and Adriana's boyfriend, Simon. The big reason Adriana was even pulled into custody to begin with is because she resembles the powerful leader of the Isle's dead wife and he wants to marry her. Adriana is not on board, so like all entitled men, the leader, Lord Barrule, has decided he'll just kill her instead. Meanwhile, her boyfriend is in complete shambles over it. I will say it is interesting to see Jakey in the role of the overwhelmed wife. He is in denial about his girlfriend being a witch, though.

The Spook, Tom and Alice make a plan to head to Greeba Keep and try to deal with the buggane sooner rather than later. After some redundant information about the buggane, we learn that it digs tunnels, and those tunnels can shift. This makes killing one in the tunnels dangerous, so it has to be killed above ground. It sucks the victim's life force, the animus, out, leaving the body a husk. A buggane can also make an alliance with a shaman, which means now we're getting somewhere interesting. Again, Pendle witch clans would have shamans with them.

We learn from Simon that Horn the abhuman came to the island with a witch, his mother. She was killed, but Lord Barrule kept Horn around to have him sniff out witches. Lord Barrule is a gambler and bets on dog fights with his rich friends.

We also learn about some of Tom's adventures with Arkwright, which never made it into that fifth book. Again, John Gregory should have been killed off and Tom should have continued on with Arkwright.

So that night, the trio go to Greeba Keep and sure enough, they find the buggane with a shaman. The shaman figures out they're there and disappears under moonlight, while the buggane prepares to attack. And the Spook is the first to approach it to begin attacking. Eventually, Tom does manage to injure it, but Alice and the dogs go missing during the attack. So Alice is now out of the protection of the blood jar. But we later on learn she's actually safe, but I won't reveal how just yet.

So after this, Simon decides to try making an appeal to the Tynwald, the ruling body of Mann. This is a real thing, by the way. He decides they might be able to influence Barrule into releasing Adriana since they are the ones who select the leader of the island. And I will give Jakey credit here: He's so far better than the other Jakeys in this series, but that is not a high bar.

So Tom and the Spook decide to try confronting the buggane again, but Tom gets captured by the yeomen. After a beating and being put into a cell with a tunnel for the buggane, Tom is forced to watch a bunch of dog fights at dawn, and people gamble on the fights. He figures out Barrule is the shaman. He controls the dogs.

After Tom is taken back into the cell, Barrule projects an image of himself into the cell and taunts Tom. He offers a fight to the death with Bony Lizzie in exchange for Tom and his dogs would be spared. So the next day, Tom is taken to fight Lizzie and we find out Alice was caught with her. Remember, Satan can't approach a woman who bore his child unless she compels him too. So that's why Alice is safe. Both her and Lizzie's lips are stitched together so they can't cast spells. This doesn't stop Lizzie from using telepathy to communicate with Tom into working with her so all three are free. The fight ends with Tom binding her with a silver chain and Alice undoing the binding on her so she can cast spells. Lizzie takes over with one spell and Tom decides to release her because she is his best chance at escaping.

Through the tunnels, Tom, Lizzie and Alice escape and end up in a tree trunk safe from the buggane. The tree is in the eye of a bone yard, which is an area a witch creates that causes the bones of any creature who enters it to grow heavy. If someone is too close to the centre, they are dead. But at the center is safe. There is a path a witch has in order to get out safely.

Lizzie is misandrist, as we learn from the conversation she, Tom, and Alice have. She just turned 40, and a witch enters her prime at 40 years old. So she is more powerful than ever. Lizzie has plans for Tom, so he needs to be kept alive for that. For Alice, she wants her to unite the Pendle clans and take over the world.

The buggane finds them, and Lizzie makes it her familiar. When Barrule projects himself into the tree, Lizzie uses this against him to get her and Alice off of the island and straight to Ireland while Barrule gets Tom and can pit him against Claw, Blood and Bone.

So back in the fighting chamber, Tom is up against Bill's dogs. Bill's ghost comes to save him and orders the dogs to kill Barrule. God I hate that Arkwright was killed off. He's more compelling than the Spook imo.

Turns out Bill's ghost is in Lizzie's control, and she never intended to head to Ireland anyway. She wants the shaman's power, which checks out, and she wants access to his library so she can learn more about it. Also checks out. So she takes the shaman's thumb bones to gain his power and decides she wants to be queen of the island.

What. The. Helly.

I don't understand this writing decision at all. It makes zero sense.

So they head to Barrule's castle, and the Spook has been brought there by the yeomen. All hell broke loose after the shaman was killed. Tom heads out to warn the Spook and fill him in, but Gregory decides to confront Lizzie and fails because he's old. Lizzie wants to torture him for putting her in a pit so I at least get why she keeps him alive. Tom, I don't know. Turns out she has more plans. She wants Tom to act as an intermediary to the yeomen. The yeomen have 10 minutes to select a seneschal, and for every five minutes over, one dies. After 20 minutes and two deaths, the captain, Stanton, is chosen as the seneschal. Stanton plans to kill Lizzie, but she already has him figured out.

Lizzie wants to throw a feast in her honour, and a whole lot of powerful people are invited. Some are coming, either to assess the danger level Lizzie poses or to use her as a means to power.

Look, I am well aware that I am not the target audience for these books. But I think someone within the target audience is smart enough to figure out that this is bullshit. Thirteen year old me was pissed at that ending for Book 13 for a reason.

So Lizzie is planning to release all the prisoners in Greeba Keep except for the Spook. But she's not going to kill Tom yet. When Alice catches up with Tom, we learn that Lizzie is keeping him alive because Alice begged her to and because she has some more plans for him.

Tom also gets the chance to tell Stanton how to kill a witch. And here comes a passage that pissed me off.

I think a child within the target audience is smart enough to understand why this is bullshit. And Tom should not be acting like this by Book 7. It at least made sense in Book 1, when he was 12 and completely inexperienced in the world of spooks. And he's talking to a commander of soldiers. I'm pretty sure Tom is 15 at this point and has been involved in some nasty shit.

And I just realized I have shown my handwriting to the few people who care about me typing this up. Whatever. And I have to be honest here, my sister was asking me if these books were any good. I told her the first five hold up, but the ending of Book 13 is bad. She's 14 year old, so a bit older than the target audience for these books. I have a feeling she'd be even more pissed off about everything that's gone down more than I am, and I know this because of the commentary she makes while we watch movies together.

At the feast, it's mostly men, but there's a few couples. Adriana and other prisoners are also there. One man, a member of the parliament, starts protesting Lizzie at the feast and she kills him right there on the spot and leaves his wife in shock. Adriana is pretty pissed at this and gets taken away by a guard. That guy was her dad, which begs the question: If Adriana's dad is a member of the Tynwald, aka the same group that appointed Barrule to lead the island, then why didn't he use his power to get her out of prison or kick Barrule out of his position for creeping after his daughter? This question is never answered.

A whole bunch of commotion happens, Tom and Alice slip away to get the Spook while Lizzie is giving orders to Stanton. I don't know why Lizzie doesn't just kill Tom off then. After the whole Barrule thing, there are multiple opportunities Lizzie gets to kill Tom but she never uses. I guess it's plot armour but it would be nice to have an explanation. They decide to grab some weapons and the shaman's notebook as well so Lizzie can't use it. In the dungeons, they find Adriana first and get the Spook as well. They get out through the tunnels. While they are trying to find Lizzie's tree in the eye of the bone yard so Alice can sniff out a safe pathway through it, they run into Horn, who leads them to the Grim Cache, a mega cache of life energy taken by the buggane and many others of its kind. It was created by a mage called Lucius Grim. The apparitions of seven Romanian witches are also hanging around there.

Horn explains that the shaman got his power from the life force. Right now, Horn controls the buggane, but Lizzie will have control over it soon. And she hasn't caught on to the cache yet, but when she does, it's game over for everyone. So he advises them to act as quickly as possible before shit hits the fan.

After the quartet leaves, they head to Adriana's house where her mom and Simon live. Adriana is pretty well off and has lots of servants. They stay for two days instead of making plans to act or delay Lizzie from being able to act. One of Stanton's yeomen finds them and gives them his plans. While everyone else was resting or whatever, Lizzie's been conducting raiding parties and killing people for their blood and bones. So Stanton's managed to rally a bunch of people up plus some Tynwald members to go after Lizzie. There is a meeting coming up for the Tynwald at night, so Stanton and his men are planning to strike then.

At dawn, everyone heads out to strike. Lizzie uses dread on everyone, including her own defenders, and scares a lot of people away. Tom and the Spook get close enough to try and kill Lizzie, but fail. Alice saves both of them. She creates the perfect opportunity for Tom to kill Lizzie by binding her, but he doesn't use it then. Tom has not gone through a lot of character development in these books. Bear in mind they are aimed at a slightly older age group than Harry Potter, so I don't expect it to be adult adult, but I expect some more maturity given that. And the first five books pointed to them having that only for Delaney to make a bunch of bad writing decisions.

So now Lizzie is on the loose again, has dissolved the Tynwald and declared herself queen of the island, and Adriana points the Spook, Tom and Alice to a place to hide. Alice tries to glean some info from the shaman's notebook (shouldn't she have done that during the two days she was at Adriana's cottage?) while Tom tries to sleep but has a nightmare. He's being chased by a witch with a crow head. When he was with Arkwright, they had a run in with a Celtic witch, who warned him to never go to Ireland because the Morrigan, a Celtic crow goddess, would kill him there. If you're wondering if I forgot to include that in Book 5, it turns out Joseph Delaney did as well. They do go to Ireland in the next book and I do remember liking that one because of how much of a turning point it is in the series.

So they stay at the cottage for a week (seriously?) and leave when Adriana sends a messenger pigeon. Her mom has died since the whole Lizzie's feast fiasco went down. All around the island, the rumour mill is chugging, and there's stories of the Romanian witch apparitions showing up (we do come back to them in another book), creatures that shouldn't be there showing up, livestock turning up dead. Lizzie has almost certainly accessed the cache and its power.

At night, Tom, Alice, Adriana, and Simon decide to find Lizzie and deal with her for good. The Spook got drugged by Adriana to fall asleep (justice for Meg). Adriana summons a bunch of birds to throw Lizzie's guards off while Tom and Alice sneak in. They head to the shaman's library so they can get more info. While Alice is going through the shaman's books, Tom is looking for Lizzie and gets caught by her and thrown into the dungeons.

He ends up with Horn and Stanton's dead body. Horn hates Stanton, hates Satan, and hates his witch mother and would like an exit out. A decent abhuman who hates his father, Satan. Surely Delaney would utilize a character like this to its full potential (Spoiler alert: No). Lizzie comes by for a visit, steals Stanton's thumb bones, and decides to leave Tom and Horn for the buggane. I don't know why she doesn't just kill Tom at this point.

The buggane comes for Tom, and subjects him to all these horrible moments, such as Tom's mother being chained to the rock by Wurmalde, Jack and his family being attacked by the Pendle witches, Tom's mom fighting the Ordeen. Then it comes back to Mother Malkin on his family's farm, and he hears Alice's voice, takes charge and kills Mother Malkin with the fire himself. And this is how he survives the buggane.

Despite being really weak after surviving the buggane, Tom convinces Horn to free the both of them and they escape only to end up in Lizzie's throne room. Lizzie kills Horn (BOOOOOOO!!!!!) and is about to kill Tom when Alice's apparition appears and talks Lizzie into bringing Tom into the fight room.

In the fight room, Lizzie is forced to hand over the shaman's thumb bones to Alice, and she flees in horror at losing her pride. As for why Alice was safe from Satan, turns out the cache protected her.

So they head back to Adriana and Simon, and the Spook is there too and not happy. Tom fills him in, and the Spook decides they're going to deal with the buggane first (WHY?????).

So they head to the ruins, only to be confronted by a hydra there. It's actually the buggane and they kill it after Alice saves Tom yet again. (What has Jakey done to deserve this?)

They rejoin Adriana and Simon, and after the Spook fails to track Lizzie, Adriana uses birds to track her and finds her really easily. She's at a cliff, however, there are traps for them along the way. At the cliffside, Lizzie casts a spell to make everyone throw themselves off the cliff. Simon succumbs to it and Adriana gets her revenge by ordering birds to to kill Lizzie. Lizzie fights them off and reveals Tom sold his soul to the Devil. She also kills Adriana (seriously?), but Adriana orders more birds to kill Lizzie and Lizzie dies.

After that, Tom spills the tea and after mulling over it for a while, the Spook orders Alice to contact Grimalkin. Grimalkin once told her she thinks Satan could be bound with spears in a pit so they'll try their luck there.

And they plan to head to Ireland after.

Final thoughts:

Can you tell this pissed me off? Not only from having two characters that should have never been killed off so soon after they were introduced, but also the whole ghost of Arkwright thing. And all the deus ex machina saving Tom. Not to mention, the Isle of Man has a really interesting history and some of that could've been worked into this book. Yet more of the English chauvinism showing up.

Anyway, I am brainstorming a fanfic rewrite of Book 6 where Mistress Wurmalde comes back. I'm thinking that it will start out the same way as Book 6 did with the maenad attacking Tom and Alice warning him via mirror. Afterwards, Tom goes back to visit his family and his mom is there. The topic of Wurmalde comes up, and this is where some tea starts to get spilled. I haven't decided what it's going to be yet. After staying a few days, Tom heads back to the Spook only for him to be missing and the boggart incapacitated. He runs into Alice and Mab shortly after and they tell him Wurmalde is back with a vengeance. She is likely to be the one behind kidnapping the Spook. So then Tom, Mab and Alice head to Pendle and stay over at Aunt Agnes' house to figure out what's going on. I haven't figured out where to go after this. All I know is that it should end with the Spook and Wurmalde being killed, plus Tom and Alice being closer and Mab and Agnes becoming important allies. And we should get some hints on how to deal with Satan.

Alice, Tom and the Spook are travelling to Dublin, Ireland. There's almost no spooks there and a lot of supernatural stuff, so there's plenty of work to be found in Ireland. On the way to Ireland, a storm occurs and Tom sees a pair of eyes in the storm, one blue and one green. While he was training with Bill Arkwright, they ran into a Celtic witch and Tom killed her and she swore beforehand that the Morrigan would get revenge on him if he ever stepped foot on Ireland. That tale is in a companian book of short stories by the way.

Many places in Dublin have jibbers, which is an apparition left behind a week after a person commits suicide. Jibbers are a new thing here. They make knocking noises and drive people insane with it. One happens to be a hotel, so the Spook, Tom and Alice are asked to deal with it in exchange for a place to stay. The person who killed herself was a maid rejected by a wealthy man.

They deal with the jibber at dawn, but while Tom is asleep, he has a dream about being chased by a crow and running to a church. A witch with a crow head transforms into the Celtic witch Tom killed. After they discuss the jibber and what it might actually be, they head up to where the girl killed herself to deal with the jibber.

Alice saves the day yet again by using dark magic. The salt and iron doesn't work all that well. Tom hears the Old Tongue from the jibber and Alice chooses to use the Old Tongue to deal with the jibber. It seems that there is a spell causing the jibbers to exist and binds the ghost to it. This makes the ghost of the maid visible and she's talked into a happy memory so she could fully cross over to the other side. The Spook does not approve of dark magic, as to be expected. But Tom does defend Alice this time. He should've started to defend her around Book Four or Five, but better late than never, I guess.

Side note: I'm listening to the audio book and the redundant information is annoying.

So after the Spook decides to accept it, Tom and Alice go about dealing with the jibbers themselves and earn some money for it. The Spook refuses to come along because he's old and also because of Alice's use of dark magic. And the blood jar has a bad crack in it and they are in danger.

During one excursion with a jibber, Tom sees an apparition of the witch with one green eye and one blue. She taunts him and brags about the storm at the beginning. And she's also responsible for the jibbers. The Spook also gets let in the know about it.

After about a week in the hotel, a wealthy man named Farrell Shey comes and asks for the trio's help. There's a bunch of mages planning sacrifices to summon the Old God Pan, and it's going to occur during a festival. They've gotten desperate enough to attempt doing it twice a year instead of the usual once. The Old God being summoned means bad news, so they need to be dealt with. Landowners like Shey have been at war with the mages for a while, and it needs to come to an end. Shey believes he can help the trio with spook work.

So Tom, Alice and the Spook head to Shey's house in a carriage. Shey has every reason to believe that they are being followed.

On the way, they stop to sleep and Tom has another dream about with the witch. He's inside the burial mound where they'd fought and in the dream, recreates the moment she was killed. He initially used his silver chain on her, but the two of them ended up trapped in a burial mound and her mouth was covered, so Tom uncovered her mouth to get both of them out. A black cloud comes out of her mouth and turns into a crow. This is the goddess Morrigan (and I will touch upon this later on). He fights against her enough to drive her away. The witch he was fighting with warns him not to visit Ireland after the fight. He agreed to let the witch go free in exchange for getting both of them out of the burial mound. Bill Arkwright killed her as soon as both were out.

When he wakes up, he knows that there is a chance the Morrigan could come for him. He hears the Fiend's footsteps too, which means he and Alice are screwed. Once he confirms it's Satan, he awakens Alice and the Spook. The crack in the jar is pretty bad. Alice says the blood jar's power is sapping, so she has no choice but to reach out to Grimalkin. It's a massive struggle considering the situation in Lancashire.

The next day, they set off and reach Shey's house. They learn about Irish heroes like Cuchallain and the hero's sword. Tom also learns that church he's running to in his dream isn't a church but a sidhe, a haven for heroes.

And all I can think about is how much of a lost opportunity it was to not have an Irish spook be featured. At least Book 6 had that, for all its many faults.

We also learn that the burial mounds are gateways to other worlds called the Hollow Worlds. Celtic witches draw their power from that. The mages are hoping to summon Pan to access weapons from the other world as well as magic.

That night, Alice attempts to contact Grimalkin while Tom eavesdrops. She finally succeeds and Tom leaves not long after so Alice can tell him herself.

When morning comes, Alice awakens Tom but doesn't tell Tom about what she and Grimalkin are talking about. He manages to get them alone after breakfast and you would think he would take his staff with him since danger could come from anywhere, but nope.

As it turns out Grimalkin is being hunted down for killing a bunch of enemy soldiers and is going to have a hard time getting to Ireland, but she is coming. And she knows from a scryer that Tom is at risk of being killed by a Celtic witch. It's likely that the Morrigan is taking on the witch's form to scare Tom.

When the pair returns back to the Spook, Tom gets chewed out for being off in the clouds instead of getting involved in planning out how to deal with the mages. I have to give this one to the Spook. The plan is to capture a goat mage to learn what exactly happens in the ceremony and reach the place the festival takes place without the mages' spies catching them. They have armed men with them for protection.

Even though there's days to come until the festival, a lot of people are already at the grounds. They pick an inn the mages are unlikely to pick and one that is near the town center, where the sacrifices happens. Shey's armed men have spotted some of the mages approaching.

The mages reach by dawn and start working on their sacrifice towers. The plan is to capture a mage by evening and burn the tower to set them back a bit. Alice just wonders what happens after the mage is captured. Shey says that the armed men will go south while the four of them with the captured mage are going in the opposite direction. Dark magic has also been accounted for.

When the plan gets put into motion, the mages pick up on what's going to happen and fight back. The Spook captures a mage and binds both the mouth and eyes with the silver chain. It goes surprisingly well. The four head to a castle up north with the mage and plan to question him in the morning.

Tom dreams about the Morrigan chasing him again. And he hears Satan walking too. So now he is panicking and he doesn't at least tell Alice. Considering how nosy he was before, he owes her that at least.

The mage gets questioned in the castle's dungeons with some guards. Shey is the one doing most of the questioning. The Spook also questions him too. The mage is pretty stubborn about giving up information. Shey isn't above threatening to torture people to get answers, while the Spook, who had no problem drugging Meg, is against this. Granted, false confessions occur, but if it's coming from John Gregory, well......

We learn the goat ceremony fails because of a variety of circumstances. It comes down to picking the best goat out of seven, the human sacrifice choices being willing to die, two male mages and one female. Even if the choices die in a way other than human sacrifice, it would still work. They can't just substitute in another person. So keeping the mage alive for a while longer is a pretty good way to stop them.

Also, the mage's name is Cormac. The woman who volunteered herself is a Celtic witch.

And the castle is under siege from the rest of the mages. You would think there would be more considering the situation, but alas. Granted, they only have so many people willing to help out landowners, but even with that, there should be at least a few contingency plans. And the Spook seems more interested in laying on Shey for eating up instead of doing things the Spook's way.

Tom actually sleeps well, but he is awaken by Alice since there's plenty of mages and they have cannons. Sure they are unskilled, but again, this is one of those situations that calls for a lot of contingency planning, but nope. The plan is to hold out until the time for the ceremony has passed.

The mages aren't very effective with the cannons, so they decide to demand Cormac's release in exchange for peace. It gets rejected.

It's also only now that Tom decides to ask about Pan, the Old God the mages are trying to summon instead of literally a few chapters ago. Pan started out in Greece but he is now worshipped by many. It takes eight days of human sacrifice to summon Pan through a portal from the dark. He has two forms: One as a musician and the other terrifying. Not much is know about him.

Meanwhile, the cannon just stopped firing. The trio of Alice, Tom and the Spook get summoned to the battlements. The mages have a few other tricks up their sleeves, it turns out. Again, contingency planning. Since the mages are doing a ritual to transfer knowledge about firing cannons to each other. Since this takes 10 minutes, this would be a good opportunity to lay a counteroffense but nope.

Now the mages are actually effective at using their cannon. By afternoon of Day Two or Three, they've managed to create a hole in the castle. The good guys still make decent progress, but alas. A large man demands someone to come and fight him and taunts them. It becomes clear he's a mage since the archers try to kill him but fail because all the arrows miss.

So the next plan is to get the Spook, Alice, Tom and some of Shey's soldiers and to take Cormac and flee while Shey and his men hold out. The plan is to return to Shey's home. On Tom's suggestion and one of the few moments that show he's matured a bit, they leave within an hour to at least make the siege by the mages pointless once Shey and his men fail at defending the castle.

The fleeing party heads into a mountain where there are mages everywhere. They have to go at a glacial pace to not be spotted. They get spotted anyway and run as fast as they could so they can lose their pursuers in the mountain. Come to think about it, why wouldn't they have a plan to flee as soon as the siege started?

Tom and Alice get separated during the ensuing fight, and Tom escapes by noticing that only one of the three mages surrounding him has a torch and knocks it out of his hand. Tom flees to a river that was the muster point if anything went wrong. He reaches a cottage where a man could be seen nearby. The man points Tom in the right direction and offers Tom a place to stay. He accepts and this is pretty unwise considering he knows nothing about Ireland. I feel like even Book One Tom would not be this stupid.

Conveniently, the woman in the cottage, Scarabek, is a Celtic witch. Tom also leaves his staff outside. He should not be making these kinds of decisions at this point in the series. It's Book Eight, he's 15 I think, and this is stupid. He also conveniently doesn't feel that normal cold feeling he gets when near the dark. He accepts food from her and notices that despite a fire in the cottage, the flags are cold. Tom falls asleep and when he wakes up, he's in no shape to fight.

I'm pretty sure what I liked about this book was the Irish mythology and the turning point in Alice and Tom's relationship. I also did like Grimalkin helping to capture the Fiend. From what I have learned about the Morrigan, the Irish mythology aspect isn't nearly as fully utilized as it could have been since Pan gets more focus. There are some serious lost opportunities here.

Anyway, so there's a baby in the cottage. Tom finally gets that warning from the dark right when he's not in the position to fight. The baby is actually a creature that eats a lot. Likes to drink blood too. It also looks a lot like the man outside the cottage. The only reason Tom doesn't die is because Scarabek pulls it away from him. Scarabek also turns out to be the witch from Tom's dreams. She's pretty happy with how easy it was to get Tom under her spell. The witch that got killed by Arkwright? She was Scarabek's twin sister, and it's unique in that they share one mind, so one experiences what the other one does. In fact, she once had two blue eyes and her sister green, but after her death and Scarabek's descent into the other worlds, her eyes changed. Scarabek is one of the sacrifices, and she's planning to sacrifice Tom to the Morrigan. But there is a journey they have to make first.

Thin Shawn, Scarabek's partner, takes Tom's weapons and are planning to torture Tom along the way to their destination to get revenge for the dead witch. Scarabek's baby demon also tags along for the ride too. They do make a stop here and there to feed the baby demon. They have to keep Tom sedated throughout it so nothing happens.

And as for how Alice never got taken by Satan during the separation? Turns out Scarabek and her friends abducted her and plan to send her to Satan. They stop by a burial ground to send Alice off before they head back to the festival place. Scarabek made a deal with the devil to send Alice to him. Even then, Tom is sure the blood jar would keep her safe.

Tom and Alice are kept separate so he wouldn't try to save her. The process of being taken is pretty torturous for Alice with her being tied up. And this is when Tom realizes he's in love with her.

I don't have an issue with him taking a while to realize he's in love with her. In fact, this is one of the things I like about this series is that it's a more slow burn. What I have issues with are Tom's lack of character development and just how much he doesn't evolve past the Spook. This is what keeps me from being fully invested in them as a pair.

We do learn more about the baby demon of Scarabek and Thin Shawn. Thin Shawn is a barrowkeeper and they can only have one son. They have short lives. The barrows are for Celtic witches, but in the past they were for the ancient dead. Usually they take animal blood.

Tom gets knocked out again before everyone heads to the festival grounds for good. When he's conscious again, Satan comes to pay him a visit. Satan taunts Tom with the horrors of what Alice is experiencing in hell.

Thin Shawn comes along after and feeds Tom while taunting him. They are at the festival grounds for the sacrifice, there's a goat with a crown on its head so Pan can enter it, and Tom is blindfolded and tied. He manages to get the blindfold off and survey his surroundings.

The ceremony begins with chanting and the weather changes along with. The goat is scared shitless and Tom is unable to sleep after the chanting is done. The sacrifice is going to happen later tonight.

Near the end of the night, Tom realizes the Old God Pan has entered the goat. In the morning, we learn Cormac, the mage who was captured, is going to get executed first. It happens by beheading. Tom is pretty squeamish from this considering everything else, but then again, this is new. It becomes clear that the goat is possessed by Pan considering it stares at Tom.

Scarabek, the female sacrifice, is missing the day of hers, so the mages decide to put Tom up instead to buy time. Just when Tom is about to beheaded, Thin Shawn saves him from being killed because Scarabek wants to torture Tom further. Nobody knows where Scarabek is and Shawn thinks it's an abduction.

Over night, Pan reaches out to Tom. This is in a dream where he's in the forest. Pan appears in his human form playing music. They're in a shadow world between limbo and the dark. Tom cannot stay for too long because he's human. Heroes can. What Pan wants is to be freed from the goat's body because it's pretty unpleasant. In exchange, Tom keeps his sanity and asks for Alice to be returned from the dark, but that isn't guaranteed because that means going into someone else's domain. Tom just has to figure out how to free the goat while tied up.

Tom frees the goat because the chains around the goat's hooves are also tied to wooden boards, but not very well. Pan basically kills the goat and Tom escapes. He does get chased and he is weak, so it's no surprise he gets recaptured. They go to the mages' headquarters. Shawn and his son are there with a bunch of mages and Scarabek is only going to be returned if they give Tom back to the Spook et al. In fact, Grimalkin is the one with Scarabek. The mages are pretty confident they can take Grimalkin, but unsurprisingly, it does not work out. And this is where the book starts to pick up somewhat in quality.

How Grimalkin does it is by killing the mage sent out to kill her and disguising his severed head as hers. She sneaks in and frees Tom. Tom is still sluggish from what he's endured so Grimalkin has to carry him. Once they get to safety, they rest and Grimalkin gets up to speed on everything that's happened. So they discuss how to deal with Satan and how to work with the Spook going forward. They also discuss how the war in Lancashire County is going. It's not great, but things are expected to get better since the enemy is stretched thin resources wise. The witch clans' scriers have foreseen a victory for Lancashire.

To bind Satan, they need dark magic and it's going to be difficult. They'd have to destroy the blood jar to get the Fiend to them once everything has been prepared, but it is doable.

A bit before dawn later on, Grimalkin and Tom reconnect with Shey and the Spook. They both get caught up to speed and we learn from Shey that the ritual failed. He also knows about Pan helping Tom out and where the Fiend can be binded safely. There's a haunted stone circle, specifically, that seems to be the best candidate. And upon inspection, they find the stone circle is a dragon's lair. Which makes it even better.

In this world, dragons are air spirits and invisible. They usually aren't detectable, but this particular dragon is strong. The pit for Satan's body is going to be in the center of the circle.

By the next day, Tom, the Spook and Grimalkin have managed to dig all the way down to solid rock. Grimalkin has spears that they can put into the rock to bind him. Satan can only come near if Grimalkin wills it because of the whole child bearing thing. They also need a silver chain, which the Spook volunteers.

It takes a total of three days overall to prepare the pit for the Fiend. There is a plan in place to tackle Satan once he's summoned. Alice contacts Tom at night through the mirror asking him for help. Tom does question how she can contact him in the dark and that the doorway out of hell is in the dragon's lair. She asks him to come alone. This feels like a trap honestly.

Tom goes anyway. It was a trap by Scarabek. Again, this feels like a mistake Book One Tom would make, but on the other hand Tom is just desperate to get Alice back. Scarabek disguises herself as Alice and drags Tom into the Hollow Hills to die by the Morrigan's hand, leaving his staff behind. Only heroes can handle being in the Hollow Hills, and they still are at risk of losing their memories. This brings up back to Tom's dream where he runs to a sidhe for protection.

And here his dreams save him because he starts running. He's being chased by the Morrigan in crow form and it jogs his memory enough to find a sidhe to flee too. He gets there in time and runs into none other than Cuchallain and his hound. We learn time passes differently in the Hollow Hills since one second in there could mean years passing in the real world. There is a way for Tom to get back, but he has to do so before midnight bell peels twelve times. There is a cave wall he has to run directly through hard and fast. When Tom agrees to fight with Cuchallain, the latter is happy to offer a sword to Tom to fight the Morrigan. Stabbing the Morrigan with it would injure the Morrigan. The sword does have a quality to test if the wielder is worthy of it and it does so by bleeding out through red ruby eyes on the hilt. See, the hilt is in the shape of a skelt, with eyes.

Tom and Cuchallain leave the sidhe and start running to the exit. They do run into the Morrigan, but Cuchallain takes over and tackles her. Admittedly, he does get caught up in a battle fury for long enough for Tom to escape further and seriously wound the Old Goddess. He finally reaches the cave to exit but the Morrigan is too close and that he has to run hard and fast through the cave. So he uses his time power to fight against the Morrigan and make it hard and fast through the cave wall. And it's just in the nick of time too. This was a moment I really liked. I think it was great. I would definitely keep this in if I were to rewrite the series.

We learn that nothing has happened in the real world because Tom is left in the dragon's lair and his staff is still there. When he gets back to Shey's house and runs into Grimalkin and the Spook, Grimalkin recognizes the sword as being one of the Hero Swords crafted by Hephaestus. This specific one is the Destiny Blade. Each user has to fulfill their destiny while they wield it. It's still night in the real world, so the Spook decides he'll get up to speed in the morning. It doesn't help that Tom is injured.

In the morning, Grimalkin gives Tom a new a shirt with padding, a strap and a sheathe for the sword. She has him practice drawing the sword and using it. They have a swordfight in Shey's cellar to give Tom experience with using the sword and his staff both. He's inexperienced enough with the sword that he uses his time slowing ability to defeat her.

When the fight is over, she reveals she met a scryer who foretold that a child who was just born would be the one to kill Satan. The scryer couldn't find the child, but Grimalkin believes this was because of Tom's mother. She wants to train Tom for a week so he could use the sword properly when it comes to dealing with the Fiend, and the Spook is on board. Why wouldn't he? The more weapons expertise, the better. Joanna Payne was saying that it would make sense for spooks to have a lot more weapons than just a staff and I agree.

Grimalkin's hard training does help Tom become a bit more skilled with the sword and practice stopping time as well. Again, Grimalkin consistently has two functioning brain cells compared to many other characters.

The pit for Satan's body is ready. The plan is to decapitate him and bury the head elsewhere. Grimalkin is responsible for the head.

The night they do it, everyone has spears and there's lanterns for everyone to see. The Spook gives a hero's speech to Grimalkin and Tom for helping with the binding of Satan. To lure him out, the blood jar is broken. It takes him longer than expected, but the Fiend comes out. Tom uses his time control ability but Satan has the same ability and uses it. Tom is no match for Satan predictably.

Tom gains the upper hand eventually and pierces Satan with his spear. The Fiend's screams cause Tom to lose control over time, but so does Satan, and Grimalkin and the Spook act. Grimalkin actually manages to pierce his heart and the next spear goes into his heart too. Grimalkin and the Spook tie Satan down in the pit for long enough for Tom to behead him. It is a bit of a struggle for Tom, but he does it.

The trio buries the Fiend and the stone is laid down. Grimalkin puts a spell in place to create some extra security. All of this is done in the rain, by the way. And I can't lie, this is a pretty cool moment. This one moment I also really like.

The only way to keep the Fiend bound is to keep the head and body separate. Grimalkin decides to hold on to the head to lower the chances of him being freed while Tom and the Spook figure out how to kill him for good. And from here, Grimalkin exits the story. They still have to deal with the Fiend's servants chasing them down, so that will keep them busy.

As we come to learn, back in Lancashire County the war is starting to wind down. One morning, Tom is with Claw, Blood and Bone (Arkwright's dogs, if you don't remember) and they start chasing after something all of a sudden. Tom hears Pan's music and when he finds him in the shape of a boy, he's surrounded by a number of animals with a white haired girl at his feet. When Pan stops playing the music, we learn that binding the Fiend allowed Pan to go into his domain to get Alice as a thanks for freeing him from the goat. Binding the Fiend also deprived the goat mages of a lot of magic to bind Pan, so that's a nice bonus too.

Alice is in bad shape, unsurprisingly. Tom tries to talk to her, but she starts attacking him and tries to run away. He uses the dogs to get her back to Shey's house. It is pretty difficult to get her back to the house because of just how bad her mental state is. Shey got the doctor to check up on her while Tom suggests finding a benign witch in Lancashire to help Alice out.

Overnight, Tom finds Alice fleeing the house and runs after her. She ends up at Shey's chicken coop killing them and eating them raw. Tom compares this to a fox that had broken into his family's chicken coop and had eaten five chickens. Two of Shey's guards also find Alice in the coop. Alice flees again and Tom chases after her. She has an almost supernatural strength ever since her return from the dark.

They end up in the forest where Alice is surrounded by some people. There's still signs of the Morrigan around with one of Shey's guards falling victim. Alice is still further ahead, so when Tom finally gets to her, she's tied up to be fed to the Morrigan's crows. Scarabek was the one who tied her up and the mages were there to help her. Tom has no weapons so he falls victim to them very quickly. Just when they're done tying Tom up to a tree to be fed, Alice breaks free of her bindings and gains some of her mental capacity back. She kills Scarabek and the crow that was about to kill Tom. She uses both physical strength and spells to do all of this. She's not quite the same Alice as she was before, especially because she has a moon on her leg. With every step closer to the dark, the moon waxes and when it's a full moon, she's a full part of the dark. It's an irreversible process. She also, as we come to learn, has always had an insane amount of power and just never revealed it to Tom. Again, I think this is a pretty cool moment, albeit quite dark. Alice is kind of unhinged throughout the whole thing, but she is starting to show signs of returning to normal given that she saves Tom. She also heals Tom of injuries that he might have. The rest of the mages have fled while all of this was going down.

Tom and Alice return back to Shey's house and explain the chicken slaughter as Alice being under a spell. The Spook knows it's BS, but he decides this can wait for another time. The good news we learn is that Lancashire County won the war and they can go back.

In private, Alice reveals what I've already touched on above, but also that she enjoyed killing the witch and feels genuinely horrified with herself. This could be because she's been in the dark for so long. She also still thought she was in the dark since Tom was used against her to make her think she was in the real world. This has happened to her multiple times. She figured out she was back in the real world because she managed to get a glimpse at the scar she gave Tom in Book One. The one that says he belongs to her.

As for the chickens, she felt the urge to drink live blood. Again, being in the dark screwed her over. Tom remembers what his mother had told him about Alice: That she could have a bit of both the dark and the light in her.