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‘What do you want? Why have you come back here?’

‘You know what I want,’ James said.

‘You want to cause trouble,’ Jacob said. ‘Of all the theatres in all the world, why this one?’

‘Think of it as a homecoming.’

‘I don’t want to think of it as anything.’

‘Come on, Jacob. We’re family. Aren’t you pleased to see me?’

Jacob shook his head. ‘I’m not sure there’s anyone I’d like to see less, other than perhaps Krampus himself.’

‘Careful what you wish for, stepbrother.’ There was a flash of light, seemingly from the sky, and for a split second James’s face lit up into something horrific. Jacob took a step back, heart racing. Had he seen a mask, some kind of illusion, or was his brother really a monster in disguise, a demon that walked among men?

‘Ten years,’ James said, turning away, peering back across the square towards the town, his cloak billowing out behind him in a wind that seemed to come from nowhere. ‘Ten years since you and your mother’s lies almost ruined what my father died for.’

Jacob frowned, trying to remember. The court case, he was talking about the court case. It had dragged on for several months, exhausting all of their energy and most of their finances. In the end it had been settled … the 24th of December. He remembered now. That year there had been no Christmas. Julie had been exhausted, taken into hospital after collapsing at home just a couple of hours after the case had finished. Jacob had spent Christmas Day sitting at her bedside.

‘I have little birds that tweet constantly in my ear,’ James said. ‘I heard what you’re doing. This Christmas … festival. Ten years on from the Christmas I spent tired, broke and alone, wondering if I still had a career after your lies had derailed it. You don’t know how much you hurt me, Jacob. All those lies you told in court.’

‘Everything I said was true. Your father ruined us to support you. My mother was working two jobs. Your father sold everything he could, and stole what he couldn’t, and sold that too. And then he nearly killed my mother.’

‘So the lies say.’

‘So the police reports say. So the evidence says!’

‘Lies!’

Jacob took a deep breath. ‘You came out all right. You’re rich. You’re famous. You’re on TV. I work in a café with my aunt. My mother is chronically ill. We lost our family home. And you want my sympathy?’

James spun round, cloak theatrically billowing out behind him again, and Jacob wondered whether the stage act ever ended, whether the stepbrother he had grown up with still existed at all.

‘I rose from the ashes,’ James said. ‘James Steamblack rose from the ashes. But the man I was … the boy … he died that Christmas Eve long ago, broken and alone. And it’s for that boy that I want revenge … and this year, I will get it. Watch your back, stepbrother. Wherever you go, I’ll be watching you.’