Free Necropolis by Anthony Horowitz

Maybe he would have insisted on going, no matter what I said. But I could have poured paint over the car or something. I could even have set fire to it. There were all sorts of ways that I could have made it impossible for them to leave the house.
    But I was too scared. I had a power and I knew that it made me different from everyone else and that was the last thing I wanted to be. Freakshow Matt…not me, thanks. So I said nothing. I stayed back and watched them go, and since then I've seen the car pull away a thousand times and I've yelled at my eight-year-old self to do something and I've hated myself for being so stupid. If I could go back in time, that's where I would start, because that's where it all went wrong.
    After that, things happened very quickly. I was fostered by a woman called Gwenda Davis, who was related in some way to my mother — her half sister or something. For the next six years, I lived with her and her partner, Brian, in a terraced house in Ipswich. I hated both of them. Gwenda was shallow and self-centered, but Brian was worse. They had what I think is called an abusive relationship, which means that he used to beat her around. He hit me too. I was scared of him — I admit it. Sometimes I would see him looking at me in the same way, and I would make sure my bedroom door was locked at night.
    And yet, here's something strange. I might as well admit it. In a way, I was almost happy in Ipswich.
    Sometimes
    I thought of it as a punishment for what I'd done — or hadn't done — and part of me figured that I deserved it. I was resigned to my life there. I knew it was never going to get any better and at least I was able to create an identity for myself. I could be anyone I wanted to be.
    I bunked off school. I was never going to pass any exams, so what did I care? I stole stuff from local shops. I started smoking when I was twelve. My friend Kelvin bought me my first packet of Marlboro Lights — although, of course, he made me pay him back twice what they'd cost. I never took drugs. But if I'd stayed with him much longer, I probably would have. I'd have ended up like one of those kids you read about in the newspapers, dead from an overdose, a body next to a railway line. Nobody would have cared, not even me. That was just the way it would have been.
    But then along came Jayne Deverill, and suddenly everything changed, because it turned out she was a witch. I know how crazy that sounds. I can't believe I just wrote it. But she wasn't a witch like in a movie. I mean, she didn't have a long nose and a pointy hat or anything like that. She was the real thing: evil, cruel, and just a little bit mad. She and her friends had been watching me, waiting for me to fall into their hands because they needed me to help them unlock a mysterious gate hidden in a wood in Yorkshire. And it seemed that, after all, I wasn't just some loser with a criminal record who'd gotten his parents killed. I was one of the Five. A Gatekeeper. The hero of a story that had begun ten thousand years before I was born.
    How did I feel about that? How do I feel about it now?
    I have no choice. I am trapped in this and will have to stick with it until the bitter end. And I do think the end will be a hard one. The forces we're up against — the Old Ones and their allies around the world —
    are too huge. They are like a nightmare plague, spreading everywhere, killing everything they touch. I have powers. I've accepted that now, and recently I've learned how to use them. But I am still only fifteen years old — I had my birthday out here in Nazca — and when I think about the things that are being asked of me, I am scared.
    I can't run away. There's nowhere for me to hide. If I don't fight back, the Old Ones will find me. They will destroy me more surely and more painfully than even those cigarettes would have managed. After I was arrested, I never smoked again, by the way. That was one of the ways that I changed. I think I have accepted