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I want to be the one who slits his throat!
~ Mrs. Deverill


Mrs. Jayne Deverill is the central antagonist in Anthony Horowitz's The Power of Five series' book one Raven's Gate, and is mentioned in the other books. She is the counterpart of Mrs. Elvira Crow from Horowitz's prototype, unfinished series Pentagram.           


                


Jayne Deverill is a witch hailing from the Yorkshire village Lesser Malling, solely populated by evil witches and wizards worshippers of the Old Ones: incarnations of Evil who ruled the world in the beginning. She lives in a farm called Hive Hall with her familiar, the demonic cat Asmodeus, and her farmhand Noah (who acts like the typical Igor stereotype). Mrs. Deverill is depicted as old, ugly, cruel and highly unpleasant, just like your average witch. She is highly strong and physically fit for someone of her age, and is a very powerful witch, who is strongly implied to have been greatly empowered by the Old Ones. She hates the outside world and wants to free the Old Ones and their king Chaos, hoping that they would destroy the world and give them immense wealth and influence over the new one they would build. (In fact, Chaos is revealed to care nothing about the Lesser Malling residents, and would kill them all as soon as they would outlive their usefulness.)

Mrs. Deverill first appears at the beginning of the story, when she goes to London to pick up the primary protagonist, fourteen-year-old delinquent Matt Freeman; having gotten his custody as part of a reinsertion program. In fact, she and her fellow cultists made sure to be selected as Matt's guardians, planning to sacrifice him during the night of Roodmas to free the Old Ones. She gets mugged on her way but the mugger is later found mysteriously dead.

She bullied Matt when he was care, torturing him psychologically and physically, and having Noah beat him and threaten to kill him. However, Mrs. Deverill made the mistake of putting a picture of Matt at his parents' funeral in her closet, which Matt found. She would also take nocturnal trips to the (supposedly abandoned) power plant in the woods outside the village, where she joined the village cult to prepare for Matt's sacrifice.

She lost Matt briefly when he went into the town of Greater Malling to escape. There, he met the journalist Richard Cole and told him his story, but Cole did not believe him, and when Matt left the office in a foul mood, Mrs. Deverill was waiting outside to capture him again. A few days later, the police officer responsible of the reinsertion program went to Lesser Malling to check on Matt. Appalled by the boy's living conditions, he told Mrs. Deverill that Matt would be taken away, but the witch killed him with a spell, making his car malfunction and keep speeding up until it crashed, to prevent him from interfering.

Matt later witnessed Tom Burgess, a farmer who had tried to help him escape, being killed by some monster (implied to be the cat Asmodeus). As such, he was shocked when all evidence of the murder - including Tom's body - vanished and when everyone told police that Tom was alive and gone to see his sheep. Then, to Matt's horror, he got a call from the dead farmer saying he was up in Cirencester. This totally confounded Matt and he wondered if he was going crazy.

He escaped and found Mrs. Deverill and the cult doing dark magic rituals in the woods at night in the power plant. Some influential man was there too. Matt was discovered and Mrs. Deverill summoned two black dogs from a fire who chased him, but he was saved by Richard, who killed the dogs and adopted Matt.

Later on, Richard and Matt went to the British Museum of London to see Professor Dravid, a member of a secret organization called the Nexus, who had vowed to protect humanity. Dravid told them about the Old Ones and said that Jayne Deverill and the others were evil cultists. But Dravid was killed when Mrs. Deverill animated all the dinosaur fossils. Matt and Richard escaped, but they got captured by Mrs. Deverill.

Later in the night, Sir Michael Marsh, a government scientist whom Matt had met earlier, was then revealed to be the mysterious cult leader who was at the ritual that night. Sir Marsh took him to the abandoned power plant, which he had built over the Raven's Gate, one of the sealed portals towards the demonic dimension where the Old Ones had been banished. Sir Marsh and the cult planned to cause a power meltdown and use Matt's blood to channel the tremendous nuclear energy that would be released, destroy the Raven's Gate and free the Old Ones.

As everything seems lost, Matt was revealed to be the reincarnation of one of the Five Gatekeepers: five teenagers with immense powers who banished the Old Ones at the beginning of time. Unlocking his telekinetic power, Matt freed himself and escaped with Richard, botching the ritual, killing the entire cult and repelling Chaos into his dimension.

But Jayne Deverill, rendered mad with rage by the cult's failure, ran after Matt and Richard and tried to kill them with a metal pipe. She fought Richard over a tank full of acid and at first got the upper hand, but he eventually overpowered her and knocked her into the acid, killing her. In his view, Mrs Deverill's fate was worse than the Burning Times back in the 1600s.

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