The baby squirmed and shuddered like he was having nightmares of his own. At first, Carla thought that was what had woken her. Then the voice came again.
“Carla? It’s okay, but you need to wake up now.”
It was a man’s voice. Not a man she knew. And it was inside the apartment. Her heart started pounding.
“Who’s there?” she said, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.
“It’s all right,” the man said. “I’m here to help you.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” she said. “I’ll scream. I’ve got a knife.”
“You don’t,” the voice said. “And if I’d wanted to hurt you, I wouldn’t be telling you that I’m here. But please wake up. I have to talk to you, and we don’t have very much time.”
Carla kicked off the covers, and they slid down to the carpet with a hiss. She should have been cold. The room was cold. The dress clung to her, tacky with sleep sweat. She walked forward slowly. She could run for the front door. Or get her cell phone and call the cops. Call Jay.
The man was sitting at the kitchen table. His pants and sweater were black, his pale fingers laced together before him. His head was shaved to the scalp. For a moment, it seemed that his paper-pale skin was covered in black tattoos. The marks were on his fingers, the backs of his hands, his throat, his ears, his eyelids. Even his lips were striped with black. The marks and symbols made her think of letters in alphabets she didn’t know or mathematical notations. She had the sense that if she looked in the whites of his eyes, there would be symbols written by the blood vessels. Then as quickly as it had come, the impression was gone, and he was only a pleasantly smiling stranger in her house. The kitchen was dark except for the overhead light, and it made him seem like he was on a stage.
His smile was rueful.
“Hey,” he said. “I know you’ve only got my word to go on, but I actually don’t usually sneak into other people’s houses like this. Most of the time I’ve got pretty decent manners. If you want to get a knife or something, I’m perfectly comfortable with that. Or I could make you some tea.”
“What the fuck are you?”
“Short form? One of the good guys.”
“How did you get in here?”
“Magic,” the man said, his voice losing its apologetic tone. “I got in here using magic. Because I need to talk to you. I need to warn you. You’re in danger. And more to the point, your baby’s in danger.”
Carla put a hand to her belly. As if in response, her boy kicked. A little thump in the middle of her palm.
“Not from me,” the man said, raising his hands, palms out. “I want the cycle broken. That’s what I’m here for. To stop it before it starts again. Surprisingly thankless job, actually, but the benefits package is decent and . . .” He let out a long sigh. “Honestly, Carla, I’m usually a lot less verbose than this. It’s something I do when I’m nervous, and I’m really nervous right now.”
“Why?”
“Something really bad is coming,” he said, trim fingernails scratching absently at the back of his other hand. “Something big and powerful that’s killed some of my friends. It’s like a demon, and now I’m pretty sure it’s after your baby. And I’m scared that you might not believe me.”
Carla stood silent for a long moment. It was madness, and she knew it. If the man in her kitchen wasn’t crazy, then he was obviously some kind of satanist. But he didn’t sound like that when he talked, and everything he said seemed to fit with some growing but still unspoken suspicion of her own. She shouldn’t talk to him. She should tell him to leave or start screaming or something.
“What is it?” she asked, her voice hardly above a whisper.
“I don’t know what your fiancé has told you about his family. About his sister,” the man said. “How much do you know about Jayné Heller?”
chapter one
When my uncle Eric Heller died, he left me a lot of money—like small-nation kind of money—and what I thought at the time was an ongoing fight against demons and unclean spirits. When I got in fights, I was impossible to stop, and spells and magic that tried to find me failed. I figured that he’d put some sort of protective spell on me.
I hadn’t had a clue.
Since then, I have been thrown nearly off a skyscraper by a demon-possessed wizard. I’ve snuck through the depths of a hospital haunted by the kind of spirit that brings on genocides. I’ve watched a friend collapse from internal bleeding after a bunch of mind-controlled people tried to kick him to death. I’ve felt my own body being controlled by something that wasn’t in any way me, and I’ve been locked in a basement by a bunch of priests who were willing to sacrifice me to save me.
The most frightening thing I’ve ever done was tell my dad I was going to a secular university.
Getting everything in place had been a long complex of deceit and intrigue. I’d used my babysitting money to rent a post office box and filled out applications for three dozen colleges that didn’t have the word bible in their names. I’d taken the tax returns that my parents had given me and made copies to send to all the financial aid departments without their knowing. For months, I’d snuck the paperwork into the house and hidden it under my mattress, taking the letters out at night with my bedroom door locked. I looked over all the pamphlets with beautiful pictures of campuses and descriptions of college life like a starving woman paging through cookbooks.
The first acceptance letter I got felt like a bomb going off in my rib cage, but I had to pretend nothing was going on. I sat at dinner that night, glowing on the inside and trying not to smile. My brothers, Jay and Curtis, were blissfully oblivious, but I could tell my parents suspected something was up. Probably they thought it was a boy.
I cobbled together a high-interest student loan that didn’t need a cosigner, a work-study position, and a couple small scholarships based on an essay I’d written as a junior in high school. And I had enough money left to buy a one-way plane ticket to Phoenix. I was going to be a Sun Devil, and every day I got out of my bed, fought for my turn in the bathroom, went to church with my family, and bowed my head in prayer felt like a little more of a lie.
I didn’t know the word compartmentalization at the time, but if you’d looked in the dictionary, I’d have been the picture next to it. I was Jayné the good little girl weighing her options with her parents and not entirely sure she wanted to go to college at all, and I was also Jayné who was already committed and getting ready to leave. My plane left on Thursday morning at ten a.m. I told my father Tuesday night after dinner.
I remember all of it. My father’s face went red, my mother’s white. There was a tremor in his voice while he explained to me that I was forbidden to go. He used that word. Forbidden. Jay took Curt to the TV room and they pretended to watch The Simpsons, but I knew they were listening. I sat at the dining room table with my hands pressed flat on my thighs and my heart doing triple time. The lump in my throat was so solid I was pretty sure I was going to vomit. And quietly, confidently, implacably, I defied my father. I was going. I was old enough to make my own choices, and I’d made them. I was sure if he prayed hard enough, he’d see that it had to be this way. All the things I’d practiced saying quietly in the bathroom mirror.