“A monster.”
“That’s right, Kinsman. Your human blood doesn’t make you any less of the monster you are. You have no place in their world. Nor do they have a permanent place here. They are no better than cattle—to be consumed and occasionally bred. It will serve you well to remember that for when your time comes to find your offering. You shall be my Keeper one day. It won’t serve you to become attached to your human like your father.”
I saw the devil raise his fist over my head in the pond’s reflection. Before I could dodge the blow, he brought it down on the back of my skull. I slumped onto the bank, the cold mud like heaven on my burning face. Darkness folded in, and the last thing I heard before unconsciousness took hold were the screams of my mother ringing in the distance.
Chapter Two
Lore
“Stoppouting,Lorelei,”mymother scolded as she tapped her acrylic nails over the steering wheel of our car. “You’re acting like I’m hauling you off to prison.”
I continued to glare out the window, not bothering to peel my attention from the pine trees blurring past my window. “Hmm. Let’s think about this for a second. We couldn’t make our rent because you spent it all on handbags and Botox and designer clothes. Again. So you go off to New York to go shopping and come back married to some guy you barely know. I didn’t even get an invite.”
“You had work,” she sniffed. “I didn’t want you to lose your job. Before Ezra, you were the one paying the bills.”
Fuck her and her nonchalance. I was paying the bills—with my minimum wage job. It’s not like she didn’t have a little money stashed away from my dad’s life insurance. But that was her designer-bag fund. So who was the one paying rent and grocery bills? Her teenage fucking daughter.
I should have been relieved that she found a man to be her meal ticket. The pressure off my shoulders was a welcome reprieve. Or at least, it would have been, if it wasn’t for the fact that she was dragging me into the middle of the damn woods. “Honestly, prison sounds like a pretty enticing upgrade at the moment, if you ask me.”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Lorelei.”
Dramatic.I had every right to be dramatic after what she’d done. My mom was a bona fide shopaholic. She was never like this before dad died. It was her coping mechanism. Mine was books. And not allowing myself to feel anything aside from the emotions in the pages of my books. Fiction was pretty much the only thing that I found any comfort in since the funeral. Which was why it had been really awesome when I landed that job at the only bookshop there was in our tiny town in upstate New York. But on one of my mom’s frequent shopping trips to New York City, she came back gushing about a man she’d met. Barely two months later, she’d gotten married, and now we were off to New Jersey to live with this guy she barely knew and his twenty-one-year-old son.
I wouldn’t be so upset if she really loved the guy. No, this was about getting money to fuel her shopping habit. Apparently, this guy had a few bucks stashed away, and that’s all Gloria Brooks needed to uproot our lives and move to the middle of the New Jersey Pine Barrens.
I wasn’t thrilled about the move. Since I was nineteen, it’s not like Ihadto move with my mother. I could have stayed behind and kept my job. But…it’s not like I had much back in New York.
So New Jersey it was, to live with my mom’s new husband, whom she barely knew. I’d never met the guy myself, and my mom had only met him twice.Twice!
“Will you call me dramatic when we find out this guy is an axe murderer?”
“Ezra is a good man. He’s a pastor and runs the church in Bishop.”
I’d done research on Bishop, but didn’t find much. It was a tiny village in the middle of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. It was a religious town with lots of ties to the old Jersey Devil legend. Supposedly, a lot of the citizens were descendants of the woman who’d been cursed to give birth to the demon. It sounded like something straight out of a novel.
“Plus,” my mom added, her tone lifting. “You get a new brother out of this. Titus is just a couple of years older than you.”
Silence fell between us. My mom didn’t speak again until we passed an old, wooden sign on the road that read: Welcome to Bishop. Established 1649. Population 664.
Population 666 now. I wasn’t even close to superstition. But as we entered the sleepy town, I couldn’t shake the uneasy sensation sweeping down my spine.
The fog hung thick over the old road, and when the buildings finally emerged through the haze, I shuddered. “This place is giving me the serious creeps.”
After a short drive down Bishop’s main street, we took a right and pulled into the driveway of a house that looked as old as the rest of the town. I got out of the car and surveyed the residence.
The siding was a bare wood that had faded over time. The shutters and door had once been painted black, going by the scraps of paint hanging off in ribbons. The yard—if it could be called that—was overgrown with dead shrubbery and decaying leaves. But I was barely paying attention to the house.
I anchored my gaze to the man across the street, lying beneath an old Ford truck on one of those mechanic’s benches. The underside of the truck hid the upper portion of his body, but I could make out his long legs clad in oil-stained denim and his heavy, black boots.
I sucked in a breath when the man reached for a wrench laying on an oily piece of cardboard on the concrete. His forearms were wrapped in swaths of ink and grease, and his veins twitched and rippled when his tatted knuckles curled around the tool.
“See something you like?” My mother snickered.
“No,” I said, a little too quickly to be believable.
Our attention swung back to the main house when the door opened and a man stepped out. Ezra Leeds, my new stepdad, looked to be in his fifties. He had salt-and-pepper hair, a sharp jawline, and was freaky tall. As he strode down the driveway toward us, the taut smile stretching his features came into view.
His appearance was normal enough, but there was a terrible energy clinging to him that had me taking a few steps backward. The only notable detail about Ezra Leeds’ physical appearance was the striking color of his eyes. His irises were pale gray, almost white—so bright they almost glowed. It’s not like the guy wasn’t objectively good looking. I could see why my mom hadn’t shut up about the guy. He was…attractive. But there was something off about him. Something I couldn’t put my finger on.
