I shook my head. “Thanks, but I can do it.”
“I’m sure it’ll be a terrible shock,” Penny said.
I nodded.
“I’ll text you later to check in. See how she took the news.” I understood that this was my best friend’s way of holding me to my word that I’d actually tell my mother this afternoon. “Maybe Louise and I can come by tomorrow and bring her a treat. More coffee cake? Scones?”
“Sure,” I said. “She’d like that, I’m sure.”
“We’ll come tomorrow then,” she said.
She looked down at my closed laptop and notebook. “So what are you working on out here?” She stared right at me as if daring me not to tell the truth.
“I—” I tried to lie. To make up something about doing research for the next Moxie book. Trying to figure out how Moxie was going to save Halloween, if Halloween even needed saving. But she was my very best friend, and I couldn’t lie to her. And I knew that even if I tried, she’d see right through me. I sighed, wondering how to begin.
“Remember a long time ago when you told me your theory about guardian angels? Good spirits watching over us, protecting us, helping to guide us?” At the time, I’d thought it was kind of a flaky idea, but Penny was into all that new-age spiritual stuff.
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Do you still believe that?”
“Absolutely.”
I ran my hand over my notebook, fingers worrying their way over the metal spiral on its spine. “Well,” I said, “if there are good spirits, doesn’t it make sense that there might be bad ones too?”
She frowned at me. “What is it you’re asking me, Alison?”
“Paul, before he left yesterday, he said the strangest thing. I was asking him what was going on with my mother, what had happened between the two of them, and he said to me, ‘That’s not Mavis.’?”
“I don’t understand.” Penny looked perplexed. “Not Mavis?”
“Do you believe in demons?” I asked.
“Demons?” she repeated slowly.
I’d come this far. There was no point going back now. “Yesterday my mother, after Paul left—she was upset too. In a rage, really. She’d gotten herself out of bed to try to get to him, I think, and ended up falling, hurting herself. Later she was talking all kinds of crazy shit, and then she said… she told me her true name was Azha.”
“Azha? A-Z-H-A?”
“Yeah. And I looked it up. It’s the name of a star. But it’s also the name of an ancient demon.” I watched Penny. She said nothing, her face unreadable. But she kept her eyes locked on mine, just like always. “I even found a picture. It has the head of a bird and the body of a snake, terrible claws.” I opened my notebook, flipped to my drawing of the creature. “Azha offers wealth and fame and whatever a person most desires. It grants wishes in exchange for your soul.”
Penny gazed at me, face blank, totally calm. There was no judgment in her eyes. But there was also none of the love, the sense of connection I usually felt when she looked at me. This was her therapist look. Was this how she regarded her totally delusional clients, so ripped open by trauma and grief they weren’t sure what was real and what wasn’t?
“So you’re saying you believe your mother is what, exactly? Possessed?” She seemed to choke out the last word.
“I know it sounds crazy, that’s what I thought too at first, but thenI started looking into it, and the stuff I’ve learned about Azha, about possession… it makes sense.”
I looked down at my notebook, ready to share the research I’d done, offer her my proof.
Penny believed in guardian angels, and in the healing power of crystals, and in the insight a tarot reading could give. So she was the perfect person to have an open mind about all of this, to accept that it might be possible. And she was my best friend, the person who got me no matter what. She’d believe me. If I showed her, told her everything I knew, she’d have to believe me.
But I was wrong.
She shook her head. “A demon, Alison? You’re saying you actually believe your mother is possessed by a demon?”
My stomach twisted into a tight knot when I saw the way she looked at me: her eyes tinged with confusion, worry, and complete disbelief.
“There are records of Azha going all the way back to the—”
