Chapter
One
Evil didn’t need an engraved invitation to slip inside a home. It just needed an opening.
Unfortunately, so did I.
I stepped onto Mrs. Klein’s front porch and wrongness settled over me like a wet blanket. The air was too still, too quiet. There were no birds or traffic sounds humming in the distance. Even the daylight seemed dimmer, as if what crouched inside this house was infecting everything around it.
I knocked on the door again, harder this time, and eyed the cracks spidering out from the tiny decorative windows that stair-stepped up the peeling red paint.
There’d been a lot of crashing around behind this door as I’d jogged up the concrete steps to 1865 Whippoorwill Lane, the kind I’d gotten used to whenever Mordechai worked. But the old man was supposed towaitfor me.
He’s holding you back. You don’t need him anymore.
“Yeah, I fucking do,” I muttered, used to my inner monologue getting mouthier right before an exorcism went down. But my shitty self-talk needed to take a break, for once. I had enough to deal with.
I lifted my hand to knock again when I heard the chain drawn back. Squaring my shoulders, I stepped away from the door.
A thin, worn-out face peered at me, watery eyes squinting, voice quavery. “Yes?”
I gave the woman who had to be Mrs. Klein my seriously capable smile, the one that clocked me at way past my actual age of twenty-five years. To be fair, though, they’d been a hard twenty-five years. “I’m Delia. Delia Thompson? I’m here to help Rabbi Mordechai. He should have told?—”
“Oh, thank goodness.”
The woman’s hand trembled as she gripped the door. Noise started up again behind her, a loud BANG! that, once begun, didn’t stop. BANG! BANG! BANG!
“The rabbi, he’s coming today?” Mrs. Klein straightened a little, hope momentarily supplanting fear. Her frail body crackled with that hope. “He—I thought he was coming tomorrow.”
“Really?” I slid a hand into my hoodie pocket to pull out my phone. It was, of course, dead. The damned thing couldn’t hold a charge for half a minute anymore. “I’m sorry, I?—”
The BANG! BANG! BANG!ing continued behind Mrs. Klein. Hope died in her eyes, replaced by something else. Dread. Despair.
I frowned at her. “Are you going to be okay until tomorrow?”
Her face shuttered, the resigned old-lady smile plastered on it once more, creasing powdery skin. “He’s coming tomorrow,” she said, almost like a mantra. “It will have to do.”
She shut the door in my face.
If anything, the commotion on the other side seemed to get louder. I heard Mrs. Klein speak sharply, her shout almost a command, but not quite.
Good. I smirked. That was how you had to talk to them.
Approval ribboned through me on the heels of my judgy thoughts, as if I’d scored well on some demon-hunting exam. I gritted my teeth against the sinuous warmth of that approval, hating how my body responded to it. Because under that praise was something else, something slick and wrong, pulsing in time with the banging inside the house. A banging that didn’t stop.
I pursed my lips and rocked back on my heels to scan the shuddering house. Itwastoday I was supposed to meet Mordechai here—wasn’t it?
It was definitely today.
I’d skipped my Thursday psych class at UIC for this. Mrs. Klein had called Mordechai about her sister ten days ago, hearing about the unorthodox exorcist the usual way—a cousin of a friend of a brother. He hadn’t been formally ordained in years, but people still called him Rabbi Mordechai, and he rarely corrected them. Ex-rabbi, former consultant to the Catholic Church, and quiet neighborhood legend, Mordechai operated well outside any official order now. He didn’t even need to advertise.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The afflicted found him.
I stepped off the porch, glancing at the neat little yards on either side of the Klein residence, taking it all in and knowing I was seeing more than I should—feeling more. I’d always had a knack for noticing the dumbest things, picking up on people’s emotions no matter how hard they tried to hide them. Fear was copper and ash. Lies were bitter, like burnt coffee. Love—the few times I’d encountered it—was either thick and sticky or light like rain.
Most of the time, I said nothing, because the kind of things I noticed weren’t the kind of things anyone wanted to hear about. I also didn’t generally like to advertise that I was a freak.
