Mordechai raised his hand. “I do not. Your time on this earth is through?—”
“No.” The word was sharp, a slap, and I looked at Mordechai in amazement. These were new words, words I didn’t know. The rabbi banished demons from mortals but he didn’t send them back to Hell or wherever demons went when they died. He simply let them go. So what was he doing here? What was he trying to prove?
Mordechai kept his hand held high. “Return to the abyss, foul one, and trouble her no longer.” And then he started saying other words, Latin words that I should have known, should at least have been able to remember, but a horrible grinding noise filled my ears, my mouth, my lungs, and I couldn’t stop the agony of it from carrying me along its tide.
Mordechai thrust both hands toward me, and I felt a tearing in my gut, my stomach cramping hard enough to make me cry out. But I didn’t fall back, I didn’t crumble. Instead, I reached for his hands, relishing the moment when our fingers connected and I grabbed hold of him, his eyes going wide and his mouth stretching open in a snarl of rage and surprise.
“Begone from her!” He shouted, and Ilaughedat him, feeling my own heart swell as his body matched itself against me, frailty against youth but not just youth; youth bolstered by unspeakable knowledge and truth. Mordechai’s face darkened to a sickly reddish gray, and I threw him from me, hard—harder than I’d ever thrown anything in my life. My head was full of words, then, words and anguish and pain.
“Get away!” Mordechai yelled. “Begone! Leave!”
I saw the scene for the last time etched into my brain. Rabbi Mordechai, still alive—still alive! Scrabbling on the ground, his hands shuddering and twisting in the dirt. I wanted to spit onhim, the disgusting weakling. There was blood on his face, and I reveled in it. He hit his head on something when he fell, one of the feeble stones of his beloved people, marking the end of their short, tragic lives.
Marking his end too.
He scratched a word into the dirt with shaking, bloody fingers. PALE...
And finally, I saw it.
In the memory, I saw what I’d obliterated with my foot as I’d scrambled away—the rest of his message. PALEMERIOUS. Mordechai had named my demon—or I’d given him the name somehow. And with his last breath, dying in the dirt, he’d handed back to me the weapon I needed to fight the thing inside me.
While I’d destroyed the evidence. Scraped it away as I fled.
“Begone,” he’d whispered. Not commanding the demon this time. Just begging me to run—to flee.
To live.
And so, I ran.
I jerked awake a second time,clutching the pillow, then spun around, trying to understand where I was. The clock on the bedside table was the only light in the room. It blinked at me, 2:37. As I stared, the numbers seemed to blur, rearrange, shift. 37:2, then 2:12. Then I blinked again, and the clock steadied. 2:12 a.m. Two o’clock in the morning.
I stared at the four walls of this room and felt a strange calm drop over me. Sitting in the house of horrors, I felt curiously apart, even safe. I reached out my hands and looked at them as if I’d never seen my own body before. I stood, turning around. There were things in this house. I could feel them now, more than ever. They scrabbled around, preying on the minds of thosewho lived here like parasites, sucking out their lives bit by bit. They hung in the darkness, chittering with excitement, drinking in the pain, the fear. Not just of the weak and the infirm but of the strong. They were noticed here, they were given their due.
The entire house felt not like a gleaming, pristine home of the affluent, but a dark, dirty hovel. Hunched over on itself, squalid and broken, as if it hoped one day it would collapse into a pile of cursed stones. And then the evil would leak out over the earth, slithering away to do its bidding on the back of someone else.
But I could face these demons now, I thought. No matter how bad it got, no matter what I needed to do, I could face this evil.
Because I was worse.
The thought should have broken me. Instead, I felt cold, clear, and ready.
I stood in the dark room and whispered the name aloud for the first time, tasting its shape in my mouth: “Palemerious.”
Inside me, the demon went utterly still.
“I know what you are now.” I smiled. “And I know what I am too.”
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
“You okay?”
Max was eyeing me over a breakfast of something that looked like a yellow cake made out of corn. He’d taken two pieces off the griddle and put them on a plate, a plate he was now handing to me. I took it and sniffed experimentally. Yup, corn.
“Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
“You were crying.”
