The first was due to a lapse in judgment. These weremomentary slips brought about by simple emotions—distraction,anger, sadness, impatience. Dee wasn’t even sure if they could be truly calleddecisions, these actions made in a moment of error.
But the second kind of decision was far worse.
Actions fueled by desperation. They were the worst kinds of decisions, because desperate people could see the error of their ways and simply not care. They would rush headlong into a bad situation because they could see no other options.
She took the bus to the hospital. Normally, it was a short commute, but today the bus kept stopping and starting, traffic clamping down all around them. Perhaps this was the universe trying to forestall some terrible mistake on her part, Dee thought, then shook her head.
The closer they came to the hospital, the more the cars around them slowed to a crawl. Dee rose from her seat and strode to the front of the bus. “Is there an accident?” she asked the driver.
Then Dee smelled it: the stench of metal and plastic, hot in her nostrils. It reminded her of when a nearby house had caught fire when she was twelve—ash and the stench of burned plastic. Houses were filled with objects that didn’t easily catch fire; they melted and smoked and made the air reek.
It turned out, hospitals burned the same. A billow of gray ascended from the hospital’s campus, and Dee drew in a sharp breath.
“Let me out here,” she said, and without waiting for the driver’s reply, she pushed the doors open and squeezed through. A car honked but Dee ignored it, darting across the bike lane and running for the hospital.
A squirming, selfish part of Dee was panicking—and not just for the hospital’s patients and doctors. If there was a fire, the demon probably wouldn’t be here. Fires meant newscasters and cameras, and demons tended to avoid that kind of attention.
But still—she had to try.
Crowds had gathered on the lawn, gazing up at the smoke billowing from the auditorium. For the first time, she felt a swell of relief that this was a teaching hospital; the fire must have started in one of those teaching buildings and hadn’t spread to threaten any patients yet. Dee couldn’t see flames, but firefighters and EMTs were rushing about, talking amongst themselves. Dee rose to tiptoe, trying to peer over taller people. With a grimace, she tried to find a way through the crowd—the smokers’ grass was on the other side of the hospital; perhaps that area was untouched, perhaps…
Someone took a step back and Dee stumbled, her toe catching their heel. She fell to hands and knees, a curse caught behind her gritted teeth. Anger welled up within her, but then she shook her head, that anger dispelling into familiar anxiety. She looked down at the grass to see if she’d dropped her purse, and that was when she saw it: a strand of bloodred yarn.
The soft material held between thumb and forefinger, she rose to her feet. She glanced about the crowd, taking care in looking over all the faces.
A demon stood beneath one of the trees.
Between the chaos and the noise, the smoke and the din, no one else seemed to have noticed. Not justademon.Thedemon, the one she’d seen knitting two weeks ago. Dee’s heart lurched and she took an involuntary step forward.
It wore the same gray suit, and an umbrella was tucked beneath its arm. It gazed at the flames with an expression it took Dee a moment to recognize. Satisfaction, she decided. It looked upon the chaos with a certain fondness, the way Dee felt herself smile on papers she was sure would garner a good grade.
You did this, she thought, utterly certain.
The demon turned and strode away, Dee following in its wake.
SEVEN
The demon moved through the chaos, unseen and unnoticed, until it came to a neighboring building. There was a side entrance, the kind kept locked from the outside, but it simply reached down and yanked the door open, vanishing inside.
Dee knew where that door led—the hospital basement.
Because of course it did.
Her heart jolted up into her throat. “Couldn’t have lurked on the roof,” she said aloud, just to hear her own voice. If she sounded normal, she could fool herself into believing this was normal.
Dee paused, gathered herself. And stepped through the door, letting it click shut behind her.
This building’s basement defied cliché. It wasn’t dark, creepy, or dirty. Rather, its cinder-block walls were kept free of cobwebs by the ever-diligent janitorial staff. Dee had been here once before, when an orderly needed extra cleaning supplies. The basement was mostly storage, although there were a few abandoned areas that might have doubled as classrooms. White paint flecked off the ceiling. Down here, the shouts and noise were gone; it was utterly and painfully silent.
Dee tried to walk quietly, but doing so in flip-flops was all but impossible. Her fingers were tight on the strand of yarn, and she held it like a talisman, as if it could lead her to the demon. There were stories about this sort of thing—heroes entering mazes with enchanted balls of yarn. But then it was to kill an evil monster, never to make an ally of it.
She glanced in every open doorway, into rooms full of folding chairs and buckets and mops. She tried a few locked doors.
Then she saw a figure in one of the storage rooms. It stood with its back to her, lit up by the pale white of the industrial fluorescents.
It wasn’t the demon.
When he turned, she saw he was definitely human, a man or a boy, or something in between.
