The Daemon remained in his seat. “This is how it always goes,” he murmured. “I told the others. Revealing ourselves has never turned out well for our kind. Give humans the slightest bit of knowledge and they cannot handle it.”
Perhaps he did not realize she was still in the car. Or perhaps Dee simply didn’t register enough as a person to him.
“You’ve… revealed yourself before?” asked Dee. “Before the press conference?”
His eyes met hers in the rearview mirror. “Many times. When we have a need, we deal with your kind. Then we disappear, let our stories return to myth, and let the truth fade from memory.” He exhaled sharply. “I suspect, with this new technology of yours, we will not be able to vanish this time. We are here. And we shall never go unnoticed again, not with cameras on every street corner.
“But,” he said, his voice a little stronger, “there are worse prices to pay to keep this world safe.” He lifted his chin in a slight nod, angled to the right of the car. “I do not see you chasing after your own kind. Is it fear that keeps you here—or courage?”
Fear. Always fear.
She gazed at him, a rabbit caught in sight of a wolf, frozen in the seat of a stolen car.
“You should go to them,” said the Daemon. “Bring them back.” His attention drifted to the darkened car windows, to the trees illuminated by the headlights of passing traffic. “There are more dangerous things in the world than myself.”
Dee swallowed. She was hyperaware of the closeness of the car, of the sound of the Daemon’s breathing, and the lump of a knitted heart shoved in her pocket.
She scooted from the backseat and tentatively stepped out of the car. The gravel was uneven beneath her flip-flops, and again she mentally berated herself for not investing in better shoes. But then again, at least she wasn’t barefoot.
Cora stood on the fringes of the trees, her arms wrapped around herself. Her feet were still bare, her shoes left in the car. She looked strangely younger, vulnerable without them. An argument had broken out amid her and James and Cal, and it took Dee a moment to pick up the thread of the conversation.
“… not getting back into a car with that thing,” Cora was saying.
“What are you going to do? Walk home?” But there was no mocking edge to James’s reply; it was a matter-of-fact question. “Hitchhike? Trust that some other kind of demon doesn’t pick you up?”
Cora turned away. Dee could just make out the nail polish on her toes. “Cora,” said Cal, all sympathy. “Listen. I get it. You saw something bad—”
“You don’t get it,” snapped Cora. “You didn’t see it. That thing. What those demons do with the body parts—” Her voice cut off, and it sounded as if she might be choking back a retch. Cora bent over herself, scrabbling at her own jacket as if it were suffocating her. She threw it to the ground, and a red knitted heart tumbled from one of the pockets.
James caught sight of Dee for the first time. He nodded to her. “You all right?”
For the first time, Dee wondered if her own past was working to her advantage. Cora was sick with fear—but Dee had never known a time when she wasn’t afraid. For Cora, this was a horrible revelation. For Dee, it was a Friday.
“I’m fine,” she said. Not entirely a lie. “I—I never wondered what the demons did with those parts,” she added, more quietly. “I feel… stupid somehow for not questioning.”
James’s mouth twitched. “If it makes you feel at all better, I came up with a few wild theories and they were all wrong. Perhaps not wondering was better.”
“Cora,” Cal was saying. “Breathe. Just breathe.”
Cora whispered, “This is wrong. We’re wrong.”
James pressed a hand to his forehead. “We should get back to the car,” he said. “I don’t like our odds if the Daemon gets impatient and drives away. I’d call a taxi, but I don’t have my phone.”
“We’re not getting in the car without Cora,” said Dee, but then she remembered the cell phone still in her back pocket. “I—I have a phone. We could call—someone.”
She was not sure whom to call. Her parents were out of the question, and Gremma… well. She had no idea how she was going to explain this to Gremma.
Dee glanced back at Cora and Cal. Cal had taken off his jacket and draped it around Cora. He was murmuring quietly, as if speaking to an injured person. But Cora pressed a hand to her mouth, looked at them. Her eyes were frantically darting between each of them.
“We’re not alive anymore,” Cora said, and her voice was stronger now.
Dee went still. “What?”
Cora rose to her feet. She looked a sight—barefoot, hair still windblown, Cal’s jacket around her shoulders.
“That thing.” Cora spat the word. “That homunculus. It could enter the void. Because it was built of parts, but not human. Rats—rats try to enter the voids but they can’t. Nothing living can enter the voids.” Cora’s gaze whipped to the car. “That’s what the demon said. ‘We living, feeling beings cannot enter them.’Theycan’t enter the voids—butwecan? What does that make us?”
Dee’s reply died on her lips.
