Page 31 of Sinister

She tsks, leaning even closer. “Because he studies demonology and other pagan things. I don’t know how someone like that was allowed into an institution like St. Anselm. And in Radcliffe, no less! They should throw him out. They should stone him.”

I flinch at the vehemence in her voice. A professor?

But more than that, I am stunned by another revelation.

Demonology. Pagan things.

Before I can fully process the thought, my gaze lifts to him once more.

He is already looking at me.

His expression shifts. Recognition, yes, but something else. Something deeper.

He didn’t want me to see this.

His grip slackens. The other man breaks free, throwing a punch. My stranger stumbles to the side, but his eyes remain locked on me.

Another blow.

His gaze never leaves mine.

The crowd surges forward, throwing stones, objects—whatever they can find.

“Devil.”

“Demon.”

“Cursed.”

A sharp object strikes him, splitting the skin just above his brow. Blood trickles down his face.

And still, his eyes remain on me.

9

PETRA

PRESENT DAY

Two and a half months have passed since that night at Elias Rutherford’s house, and as I sit at my desk, exhaustion seems to press me down ever farther into my chair.

I’m always tired these days, no matter how much I sleep. And even that sleep is disturbed by peculiar dreams.

In some of them, I drift through large rooms filled with transparent, fleshless outlines of people. They stand around and hold silent conversations, all dressed in old clothes, as if frozen in time.

It’s like watching a period drama where the main character is some weird version of me: a repressed and misunderstood young woman fighting against the confines of society.

Perhaps I’ve been watching too much of The Gilded Age. Perhaps . . .

Yet sometimes, the dreams are vivid scraps of sense-memory from time spent in that room with Sin: the deep colors of the bed coverings and the curtains, the muted glow of the ornate lamps, the music . . . as if by going over those scenes while I slept, my mind is trying to recover some lost memory.

And not to mention my mood swings, which have lately been affecting all personal relationships.

My parents did manage to procure a gift for me when they finally remembered that their daughter was again reaching important milestones in utter isolation.

I had been in a particularly nasty mood at that time, so I made them—well, their assistants, actually—run all around the place so I could have exactly the dress I wanted: a knee-length black and gold brocade dress from Dolce&Gabbana’s Fall 2012 collection.

Though the gift did nothing to dispel the bleak clouds of resentment that now hung over all my interactions with my parents, I did look like a scandalous Austrian princess with a reputation for getting widowed in the first year of all her marriages. So I was probably going to forgive my primary caregivers when they, inevitably, forgot my next birthday.