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“Over two hundred years is a pretty long haul,” Alara said, referring to how long the Legion had been in existence. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life toeing that line.”

“Yeah. I got that,” Priest snapped, turning up the music.

Lukas reached over and squeezed Priest’s shoulder. “Come on. It was a hypothetical conversation. We don’t even know where to find Andras, let alone how to destroy him. It’s not like the band is breaking up tomorrow.”

Priest relaxed a little, but he didn’t respond.

I couldn’t imagine wanting to lead a life like his forever, not if I had the chance to have a normal one. But to Priest, the Legion probably was normal. His grandfather had raised him and trained Priest from the time he was young. He was homeschooled. I didn’t even know if he had any friends before he met Jared, Lukas, and Alara, less than six months ago.

He wanted to belong.

Something I understood better than anyone.

I
’m not sleeping with the dog,” Elle said, flopping down on one of the double beds in our hotel room.

Alara unbuckled her tool belt and dropped it on the other bed. “Don’t worry. He doesn’t want to sleep with you either.” She scratched Bear’s ears. “Do you?”

“I hope you’re nicer to Elvis,” I said to Elle, prying off my wet boots.

Elle had unofficially adopted my cat when I took off with the Legion. After being possessed by a vengeance spirit, he’d been traumatized enough when she found him.

“Whatever.” She waved a hand in the air. “I treat that cat like the king that he is. I’m definitely a cat person.”

Alara opened a pack of complimentary oatmeal cookies and fed one to Bear. “That explains a lot.”

One of the guys knocked on the door between our adjoining rooms. When neither Alara nor Elle moved, I got up and opened it.

“Why is your room bigger than ours?” Priest asked as they walked in. He was finally talking again after the awkward conversation in the car.

Alara popped a cookie in her mouth. “Because I’m the one paying.”

Jared sat down on the bed next to me. He noticed my aunt’s silver journal on the nightstand and picked it up. “I still can’t believe we found it.”

“I know.” I opened the cover, and my fingers brushed his. “Faith wasn’t exaggerating when she told us it was in bad shape. Some of the pages are so faded you can’t even make out the letters anymore.”

“You have it now. That’s what matters.” He closed it, keeping my hand beneath his.

Priest stretched out next to Alara, who was watching TV, and Bear sandwiched himself between them.

“What do you think?” she asked Priest as the host of the show challenged viewers to predict if a punch from a heavyweight boxer was more powerful than one from a mixed martial arts fighter. “I’m going with the MMA fighter,” Alara said.

“How do they know who wins?” Elle asked.

Priest pointed at a group of scientists in white lab coats on the screen. “The experts use a robotic dummy
that measures all kinds of variables when the fighters hit it.”

Lukas stood in the doorway. “Hey. I’m going down to the vending machine. Anyone hungry?” He looked over my shoulder at Elle.

“I’ll go with you,” she said a little too quickly.

“Of course you will.” Alara turned up the TV. “I’ll take chips if they have salt and vinegar. And a Coke.”

“Just give me a minute to change,” Elle told Lukas before disappearing into the bathroom with her huge bag.

“Wipe that dopey grin off your face,” Jared said, teasing his brother.

“What?” Lukas looked at me like he was checking to see if Jared’s comment bothered me—and hoping it didn’t.

I smiled at him, and he relaxed.

“Make sure she calls her mom while you guys are down there.” Alara didn’t look up from the TV. “According to my cousin, her mom is super high maintenance.”

Lukas nodded. “Got it.”

The moment Elle came out of the bathroom, I knew we had a problem.

“You
cannot
wear those in here.” Alara stared at Elle’s pink sweats like she was wearing raw meat.

Elle glanced at her outfit, trying to figure out what Alara was talking about.

“They’re pink.” Priest pointed at her sweatpants, as if that explained everything.

“And?” Elle asked.

“And that color represents death and bad luck. I’m not sleeping in a room with anything pink in it,” Alara said. “Including you.”

Elle stared at Alara, waiting to see if she was joking.

She wasn’t.

“You have serious issues,” Elle said. “No one told me about the color rules. Are there any others I should be aware of?” Lukas dragged her out of the room, but Elle was still ranting. “Red? Gray? Blue? Let me know.”

“Wow. She’s sensitive.” Alara popped another cookie in her mouth as the mixed martial arts fighter threw a punch and knocked the head off the robotic dummy. “Told you.”

“Want to go in the other room?” Jared whispered.

I nodded and followed him.

“Don’t do anything a priest wouldn’t do,” Priest called out.

I curled up on one of the beds under Jared’s arm. “Can I ask you something?”

He pulled me closer. “Anything.”

“If you destroyed Andras tomorrow, what would you do?” Jared was the only Legion member who hadn’t answered the question. “Travel around like Alara? Or go to college?” I didn’t know anything about his dreams—the regular things he wanted that had nothing to do with demons and vengeance spirits.

He frowned. “I’m not college material. Luke is the smart one out of the two of us.”

“Don’t say that.” I sat up and looked down at him. “You have instincts I’d kill for. And you’re brave and loyal, and you’d do anything for the people you care about. My mom used to say, ‘There are always choices.’ It was kind of her way of asking me if I thought I was making the right one.” I rested my hand on his chest, right over his heart. “When it counts, you make the right ones.”

Jared’s heartbeat sped up under my hand. His lips parted like he was about to say something. But he stayed silent. He watched me, his heart hammering.

Finally, he reached up and slid his hand behind my neck, pulling me toward him.

I closed my eyes, anticipating the kiss.

“Look at me, Kennedy.” His voice was thick and heavy. “You’re the only person who’s ever said anything like that to me. The only person who sees me that way.”

Our faces were a foot apart, but it felt like Jared was so close he could hear what I was thinking.

“That’s not true—”

“Shh.” He moved his hand and brought his finger to my lips. “I don’t care if anyone else thinks those things, as long as you do. The way I feel about you…” He bit his lip, as if he couldn’t find the right words. “Sometimes, when I look at you, I can hardly breathe.”

I pressed my lips against his, trying to make the space
between us disappear. It felt the way it always did when our lips finally touched. I sensed how much he wanted me—how much I mattered to him. Like a need I’d never be able to fill.

But I tried until every part of me ached with exhaustion and with something I only seemed to find with Jared.

Happiness.

When I woke up the next morning still tangled in Jared’s arms, I felt stiff—and desperately in need of a shower. I wiggled out from underneath his arm and tiptoed past Priest, who was sleeping in the other bed.

The adjoining door was still open. Alara was buried under the covers in one bed, with Bear sprawled across the bottom, and Elle and Lukas were asleep on top of the covers in the other bed. Lukas was propped up and Elle was using his chest as a pillow. At some point, she’d changed out of the offensive pink sweats, and now she was wearing red ones.

I dug through her clothes until I found a pair of skinny jeans and a T-shirt that wouldn’t look like a dress on me, and carried them into the bathroom.

The water barely had time to heat up when I stepped into the shower. As the soap slid down my back, I wished the guilt would wash away as easily.

I needed to stop feeling responsible for the horrible
things happening around me for at least a few minutes. I flipped through mental snapshots of my life, searching for a happy memory.

My house.

The smell of macaroni and cheese cooking—not the orange kind from a box, but the kind my mom always made, with bread crumbs sprinkled over the top.

A door closes upstairs, and I wait for her to come down. But it isn’t her. My father smiles at me, all green eyes and dimples and five o’clock shadow.

“How’s my sunshine?” He takes something out of his pocket.

I know what it is before I even see the writing on the red and white candy wrapper.

No—

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyelids, forcing the images to fade.

Not him.

My father wasn’t allowed to be my happy memory, or anything else.

The water suddenly felt heavier, like the syrupy filth inside the well in Middle River. I didn’t need those awful memories coming back, too. I moved my hands away from my eyes, and the shower floor slowly came into focus.

First the tiles. Then the round silver drain. Black lines were still blurring my vision. I blinked a few times and looked down again.

Black streaks cut across the tile and the letters printed on the drain:
MADE IN THE USA.

Drops of inky liquid splattered onto my skin and around my feet.

I scrambled backward, my hands slipping over the smooth glass walls. The showerhead was directly above me now. Dark water ran down my body, the sticky consistency of motor oil.

I opened my mouth to scream, and the black liquid burned its way down my throat. Cigarette butts and gasoline was my first thought. I stumbled out of the shower, gagging.

My black handprint dripped down the glass.

I snatched a towel and reached for the doorknob. The moment my fingers curled around it, I froze. A drop of clear water ran down the perfectly clean skin on my wrist. I turned back to the glass.

The handprint and the black streaks were gone.

The burning sensation in my throat and the nauseating taste in my mouth—even the smell—had all vanished. Clear water sprayed from the showerhead.

I threw on the T-shirt and jeans and tore out of the bathroom.

“Something’s in here!” I yelled, slamming the door behind me.

Lukas, Elle, and Alara were awake now, watching TV.

Alara jumped out of bed. “What do you mean?”

Jared and Priest ran into the room. “What happened?” Jared asked.

I struggled to catch my breath. “Black stuff came out of the shower. It was all over me. Then it just disappeared.”

“Was it thick?” Lukas asked.

“Yeah.” I could still feel the slimy liquid running down my body.

Jared and Lukas exchanged a knowing look, and Priest darted into the other room. He returned moments later with a nail gun in one hand and a kitchen fire extinguisher in the other, which I knew was filled with a rock salt and water solution.

“That black stuff is a sign of demonic activity,” Lukas said.

Alara walked around the room with her EMF. Priest shadowed her, with his weapon ready.

As she stepped into the bathroom, I held my breath.

“Nothing,” she called from inside.

“I want to get out of here.” I pulled on my boots and twisted my wet hair into a ponytail.

Elle shoved her stuff back into her bag and grabbed her coat. “Me too.”

We waited in the Jeep while Alara checked out of the hotel and Priest took Bear down the stairs the same way we’d
brought him in the night before. Priest made it to the Jeep first.

Lukas turned on the radio and switched between stations. “I want to see if anything weird is going on nearby. It might explain what happened to you in the shower.”

Meteorologists continued to weigh in on the unusal weather, citing everything from global warming to acid rain as possible causes.

“Pretty soon, these geniuses will be saying the polar ice caps are causing it.” Priest changed the station.

Alara jogged across the parking lot and climbed in just as the weather report cut to breaking news: “The body of Father John O’Shea was discovered this morning when a parishioner at Blessed Sacrament arrived for eight o’clock mass to find the priest hanging from the rafters above the altar. The police have ruled out suicide, due to what they are calling the
bizarre
details of the crime.”