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T
he next day was New Year’s Eve, a subject my friends avoided like the plague. We were holed up in Lukas and Priest’s room trying to come up with a plan. Every once in a while, someone almost made the mistake of mentioning the holiday, and the room fell into an awkward silence.

After the third time, I couldn’t take it anymore. “I know it’s New Year’s Eve. You don’t have to tiptoe around it.”

Priest and Lukas exchanged worried looks.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s a totally overrated holiday,” Elle said, tossing her hair over her shoulder.

We both knew she was lying. A night dedicated to dressing up, flirting shamelessly, and kissing some heartsick guy at the end of the night was Elle’s definition
of the perfect holiday—which only made me love her more for pretending it wasn’t.

Lukas gave me one of his crooked smiles. “No one’s really in the mood to celebrate.”

Alara fed Bear one of the oatmeal cookies she’d saved for him. “And I’m completely against celebrations in any and all forms.”

“The only thing we have time for right now is figuring out how to get back to the prison so we can find the Shift,” Priest said, turning up Linkin Park in the background. His music was our insurance policy—the sole reason Dimitri and Gabriel refused to set foot in here.

Alara sighed. “There’s no way we’ll be able to get out of this place without Dimitri and Gabriel asking a million questions. Like where we’re going.”

“And I don’t want them looking for the Shift without us,” Lukas said.

No one argued. We needed to get to West Virginia State Penitentiary without Dimitri and Gabriel, and we had to do it fast.

“We’ll have to sneak out during the day,” Priest said. “Gabriel stays awake all night like a vampire.”

“If we disappear, they’ll come looking for us,” Lukas said.

Bear slept by the door, but I knew his ears would perk up if he heard anyone in the hallway.

“I’m not leaving Jared alone with Gabriel and Dimitri.”
Even if I trusted them—which I wasn’t sure I did—Gabriel couldn’t see past the demon when he looked at Jared, and Andras manifesting my mother had only made it worse.

Priest turned up “Castle of Glass.” “Two of us go, and everyone else stays to make sure Dimitri and Gabriel don’t do anything crazy.”

“That still leaves one problem,” Lukas said. “We left the Jeep parked on the street in Boston. It probably has a boot on it by now, and I doubt Dimitri and Gabriel are going to give us a ride unless we tell them what we’re looking for.”

A mischievous smile tugged at the corner of Elle’s lips. She was stretched out on Lukas’ bed, propped on one elbow. “Maybe they won’t give us a ride to the prison, but I can get them to take us into town.”

“Then what? Moundsville is ten hours from here,” Lukas said.

Priest perked up. “I can steal a car.”

“No one is stealing anything,” I said.

“I can get us a car.” Alara was swapping the black laces in her tactical boots with white ones covered in bleeding ex
-voto
hearts.

“How?” Priest still hadn’t figured out where Alara had gotten the Jeep, a detail she refused to divulge.

“Stick to designing weapons to save our asses and keep us from being possessed.” Alara smiled. “Leave serious stuff like auto theft and saving the world to the girls.”

Even after we explained Elle’s plan twice, Priest was still having a hard time grasping the genius of it. “It’ll never work. Gabriel and Dimitri won’t care about buying that kinda stuff.”

Lukas flipped his coin. He didn’t seem interested in discussing the details any more than we were hoping Dimitri and Gabriel would.

Alara checked the supplies in her tool belt: plastic soda bottle filled with holy water, paintball gun, ammo, pouches of herbs and rock salt, an EMF, a multi-tool. “You obviously don’t have any sisters.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Priest asked.

Alara winked at him. “Watch and learn.”

We found Gabriel camped out in the room with the glass dry-erase boards. Azazel was stretched across the ebony table in front of him.

“Can I help you with something?” Gabriel didn’t look up from the barbed demon vertebrae he was polishing.

Alara and I fidgeted uncomfortably for his benefit. “I need to go to the store,” I said.

“I’m sure we’ve got whatever you want here.” He moved on to a hooked claw.

Alara cleared her throat. “Um… not everything.”

Gabriel rubbed the dark stubble on his chin.
“Doubtful. But tell me what you need. If we don’t have it, I’ll go out and pick it up for you.”

I gave Alara a questioning glance.

She shrugged. “If you’re sure. It’s girl stuff. It’s in a special aisle. There are lots of different kinds.”

Gabriel’s cheeks flushed.

“I have a picture on my phone.” Alara pressed a few buttons, pretending to look for something.

He held up his hand. “I’ll take you. But we can’t be gone too long.”

Priest, Lukas, and Elle were hanging out in the hallway, listening. I imagined the look on Priest’s face and smiled.

Gabriel wound the whip around his arm and hooked it behind him. “Do you both need to come?”

Alara gave him an innocent look. “Well, we both—”

Gabriel cut her off. “Let’s go.” He obviously didn’t want the details, which was exactly what we had counted on.

When we pulled up in front of the drugstore, Alara hopped out first. “Sure you don’t want to come in?”

Gabriel gave her a hard stare and opened a tattered issue of
Soldier of Fortune
. “I’ll wait here.”

Alara sauntered through the automatic doors in her cargos like she owned the place, and the world along with it.

I followed her through the aisles toward the back of the store. “You’re really going to do this?”

She stopped in the makeup section and glanced in the mirror, smudging her black eyeliner a little. “Just give me a head start. Hang out in here for fifteen minutes before you go back to the car.”

That’s the part I was dreading, but it was worth it if she found the Shift.

Alara pushed open the swinging doors at the end of the freezer aisle, marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY
. “There’s always an exit in the back of these stores.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “How do I look?”

It was the last thing I expected her to ask. “Are you serious?”

She zipped her hooded leather jacket and tightened her tool belt. “Of course I am. Do I look like the kind of girl a guy would mess with on the subway?”

For a second, I thought she was joking. But she was waiting for an answer. “No.”

“Perfect.” Alara strode through the back door and straight toward the jet-black Dodge Challenger parked in the alley.

A broad-shouldered guy with black hair and sun-kissed skin leaned against the car, his arms folded in front of him. Everything about him was rough around the edges, but he was gorgeous.

The moment he saw Alara, his bad boy demeanor
vanished and his face broke into a wide smile. He didn’t wait for her to make it all the way to the car. Instead, he met her halfway and hooked an arm around her neck, pulling her in for a hug. “I knew you’d miss me.”

She pretended to push him away, but he only held on tighter. “What if I said I just needed a ride?”

He grinned. “I’d ask you what you did with the last ride I lent you. Then I’d say you were lying.” He held out his hand. “You’re Kennedy, right? Alara talks about you all the time. I’m Anthony D’Amore.”

I couldn’t decide what surprised me more—that I was about to shake hands with Alara’s mystery guy or that she’d told him about me.

“Nice to meet you. Alara’s told me—”

“Nothing about me, right?” He took her hand and interlaced his fingers with hers. “That’s my girl.”

His girl?

Priest and Lukas would’ve killed to see this.

“How do you two know each other?” I had to ask.

“We met at one of those junior high mixers. Alara went to our sister school.”

A mixer? I had enough trouble imagining Alara in a club, let alone a school dance.

“I used to get into a lot of trouble, and Alara was always the one who got me out of it.”

“Now it’s your turn to return the favor,” she said, nudging him playfully.

“You’re lucky I’m on break, or I’d be training. I have a big match coming up.”

“Are you a boxer?” I asked.

Anthony laughed. “No, Alara’s the fighter. I design BattleBots for the team at MIT.”

He was a nerd. Alara’s gorgeous, tough-looking secret boyfriend was a robot-battling geek from MIT. It was like Clark Kent had just told me he was Superman.

“We’d better go,” Alara said.

I gave her a quick hug. “You just became exponentially cooler in my eyes.”

“Just don’t tell Priest and Lukas.” Her smile faded. “If the Shift is there, I’ll find it.”

“I know.”

As I turned back to the store, Anthony opened the car door for her. “So, where are we going anyway?”

“How do you feel about haunted prisons?”

I underestimated exactly how angry Gabriel would be when I showed up at the car without Alara. Enraged was more accurate. The only thing that infuriated him more was the fact that I wouldn’t tell him where she’d gone.

The car ride back to the safe house was miserable, a Jekyll-and-Hyde meltdown on Gabriel’s part. But his reaction was nothing compared to Dimitri’s.

After he’d forced Gabriel to account for every second of the trip, it was my turn. “Where is she, Kennedy?” Dimitri sounded too calm, which only proved he wasn’t.

He chose the athenaeum for our little chat, otherwise known as an interrogation. Dimitri leaned forward in the chair across from the one I was sitting in, next to the mummy. “I’m not angry—”

“Yes, you are.”

He took a deep breath and dug through his pockets until he found a cigarette. “All right. I am angry. But only because Alara is out there alone, and I don’t want anything to happen to her.”

Tell him and get it over with.

“She’s not exactly alone.”

Gabriel looked up from where he stood at the railing. “Who’s with her?”

“A friend.”

Dimitri rubbed his hand over his face. “This isn’t a game. There are already seventeen dead girls, and we have no idea what Andras is capable of, even from in here.”