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Lukas dragged me down the dark tunnel. “You can’t let him get in your head. It’s just another one of his lies.”

What if it wasn’t? What if my soul was the one marked by a demon? I had stared out the window at the little girl, too.

He’ll always be able to find you.…

I had assembled the Shift and released Andras, and now he’d left his demonic fingerprint on my soul? Maybe this was my punishment. House arrest at the hands of one of hell’s soldiers. A soldier who was slowly killing the boy I—

Love.

I felt it every time I looked at Jared, every time he touched me.

I’m in love with him.

At the top of the stairs, the fluorescent glare against the steel walls made me dizzy. I reached for the closest wall to steady myself, but it was too far away. Or I was.

Lukas caught me as my knees buckled, and wrapped his arm around me. “It’s gonna be okay.”

“You’re wrong. It’s my fault Andras found us in Boston. My fault Jared’s possessed.” I could barely choke out the words. “I’m the one he marked.”

How many times had I prayed to be marked as a Legion member?

“I wish it were me. Jared doesn’t deserve this,” I said.

Lukas took a shaky breath. “None of us do.”

I wiped my face, and Lukas loosened his grip, his arms still around me. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said.

“Hey, I’ve been looking for you—” Elle said from behind me.

Lukas dropped his arms and took an awkward step away from me.

“We were talking about Jared,” I said, wiping my nose on my sleeve.

“Whatever,” she snapped. I recognized the anger in her voice, but I wasn’t prepared for the expression on her face. My best friend looked like she wanted to kill me. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“It’s not like that.” Lukas skirted his way around me like I had the plague.

Elle took off down the hall in a flash of red hair and black leather.

I leaned against the cold metal behind me and slid to
the floor. I wanted to scream and pound on the walls and cry—do anything to avoid feeling the way I did right now.

Broken, battered, and beaten.

This was a war we couldn’t win. Or one we’d already lost.

H
ours later, I stood outside the mech room, working up the courage to face Priest. Dimitri and Alara had persuaded him to stay for now, but I hadn’t seen him since he’d threatened to leave.

Priest didn’t hear me when I stepped inside. He was wearing his headphones, nodding in time with the music, his attention focused on a long silver pipe in front of him. On any other day, standing behind a lab table surrounded by scrap metal and power tools would’ve cheered him up. But as he searched the wall of hammers, screwdrivers, and drills behind him, the frown never left his face.

I watched as he attached a propane tank to one end of the pipe and drilled a row of holes along the top. Usually, his oversized hoodie and long blond bangs reminded me of
the skaters from my old high school in Georgetown—the misfit band of freshmen and sophomores who traveled in swarms, with their skateboards sticking out of the top of their backpacks. The boyish quality that had always made Priest seem like one of them was gone now.

I recognized the look on his face; it belonged to someone who knew what it felt like to be betrayed, and I hated myself for being part of the reason.

“How long have you known?” he asked, without glancing in my direction. He pushed his safety goggles up on his head and secured a speaker to the opposite end of the pipe with a roll of silver duct tape.

I stared at the floor, letting my hair create a curtain between us. “Jared told me when we were trapped in the wall at Hearts of Mercy.”

“And you didn’t think Alara and I had a right to know?”

“I thought Jared should tell you himself, and he wanted to,” I said.

“Except he didn’t, did he?” Priest turned on the speaker and flames flared from the holes in the pipe, rising and falling to the intensity of the music.

“That’s amazing.”

He didn’t look at me. “It’s a Rubens tube. Physics 101. Any idiot can make one.”

Except an idiot like me, who would lie to her friend—that was the message.

“I’m so sorry.”

Priest slammed his fist against the table. “Sorry won’t bring my grandfather back. I’m not like the rest of them. Jared and Lukas have each other, and Alara still has a family, even if she doesn’t wanna live with them. My granddad was all I had. I thought you of all people would understand that.”

“I do.”

He shook his head. “No, you don’t. You went to a regular school. You have a best friend who took off with a bunch of strangers because she wanted to find you. I lived in the same broken-down house with my granddad for as long as I can remember. I was homeschooled. That means no teachers, no friends, no enemies. No one except the two of us. He was my best friend.” Priest’s voice cracked. “My
only
friend.”

I tried to imagine a life without school and Elle. A life that only existed within the four walls of my house. “You’re right. I should’ve told you.”

Priest unhooked his headphones from around his neck and hurled them across the room. The plastic smashed against one of the shiny silver walls.

“Jared should’ve told me!” he shouted. “He was supposed to be my friend. I followed him around like a puppy. And the whole time, he knew my granddad was dead because of him.”

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying. “He is your friend.”

Priest turned his back on me and stalked down the hall. “We have a different definition of friendship.”

After my conversation with Priest, I wanted to find an empty room and hide, but it would only delay the inevitable. Facing Alara.

I took a deep breath and opened the door to our room. The only sign of her was a box of shotgun cartridges and a bottle of rock salt.

“She’s not here,” Elle said.

I sat on the end of Elle’s bed, the way I had a million times back in her room at home. “What’s going on with you? You’re acting weird.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why? Because I don’t want to watch you hang all over Lukas?”

For a second, I thought she was joking. Elle had never been jealous of another girl in her life, at least not over a guy. Amazing hair, a cool pair of vintage shoes, maybe. The idea of Elle being jealous of me was even more ridiculous.

“Lukas and I are just friends. Anyone who spends more than five minutes with the two of you can tell how he feels about you. Trust me, you have nothing to worry
about.” A sob caught in my throat, and my voice cracked. “The only guy who ever cared about me is sharing a body with a demon.”

“I’m sorry,” Elle said, but she didn’t sound convincing. “I’m acting stupid.”

What’s wrong with her?

Maybe she was having a hard time dealing with this world I’d dragged her into and I hadn’t noticed. “It’s okay.”

“Don’t worry.” She draped an arm over my shoulders. “We’re going to find that thing to save Jared.”

“The Shift.”

I didn’t have the energy to look for Alara. Instead, I fell asleep thinking about another person I couldn’t save.

A scream pierced the darkness and my eyes flew open.

Elle.

I shoved myself off the bed, struggling to reach her.

“Don’t touch me!” she screamed.

Bear barked in the darkness.

The door burst open, and someone turned on the lights. Lukas and Priest stood in the doorway, weapons drawn. Alara must’ve come in after we fell asleep, and she jumped out of bed. “What happened?”

“I don’t know.” I scanned the room, but no one else was there.

Elle clawed at her arms, hysterical and sobbing. Lukas
ran to the bed and pulled her into his lap. She was covered in dark bruises, as if someone had hit her.

Footfalls echoed through the hallway, and Gabriel and Dimitri appeared in the doorway, out of breath. Gabriel noticed Elle’s bruises. “Who did this?”

The lights flickered, and Priest pushed our half-open door closed. “Not who… what.”

On the back of the door, a message was scratched into the metal over and over:

WHEN THE NIGHTMARES COME, FEAR ME.

Lukas hugged Elle tighter. “He’s getting stronger.”

I didn’t wait to hear the rest.

I grabbed the contact lens case next to my bed and took off. My bare feet slapped against the cold concrete floor as I ran toward the door to the containment area. Priest was behind me, shouting my name, asking me if I remembered something or had a theory. I didn’t have either, just a feeling something was very wrong.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I popped in the contacts. Voices drifted through the tunnel—the demon’s and a girl’s voice.

The cell door was still closed, but Andras wasn’t alone.

A girl stood in front of him, picking the locks on his
wrist shackles with a wire. Even with her back to me, I recognized her immediately.

“Am I hallucinating again?” Priest asked.

The girl turned slowly, long brown waves grazing her neck.

My neck.

The girl in the cell looked exactly like me.

“Oh my god,” I whispered.

She noticed us and tried to work faster, but the shackles held. Her eyes darted to Andras for guidance. He spoke to her in a strange language, and reluctantly she gave up.

She brought a finger to her lips and blew me a kiss, the same way Andras had on the street in Boston.

Gabriel caught up with us. “What the—”

He struggled to unlock the cell, but the girl was already transforming. Her body—what looked like
my
body—spiraled into a ribbon of particles that glittered in the air like dust in the sun.

The wire slipped out of her hand and fell to the floor.

Gabriel cracked Azazel, and the whip hit her dusty form. She cried out in pain, confirming what I had already known. She wasn’t one of Andras’ illusions—because this scenario
wasn’t
one of my fears.

The girl-who-wasn’t-me was real—whatever she was.

Gabriel jerked the whip back as if he was trying to drag her toward the bars. But Azazel’s barbs didn’t hold,
and the ribbon of particles twisted through the bars and shot down the tunnel.

Gabriel slammed his hands against the wall. “We lost her.”

“What the hell
was
she?” Priest asked him.

I was already trying to figure that out for myself.

My eyes darted to the wall behind Andras. Every inch was still covered with writing and symbols—new ones overlapping the protective and binding symbols that were already in the cell when Gabriel and Dimitri locked him inside.

Dimitri had been tracking the demon’s writing. It had seemed random, like the scribbling of a madman.

But as I studied the wall more carefully, something looked different today. Behind the symbol and the sadistic Scrabble pattern Andras had created from the dead girls’ names, another image jumped out at me, as clearly as if I had drawn it myself.

A summoning circle from
The Goetia
, a seventeenth-century grimorie that provided instructions for summoning and commanding demons.

Andras had used the circumference of an existing symbol to hide it, his cryptic writing hugging the black lines of the drawing.

The letters, which meant so little before, created a hidden message. A name was written over and over within it.

Bastiel.

How did he do it without us noticing?

I hit Rewind, and my mind searched the mental snapshots of the wall, separating the layers of recorded images.

Layer one: the day Alara left to search for the Shift—

Strange alchemical symbols drawn in repeated sequences over the names of the dead girls—

Layer two: last night when Andras revealed Jared’s secret to everyone and Elle got jealous when she saw Lukas hugging me—

The inner circles and the name
Bastiel
written seven times, the letters hidden among other words—

Layer three: today—

The outer circle and the looping characters of a forgotten language—

“I know what he did,” I said. “He drew a summoning circle using the symbols that were already in the cell. It’s hidden underneath a ton of meaningless characters I don’t recognize. He summoned another demon—Bastiel.”

Andras roared like an animal, and the muscles tensed and rippled up his arms. “She will be my vengeance and rain hell upon you all.” He curled his hands into fists, pulling against the chain attached to his shackles.

The iron snapped, and the links fell to the floor.

Gabriel shoved me behind him, even though Andras was still locked inside the cell. “I don’t know how you
figured that out, but nice job.” Gabriel held Azazel in his hands, whispering:

The whip reared and lunged through the air, curling and twisting. Azazel cracked against the demon’s back. Andras cried out, but he was stronger now and quickly recovered.

Andras looked at Gabriel. “You make promises you cannot keep, Gabriel. And for that, I won’t harvest your soul. I’ll make you my slave.”

Dimitri rushed through the tunnel carrying an armload of books, with Lukas, Alara, and Elle behind him. He slid a heavy book across the floor to Priest. “The
Rituale Romanum
. Quickly.”