She was always gentle and genuinely sorry during these times. I think it might have been an apology of a sort. Never enough, obviously, but it may have been her way of reaching back to the light, of letting us know that she was surfacing out of the darkness and into the gray zone.

She hummed it incessantly after Paige’s “accident.” We never did find out exactly what happened. Only my mother and Paige were in the house at the time, and only they will ever know the real story. My mother cried for months after, blaming herself. I blamed her too. How could I not?

“Mom?” I call out through the closed bathroom door.

“Penryn!” she calls out through the shower splashes.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Are you? Have you seen Paige? I can’t find her anywhere.”

“We’ll find her, okay? How did you find me?”

“Oh, I just did.” My mother doesn’t usually lie, but she did have a habit of being vaguely evasive.

“How did you find me, Mom?”

The shower runs freely for a moment before she answers. “A demon told me.” Her voice is full of reluctance, full of shame. The world being what it is these days, I might even consider believing her, except that no one but her sees or hears her personal demons.

“That was nice of him,” I say. The demons usually took the blame for the crazy, bad things my mother did. They rarely got credit for anything good.

“I had to promise I’d do something for him.” An honest answer. And a warning.

My mother is stronger than she looks, and when given the upper hand of surprise, she can do serious harm. She’s been contemplating defense all her life—how to sneak up on an attacker, how to hide from The Thing That Watches, how to banish the monster back to hell before it steals the souls of her children.

I consider the possibilities as I lean against the bathroom door. Whatever it is she’s promised her demon is guaranteed to be unpleasant. And quite possibly painful. The only question is who the pain will be inflicted upon.

“I’m just going to collect some stuff and hole up in the corner office,” I say. “I might be in there a day or two, but don’t worry, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I don’t want you coming into the office. But don’t leave the building okay? There’s water and food in the kitchen.” I think about telling her to be careful, but of course, that’s ridiculous. For decades, she has been careful about people and monsters trying to kill her. Since the attacks, she’s finally found them.

“Penryn?”

“Yeah?”

“Make sure you wear the stars.” She’s referring to the yellow asterisks she’s sewn on our clothes. How I can not wear them is beyond me. It’s on everything we own.

“Okay, Mom.”

Despite her star comment, she sounds lucid. Maybe that’s not the healthiest thing after desecrating a corpse.

~

I’m not as helpless as the average teen.