He tried to lift his head to see more clearly, but it was as if the damn thing were Velcroed to the back of the sofa, and though he strained until his breath jammed in his throat, he got nowhere.

As the room degraded once more, everything looking like a bad acid trip, he was powerless. Frozen. Both alive and dead.

Devina didn’t stay behind him.

She moved around the couch, and his eyes stretched wide as she came in front of him. Her body was decayed, her hands twisted into claws, her face nothing but a skull with strips of gray flesh hanging from the cheeks and chin. Trapped inside his paralyzed body, he struggled to get away, but there was nothing he could do as she approached.

“You made the bargain, Vin,” she said in a dark voice. “You got what you wanted and a deal is a deal. You can’t go back on it.”

He tried to shake his head, tried to speak. He didn’t want her anymore. Not in his house, not in his life. Something had changed when he’d seen Marie-Terese, or maybe it was Jim Heron—although why that guy would matter he hadn’t a clue. But whatever the cause, he knew he didn’t want Devina.

Not in her beautiful form and certainly not in this one.

“Yes, you do, Vin.” Her horrible voice wasn’t just in his ears; it vibrated through his body. “You asked me to come to you and I gave you what you wanted and more. You made a bargain and you’ve taken everything I brought into your life, you’ve eaten it, drank it, fucked it—I’m responsible for it all and you owe me.”

Up close, she didn’t have eyes, just raw sockets that were black holes. And yet she saw him. Just as Jim had said, she saw right into him.

“You have what you wanted, including me. And there is a price and a payment for everything. My price…is you and me together forever.”

Devina mounted him, putting a skeletal knee on each side of his thighs, planting her horrible, shredded palms on his shoulders. The stench of her rotten flesh clawed into his sinuses, and the hard edges of her bones cut into him. Ugly hands went for his fly and he shrank back inside his skin.

No…no, he didn’t want this. He didn’t want her.

As Vin struggled to open his mouth and couldn’t budge his jaw, she smiled, her waxy lips parting from teeth anchored by black gums. “You’re mine, Vin. And I always take what is mine.”

Devina sprang his cock, which was hard with terror, and stood it up between her parted legs.

He didn’t want this. He didn’t want her. No…

“Too late, Vincent. It’s time for me to claim you, not just in this world but the next.”