The a/c wasn’t on. It was hot and stuffy. Across the room, Balthazar and Tempest from In The Dark Places gazed mournfully out from their poster. Her laptop sat upon her desk. Her bed was made. She’d grown up here. It was her bedroom, filled with her things, yet it wasn’t. Not anymore. The act of leaving, of running, had sealed this house away from her. It looked like her home and smelled like her home – that hot, cloyingly sweet smell – but it no longer felt like her home.

She stepped into the hall, moving quietly despite the fact that her parents and their friends were still in Alaska.

She didn’t sweat. Of course she didn’t. She could feel the heat, but it didn’t bother her, not as a demon. She walked into the kitchen. Grabbed an apple. Took a bite and munched. Went to the refrigerator and found a carton of milk, poured herself a tall glass. She lobbed the apple into the sink, took the milk into the living room, leaving bloodstains wherever she went.

On the piano in the corner (her mother was a wonderful pianist) there was a framed photograph. A family photograph. Amber and her parents. Bill and Betty standing side by side and in front, smiling and oblivious to what was to come, was little girl Amber.

She dropped the photo, crushed it with her heel.

Taking another swig of milk, she dumped the rest of it over the couch and went back to her bedroom, dragging her hand along the corridor wall and smearing it with blood. She grabbed a bag, stuffed it full of clothes. She took her laptop, too, and a teddy bear she’d had since she was a kid. She put the bag on her back, closed the door, slid the key in and tried to remember what the doors looked like in Virgil’s house.

“Goddammit,” she said to no one.

The motel then. She pictured the room she’d stayed in, pictured the door. She wasn’t in Desolation Hill anymore, but maybe the fact that she wanted to return there might spur the key on to cutting her a little slack. She focused, turned the key, and turned it again, then pulled it out as she opened the door …

… and stepped on to the landing in the Dowall Motel, and the first thing she heard was her mother’s voice.

“He doesn’t know anything,” Betty said. Amber crouched, her fingers turning to claws once again. It took her a moment to calm down. She hadn’t been detected. Her mother’s voice was coming from below, in the lobby. They didn’t know she was here.

Her mother spoke again. “Will you please stop him from crying?”