Paige looks around and walks over to the window. Beyond the warped glass, Raffe drags Beliel up to the fence gate. He dumps him there and walks behind the house. Beliel seems dead, but I know he’s not. Locust-stung victims are paralyzed enough to seem dead even though they’re still conscious. That’s part of the horror of being stung.

‘Come on. Let’s check out the rest of the house,’ I say. But Paige continues to stare out the window at the shriveled form of Beliel.

Outside, Raffe walks back into sight with his arms full of rusty chains. He makes quite the intimidating picture as he wraps the chains around Beliel, forming loops around his neck, the fence post, and his thighs. He padlocks them together in the center of his chest.

If I didn’t know better, I’d be terrified of Raffe. He looks merciless and inhuman as he handles the helpless demon.

Strangely, it’s Beliel who keeps pulling at my attention, though. There’s something about him in chains that keeps catching my eye. Something familiar.

I shake it off. I must be on the verge of hallucinating from exhaustion.

Chapter 3

3

I was never a morning girl, and now that I’ve had a few nights with no sleep, I feel like a zombie. I want to crash onto a couch somewhere and sleep for a week.

But first, I need to help my sister settle in.

It takes me an hour to clean her up in the bathtub. She’s covered in Beliel’s blood and gore. If the frightened people at the Resistance thought she was a monster when she was in a clean flower-print dress, they’d definitely turn into torch-bearing, lynch-mob villagers if they saw her now.

I’m afraid to actually scrub her because of all her stitches and bruises. Normally, our mom would do this. She was always surprisingly gentle when it came to handling Paige.

Maybe thinking the same thing, Paige asks, ‘Where’s Mom?’

‘She’s with the Resistance. They should be at the camp by now.’ I dribble water over her and dab gingerly between stitches with a sponge. ‘We came to look for you but got caught and taken to Alcatraz. She’s all right now, though. The Resistance came to rescue everyone on the island, and I saw her on the boat as they were escaping.’

Her bruises still look angry, and I don’t want to accidentally pop a stitch. I wonder if these are the kinds of stitches that dissolve or if a doctor needs to take them out.