He let the words fall like bombs into the space between us. My heart, already thumping hard, now beat double-time. I turned to look at him, his severe profile—a hard, dangerous kind of beauty. I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He sat in silence, his gaze on the budding trees in front of us, and I hung on to those words with everything I had, wondering if what Laney believed was actually true. Was he trying to tell me it was? Was this an invitation, a hint, or just a report of the facts?

And could I be any more selfish, thinking about dumb high school stuff when everything Malachi believed might be crashing down around him? “We haven’t talked about what that Mazikin inside my mom told us today,” I said quietly.

“What is there to say?” he replied. His gaze was unfocused again, far away. It filled me with a savage ache, so much worse than the stupid jealousy that had been there before, especially as he added, “I have made yet another foolish, disastrous error, and in doing so have condemned countless innocents to eternal suffering.” The muscles of his shoulders were tight, shaking with tension and emotion. “At least the Mazikin that possessed your mother was too addled or ignorant to keep up the ruse. I’m quite sure Sil will be furious at her when he discovers that she’s corrected my idiotic misconceptions. Now,” he said as he stood up abruptly, “we should retrieve that body from the car.”

He rose and went into the house, and then emerged a moment later with a tarp. Together we tugged the body of the blonde prostitute out of the car and laid her on the starchy plastic. As we did, a small change purse fell from beneath her blouse. I picked it up and opened it.

Among a few neatly folded bills was her driver’s license. “Her name was Andrea,” I murmured, looking down at her beautiful smile in the picture, lit up by the sliver of moon above us, and then down at her white, bloodless face. Her eyes were still half-open. Her lipstick was smeared and smudged around her parted lips. I’d never taken the chance to really look at a person I had killed, too busy fighting or fleeing. Andrea. Did she have a family? A daughter? Had someone loved her? Was someone missing her right now?

“Malachi? What’s that thing you say over their bodies? You know, after you’ve killed one of them?”

He gave me a wary look. “It’s El Male Rachamim. A prayer for the dead.”

I bit my lip and knelt by Andrea’s head. With the tips of my fingers, I closed her eyes. I wiped her lipstick with the cuff of my sleeve. “Can you say it?” Maybe this would be what both of us needed.