“Right now?” A pulse of fear rocks me. “Can you see them?”

“Yes.” She points. “There’s one hanging in the tree just above you.”

Instinctively, I duck.

But nothing happens. I’m just waiting, with my shoulders up to my ears and Thea watching me, and the trees shushing softly.

Finally, carefully, I look up.

There’s nothing. Of course there isn’t. Above me a bunch of branches make their messy black lace against the sky. “I don’t see anything,” I tell her.

She nods. “Most people don’t. Unless they see like I see.”

I take another, longer look. The woods are dark, sure. But there’s nothing moving in that darkness, except the branches swaying softly back and forth.

And all at once, like I’ve pulled off a pair of sunglasses that were distorting my vision, I can see just how absurd this is. I mean, I have to be crazy, leaving my expensive, gorgeous guitar lying in the mud behind me. And this girl, with her giant clothes and her stalking and her stories about demons, is definitely, utterly, totally insane.

“So . . . I’m just supposed to believe you?” I say. “Because you tell me you can see something that’s not really there?”

Thea just gazes back at me. She keeps so still now, if it wasn’t for her drifting hair, she’d look like some weird statue.

I push on. “I mean, if these invisible things are demons, then what do you think you are? An angel or something?”

She hesitates for a second. “Angels don’t exist,” she says.

“Right. Exactly.” My words accelerate. “Demons don’t exist, either. And all of this, everything that’s happened, is my fault, because I’ve screwed up my own life without any help from Satan. And you are just some fan who’s come to enough shows and listened to enough gossip and spied on me enough to weave this story. And that’s it.”

I stride past her, toward the Crow’s Nest.

She’s in front of me again so fast that it doesn’t seem possible.

It isn’t possible.

I stop, blinking. Nobody can move like that. But there she is, with that old blue bike beside her, standing right in front of me.

I stagger backward. My heel hits a root, and I fall, landing on my ass in a heap of wet leaves.

Thea looms over me.

“Listen,” she says, leaning down over her handlebars so that her face is close to mine. Her voice is low and fast and hard. “You started studying the guitar with Flynn Martin nine years ago. You practiced. You got better. When you were fourteen, you and Jezz and Patrick formed a band. You tried writing music of your own, but nothing came out the way you wanted it to. Still, you practiced, and you kept getting better, and soon you had a little following.”

“Everybody who’s ever read an interview knows—” I start, but she goes on as if I haven’t spoken.

“Then, in the fall of your junior year, you met a journalist who walked with you here, in these woods, not far from where we’re standing now.”