“Okay,” I allowed after several beats. “I trust you. But then . . . what now?”

He let out a sigh, as if he’d been afraid he wouldn’t have gotten past this barrier with me. In truth, he still hadn’t. But I needed help and so did Erik.

“As the story stands,” Lucas plowed forward, “I can tell you right now, the others won’t believe it. But if I give them my version, I think they’ll believe me.”

“So . . .” I paused, not understanding. “What are you saying?”

He frowned. “I’m saying that you should let me do the talking.”

And so it went that the rest of the SPOoKy team got an abridged and much more academic version of the previous night’s events from Lucas, who had translated everything I’d told him into far more technical (and far vaguer) terms.

Phrases like “multiple aggressive dark apparitions,” “open portals,” “vortex hotspots,” “psychic attacks,” and, the most ambiguous of all, “confirmed nonhuman entity” got dealt around the coffee shop table like cards at a blackjack game.

I eventually tuned out the jargon talk, my mind taking me back to the previous night. To my impromptu embrace with Erik.

I’d been so terrified and so relieved to see him that I had just rushed him, winding him in my arms.

His frame had felt like that of a scarecrow. Light and hollow and . . .

I flushed at the memory of it—of his scent, which, like his voice, had been so familiar. And the way his gloved hands had lingered as they’d traveled along my arms, tenderness lacing the action.

Then there had been his eyes. Those lights-for-eyes that, according to my sister, were supposed to belong to Zedok. Zedok’s eyes, though, had been blacker than black—two empty and night-filled pits of nothing. Had Charlie seen both figures and somehow confused the two? Or was this solid evidence that Lucas could be right? That Erik wasn’t real. That he was, essentially, a trick.

The prospect caused my heart to contract and pound almost painfully hard.

I didn’t want that to be so.

If not for that embrace with Erik, Lucas might have convinced me I’d hallucinated the whole ordeal. But that encounter, I couldn’t have imagined.

And neither could I believe now that Erik, in all his turmoil and sadness, was not a prisoner of the monster.

I scowled at the tabletop. Confliction and confusion, and a hint of longing, warred with my fear of going back inside that house.

It didn’t help that the legend Lucas had told us fit with all I had experienced firsthand. Everything but his assertion that the entity in the house was “nonhuman.” Because if Zedok was the Egyptian priest, then he would be human. But then, he had been incorporeal, and garbed like another masquerader, so that didn’t fit. And what about Erik? Lucas never mentioned him once to the others. Would the cleansing set him free? If it worked, would I even get to say goodbye . . . ?