Unable to resist any longer, I grabbed my cell phone from my nightstand, keyed in the passcode, and opened my pictures. Thumbing through, I arrived at a photo Patrick had snapped of me and Stephanie the night of the dance.

We leaned against my car, both of us smiling, my arm looped around her shoulders. There was something in Stephanie’s eyes, though, that I hadn’t noticed that night. A distance. A worry that dimmed the enthusiasm of her smile. How much else had I failed to pick up on? Until now, I hadn’t thought much.

Somewhere along the way, even in spite of everything, I’d gotten distracted.

Hard not to do around her.

And at the dance, it had felt so good just to hold her. Then there’d been that kiss. The one full of heat and desire and everything I had, up to that point, kept myself from saying out loud to her.

God. I missed her.

What was she doing right now? Was she okay? Was she thinking of me, too?

Guilt, heavy as a cinder block, returned to my chest. If she was thinking of me, then she had to be wondering what was taking me so long. Or had she assumed I’d given up on her?

Dropping my phone to the bed, I glared harder at the ceiling fan, my gaze shifting past the blades to the shadows they cast on the smooth white ceiling above. And as my focus switched from phone to fan—from Stephanie to those shadows—a shift took place inside of me.

From love to hate.

For Erik.

Rastin had told us he believed the creature had taken Stephanie because he’d fallen in love with her.

And that hadn’t even been the most difficult part to swallow. Then again, maybe it had been. For me.

Insane at is it seemed, I could see it happening. It had happened to me, after all. But exactly how . . . Well, there was the mystery.

Stephanie had told me about her recurring dreams of Erik but never mentioned what those dreams contained. Only that Erik had spent the majority of them trying to warn her about Zedok.

Turned out I’d been wrong in my assumption that Erik had been just a front for something much darker. But then, in a way, I’d also been right.

If only I’d delved a little deeper, plied Stephanie until she told me what, specifically, had gone on in those dreams. Then I might have suspected even more of the truth.

I hadn’t, though, and now Stephanie was with him. In his world. Trapped.

Regardless of what Rastin or anyone else said or believed—that wasn’t love.

Human or not, cursed or not, Erik was evil. And that meant he had to be stopped—for good.

Already, I’d made up my mind that I would be the one to do it. Based on everything Rastin had divulged about how to destroy the monster, there seemed no other way.

According to the medium, the lore about the Mothmen and the mummy unwrapping had been true. And while Erik had incurred the wrath of the mummy by disturbing and inadvertently reawakening him, he had also succeeded in extracting the power he’d sought. Power that had afforded him certain abilities, like the conjuring of apports—which was basically making something appear from nothing. He also possessed other dangerous psychic powers aside from the ability to infiltrate and manipulate the dreams of those who entered onto the property.