“Wait,” said Charlotte, cutting in. “Lucas, what’s going on?”

“I just moved here from St. Louis,” I told her.

“Yeah,” replied Charlotte. But it might as well have been a “duh.”

“And so ensue-eth the brandishing of claws,” recited Wes in an eerie monotone. “The gnashing of teeth. The desperate attempts to undermine one another in the pursuit of my ardors.” He held up a halting, silver-ring-lined hand. “Ladies, take heart, I am not as celibate as my nickname might imply.”

“Shut up, man,” Patrick said, shoving Wes’s hand down. “Nobody wants your creepy ass.”

“She lives in Moldavia,” said Lucas.

Wes’s near-smile fell. Patrick’s expression sobered.

Charlotte’s glare went from glacial to apprehensive.

“You live in Moldavia.” Wes repeated the statement, his pale gray, kohl-rimmed eyes boring into me.

I chose that moment to speak to the table at large. “Okay. Will someone—I don’t care who—please tell me what the story is on my house?”

“What’d you see?” Patrick asked, causing Charlotte’s stare to bounce between everyone.

“Buddy Holly come back?” With this question, Lucas tipped back in his chair, folding those finely sculpted forearms over the dark pinstriped vest he’d buttoned over a white dress shirt. Which, I had to admit, looked snappy on him.

“Try Zedok,” I said.

The front legs of Lucas’s chair came crashing to the floor, his glasses knocking askew.

Wes’s spoon made a crash landing on the floor.

“Nope,” said Patrick. “We’re all booked up with nope. Indefinitely. Sorry for your luck.”

“Trick,” chided Lucas, and it took me a second to realize that was another nickname.

“Oh, please,” said Charlotte. “She’s messing with us, you guys.”

Lucas frowned at this. At me, too. Like he thought Charlotte had to be right.

But I didn’t care what any of them thought of me or my motives for joining their lunch table. Not after a reaction like that. Not as long as someone started telling me what was wrong with my house.

“What about the name Zed—”

Wes hissed—actually hissed. Wincing, he held up a finger.

“What?” I splayed my hands.

“Names hold power,” answered Wes. “To speak a demon’s name is to summon it.”

“Demon?” Internally, I officially started to freak. Because Erik said something similar in the dream. He hadn’t called Zedok a demon, but he’d told me not to say the name.

“Wes is our resident demonologist,” explained Lucas in a dismissive tone. “He thinks every haunting is demonic.”

“And Lucas,” Wes retorted, “is our resident fearless leader and professional debunker. His superpowers include dismissing full-bodied apparitions as fart clouds.”

“Excuse me if I didn’t want to scare her, Wes,” Lucas said through gritted teeth.

“Sounds to me like she’s got good reason to be scared, Lucas.”

“Guys.” Charlotte again. “Hello. She’s lying. You know as well as I do where she got that name.”

“Excuse me,” I said to Charlotte, because if there was one thing I could not stand, it was people talking about me like I wasn’t there. “My six-year-old sister is where I got that name.”