“Oh, Vera, I wish I could be there when it happens. You’re going to be so beautiful!”

It. Wanted. Her.

“The line that separates good and bad, it doesn’t exist out there somewhere in need of an invitation. It’s inside you…It’s a choice.”

It wanted Vera to choose—Chloe’s life, or her own. The lives of every brainwashed cult member, or her own. The lives of innocent children, an entire town, the entire planet, or her own. Would Vera let the monster take her?

As though hearing her thoughts, the demon turned her way. The depths of Hell she saw in its pitted eyes could have sucked a person’s sanity.

“Ready yet?” it hissed, then tightened the stranglehold on Chloe’s neck.

The girl yelped. Vera bit her cheek, warring with herself, the coppery tang of blood filling her mouth. Why did it want her? Because she was her parents’ daughter, because they had fought this exact demon before and won. The cult leader knew her parents were out of town. The demon wanted her to submit while they were gone, ensuring their devastation when they returned. It was striking first before her parents could strike at it. Before her parents could bind it. Again.

There was a click, an audible flip to the machine working her brain.

It didn’t want to release the other demons in the basement. Demons don’t hang out with the other cool demons and get each other’s backs. It wanted inside her basement to destroy all remnants of the chalice, to destroy the shards of the object that bound it. Her parents had the power to do it, and it thought Vera could do the same.

Demons don’t want to possess things, they want to possess people. That’s why we’re able to contain it in an object, if the object belonged to the person doing the demon’s bidding.

It didn’t want to be vanquished.

The sleepwalking. The strolls to the basement. Her body was trying to open that door in her most unconscious state. Her mother was wrong; her dreams weren’t demonic. Something was awakening in Vera that she’d repressed for years, maybe her whole life.

Instinct was leading her to that door.

Because that was where the solution was.

Her aunt’s words returned: Sometimes people choose evil, but they can also choose to be heroes.

Vera sprinted to the truck, letting the whispers of intuition guide her. Her scientific mind couldn’t process what was in front of her, couldn’t rationalize a plan, but something else inside her could. She tore open the passenger-side door, grabbed the hard hat, and sprinted across the lawn with lungs gulping misty air, blood thundering in her ears.

Her aunt yelled. Father Chuck bellowed for Vera to stop. And the beast followed her every move with its obsidian eyes.

Vera bounded up her porch steps in two giant leaps and dove through her front door. The hat was clutched in her clammy hand as she shook the old wooden house with her thwacking sprint to the basement door. Her sandals skidded to a halt in the kitchen as the brass knob came into view.