A phone rang in the distance. She spun to the clock on the microwave: 2:32 a.m.

It all rushed back. Maxwell. Chloe. His mom. Vera’s mom.

She was calling.

Her bare feet padded through the living room and up the stairs, two at a time. She had walked all this way in her sleep, her body moving beyond her control. Her mind was someplace else—the dream, it felt so real, so vibrant. Like the others.

She threw open her bedroom door and dove for her cell phone on its final ring.

“Hello,” she panted into the receiver.

“Vera, honey, it’s Mom. What’s wrong?”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Vera

The next morning, Vera crawled into work with bleary eyes. After the conversation with her mother, following her dreamy wandering, questions bubbled in her brain all night. There were no good answers.

Vera yanked the metal latch on her hospital locker, tossing in a fresh set of clothes. She was meeting Maxwell after work to recap the call, which included her mother insisting Vera go nowhere near the Oliver house again, not until they returned home. That left Vera to decide whether to defy her parents or abandon Maxwell.

“Hey, you!” Chelsea cheered as she barreled into the changing room, her scrubs as bright as a fresh-cut lime.

Vera wore blackish-red scrubs so dark a patient could spit blood on her chest and no one would notice. She didn’t understand why the entire staff didn’t wear the same. She didn’t understand a lot of things lately.

“Hey.” Vera yawned.

“You look awful.” Chelsea grimaced.

So much for the under-eye concealer. Vera slammed her locker.

The doors pushed open and Samantha sauntered through, pecking her girlfriend’s lips and smiling as if they hadn’t just seen one another the night before. Vera’s chest sagged more. She’d never had that with anyone, and maybe for the first time, she wanted it—not in a general sense, but with someone specific, someone she was pretty sure didn’t feel the same way. How could he? His family was in a deadly, otherworldly situation, and there was no way he had space to consider anything more than that. Vera was the girl he thought could help. He didn’t choose her, at least not in the way she wanted.

“What’s up with you?” Samantha eyed Vera’s wilted appearance.

“I was up half the night.” Vera pulled at her knotted neck, remembering her mother’s words.

You are in too deep. That was what she’d said when she learned of Vera’s sleepwalking. Not “You’re okay,” or “It’s happened to me too,” or, what Vera secretly hoped, “I always knew.” A tiny piece of Vera’s soul longed for the sleepwalking to confirm a connection to her parents. Maybe she was like them after all. But her mother stomped that hope under her foot, even from across an ocean.

The darkness is moving in, Mom insisted. Do not invite the demon any closer.

As if Vera were consciously choosing to wake up in the kitchen with her hand stretching for the basement door. As if she were tossing around Evites to every demon on the block. Was it really that impossible to believe that Vera could be inheriting a smidge of the power her family possessed? Apparently, to her mother, it was. Vera could hear it in her voice—she thought that her daughter was too weak to handle this situation and that the demon was taking advantage.