“Bring her upstairs,” the aunt instructed.

He hoisted his sniveling sister up the staircase, her long legs dangling past his knees, as he followed Vera into a guest room with a four-poster frame and a lace doily bedspread.

“I’ll take it from here,” said the aunt as she entered the room.

He lowered Chloe onto the mattress. The aunt sat and hugged his sister’s sweaty head to her chest, singing a song that might have been Gaelic. Before Max got back to the first floor, his sister’s sobs had lessened.

About a half hour later, Chloe was still upstairs. Max was in the kitchen clutching a steaming mug of spearmint tea that he in no way wanted to drink, but that Vera’s aunt insisted he finish.

“Every drop. It will calm you,” she said.

Max grimaced at the minty herbal taste. The only warm beverage he liked was hot cocoa with mini marshmallows, but that felt inappropriate under the circumstances. He slumped in the chrome-framed chair, the black vinyl cushion squeaking beneath him.

“Chloe seems calm. I washed her face and gave her one of Vera’s old stuffed animals,” said the aunt.

What was her name? Aunt Tilly? Tully?

“Greenie is in capable hands. He’s my mint-green tiger.” Vera grabbed a plastic teddy bear of honey from a cornflower-blue cabinet. The counters were butcher block, and they had one of those big white sinks that sank super deep. His mom would have loved it. No, she will love it. She’s not dead.

“I should check on her.” Max stood.

“Sit,” Vera’s aunt instructed.

He dropped back down. It had been a long time since he’d been parented. And now his remaining parent…he didn’t know who she was. Or what she was.

“How are you?” Vera sat beside him.

“Freaking out.”

“The spirit’s demonic,” the aunt began, tucking a gray hair behind her ear. “I don’t have my sister’s gift, but I can sense evil, and there’s evil in this town.”

“Aunt Tilda, I said go slow,” Vera whined, as if Aunt Tilda (that was her name!) had broken some sort of agreement. But after what just happened in his mother’s bedroom, they could skip the honey and go straight to the heavy ingredients.

“Just tell me.”

Vera sighed, setting down her tea. “Okay. That shrine, the one we saw in your mom’s closet?” She paused as if needing to jog his memory. No, he was good. The whole thing was hard to forget.

“It’s called the Angel of Tears,” she went on. “It’s the same one I saw in my patient’s room. Remember I asked you about it that first day?” He nodded. Vera continued. “It’s popping up all over the hospital—a Grim Reaper with wings and a burned-out torch. People are praying to it.”

“That’s why those strangers were in my mom’s room?”

“Probably. And by the way you described them, it sounds like they’re—”

“One flew over the batshit nest?”

Vera almost chuckled. “More like brainwashed, or hypnotized—”