“Bacon! I found bacon!” Aunt Tilda cheered.

His face flung toward her as she yanked a plastic package from the fridge.

“She stress-cooks. Just go with it,” muttered Vera.

Max rubbed his temples again, then glared at the wooden door, boards crisscrossing like Xs on the upper and lower panels. An X usually meant stay away. “If it were just me here, fine. But my sister is upstairs.”

“She’s perfectly safe,” said Aunt Tilda, plopping carrots onto a cutting board. She grabbed a chef’s knife.

“She is.” Vera agreed. “I wouldn’t let you stay here if she weren’t.”

“How can you say that? You just told me that you have to invite a demon in. Well, how many demons have you invited in here?”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“How?” He knew he was frustrating them, but he didn’t exactly have a lifetime of demonic background information.

“The objects in our basement—it could be a toy from a house that was haunted by the ghost of a child, or a mirror that was once owned by a warlock—my parents take them so we can watch over them. We have them blessed every week. We make sure their evil never spreads.”

“But what if you’re wrong? What if it doesn’t work that way?” His eyes narrowed. He couldn’t believe she’d grown up like this, with evil artifacts steps from the breakfast table. A rush of pity swept over him. How was she not more messed up?

“My parents know what they’re doing,” Vera replied.

“Why? Because they have, like, superpowers?”

Vera’s aunt chuckled. But he wasn’t joking. What else would you call it?

“Yeah, something like that.” Vera reached for his hand. “You’re safe here. I promise.”

No one could promise that.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Storm

In a small coastal community, a hurricane rages. The eye is cutting an unrelenting path up the jagged coast, from Washington, D.C., to Atlantic City, from Lower Manhattan to Roaring Creek. The storm surge is expected to crest beyond the Great Flood of 1955—a historic squall still tattooed on buildings with fading lines that mark the day canoes rowed down Main Street.

A ten-year-old girl is huddled in a dining room, the most interior space in the house. Her only protection is her aunt and the packing tape crisscrossing the whistling windows.

“Pray, Vera, just keep praying,” her aunt tells her, squeezing the girl to her chest, her long salt-and-pepper hair forming a shield to cover them both.

Outside, the wind howls like a mother who’s lost her child, branches flinging violently into the air as if every spot must be searched, all debris upended. The roof groans from the blasts.

“Our Father, who art in Heaven…,” her aunt chants, rocking the girl who is nearly taller than she is as they cuddle together on the hardwood floor. The girl’s parents are stranded overseas, unable to return.

They are alone.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done…”

For days, the governor pleaded for evacuations, but they didn’t pack. There are items in the basement that cannot be moved, cannot be left unattended, and cannot be taken in a fire. The girl knows this. She knows what her parents do.