He pictured his mom curled on the rosy wingback chair in their living room, wearing her black-framed reading glasses that made her look like a teacher, that yellow book spread across her lap. He hadn’t seen her smile that bright in a long time. She was focused—she got the restaurant out of debt and their finances in order. She never mentioned the part about the satanic altar.

“A body part is just one example of a supreme sacrifice for a demon.” Father Chuck placed a heavy palm on Max’s shoulder. “A soul is another.”

Max swallowed hard.

“It’s time for me to meet your mama.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Vera

They worried briefly that Max’s mom might have finally left the confines of her bedroom sanctuary, but as soon as they turned the corner to his street, Vera felt a pulley system loop around her chest and wheel her close. His mom was still there.

Vera slowed the car, Father Chuck sitting in the passenger seat staring out the window while Maxwell bounced his knee behind them, rocking the sedan. In the light of day, his house looked like most others in Roaring Creek, completely forgettable. A petite white ranch house sulked in disrepair under an intolerably bright sky. The asphalt driveway, spread pitch-black when fresh, was now a dusty white, cracked and patched. An orange-breasted robin rested on the shingled roof pecking at gutters brimming with globs of rotten leaves. There was a garage, its door splattered with years of snow-shovel muck and hurricane slime.

The only remarkable aspect was the front door—the color of a perfect, plump tomato dangling on the vine. All the other homes on Stone Street had maple, ivory, black, or, at most, evergreen doors. But not the Olivers’; their door screamed to be noticed.

Only, no one noticed what was happening inside.

The neighbors abandoned this family. They left a boy to care for a newborn, then silently watched for seven years while his mother wilted with grief, seeking solutions everywhere, from a bottle to possessed strangers.

Vera reached for the handle of her car door, her heart kicking up a notch. Then she touched a foot on the pavement and instantly felt the rush of a ski’s first slip down a black-diamond slope. The exhilaration returned, and with it a sense of absolute rightness.

She needed to be here.

And it wanted her here. Something had changed.

Father Chuck slipped out of the car, a black medical bag in his hand.

“Your parents asked me to keep you away.” Father Chuck peered at Vera. “They don’t think you should be here.”

“My parents are on another continent.” Vera stared him straight in the eye. “And you need all the help you can get.”

The priest assessed her conviction, then nodded once. “Just follow my lead. It’s not my first rodeo.” Father Chuck made the sign of the cross, then kissed the crucifix hanging around his neck.

He’d been blessing their basement for as long as Vera was alive, sometimes even staying for Sunday dinner. Yet she never really thought much about him, other than the fact that he made her uncomfortable. Not because he did anything inappropriate, but because he was a priest. It was like seeing your high school principal in a bathing suit at the beach. Father Chuck was an adult in a position of authority, a vocation that was revered in her home, so of course, her natural instinct was to never look him in the eye and speak only when spoken to. Now, for the first time, they were walking side by side. Her mom would be livid.