Our “mother” had abandoned her human guise entirely now. She moved as if her body had too many joints. As if her bones were too long. And maybe they were. She wasn’t yet as deformed and animalistic as a degenerate, but her body was no longer fully human either. When had that happened? Was that why she slept all day—so we wouldn’t notice?

Melanie screeched and let go of my hand. She tried to run, and the demon lunged for her. I stepped between them, and the demon bowled me over. My head smacked against the floor—concrete covered by thin carpet—and the room spun around me.

The demon launched herself off my abdomen, driving the air from my body as she pounced after Mellie like a cat. I forced myself up, gasping, when she dragged my sister away from the door and tossed her toward the couch. Melanie stumbled foot over foot and caught herself with one knee on the center cushion.

“Run,” I gasped, still trying to catch my breath. But Melanie collapsed on the couch, crying, her knees tucked up to her chest.

“Where would she go?” the demon demanded, hunched in an agile squat between me and my sister. “We are everywhere. Seen but unseen. Known but unknown.”

“She’s lying.” I backed away from Melanie, trying to draw the mother-monster my way so my sister could run. But Mellie only cowered. “The war is over. We won.” The only surviving remnants of the demon hordes roamed the badlands as degenerates, and they were reportedly few and far between. And gradually dying off as they slowly starved for souls.

“Yes.” The demon advanced on me, swaying sluggishly like a bridge in the wind. As if she might pounce again at any second. “We did.”

“What does that mean?” I said as Melanie finally climbed off the couch and crawled toward the kitchen, and suddenly I wished we’d found a way to pay the phone bill. The Church could already be on its way.

“We are endless, Nina. We are legion.” The demon stood straighter and frowned, as if my lack of a reaction disappointed her. “That statement would have scared the shit out of your grandparents. But my point is that there are more of us than you could ever imagine. We outnumber the grains of sand on the beach, the drops of water in the ocean. The seas in hell rage with us, rising and falling in waves, cresting and crushing one another. We bleed and moan and starve, yet we cannot die. We think of nothing but escape, yet there is nowhere to go. Nowhere but here. And for every one of us that breaks through, anchored in your world by the souls we devour, there are thousands still waiting, begging, fighting for the chance. But souls are finite and your bodies are fragile hosts. There will never be enough of either to go around. The only way to stay here is to find a new host before the old one dies, and every time one of us fails in that endeavor, another will rise to take its place. You. Cannot. Win.”