Despair pinned me to the spot where I stood. Was she telling the truth? Were there really thousands of demons in hell for every one that had broken into our world? If so, why bother to fight? Humanity would fold in the end anyway. How could it not?

Then Melanie’s gaze met mine over our mother’s shoulder, and I remembered why we should fight. Why we’d been fighting for more than a century, though no one else seemed to realize the war was still raging.

Demons might win in the long run. In the future. That seemed inevitable. But this demon wasn’t going to win this fight. She wasn’t going to sell my sister and claim my soul.

This demon was going down.

“Run!” I shouted at Melanie. My sister stared at me in surprise for the half second it took our mother to whirl toward her. Then she took off for the back door, sneakers squealing on the scratched, faded linoleum.

The demon snarled and lurched after her, but I grabbed her thin arm.

She turned to me, her eyes flashing with a cold, bright white light. Her mouth opened wider than should have been possible with a human jaw, and terror shot through me like a thousand bolts of lightning. Suddenly I realized I had no idea what to do next. I hadn’t thought beyond distracting her so Melanie could get out.

The demon snarled again—at me this time—and the back door slammed shut as she jerked her arm free from my grasp and lunged for the door. And that was when I understood that she couldn’t hurt me. At least, she couldn’t kill me. Not if she still wanted my body.

I sprinted several steps and grabbed a handful of my mother’s shirt, then jerked the material as hard as I could. She made a strange strangling sound as the collar pulled tight against her throat. I yanked again, and she stumbled backward toward me.

“Keep running!” I shouted, with no idea whether or not Melanie could hear me. “Don’t stop and don’t come back! I’ll find you after—”

After what? After I killed the demon?

Demons couldn’t be killed; they could only be exorcised. But I wasn’t an exorcist. The best I could do was kill the host body—my own mother’s body—and even if I managed that, what was to stop the demon from then taking over my body? Which had been its plan all along.

Exorcist. I needed an exorcist. For the first time in my life, I was desperate to get in touch with the Church. But the phone was dead.

“Help!” I shouted, and the demon whirled on me, ripping her shirt from my grasp. “Someone call—” My mother’s bony hand clamped over my mouth.

“They won’t get here in time,” she whispered, but her voice seemed to originate from inside my head, where the words echoed over one another in an endless, cacophonous loop. “By the time they arrive, this body will be dead and your body will be mine, and you—the part that makes you Nina Kane, anyway—will have been extinguished like the fragile, flickering candle flame you are.”