One more try. I owed it to Melanie. If the demon possessed me before the authorities arrived, she’d be alone with a monster. Or in Church custody.

I tried to push the monster off again, this time with my tingling left hand. The moment my fingers touched her chest, something exploded between us. Something brighter than light and hotter than fire. Something I’d only seen in person once—that morning, when the rogue exorcist had saved my life.

The demon screeched and dropped me, and my feet finally hit the floor. Normal human warmth returned, like a flood washing over me. The monster tried to back away but couldn’t disconnect from the fierce light still shining between us, so bright I wanted to close my eyes. But I couldn’t look away from her or from the light glowing beneath my hand, still pressed to her chest.

She tried to scream and choked on the sound. She tried to run but was frozen in place.

Sight and sound zoomed back into focus around me. The wailing sirens abruptly stopped altogether, and distantly, I realized the police had never even gotten close.

Were they out on a different call? Had Mellie not stopped to call them? I was both relieved and terrified by that thought.

My hand still burned. That tingling beneath my skin had become the roar of a blaze that should have devoured my fingers but consumed the demon instead. She hung from the fierce light between us now, like a coat on a hook, limp and slowly swaying, though she seemed to weigh nothing.

I wanted to make it stop but didn’t know how, and my ignorance scared me almost as badly as the fire I couldn’t explain. As badly as the demon hanging from my open hand.

My front door flew open and crashed into the living room wall. I screamed, and the light in my hand blinked out through no conscious effort of mine.

My mother’s body crumpled to the floor like a heap of clothes.

Smoke rose from a jagged, scorched hole in her sternum, where my hand had been an instant before.

I’d burned a hole into my mother’s chest.

No, that wasn’t my mother. My real mother died before I was ever born.

The room spun. My lungs refused to expand. My vision swam and blurred.

“Don’t move!” The man in the doorway aimed his gun at me, and the world snapped back into focus. His black linen cassock was fastened with distinctive silver buckles matching the elaborate silver embroidery on the dramatic flare of his wide cuffs. The tails of his cassock were split up both sides to his hips, for ease of movement, and that split revealed his snug black pants.

His right cheek was branded with a stylized column of fire, scarred into his very flesh.

Even standing there in total shock, I recognized him instantly. Him, and the three others behind him, fanned out on my front lawn—a terrifying sight in their black Church robes and silver-buckled boots.