Exorcists.

No wonder the police hadn’t come. They’d called in a team of specialists. Real exorcists, trained, dressed, branded, and given authority by the Church.

But the cavalry had arrived too late. I’d already…

What had I done?

It had looked for all the world like I’d done to the mother-monster what Katherine Abbot had famously done to that demon on television nearly a century ago. But that wasn’t possible. She was an exorcist. She was the exorcist. A naturalist, the Church had called her, because she’d needed no training. She was born an exorcist. There hadn’t been one like her since.

Except maybe the Church was wrong about that, because what else could you call the boy in the alley, if not a natural-born exorcist?

That thought led to an even bigger question as I stared at the black-clad men aiming guns at my head.

What the hell were they going to call me?

“Put your hands up!” the man at the door shouted. “Did you see what she just did?” he said in a softer voice, that part obviously aimed at the men behind him. “She lit that bitch up!”

Yes, that was what I’d done. I’d lit the bitch up, as if my hand were a match and my mother were a kerosene-soaked rag. I’d lit her up, and now she was dead, and the demon inside her was fried. I’d lit her up, and that was when the world stopped making sense, because my mother was a demon, and I had a five-fingered torch for a left hand, and the exorcists were obviously scared of me.

A second man in a black cassock crowded the first, trying to see over his shoulder and into my house, where I still stood like an idiot, not sure what to do other than keep breathing.

In and out. In and out. Not so fast, Nina. You’re going to pass out.

“She’s a—”

“Yeah, she is.” The first man cut the second one off before he could say something I was pretty sure I wanted to hear. I was a what?

“We have to take her to—”

“Yeah, we do,” the first man snapped.

Whatever happened in the next few moments would change everything for me, and for Mellie. Everything. I knew that. Yet I felt powerless to influence the outcome.

“Turn and face the wall, and put your hands over your head!” the first man shouted, and I realized his aim had never wavered. There was a dead demon on the floor¸ but he was pointing his gun at me. As if I were the bad guy.

“But I didn’t—”

“Silence!” he shouted, and I jumped, startled. “Turn around and put your palms flat on the wall.”

Before I could decide whether to obey, something moved on the lawn at his back. The neighbors had come to watch our private drama, but they were being herded back to their own houses by the remaining two exorcists, in cassocks so dark they seemed to be part of the night itself.