But I didn’t know how I knew.

I pulled my hand from the boy’s for the first time since we’d left my house.

“It’s okay,” he said when he noticed me scanning the room, peering into the shadows for this threat I couldn’t see but couldn’t shake off. “I don’t think they saw which way we went.”

“It’s not that.” I wasn’t sure how much he’d seen, why he’d been near my house at just the right time, or why he was helping me, but my naïveté had died around the time I lost my first baby tooth. He knew all he was going to know about me until I knew a little more about him.

His eyes narrowed as he studied me. “You feel something?” he said, and I blinked as if I didn’t know what he was talking about, because I shouldn’t have known what he meant, and he shouldn’t have known what I felt—the pursuit of…whatever was chasing me.

None of this made sense.

“I feel like my mother’s dead and I don’t know how that happened.” I breathed deeply while the burning in my lungs slowly faded. “I feel like my pregnant sister is in Church custody and probably terrified. I feel like I shouldn’t be standing in an abandoned warehouse with some guy I don’t know.”

I feel like my life is a book, and someone turned the page before I was ready, and now I can’t follow the story.

“That wasn’t your mother.” His green eyes practically glowed, reflecting moonlight shining in from a broken window overhead. He brushed his palms on his dark jeans, and when he turned to gesture through a doorway at the body of the warehouse, I realized that his black hoodie was threadbare and almost worn through at the elbows. “Come sit, and I’ll explain what I can.”

A new possibility crept in to overwhelm the fears that had driven my flight from the police. I shook my head slowly, hands curling into fists at my sides. I didn’t know the alley we’d run through. I didn’t know the building. I didn’t know the boy. And I had no idea how he knew about my mother.

Or how he’d found me.

I lurched for the door we’d just come through, suddenly sure I’d made a horrible mistake. What if I’d run from the police and the exorcists straight into the arms of some pervert stalker/murderer? Or even another demon? Sure, he’d killed the degenerate hunting me and helped me flee the men aiming guns at my head, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have his own dangerous agenda.

“Nina, wait!” he said the moment my hand touched the cold doorknob. “I have blankets. And food. And…answers. Some of them, anyway. You must want some answers.”

I hesitated because he hadn’t tried to physically stop me from leaving. And because the lure of answers was more than I could resist.

“If you go out there, they will find you.” He set my school satchel on the floor between us, obviously a demonstration of goodwill. “And asking your friends and neighbors for shelter would be like painting targets on their backs. Your face is probably all over the news already, along with whatever lie they’ve cooked up to explain what happened at your house tonight. They’ll probably say you’re possessed. They’ll definitely say you’re a murderer.”