“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.”

I turned slowly, my hand still on the doorknob at my back, and the boy was watching me. “Murderer?” The word wouldn’t sink in.

He nodded. “Matricide. And they’ll probably tack on a charge for theoretical infanticide, because in killing your mother, you’ve denied some poor baby the chance to inherit her soul.”

“But…she wasn’t my mother. She was a demon. No one could have inherited her soul.” The soul she’d stolen from my real mother years before I was born. The soul that was almost completely devoured by now, if her physical degeneration was any sign.

“Yeah.” He shrugged and shoved his hands into his pants pockets. “They’ll probably leave that part out.”

“How do you know what they’ll do?”