The cackling is gone. The chaos over. The moonlight still frames my room like a security spotlight, quiet and unfeeling, as if God saw everything that happened and simply did not care.

The demon returns.

Crawling up the corner of two walls across the room like a rabid squirrel. He’s wearing a gray hoodie, with shoulder blades that are bent like they’re trying to meet, arms curled like a raptor’s, white hands the most human thing about him.

Forget that I’m here. Forget that I’m here. My thoughts are chemical explosions—compounds with no balance, only panic.

Of course he won’t forget that I’m here. I am the reason that he’s here, as a cockroach or spider, thoughtless, moving in directionless crawling patterns across the walls.

He skitters along the ceiling, pattering the walls, and stops where the light fixture swallows his head.

His body turns to face me and drops from the neck. He hangs there like a vulture with its neck snapped. The moon illuminates a pair of blue eyes glowing from inside the glass bulb. Wide, like they can see everything, and bright, like they’re a source of light themselves. Somehow, still so dead inside.

I rush to the nightstand drawer, rip out a bottle of Axe, and push down the button so a cloud of mist bursts in between us. It shoots through the bottom of one of his legs.

Sawyer hisses and throws a fit with his arms and legs. His body drops through the floor.

The room is silent once he’s gone, the lingering smell of musky deodorant spray the only proof anything ever happened.

Hours pass. I stay awake. The walls brighten with the sunrise. At 7:00 a.m. sharp I get a text.

ALLISTER: Pancakes or waffles?

I’m too sleepy and paranoid for this.

ME: Pancakes, I think.

HIM: You think?

ME: Depends?

HIM: Everything depends with you. Is it never just a definitive choice? Lol.

I’m out of it. I know I should be laughing, but I’m too distracted.

Through my morning routine, I ponder a response and wonder if responses even matter. Two different boys have managed to take up residence so quickly in my life—one who appears to be a psycho killer, and one who . . .

Well, I don’t know who Allister is. He seems nice, but what does he want? His kindness feels suspect.

I get dressed and go back downstairs, where I find Benji awake and staring at the TV, paralyzed by a headline:

Body of Missing Heritage Student Kieran Waters Found in a Ditch

An eighteen-year-old found dead in the middle of the Jefferson Nature Trail, in Heritage.

“Viewer discretion is advised,” the anchor warns. “The images you are about to see may be disturbing to sensitive viewers.”