hysterical laughs in response.
I WOKE WITH THE cold claws of panic inside my chest. I had been prone to anxiety attacks in the past and could feel the old eddy now, offering to suck me into the spin cycle.
Queasy and unsteady on my feet, I pulled open my apartment door and stumbled down the stairs to the bank of mailboxes inside the foyer. I averted my eyes from the glare of midmorning sun pouring through the glass double doors; I didn’t want to know what or who I might see standing there, peering in with too-knowing eyes. I snatched one of my neighbors’ paper.
Back in my apartment, the door locked firmly behind me, I folded the
I searched through the rest of the section, but there was nothing more.
I felt infected—by dark words, images, and influences, by my own willingness to expose myself to his particular strain of evil. While his first appearance had been a startling aberration, his presence in my life had become more real, more normal to me than the facts of my everyday existence. Just yesterday I had stepped willingly from the corporeal world into an alien spiritual realm.
What did it mean that a demon could infiltrate my life? And what were the implications for me that I had willingly met with him since? That death followed him even as he spoke of heaven, of God?
Worst of all, I could not erase the memory of that sound. Of a human thrown into a windshield. It should have been hard, the crack of a body breaking. But it had been sordidly dull, as muffled as a gun fired through a silencer.
Someone knocked at my door. I jumped, sweat breaking out on my back. Was that him? Would he come here? I wished I had my laptop open to my calendar. I never wanted to see that cursed
I sat very still. There had been no buzz from the front door, but did that matter? Would he force his way in if I didn’t answer? Somewhere I had a list of this building’s tenants and their numbers. If I called, maybe a neighbor could investigate for me. But no, that was stupid; I wouldn’t know what to tell them to look for. He could be a twelve-year-old selling Girl Scout cookies for all I knew.
“Hello?”
I didn’t move.
“Clay? It’s Mrs. Russo. Are you there?”
I exhaled and moved on slack legs to the door. I had unlocked it and started to pull it open, relieved at the thought of seeing her short gray hair and smooth olive skin, the crow’s feet around her eyes, when I was leveled by a frightening idea: Could Lucian show up as someone familiar to me?
Again the eddy, the cold fingers clutching at my chest.
I pulled the door the rest of the way open, ready for anything.
A plate of muffins. Blueberry, by the look of them. Across our shared second-floor landing, Mrs. Russo was just closing her door. Upon hearing me, she came back out.
“Well, there you are!” She smiled and retrieved the plate from the mat. I stared, making certain it was the same Mrs. Russo who had brought me lasagna the day I moved in, who had helped me arrange my furniture—which consisted of little more than a few items on sale from Crate & Barrel and a desk my grandfather made for my eleventh birthday—and who had declared the result “elegantly Spartan.” Mrs. Russo, the widow whose husband had died of the kind of complication people sued hospitals over—though I don’t think she did that. It would have seemed beneath the woman who often referred to those things that can and can’t be changed, and to the will of God. Mrs. Russo, whose mail and newspapers I collected when she went to visit her children and grandchildren. Mrs. Russo, who was always baking, warm and homey smells drifting out onto our landing from her apartment as they did now from the plate I accepted from her hands. My stomach cramped.
“Clay, dear, are you all right?”
“I’ve been sick.” It wasn’t far from the truth. Dehydration had taken its toll. I was sure that my face was pasty, my eyes shadowed and hollow. My breath was certainly bad enough.
“Have you? That must explain why I’ve been thinking about you so much these past couple of days.” She reached up to lay the back of her hand against my cheek. Her crisp white shirt crinkled when she moved. A double strand of pearls hung in the neckline like a beady smile around her neck. She was made up for the day, her lipstick the color of new bricks. Her hand smelled like Jergen’s lotion.
“Well, you don’t have a fever.”
I wanted to tell her everything, from the first meeting in the cafe to the dreams and the accident—the horrible accident—to unload it all like tears spilled in a mother’s lap. But one long, stream-of-conscious sentence out of my mouth and that matronly look would change to alarm or worse. Mrs. Russo would disappear behind her door, and this moment of relative normality would be taken from me as surely as the peace had disappeared from my life that first night in the Bosnian Cafe.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” She frowned, her hand going to her hip. Her camel pants were smartly pressed, and I realized she was about to head out for the day. I nodded, angry at finding myself on the verge of tears.
“I think I need to lie down. Thank you, Mrs. Russo, for the muffins,” I said. She looked as if she might say more, but I gave her a weak smile, thanked her again, and closed the door, hoping I hadn’t offended her in my graceless haste.
I SPENT ALL DAY thinking about who to go to. Who I could tell without seeming like a lunatic. And I came up with only one
