above her, took a step forward—
Suddenly, black spots dotted her vision. Dizziness?
The little bitch might reclaim control of her body, but, as usual, she’d wake to a fresh nightmare. “Enjoy, Elizabeth. . . .”
Her legs buckled, her back meeting the carpet. Blackness.
Ellie Peirce woke to a mad drumming in her ears. She lay on the floor of her family’s trailer, eyes squeezed shut, her body coated with something warm and sticky.
No words were spoken around her. The only sounds were the living room’s crackling fire, her shallow breaths, and the howling dogs outside. She had no memory of how she’d come to be like this, no idea of how long she’d blacked out.
“Mama, did it work?” she whispered as she peeked open her eyes. Maybe the deacons had been successful?
Her eyes adjusting to the dim, firelit room, she raised her head to peer down at her body. Her worn jeans, T-shirt, and secondhand boots were sopping wet.
With blood. She swallowed.
But Reverend Slocumb and his fellow members of their church’s “emergency ministry” had smugly thought they could handle her—
Movement drew her gaze up. A fire poker?
Clenched in her mother’s hands.
“Wait!” Ellie flung herself to her side just as the poker came slamming down on the floor where her head had been. Blood splashed from the carpet like a stepped-in puddle.
“You foul thing, begone!” Mama shrieked, raising the iron again. “You got my girl, but you won’t have my boy!”
“Just wait!” Ellie scrambled to her feet, dropping the cleaver. “It’s me!” She raised her hands, palms outward.
Mama didn’t lower the poker. Her long auburn hair was loose, tangled all around her unlined face. She used one shoulder to shove tendrils from her eyes. “That’s what you said afore you started snarlin’ that demon language and slashin’ about!” Her mascara ran down her cheeks, her peach lipstick smeared across her chin. “Afore you killed all them deacons!”
“Killed?” Ellie whirled around, dumbfounded by the grisly sight.
Five hacked-up bodies lay strewn across the living room.
These men had been lured all the way out here by her mother’s imploring letters and by evidence of Ellie’s possession: recordings of her speaking dead languages she had no way of knowing and photographs of messages in blood that she had no memory of writing.
Apparently, Ellie had once written in Sumerian,
Now Slocumb’s head lay apart from his other remains. His eyes were glassy in death, his tongue lolling between parted lips. One arm was missing from his corpse. She dimly realized it must be the one under the dining room table. The one lying beside the hank of scalp and a pile of severed fingers.
Ellie covered her mouth, fighting not to retch. The five had vowed to exorcise the demon. Instead, it’d butchered them all. “Th-this was done by . . .
“As if you don’t know, demon!” Mama wagged her poker at Ellie. “Play your games with somebody else.”
Ellie scratched at her chest, her skin seeming to crawl from the being within.
Sirens sounded in the distance, setting the dogs outside to baying even louder. “Oh, God, Mama, you didn’t call that good-for-nothing sheriff?” Ellie and her family were mountain folk through and through. Any Law was suspect.
At that, her mother dropped the poker. “You really
No wonder Mama had attacked.
“It’s me,” Ellie said over her shoulder as she hastened to the window, her boots squishing across the carpet. She pulled aside the cigarette-stained curtains to gaze out into the night.
Down the snowy mountainside, the sheriff’s blue lights glared, his car snaking up the winding road. Another cruiser sped behind it.
“I had to call them, Ellie! Had to stop the demon. And then the nine-one-one dispatcher heard the deacons just a-screamin’. . . .”
Because these five ministers weren’t the demon’s first victims.
There’d been at least two other men since the creature had possessed Ellie’s body a year ago. Early on, she’d woken to find a middle-aged man in her bed, his skin cooling against hers, his slashed throat gaping like a smile.
None among her extended Peirce family had known what to think. Had a rival clan planted the body? Why single out Ellie? Why had there been blood on her hands?
Her close-lipped cousins had buried the man out behind the barn, telling themselves he must’ve had it coming.
The family hadn’t begun to suspect she was possessed until more recently, when the demon had posed a mutilated coal company rep among Ellie’s old stuffed animals, then “blasphemed” for her kinfolk in ways a girl like Ellie “could never imagine.”
After that, her mother and Uncle Ephraim had started chaining her at night, like Ellie was one of the hounds outside. Though she hated the chains and could easily have picked the locks, she’d endured them.
But it’d been too late for some.
Hikers had found a gruesome altar in the woods, with human bones littering the site. Mama had whispered to Ephraim, “You reckon it was Ellie?”
As blue lights crawled closer, glaring even in the bright moonlight, Ellie had a mad impulse to clean herself up, waylay the sheriff outside to badger him for a warrant, then
After all,
But she knew the Law would put dogs on her trail; she’d never make it to the next holler, not in the winter.
And that wouldn’t solve the problem of the demon within her—
She heard a thud behind her and spun around. Her mother, usually so resilient, had fallen to her knees, her face crumpling. “It told me it’d do me in, then go after the rest of the family, go after baby Josh.”
Joshua, Ellie’s adored brother. She pictured him toddling about in his footy pajamas, his chubby cheeks growing pink as he laughed. An aunt was babysitting him in a trailer just down the mountain.
At the thought of harm coming to him, Ellie’s tears fell unchecked. “Wh-what should I do?”
Mama’s own tears poured. “If the reverend—God rest his soul—and his ministerin’ couldn’t get that devil of yourn out of you . . . no one can, Ellie. Maybe you ought to let the sheriff take you.”
