Jared’s eyes locked on mine, and my heart sped up. Until his expression changed, and I realized he wasn’t looking at me anymore.
He was looking behind me.
“Kennedy, move!” he shouted.
A rush of cold air burst from the box and knocked me over. It swept past me and stopped in front of Alara. It was the torso of a man with bare milk-white skin marred by black bruises. But this thing wasn’t a man. Its head was shaved and the vertebrae in its spinal column strained beneath the skin as if it was a size too small.
But where the bones ended, so did the human form—and its waist disappeared into a thick blur of white smoke.
I forced my legs to move, stumbling over the clutter.
The dybbuk whipped around, following the sound. I pressed my hand against my mouth, stifling a scream as I stared into the blackened recesses where its eyes should’ve been.
It reached for Alara. Her body rose off the floor as if the dybbuk was using some kind of telekinetic power. She screamed, and the force slammed her against the wall. Alara’s head hit the concrete, and she slid to the floor without a sound.
Jared ran toward her. The dybbuk ripped him off his feet, using the same supernatural power it had used to lift Alara, and hurled Jared into the metal shelves.
“Screw this.” Lukas aimed and fired round after round of liquid salt. The bullets passed right through the dybbuk’s pale torso and dropped to the floor on the other side.
I scrambled around the edge of the room toward Alara. She had managed to sit up, but she was still disoriented when I reached her.
“Are you okay?”
“It’s so strong.” Panic clung to her voice—the fearless girl I found so intimidating suddenly replaced by one as vulnerable as the rest of us.
Lukas and Priest knelt next to Jared, who lay on the floor amid a sea of severed doll limbs.
There was only one way to help him. “Alara, how do we stop it?”
She stared at me blankly.
I grabbed her shoulders. “How do we destroy it?”
The dybbuk laughed, and the menacing sound echoed through the room.
It focused on Lukas and Priest, and their bodies rose in the air simultaneously. They hovered above the floor for a moment before their backs smacked against the wall, halfway between the floor and the ceiling. Their bodies slid up the wall, their shoulders and elbows cracking against the corners of the metal shelves.
“Alara, tell me what to do,” I pleaded.
Her eyes darted from the dybbuk and back to me. “We have to bind that thing inside the cabinet and burn it.”
“How?”
Alara blinked hard. “A binding symbol.”
“Like the one from your journal?” I remembered it perfectly.
She nodded. “The Wall is the easiest. But I can’t draw it without my journal, and it won’t bind that thing unless the symbol looks exactly the same.”
Boxes crashed to the floor as Lukas dropped onto the concrete not far from where his brother’s body lay, unconscious. Lukas struggled to sit up, but he looked unsteady.
“Screw you.” Priest thrashed wildly, still pinned halfway up the wall.
The dybbuk threw its pale head back and demonic laughter filled the air like a thousand pins pricking my skin.
“I can do it,” I said automatically. “I remember what it looks like.”
Alara shook her head. “If you make a mistake—”
The symbol formed in my mind as clearly as if I was still staring at the page. “I have a photographic memory. I won’t make a mistake.”
“You’re serious?”
“Completely.”
Alara slid the black marker out of her tool belt and handed it to me. “I’m going to distract it, but you’ll have to work fast. Then I’ll find a way to lure it into the box.”
The dybbuk let Priest fall and jerked his body back and forth across the floor like a rag doll without so much as a touch.
I ran for the cabinet.
I stepped inside and my eyes burned from the stench of ammonia. The snake’s open mouth was only inches away from me, shards of mirror forming perfect fangs. And something else—two round pieces of green glass edged in silver stared back from the centers of its eyes.
Tiny splinters pushed their way underneath my nails as I worked one free. In the dim light, it looked exactly like the disk from inside the doll. Unfortunately, so did the other one. I slipped them both in my pocket and glanced behind me.
Alara opened the plastic bottle of holy water holstered on her belt, and dumped it over her head.
This was her plan?
I closed the cabinet door, pitching myself into darkness. Within seconds, panic set in and it felt like I was five years old again, hiding in the tiny crawl space in my mother’s closet. Waiting for her to come back.
My pulse thundered in my ears, but another sound was louder—a crash.
Was it Priest this time? Or Lukas or Alara? I pictured Jared lying on the floor, and my heart ached. What if he needed a doctor?
A tiny crack between the hinges threw a slice of light across my boots, but there wasn’t enough room for me to bend down and draw the symbol on the floor. I was going to have to do it on the ceiling, which meant sketching blind.
How would I know if I made a mistake?
“Priest? Lukas? You okay?” Alara shouted, her voice muffled by the layer of wood between us.
“Yeah.”
“Get Jared out of here,” she said.
“We’re not leaving you guys.” Lukas sounded as determined as she did.
“If you want to save your brother, you will,” Alara shot back.
“Pretty girl with an ugly soul.” The voice that answered this time didn’t belong to Lukas. It was distorted and wrong—the sound of something horrific trying on human skin.
Working quickly, I let my mind guide the marker. I drew the first line, positioning my other hand so I’d know where to begin the horizontal line I needed to make next.
The heavy metal door to the alley slammed shut.
Someone had made it out—maybe all three of them.
But if the door was closed, the guys were locked out. I was the only one who could help Alara.
I concentrated on the one thing I had always been able to do—the skill that felt more like a curse than a gift.
My hand finally stopped when the marker finished the last line. I peeked through the crack just as the dybbuk charged Alara. When its body touched her wet skin, a hiss of white steam rose above them, and the dybbuk lurched back. I had to get that thing away from her and into the cabinet. Fast.
I flung open the door. “Hey, over here! I’m in your nasty box.”
It whirled around, the blackened eye sockets facing me. “Get outtt!”
“Kennedy, no!” Alara shouted.
It was coming right at me—
I pressed my hand against the false back of the cabinet, but I wasn’t quick enough.
