EIGHT

WE ALREADY KNEW DEMISE was near, watching us against our will, but neither of us expected it would actually come at us.

The thing climbed the brick exterior of my apartment building, passed through the railings lining my balcony, then crouched down in the corner on all fours —or all threes, given its missing hand. Creepers are at least eight feet tall, but this one had crumpled itself into a tight wad within its ragged garments, a confounding cluster beneath its big head. It was like a massive daddy longlegs retracted into a compact ball.

It had been a while since I’d been so close to a Creeper’s face, much less in broad daylight, and I’d forgotten how utterly gruesome they were. Disproportionately pronounced cheekbones under an ultrathin layer of rotting skin. Jagged, discolored teeth poking out from a mouthful of brown saliva. This one’s black pupils seemed to spill misshapen into a pool of gray, festering with unmistakable hatred like every other Creeper.

Demise growled like a starved grizzly bear, but Ray Anne planted her feet and pointed her finger at it. Then she recited Luke 10:19, a verse that, a few months ago, I’d liked enough to write on a sticky note that was still stuck to my bathroom mirror.

Demise grimaced at us and ground its teeth. Then it shot up and moved above our heads, fully extended now, crawling across the ceiling until it had left my balcony and was clinging to the side of the building.

This next part happened really fast.

There was a blinding light, then a giant hand reached up and plucked Demise from the bricks like a flimsy clump of cotton. Custos had the Creeper by its neck. I got the feeling there was more strength and power in a Watchman’s pinkie than in all the world’s military forces combined.

Suspended some twenty feet off the ground, my favorite Watchman proceeded to speak to the shuddering Creeper in a language like nothing I’d ever heard. Each syllable flowed eloquently into the next. So he did talk. I’d have paid anything for the translation. His commanding voice rattled my eardrums. Ray Anne hit her knees, awestruck.

Demise winced and tried to look away, but Custos gripped its deformed jaw and physically forced it to look at him.

Demise started squealing something over and over and over. Some kind of “Yes sir!” in spirit language, I imagined. Or maybe, “Please don’t!”

Creepers began closing in from different directions, a dozen or so, all charging toward Custos with their lips drawn back and fangs exposed. Custos saw them, and without loosening his grip on Demise, faced the field behind my apartment complex. A battalion of armored Watchmen —I counted nine —now stood there.

Glory personified.

It literally took my breath away. The gang of Creepers tucked tail and ran.

Eyes bright with fury, Custos uttered a few more intense words at Demise before dropping down and plunging the flailing Creeper into the ground, pounding him into the earth, away from us. At least for now. Then Custos rose and stomped down hard on the crater, sending a tremor through my apartment building that I assumed only Ray and I felt.

In a matter of seconds, we witnessed the hole in the ground return to an undisturbed patch of grass, like pixels swarming a screen, then settling into a crisp image.

Demise was gone, literally buried in defeat.

Custos looked up at me, and all I knew to do was wave. Tears running down her cheeks, Ray Anne whispered, “Thank you.”

I expected Custos to smile, but his face was somber, his eyes narrow with concern. He turned and charged across the parking lot, passing through the fence into the field. Once he joined them, the team of Watchmen left.

I lowered to the cement beside Ray Anne and brushed wisps of hair away from her clammy face, perspiring from the intensity of the moment. “It’s okay now.”

She caught my hand midstroke and held on tight. “No. Don’t you see, Owen? The war is closing in on us and escalating. Something’s happening.”

Of course I could see that. How long would I continue to try and shelter Ray Anne from harsh realities? She always figured things out anyway, and she’d proven she could handle it. I didn’t have to baby her like I’d done my whole life with my mother.

“You’re right. We have to step things up.” I didn’t think it was possible to become more determined than I already was, but I insisted to Ray that we had to dig deeper and look harder for answers and solutions.

Ray Anne nodded, then threw her arms around my neck. I resisted the urge to rely on her to talk to God for the both of us, like I usually did, and asked him myself to please guide us and show us what to do —to help us understand how to drive evil forces out of Masonville for good. “And bring Tasha Watt and the other missing people home,” I prayed, “if it’s not too late already.”

I held out hope we’d get some answers soon.

Tuesday afternoon, it was time for tutoring again at Masonville High. Even before I turned into the parking lot, I knew something wasn’t right. I looked beyond the students piling into vehicles and peeling out onto the street, to the school building, where a dark blob was covering most of the roof, shifting like a tattered tarp in the wind. I finally made sense of it. Creepers were piled two and three deep on top of the building, facedown, shoving one another.

By the time I careened into a parking spot and slid my helmet off, the Creepers had spread their arms and legs out, and while lying prostrate, started chanting in one human language after another. I’d seen this kind of thing before, my senior year —the day they’d called to Molek and he appeared, stoking their thirst for destruction. And now they were chanting for their king again.

I looked into the sky and then all around, convinced that this was it —the Lord of the Dead was coming home. On and on the chanting went, until, one by one, the Creepers lifted their huge heads and started scrambling to their feet, gathering into a tight, upright cluster.

They peered into the sky behind me, still pushing and jabbing. I turned, and high in the air, off in the distance, a huge object loomed —something dark and big and bulky with . . . what was that stuff hanging off it?

I stood there staring, expecting Molek to rise out of the mysterious object or lurch out from behind it. But instead the thing hung there, unmoving, untouched, and unoccupied. I looked toward the school again, and the Creepers were reaching toward the contraption, staring at it as if enthralled. Obsessed.

Finally, the Creepers dispersed, seemingly content to carry on as usual while the airborne oddity remained.

I had to carry on too. It’s not like I wanted to walk inside that building, but it was time. Past time by now.

I made my way toward the main entrance of Masonville High, contemplating.

It seemed like the harder I tried to make sense of spiritual realities, the more questions I had —an aggravating cycle. I mean, what was that hovering object? I grumbled under my breath on my way to Ms. Barnett’s classroom. I pray for answers but get none. Why do I even bother? My nagging sense of irritation escalated to all-out anger.

I passed a row of lockers and wondered if I could pound my knuckles into one without getting caught on camera. But then I felt a wave of freezing air against my back. I turned to see Doubt trailing close behind me. It had a double set of fangs and reeked like curdled milk.

Oh. I understood now . . .

That last cynical thought of mine hadn’t come from me.

To be clear, Creepers don’t have to be attached to a human’s chains and cords to target a person’s mind —I didn’t even have entrapments anymore. All they need is a whiff of human vulnerability, and they’ll rush in to test a person’s resolve, launching thoughts into the air like spiritual sonar, aiming at shackled people and Lights alike.

To agree with Doubt would provoke it to keep up its pursuit of me, but to disagree required confidence in God —something that, I had to admit, fluctuated in me from one day to the next. Sometimes from one hour to the next. But I’d side with God over a devil any day, so . . .

I didn’t say it loud, just loud enough: “I trust God to give me answers. At some point.”

Doubt hissed like a territorial cat, then sank into a wall, out of sight.

It wasn’t a world-changing victory, but it meant something to me.

I wasn’t in the mood to discuss chemistry, but that was the lame part of my job —the downside of being a spy at Masonville High. By this point Hector and Riley could hardly stand to be in the same room together, but I managed to get them to interact enough to redo a lab they’d both failed.

At one point, Riley leaned against my shoulder, trying to make Hector jealous, I think. “Are you going to Spring Scream?” she asked me.

“What’s that?”

“Biggest costume party ever —like Halloween six months early, behind the school.”

A narrow field of grass was sandwiched between my wooded property and the back side of campus. I wasn’t sure if the land belonged to me or the school district, but either way, it was a terrible place to have a party —overrun with Creepers.

Not that I’d ever convince Riley of that.

Apparently determined to talk me into going, she stood and began describing her cat costume, motioning while explaining how strips of black fabric would stretch across her stomach and match a mask she was making herself. She was smiling bigger than I’d seen in a while but stopped when she caught my sudden wide-eyed grimace.

“What are you staring at?” She fiddled with the waist of her low-cut yoga pants, confirming that I’d truly seen what I thought I had —a tiny megawatt glow in her abdomen. A baby on the way.

“Riley . . .” I started to say something, but Hector was right there. Plus, it was none of my business.

Surely she knew by now. Although still minuscule, the radiant shine was twice the size as the one I’d first spotted in Jess our senior year.

No telling who the father was, but my guess was Hector. Poor baby.

I wrapped up our session early. While I made my way down the Creeper-graffiti-stained hallway, I thought about Ray Anne —how she’d never carry a little light.

Suddenly I caught sight of something glistening in my peripheral vision, distracting my attention from my depressing thoughts. There was a trail of gleaming spots on the floor, bright patches of white, shimmering light that marked the tile hallway like dazzling footprints. They faded in and out, but if I squinted and concentrated on seeing them, I could spy them more clearly. That was a first.

I followed the path of illumination, and it took me around a corner, then down another hallway. The alluring spots led straight to a heavyset woman, a Light who was speaking under her breath while unloading a locker full of books and binders into a bag. She was dressed like a professional, in a silky blouse and tailored slacks.

“Excuse me?” I approached her with no clue what I was going to say. “Do you mind me asking what you’re doing?”

She looked up at me. Outside her glossy brown irises, her eyes were a tearstained shade of pink. “I’m emptying my niece’s locker. Tasha.”

“Oh . . . I’m sorry.”

She managed a slight smile. “I have faith we’ll find her.” After a final, lingering glance into the empty locker, she pushed the door shut.

“Me too.” I introduced myself, and she told me her name was Betty. I reached out to shake her hand —the same medium-brown shade as Walt’s had been, I noticed with a twisting in my gut —but she wrapped me in a bear hug instead. Her embrace felt more motherly than my mom’s ever had. She gave me some heavy, affectionate pats on the back too.

“You’re so tall, you must be a senior.”

“Actually, I graduated last year.”

She looked to the end of the hallway, somber, then back at me. “That was some school year, huh?”

I nodded, the unwelcome image of Dan’s face surfacing in my mind. The memory of blood gushing from Ray Anne’s abdomen.

Thankfully, Betty changed the subject. She told me she was born in Masonville but left as a child, and she’d recently moved back from Baton Rouge. She seemed proud to tell me that her family had lived in Masonville for three generations before her.

While walking alongside Betty toward the main entrance doors, I offered to carry the bag of Tasha’s belongings, but she didn’t want to let go of them.

I sneaked a few glances behind us —the floor was blank. Why wasn’t Betty leaving any glistening prints now?

She asked if I’d known Tasha, then explained that her niece had recently moved in with her because Betty’s sister —Tasha’s mom —had become too unstable to function as a parent. I could relate —to the messed-up mom part, not to the part about having a loving aunt.

“So, you moved to Masonville to take care of Tasha?” I asked.

“That’s one reason.” She waited for some students to pass us before carrying on. “I also knew I had to get back here when I saw the news broadcast of that young man opening fire in these halls.” Her pace slowed until she came to a stop in the middle of the science wing. “There’s work to be done in this town.” She gazed above our heads, then shuddered. “Somethin’ strange is going on here —evil on the loose that needs to be put in its place.”

I caught glimpses of Creepers scampering overhead and within the walls, but they kept their distance from us, a pair of Lights. “Let me get this straight,” I said. Betty eased the bag in her hands to the floor, and I searched her freckled face. “Are you saying you believe there are evil beings here? ’Cause . . . I believe that too.”

“Yes, I am, son.” She stared long and hard at me, then reached out and grasped my shoulder, speaking in my ear. “My great-great-granddaddy saw things on the land around here with his own eyes. Evil beings. He told my grandmother they were tall and hideous —looked like they hadn’t eaten in some thousand years and smelled as nasty as rotten corpses. And they would sneak up on people and bind them with chains around their necks.”

Betty let go of me, and I stumbled backward, my mind on overload. In my peripheral, paranormal vision, Creepers shifted and rushed around us, stirred by our conversation.

Betty sighed and shook her head. “I’m sorry. I know I sound ridiculous —I don’t expect you to understand.”

I took her hand and squeezed it. “Betty, I don’t just know what you’re saying.” I swallowed hard. “I see it.”

She pierced my eyes with a stare that made me never want to lie again. “You better not be feeding me a line, you hear me, son?”

“I’m not lying, I swear. Everything you just described —the chains, the stink, their skin-and-bones appearance —all of it, it’s as real to me as you standing here now.” I couldn’t believe that I had just happened to run into someone who might be able to give me the insights I was looking for. My pulse pounded. “Betty, did your great-great-grandfather pass down any more information?” I wanted to know everything. Immediately.

“Oh, honey . . .” Betty was as wide eyed as a deer facing oncoming traffic. “There’s more. A whole lot more.”