I don’t have any classes on Friday, which is great because my house is about to be invaded in twelve hours. Wrath is no help, sitting in the living room and pointing out the paintings crying blood, the way the windows are rattling “Get out” in Morse code, the artifacts that are screaming with necrotic energy, or just how dusty everything is.

  “How did I end up agreeing to host a party?” I demand two hours later, as I ping-pong from room to room, hastily cleaning one thing after another. Not that it does any good. The minute I start wiping down the Etruscan battle urns, all the dust and emotions it kicks up circle back around and land on the Peruvian death spiders mounted on the far wall.

  Everything in the house is in conflict with everything else, and there’s no way to make everyone happy. No wonder the Morecrofts died out. They were probably annoyed to death by their entire house full of petty grudges and hostile tchotchkes that they’d accumulated over the centuries.

  I’m in the middle of scrubbing the dining room floors with a mop when a tiny little porcelain doll that I think is supposed to represent the Lindbergh baby begins vomiting blood.

  And that’s when I call it quits.

  “Don’t you have minions?” I ask Wrath, who is still lounging unhelpfully on one of the fainting couches.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says loftily, refusing to meet my eyes.

  I collapse on the fainting couch next to him, edging him off. He humphs and moves across the room, slouching down onto a different couch. “Your little green critters from the other night.”

  “Those are my friends, Theo. Do you think just because you see a group of demons together that one of them is the master and the rest are the servants? That’s so racist.”

  “Are they your servants?” I ask, point blank.

  “Of course they are, but that’s no reason to be so racist about it.”

  “Can you get them to clean the house? I’ll buy you a bagel guillotine.”

  “I can afford my own bagel guillotine.”

  Except I had removed my credit card from the Babylon account when he pretended to buy one once before, and tricked me into inviting Nico into the house. So even if he wanted a new kitchen gadget, there was no way he could get one himself. Unless of course the demon talked someone into signing him up for a HasturCard. Never leave home without Him, the gothic voice whispers at the back of my mind like clockwork.

  “They can help out… for a price,” Wrath drawls.

  “I already said I’d buy you something.”

  “Not that kind of price. I want something better.”

  I glare at him, because this has the smell of some kind of trick. Like he’s going to make me perform a dance number in front of everyone tonight. Wrath loves to do things like that - it’s the demon in him. His nature is to be an asshole.

  “I won’t collect tonight, but you’ll have to do me a favor.”

  I narrow my eyes.

  “Nothing too embarrassing,” he amends slowly. “And I have to use it within a week or the option lapses.”

  That sounds… remarkably agreeable, actually. The odds of him forgetting entirely are pretty high, and if I can keep him distracted it might pass by entirely without his notice.

  Nico rings the front doorbell nearly an hour before everyone else is set to meet. When I go to open the door, I see a stack of drinks set to one side, which he begins to lug inside. When I go to help him, he nudges me off and heads for the fridge. “I thought I’d stop by earlier so the drinks had a chance to get cold. Isaac and Winter are bringing side dishes, and then I think the plan is to order pizza.”

  “Pizza won’t deliver out here,” I say, pointedly not looking towards where Wrath is hiding invisibly in the hallway. Scare a handful of pizza delivery guys by breathing on the back of their necks while they’re trying to muster up the courage to deliver will do that.

  “I can go pick it up,” he says easily enough. He brings in a couple of cases of soda and then goes back out and brings in something that I’m pretty sure isn’t beer. Unless beer comes in reddish bottles that look like something between fruit punch and blood.

  “Sangria,” he says, lifting the six-pack. “I thought it was fitting if we were watching something about zombies.”

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  He makes his way easily into the kitchen and finds a spot in the refrigerator for all the drinks. Then he drops down to the kitchen table with a deep sigh. Nico’s eyes flicker to the downed coffee machine and his expression gets sad. “Still no luck in getting it fixed?” He’s heard of the struggle Wrath’s had in trying to repair the devilish monstrosity.

  “The priest got stuck in Customs,” I reply blandly.

  He nods, grinning a little like he thinks I’m joking. I’m not, but I don’t really want to explain why a priest was carting around a giant bottle of holy water with some old dead guy’s finger bone in it. Wrath still can’t explain to me how that makes sense.

  “Have you started your paper yet?”

  I shake my head and take the seat across from him.

  “Listen, I didn’t mean—“

  His eyes are intense on me, and I’m suddenly nervous. I bolt back up out of my seat and go to scrubbing the kitchen sink. However, with Wrath’s friends making a run through the house, there’s not even a speck of dirt to be seen.

  “It’s fine,” I find myself saying quickly. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Wrath sighs audibly from the other room. “Coward.”

  It’s fine when Wrath harasses me when it’s just the two of us, but when outsiders are around, it’s so much worse. It’s not like I can turn and react to him - other humans don’t hear him when he speaks or see him when he makes faces at me. They only see the stuffed animal.

  He does it on purpose. I know he does. There’s nothing he loves quite like getting me to make a fool of myself in front of strangers. Well, the joke’s on him. I’m not going to react.

  But the moment I take a sip of my water, Wrath whispers directly in my ear, “I bet he’ll take his shirt off if you ask,” and I nearly spit out a mouthful of water directly across the table. Only through a diabolical effort do I manage to keep it together, nearly choking but swallowing it down.

  Maybe I should spray him down with holy water, I consider darkly.

  “You okay?” Nico asks with concern.

  “Went down the wrong pipe,” I reply eventually.

  Nico keeps me company while I finish cleaning, even offering to help. He seems to find the house cool and interesting, which is a far cry from the time he ran screaming from it after the Doom Clock woke up.

  I consider going upstairs and bringing Pox down, but he might get cranky if I run him back upstairs as soon as more guests come down. I’ll just play with him extra hard in the morning, I decide. That way, he gets undivided attention and doesn’t think I’m ignoring him too much.

  Winter and Isaac show up arm in arm, laden down with snacks and treats and a promise of pizza on the way.

  “The pizza guy won’t deliver here…” I try again, but they brush me off completely. What do I know? I just live in the most haunted house in the county. I have terrorized a generation of pizza delivery drivers, each a college student thinking he’s braver than the ones who came before, each one just a single delivery

  But lo and behold, Nico does exactly as he offered, and leaves to go pick up the pizza and we are able to eat and laugh and have a good time before the main event. While I’m cleaning up in the kitchen, I usher them towards the TV room, and once I’m done, I head in behind them.

  Just before I settle down, Winter grabs Isaac by the hand and pulls him off the couch, and then down into one of the loveseats with her. This leaves Nico on the couch by himself. The rest of the chairs in the room aren’t positioned to watch the television, so it’s either share the couch with him, or move a chair across the room. Which would be both awkward and embarrassing. I’d planned to take the loveseat for myself, thereby saving myself the embarrassment of sharing, but Winter has ruined that for me.

  So I take the seat across the couch from Nico, pulling down a blanket that normally drapes over the cushions and offer half of it to him as I kick on the television. We watch something on one of the local stations for a while. It’s a little after nine when I turn the TV over to Dreadflix and look for Nec-Romance, the show we’re intending to watch tonight.

  Wrath is tucked in a rocking chair in the corner, and if the chair itself starts rocking every so often, no one else has noticed yet.

  “I think it’s cute you brought him along,” Winter said when we first walked in, and I didn’t try to correct her.

  When the show starts, I’m surprised by the fact that it’s in black and white. It’s more of an old school vibe than I was expecting.

  “Huh,” Nico says from my side.

  “This looks a little familiar,” Isaac says quietly. “Doesn’t it? Am I crazy?”

  “No, there’s definitely something.” Winter leans forward as we watch someone running. The camera is pretty far behind, but it looks like it’s trying to catch up. He circles around a building, following a pathway that moves into the woods. A pathway I see every day on my way home from campus.

  No, it can’t be that. It just looks familiar. If a TV show had filmed in Hollow Hills, everyone would have been aware of it. People wouldn’t have stopped talking about it for months.

  “It almost looked like the campus,” Isaac adds.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Winter says, but there’s enough doubt in her tone to sway even the most confident of people.

  The boy continues to run, and the further he gets down the path, the closer the camera begins to creep. Music begins to fade in, quiet at first, but growing in intensity and tempo. It’s a throbbing sort of sound, pulsing like a heartbeat quickening.

  Soon it’s overlaid with the sound of breathing. No, this isn’t quite breathing. It’s panting. The boy runs like he’s being chased, only we can’t see anything behind him.

  “What’s going on?” Nico asks, but he doesn’t sound alarmed. He sounds curious. “Is this the right channel?”

  “It’s a streaming service. You saw me turn on Nec-Romance.” I click the Info icon on the remote and the name display appears at the bottom of the screen. The timestamp shows that we’re four minutes in. No credits. No names displayed across the screen. No title card. Just this boy running.

  Running faster now. Breathing faster now. Chords coming in such quick succession that they slam into one another. A cacophony of noise and panic and anxiety.

  “Isn’t that… your friend from the library?” Winter asks slowly, turning to look over at Nico.

  He leans forward, but he sees the same thing that all of us do. The man running down the paths, the one being chased by something with glowing eyes, is definitely Severn Reilly. He breaks out of the woods suddenly and now there’s a house in the distance, and a moment before it happens I know what I’ll see.

  The house he’s running towards is mine.