I woke from old memories into a world of breathless agony.

The pain stole outward from my middle, curling in my veins and heightened by my heart's racing tempo, seeming to thrum in my blood and sting under my fingernails. I screamed and, because the release did nothing to alleviate the feeling, choked on a moan, body trembling, curling in upon itself as if to cover and quench the insatiable burn. I laid in gasping repose for several minutes before reaching true awareness.

I wasn't dead. I knew I wasn't dead, because, for all its unspeakable terror, I knew death to be a final mercy—cold and unfeeling and essentially nothing, a sudden descent into the freezing unknown. This state of hot, sweat-soaked torment, damp sheets and the odor of antiseptic, bile and blood, my very skin so painful I wished to crawl out of it, was not death. Unfortunately, I was very much alive.

My sheets tangled in my slow, questing fingers. My sheets; I lay in my own bed in my own home, surrounded by the surreal, familiar objects of my life. The book I'd tossed aside after reading it the other night stuck out from beneath the pillow, the pages rumpled with perspiration and inattention. My grandfather's bequeathed pocket-watch ticked on the bureau and, outside, the sparrows chirped in the neighbor's cypress trees, just as they did every morning before dawn.

I was home.

That night, that horrid, wretched night, flashed through my pounding head and warped with the lingering memory of my misspent youth; my sister screamed both from the hanging rack and a cliff on the Californian coast, my name echoing in the dark and in the wind, a final, plaintive cry of terror, anxiety, and—above all else—regret.

My stomach flipped and bile rose in my throat. I managed not to sick up on the bed, but it was a near thing as I threw myself out of the blankets, retching, and collided with the bureau. The pocket-watch and various accoutrements, mostly cheap costume jewelry not deserving of the title accoutrements, rattled on the surface and the lamp took an unfortunate tumble to the floor. I clutched at the bureau's weathered drawers to keep myself upright, because if my trembling legs went out from under me, I knew I would not be getting back up.

Above my gasping and the shaking came a different sound, the ambient sound of...a pan shifting on the stove's grate, the click-click of the igniter, the rush of water as the kitchen sink turned on and then off again. Someone was in my house.

What happened?

If a person had come across us—me—in that despicable building, I would've woken in a hospital, plagued by the incessant drone of medical equipment and bored doctors. I would not have woken here. Raising a shaking hand, I stared at the gauze wrapped about my wrist, at the scrapes peppering my knuckles and the yellowing bruises staining my fingers. I wore clothes from my closet: a pair of old, threadbare sweatpants and a stretched cotton t-shirt, shoved onto my body inside out. Old blood darkened the shirt with careless smudges, the marks never clear, though a stain on my thigh, placed as if someone had gripped it to shove me over, showed an unmistakable handprint.

I placed my own hand over the bloodied spot and found it was much, much larger than my own.

Who's in my house?

Some delirious fevered voice chanted "Tara, it's Tara, it has to be Tara," over and over again, but cold cynicism reminded me I'd watched her die, that I'd stretched for her hand and I hadn't been able to reach it—.

...an accord, my promise and your order—.

I shut my eyes and cleared the errant voice from my thoughts, not sure where it came from. I remembered little beyond hitting the concrete floor and, judging by the sticky tape tugging at my hair, I must have injured my head along with everything else. Swallowing, I forced myself off the bureau, stumbled, and grabbed the door so I could wrench it open and enter the hallway.

The sounds in the kitchen paused, then resumed. I braced my shoulder against the wall and walked forward with an arm pressed on my seething middle and my teeth clenched to suppress small grunts of pain. Whether or not the person in the kitchen heard my panting, they kept cooking—or so I guessed they were cooking, going by the sudden sizzle of fat on a hot pan and the smell of burnt meat in my nose. The hallway couldn't be more than half a dozen or so feet in length, and yet I spent several minutes regaining strength in the muggy shadows before exiting it.

Upon their deaths, my grandparents—French immigrants Blanche and Rene Gaspard—left me their one bedroom home in the sprawling suburb of Evergreen Acres outside Verweald proper. An unremarkable, small place, they nonetheless loved and cherished their house, though the garden had gone to seed in my care, and a pall of dust hung over the furniture like a funerary shroud. The main sitting room I edged into adjoined the kitchen and the dining area, the front window brightened by the dull orange glow coming off the street light, and as I rested my weight against the couch's back, I could look over the breakfast bar and see the intruder in the kitchen.

It was a man. He dressed casually, wearing a plain gray shirt and a pressed pair of dark jeans, moving with ease though he hadn't bothered with the lights. He stood as a rigid, unrelieved pillar against an otherwise dim and desaturated background, and when he turned into the distant street light's vague glow, I could see the severity of his countenance, the straight line of his nose and the harsh cut of his bones. He looked, perhaps, thirty in age, but could have been younger or older; it proved difficult to discern anything beyond the irritation chiseled into the furrow between his black brows and in his blatant sneer.

He dropped a plate of runny eggs and burnt bacon onto the counter between us. I jolted when the glassware struck the granite.

"Who—?" I choked, then tried again. "Who are you?"

The man tipped his chin up and returned most of his face to the shadows. "Ah," he drawled. "Don't remember me, then?"

He spoke and his indifferent tone resonated with the fractured images in my head.

...an accord, my promise and your order—.

Footsteps approaching like a circling wolf—.

You're beyond the redemption of an angel—.

Denim pant leg in my grasp—.

Let alone a lowly demon such as myself—.

A hand ghosting over my face—.

Your soul, in return for—.

Fingers tight, tightening, not bruising but leaving their mark all the same—.

That which you desire most.

I clutched at the couch and realized the strange echoing filling the house was my own terrified breathing. "Shit," I whispered, voice weak. "You're—."

"Real?" he said, drawing himself to his full height. "Oh, yes. I'm very real."

He began a languorous approach around the counter and my chest heaved with every step he took.

"And you are my host. We came to an agreement. I have brought you to your home, have tended your wounds, and provided sustenance." He tilted his head toward the poorly cooked dregs on the plate. "Now, we're going to have a discussion regarding our arrangement."

"What arrangement?" I asked, the words whisper thin and breakable. "Wh-what agreement?"

"The agreement for your soul. I believe your exact words were...kill them for what they've done." He smiled, and it was a terrible thing—broken and mocking, sharp teeth glinting in a shadowed face too strange to be human, and yet, and yet—.

He's fucking mad. No other conceivable reason behind his demeanor occurred to me. He had to be one of the wretched bastards in the robes. He—.

Let alone a lowly demon—.

My eyes widened.

—such as myself.

I bolted. He managed to round the counter and the sitting room before I could take more than a few steps toward the front door, so I threw myself down the hallway and into my bedroom once more. The door slammed, the wall shaking, the lock clicking unheard in my loud gasping as I stumbled to the bureau and jerked open the top drawer. I slipped my hand through the unpaired socks and palmed the cold revolver hidden within.

My father, in my youth, had compromised with my gun-hating mother and had tutored both my sister and me in gun usage, storage, and cleaning, ostensibly so we wouldn't have a chance to shoot ourselves with the revolver or the .45 caliber pistol he kept in the family's safe. When I moved to Verweald—a city notorious for its violent crimes—Luc Gaspard showed up at the door and, placing the revolver in my hand, said, "Never take aim at anyone unless ready to kill."

Steeling myself, I lifted the gun, aimed it toward the shut door, and waited.

No sound came from the hall. He did not try the door and I heard nothing aside from my own pained breathing, warmth seeping through the bandages swaddling my ribs, the heat trickling along the outside of my hip. My arms quivered under the gun's weight.

"They always run."

I swiveled in place. The man appeared across the room, not by the door, seeming to slip from the very shadows themselves, cloaked in that ubiquitous darkness clinging to his broad, threatening frame.

I pulled the trigger before I could think.

Recoil and shock threw me into the bureau at my back, the gun bouncing on the stained carpet like a child's dropped toy. My head struck the wall. The sound vibrated in my teeth. Crimson blossomed on the man's shirt, just over his heart, and yet he did not fall, did not stumble. He spared the wound an indolent glance and lifted a hand. Using only his thumb and forefinger, he dug the spent bullet out of his own sternum and flicked it aside.

I thought myself a rational woman—sensible, composed. When presented indisputable truth, I accept it readily until it can, by some means, be disproved. There stood a man who could pass through locked doors and drag battered women back from the brink of death. There stood a man who could endure a gunshot to the chest without effort, without emotion, without thought.

He couldn't be human.

"You are the same as the rest of them. I should not have expected differently."

In an instant, he appeared before me and I threw my arm up, ready to ward him off, and the man—the creature, the demon—took hold of my wrist. The cold leached into my bones, but his skin burnt like hellfire, and I looked up into his eyes for the first time.

Those eyes burned a bright, vivid red.

Demon.

What had I done?

"It does not matter if you are frightened," he sneered, squeezing, his grip keeping me upright when my legs went numb. The room swam; I felt nauseous, faint. "It does not matter if you think me an abomination, something unholy unfit to walk your precious earth. You have bargained your soul, human; it belongs to me now."

Demon. The word rattled like the last mint in a tin: demon, demon, demon. A short, hysterical laugh left me, for I had reached the end of my endurance and could no more stand the pain or the confusion or the sheer fucking ridiculousness of my situation. This could not be happening, and yet it was. His hand burned like fire, and yet I felt deadened by the cold.

"Hey," I said, touching his arm as something in the anterior of my being answered with coiling, twisted warmth. I couldn't see, and my stomach quaked.

"What?"

"I'm going to puke on your shoes."

I did.