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But devils are subservient to certain influences of the stars, because magicians observe the course of certain stars in order to evoke the devils.
--Heinrich Kramer, The Malleus Maleficarum
The Harvard University dormitory where Adam Parrish studied and lived was cold, and Adam thanked God for that cold, because it was the only thing keeping him awake. The cold was a careful blanket of Adam’s own design: theoretically, he could turn on the radiator, except if he did he might get comfortable, and then he would immediately pass the fuck out.
There was nothing in the world that Adam wanted more at that moment than to be asleep. There was a fizzing, burning exhaustion cauterizing the inside of his head. There was a desperate ache gnawing at the base of his neck.
There was a half-finished midterm paper beneath his fingertips.
Thus, the cold.
Adam was an architect of discomfort: almost everything he was good at hurt, and this was no exception. His shirt was thin and short-sleeved, a faded green rag that fifteen-year-old Adam had received the summer he ran St. Agnes’ experimental Vacation Bible School. His legs, which looked thin but were strong from years of manual labor, were bare and tucked under his little desk where the cold could bite at them. He was wearing socks; they were knobby and thick and homemade, an early Christmas gift from his roommate Gansey’s not-girlfriend, and they kept his feet warm. Adam allowed himself the small comfort of those socks only because they kept trying to velcro themselves to the one thousand splinters in the old wooden floor. It was supremely annoying, and therefore difficult to sleep through.
The laptop keyboard was kind of nice under Adam’s hands. Warm. Adam typed a few words about Doctor Faustus, and then dug his knuckles into his eyes. The spirit box he had bought secondhand off eBay crackled in the background; Adam had taken to leaving it running on nights like this, when he wouldn’t be getting any sleep. Adam had a theory that demons might be drawn to desperation.
Adam’s forearm twitched, and, in doing so, brushed against his stack of books, which--right, essay. He typed a few more words. He thought it was interesting how, for once, his tower of research books looked a lot like his personal to-be-read pile. To one side: The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus; Angels and Demons in Mythology; his philosophy textbook. To the other: a two volume set of The Malleus Maleficarum, an English translation and the annotated Latin text; a blue-jacketed biography of Joan of Arc; a book of tarot layouts. All proof that he was where he was supposed to be.
He cared about these classes, he reminded himself. There was a reason he was awake at four-thirty in the morning, constantly pushing his mortal limits. He had things to discover, and discovery was nothing without credibility. This was why he was going to press himself into the tight mold that was Harvard University, and emerge reformed into the most knowledgeable religious scholar the school had ever produced.
His fingers clicked words into existence. His socks caught against the floor again and again. They made staticky little noises when they did, tiny fibers tearing and tangling. Adam shouldn’t do that if he wanted the socks to last. Blue had made them well. He was actually surprised she had gone to the trouble; Blue Sargent was not nice--which was actually most of the reason Adam liked her--and he didn’t think he could have really earned his way onto the Christmas list. She probably just wanted to endear herself to Gansey. That was okay. Socks were socks.
Essay. Okay. Words, and words. The keys on his laptop glowed white-blue. A tiny part of his brain itched to navigate away from his work and refresh his YouTube feed. Most of what people posted on Youtube was bullshit, but every once in a while someone would catch something that Adam thought was real: a sinuous flash of burnt-looking flesh in the background of a prank video, only noticed after the fact; a black figure stretched across an open doorway while sleepover girls recorded themselves dancing; footage of some British kid shoveling down jar after jar of fruit preserves, the mad lad, his eyes glazed over and tearful, his hands sticky and red from demolishing over a year’s worth of his gran’s canning efforts, all while his buddies whooped and called him a legend in the background.
Just more funny videos. Kids being kids.
Adam knew what those videos really were, even if no one else did.
He couldn’t, though. He couldn’t check. He couldn’t go to sleep. He had to keep writing. The dorm room smelled like the ghost of Gansey’s obnoxious cologne, and like coffee. Gansey’s EMF detector whined briefly in the background. He hadn’t taken it home with him, so Adam had it running alongside the spirit box.
It would be good to look at the EMF, see if he could replicate the energy spike. See if he could get it to make another noise. But that would be a distraction. He should leave the sound be. Ambient noise was supposed to be good for concentration. Adam had read that somewhere.
The overhead lights and the lamp were all on, full brightness, but the room still somehow seemed dim. It made Adam’s eyes itch; he rubbed at them again. Maybe he could get more coffee.
God, it was cold. Really cold. He wanted so badly to go to sleep.
Adam reached for Faustus, to make a reference. He flipped it open: not that page, not that page either, where was that line, the Latin, the really obvious quote. Not this page either. He should remember this. Maybe the next page? Fuck, that was a paper cut. Adam had bled all over the text. So much for returning the book to the seller. His carelessness had just cost him fifteen dollars.
There was the line though, streaked red and bloody, Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris . He typed it quickly, before his mind moved past it. The glowy bright keys dimmed under smudges of red. The screen swam in his vision like a waving flag. If only he could be done, and asleep. If only he could be warm.
The room smelled bad, like Gansey’s cologne, and like coffee, and like burning tires. Like cars on fire and overheating electronics and if EDM was a scent. Adam could taste gasoline. He was struggling to remember what the Latin meant; he had known a moment ago. He should know it without translation, even, it was that ubiquitous.
A prickly thing happened in Adam’s arms just then, and crept up into his neck, into his face, and dimmed his vision down to nothing. He noticed distantly that he felt sick. By the time Adam realized that he was losing consciousness, he was already slipping sideways out of his chair--except, as he fell, he landed not on the floor, but into the most incredible, summery clutch of all-encompassing heat he had ever felt. There was no cold, and there was no barrier between Adam and sleep; there was only this, a miracle.
“ Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris . Misery loves company,” said the miracle. “Dipshit.”
*
Once upon a time, Adam Parrish had not--if you’ll pardon him--given a good God damn about God or the devil. At eleven, Adam took for granted that praying did not mean an answered prayer. At twelve, he understood that devil was just another word for the man who lived in his house and shared his eye color.
At thirteen, Adam realized that, actually, he was fucking wrong, that the devil was literal and maybe so was God. He knew this because one day, a demon crept into his parents’ trailer and made Adam wolf down the entire meager contents of the refrigerator, made him gorge himself on pickles and processed cheese slices and casserole leftovers, and then slunk out the open kitchen window in an ooze of black feathers.
His father had found him there, kneeling on the floor in a small drift of wrappers and food debris, his skinny belly distended and his mouth sour with horrified bile. The rest--well. He didn’t like to think about it.
Adam was different after that. He had always been different, of course, quiet and intelligent and fundamentally unwanted, but this was a different sort of difference. He knew something he shouldn’t know, and he never wanted to go home again. He was just a kid, though, and he had to go home whether he wanted to or not. But in the meantime, between there and school, Adam discovered St. Agnes Catholic Church.
The church building was old and lovely, and Adam’s father would never have followed him there for fear of making a scene in front of God and the whole town. That was the church’s primary appeal. The other thing was that Adam Parrish believed in what had happened to him with the same detached certainty he felt while solving a math problem, and what had happened to him was a demon. It was impossible, but true. Where else could Adam have gone for answers but the Church?
He read the Bible, studied the songs. He snuck in for services on Sunday mornings until the priest asked him whether he might like to stay for other church functions, and then he did that, too. He ate the body of Christ and drank his dry, fermented blood. He tried out confession and lied so convincingly during that he figured the lie would cover him for the next three confessions, at least.
At first, Adam wasn’t there for the religion. He was there as a spy. Did all demons look the same? How might a person avoid demons? If a demon came to you, did that mean you were already a bad person? Or did it mean the opposite, that you had such potential for redemption that you became a target?
The congregation must have thought him the strangest teenager in Virginia. They never said it, though, never made him feel it. Instead, the people there started looking after Adam in little ways: offering him odd jobs on weekends, hosting a suspicious number of potlucks, not mentioning the way he sometimes fell asleep during the services. Squeezing his dry hands and whispering, really, honey, are you sure everything’s okay at home? You can tell us, you can tell us, well, we’ll pray for you anyway.
Things were not okay at home. Adam went to school with bruises, ugly things that made him wince his way through his after school jobs at the garage and the church. He peered through fat, lurid shiners while he aced his classes and haunted the school computers looking up stories about exorcisms and hell portals.
At seventeen, somewhere between his father’s fist and the porch railing, Adam lost the hearing in his right ear. St. Agnes covered his hospital expenses; the church treasurer pleaded with him to press charges. When Adam did, he quietly moved out of the trailer and into a tiny, slanted apartment above the church.
The room was awkward and without air conditioning. Adam slept on a mattress on the floor, stored his belongings in plastic bins, and showered under nonexistent water pressure. It was his favorite place in the world; it was freedom. Adam would sit in that room and tell God thank you, thank you, on the off chance that there was a God, and then he would sit in his bed and consider what he might do if he wanted to summon a demon.
That day, the demon day, festered in his mind. A burning hand on him. An oily sludge of raven-black plumage dripping over the window sill. His father’s belt, and the way he had puked on the floor, all over the plastic cheese wrappers.
He had been so hungry that day. He hadn’t been allowed to bring food to school because they had to save what was left for dad’s lunches that week. Adam would have qualified for free school lunch every year of his life, but his parents were too proud to fill out the papers. He had felt so defeated. So desperate. Thirteen-year-old Adam had ached and longed and wanted for food that day in a way that filled up his body and branded his soul, and then a hand had bled out of the shadow between the fridge and the counter, and touched Adam’s mouth.
It was a defining moment of Adam’s life. The unreal became real, and it hurt him.
Adam was good at things that hurt.
Adam was a scientist at heart, and he would be damned if he wasn’t going to find a way to repeat the experiment. It had been real, and he knew it, and he was going to prove it. So Adam lived in his holy little room, and visited other churches, visited psychics, combed through every dubious demon sighting for any speck of truth. He became an aficionado of grainy Youtube videos and paranormal blogs, academic libraries and National Enquirer articles. Televised ghost hunters were a constant source of disdain; esoteric religious lore was his lifeblood. The local library recognized his interlibrary loans on sight.
After Adam graduated as valedictorian of Henrietta’s lackluster public school, St. Agnes and its parishioners scraped together a scholarship to help him pay for his philosophy undergrad, with the understanding that it would lead him to divinity school. Adam was never, ever going to tell those kind people that he was not pursuing the priesthood as a man of God--though he often considered that it might not be a bad idea to become a man of God along the way, just in case.
Unmaking the rules of good and evil consumed Adam Parrish. Proving himself right was the undercurrent to everything he did. That was why it was so absolutely fucked up that when he did finally encounter a demon for the second time, he wasn’t even trying to do it.
*
“Parrish. Parrish. Runt . Wake the fuck up. It’s all done, you did it, only I need you to get off me so I can, you know. Slink back into my shadowy realm.”
Adam stretched his head luxuriously backwards. He had never been this comfortable before in his life. There was not a single place on his body that hurt; maybe he had taken some really strong painkillers.
“Come on, Goody Proctor. They’re gonna catch you consorting with the devil.” This ambient noise was pleasant, a deep thing purring against Adam’s back. “They’re going to screw your husband and bring you poppets and throw you in jail, for fuck’s sake, Parrish .”
There was nothing better than this: not having to think, to worry. Nothing could possibly be wrong. Adam’s bed was warm enough to be a living thing and he had slept for days, long enough to never be tired again, but he could sleep a little more if he wanted. There was a clutching feeling around his waist, heavy like arms, and if Adam had uncharacteristically brought someone home they must have been good. Adam felt content and satisfied all the way into his bones, like he had everything he could want and might never want for anything else.
“I’m gonna have to pick you up. I’m gonna have to throw you out the window.”
It was ridiculous earlier, when Adam had been worried about finishing his paper. It must have been an easy task. Adam could do anything at all right now, and it would be easy.
Except, wait. His paper.
Adam’s unbelievable bed hissed, “ Jesus fucking Christ ,” and hoisted him into the air by his armpits.
As soon as Adam’s feet hit the floor, every ache and discomfort started to fade back into his body, as if his various agonies were controlled by a dimmer switch and the lights were ready to come back on. It wasn’t great. He had liked the other way better.
There was nothing else for it: Adam opened his eyes. He wasn’t as cold as before, or as tired, but he was going to fail his midterm, and also there were blistery charcoal-colored arms sliding away from his torso.
On instinct, Adam snatched at them, and managed to manacle a bony wrist in his hands.
This was the moment. This was the moment. Adam’s heart was beating hard. He spun around, still clutching, and it got him a little dizzy. The side of his leg knocked painfully into his wooden computer chair and sent it scraping to the floor. He had never moved from the desk, he realized; he had never made it to bed. Adam knew what he was seeing, what was happening, and it occurred to him that he must have been sitting on the thing. It must have been holding him up. Nausea crept into his throat.
The demon flexed its trapped hand halfheartedly. It was the color of hellfire after it had burned down to coals, and had honest-to-God horns, and was rolling its eyes as though it was the one being inconvenienced.
“Don’t move,” Adam commanded. His breath was ramping up into the realm of hysterics and his body was shaking with sudden adrenaline. “Do not fucking move.”
“Fine, okay. Whatever. Not moving.” The demon’s face was a picture of exasperation; its eyes, bizarrely, were blue. “Jesus fucking Christ,” it said again.
Adam was caught off guard. “Shouldn’t you not be able to say that? I really feel like saying Jesus Christ should be beyond you.” Something interesting and terrible was happening to Adam’s hands: they were clutching tighter and tighter around the demon’s wrist without Adam’s permission.
“I’m Catholic. And besides, I threw a ‘fucking’ in there.”
“Catholic.” Adam could not make his hand let go. “That seems unlikely, given that you’re a demon.” Adam’s voice was starting to go twangy with stress. His Virginia accent always resurfaced when he couldn’t control himself. “I want you to stop making my hands do that.”
“Yeah, well, someone has to poison the Eucharist. Did you think you were going to summon a Protestant?” The demon smiled. Its teeth were perfect. It did not look like a snake, necessarily, but it reminded Adam of one. “Also, I’m not doing shit. You could let go if you really wanted to.” The demon was wearing a black tank top with the arm holes shredded all the way down to its waist, like a douche. Adam tracked the fabric’s movement over the demon’s ribcage as it shrugged. “I don’t think you really want to.”
The dorm room was growing lighter, bland with the arriving morning. Adam saw it this way so often that it even made the demon look commonplace--brown floor, white walls, blue bedspread, void-dark face, all washed out in the early light. The picture it made was strange and gentle, and all at once Adam was furious. “Don’t you try to tell me what I want,” Adam snapped. So what if the demon had a point? Adam didn’t want the demon to leave, and if he let go, it might. That didn’t mean he wanted to graft himself onto its arm.
“Anyway, your paper’s done. We even submitted it. I didn’t throw you out a window, and I saved you from bashing your head open on the floor. You could at least pretend to be grateful.”
Adam was not interested in being grateful. “Why are you here? Why now, why not any of the thousand times I meant for you to come?”
“Thanks for being a pal, Ronan. Thanks for saving my ass, Ronan, and getting me the bullshit grade I wanted. Thank you so fucking much for not letting me concuss myself, Ronan.” The demon’s--Ronan’s?--face was made for mischief. His eyes shone. “There you go. Did all the work for you. Again.”
“Fuck you.” Adam wanted to rip the demon’s throat out with his teeth. “No, actually, you’re right. I forgot my manners. Ronan, is it?”
The demon--Ronan--offered the tiniest, most condescending nod Adam had ever seen.
“Great. Fuck you, Ronan, for coming here the one time I didn’t ask. Fuck you for assuming I wanted your help. And fuck you so very much just on principle. Just for being what you are.” Adam managed to pry one of his hands away from Ronan. It was shaking. “Now that all the politeness is out of the way, I’m gonna ask you some questions, and I’ll be damned if I let you leave without answering them.”
Ronan flickered a glance toward the window, over and back in less time than it took to blink, and then he grinned a white, knife-sharp grin. “You can be damned all you want. I don’t mind.” He took a step backwards; at the last second, Adam registered what was happening as Ronan collapsed in a lazy heap on Adam’s bed. Adam stumbled forward with him, and, in his panic at trying not to fall, let go of Ronan’s wrist.
A little puff of downy black feathers rose from Adam’s mattress at the impact. Ronan looked comfortable and obscene, bizarrely human in his stupid tanktop and ripped up jeans and heavy black boots. Surely demons didn’t habitually wear human clothing, and if they did, Adam couldn’t imagine that most of them went this far out of their way to dress like a stereotype. Ronan was essentially a goth girl’s wet dream. Adam had the thought that his lap looked just as comfortable as it had actually been, and then he dismissed that thought immediately.
Right on cue, Ronan made a jack-off motion with his newly freed hand, instantly ruining any illusion of charm or appeal. “How about this, Parrish: I’ll make a deal with you.”
Adam didn’t love that this presumed spawn of Satan knew his name without asking. Still, he slid onto the only corner of his bed that was not currently occupied by demon limbs. Adam couldn’t help it; he was intrigued. “A deal. I bet you’d like that. What is it?”
“You can keep me here for six more hours. In that time, you can ask me six questions, one per hour. In exchange, you will do me a favor.”
There was the catch. Adam was waiting for it. “What’s the favor?”
Ronan looked down his nose at Adam. His eyes were icy in his dead campfire of a face. “I’m going to need you to wake me up.”
*
Adam Parrish might have been a bigshot Harvard boy now, but his car was still a piece of shit, and he was hoping that the demon currently trailing him through the parking lot and eating fistfuls of dry cereal straight from a box wouldn’t know the difference.
“Your car’s a piece of shit,” Ronan said, around his full mouth.
So much for that.
“Also this cereal fucking sucks.” He scraped another palmful into his mouth like he was a grazing horse. “Who buys plain wheat Chex? This tastes like depression. I want marshmallows.”
“It’s high in fiber. And it was on sale. You don’t have to eat it if it’s so terrible.” Adam unlocked the passenger side door for the creature of Hell that he was about to let into his vehicle. “Quit complaining, it’s not like I asked you to steal my food.” He scanned the parking lot to make completely sure that no one had spotted them. There was a beat-up old pickup truck, a rental car the color of champagne, and an ostentatious sports car, but no occupants in any of them. Still, Adam worried.
“We should get McDonald’s. A road trip isn’t a road trip if it doesn’t start with mediocre breakfast sandwiches.”
“We won’t be doing that. And I can’t imagine where you’re getting your intel about the correct way to be a human, but I can tell you that your source is flawed.”
It was winter in Cambridge, and it felt like it. Adam counted it as a blessing that it wasn’t snowing, but his breath still came out in little clouds of fog as he circled the car and got in. The engine stuttered once--twice--and caught. The car needed to warm up before it was driveable, and in the meantime Adam tried to subtly retreat deeper into the hoodie, coat, and scarf he had stacked onto his body.
On the other side of the car, Ronan sat down, slammed the door shut, opened the door and slammed it again harder, and got his horns stuck on the headrest. All of the glass within a foot of him instantly steamed up with the door closed, and Adam prayed that his windows wouldn’t crack from the temperature change. Adam also wondered if maybe he shouldn’t be praying right then, what with the demon in his passenger seat.
“You’re so responsible,” Ronan complained. His horns came unstuck, with a little bit of wiggling. When he said responsible it sounded like boring . He shot Adam a glare, and then did a double take. “Oh--shit, you’re freezing again, aren’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, Ronan reached over the broken center console and slid his hand over Adam’s.
Right away, Adam felt incredible. Physically, he was warmed through and deeply comfortable, but he somehow felt emotionally warm, too, like he was facing a paid week off of work and could stay in bed for as long as he wanted.
It was scary. Adam jerked his hand away, staring. His heart was hammering in his throat as the cold came back to sting his eyes and freeze the inside of his nose. “Don’t do that . Don’t touch me without asking, you don’t get to just make me feel however you wanna make me feel.” There was Adam’s accent again, shame on top of panic. “I didn’t agree to that.”
Ronan’s face did something complicated. He studied Adam for a moment, and then withdrew his hand. “Okay. Yeah, you’re right. You’re totally right. I won’t do it again unless you tell me to.”
The mood in the car was sour and quiet as Adam eased out of the parking space. It lasted all the way out of the lot and down the street, right up to the stoplight, which was when Adam let out a huff of laughter.
“What?” Ronan, for his part, was now being very good and still. The open cereal box was clutched gingerly to his chest so as not to make any crinkling sounds, and he had not done anything to the radio dial, though Adam could practically taste how badly he wanted to.
“It’s just, there’s a demon in my car. And it’s six feet tall and creepy and it has horns. And I’m driving it to--where am I taking you? I don’t think you actually said.”
“I’m six foot two,” Ronan said shittily, “and you’re not going to like it when I tell you where we’re going.”
“What, am I driving you to Hell?”
“No. Never been there in the first place. Besides, I said somewhere that you won’t like. You specifically.”
Adam was smart; it only took a minute for him to understand. He blew out a long, icy breath, and scrubbed a hand through his hair. It was greasy. He had planned to take a shower that morning. “We’re going to Virginia.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a ten hour drive.”
“Yes.”
“But you said I could only keep you here for six hours.”
“Also yes.” Ronan stretched to one side, and accidentally clacked a horn against the window. The damned things were a hazard. “And then after that I said something about how you’re going to do me a favor.” He finally couldn’t help himself any longer, and reached for the radio.
Having a demon around was confusing. Something about temptation. Demonic wiles. In an improbably quick turn around from the strained atmosphere of several minutes ago, Adam was almost starting to enjoy Ronan’s company, which was certainly a bad sign. “So I’m gathering that the two things will be related.”
Ronan clicked through radio stations at a dizzying pace. “Time will tell, Parrish.” Static. Country. Oldies. Static. Static. Evangelical talk radio, which Ronan lingered at for a full thirty seconds. Top 40. Finally, some sort of shitty dubstep. “Oh, hell yes.”
“Turn on the heater while you’re at it.” Adam navigated through a handful of narrow, maze-like streets until the car was pointed toward the interstate. The trees and houses they passed were frosted over, but not quite icy. Cambridge was in a lull between storms, and so many students had already headed out for winter break that the place seemed like a ghost town in comparison to its usual level of activity. “I’m going to ask my first question. The one I asked before. Why now? Why show up today, out of all the days you could have chosen?”
They drove past a McDonalds. Ronan gazed at it longingly, and then sighed. “Look, the demon gig is all about giving people what they want, for a price. People are always wanting things, usually basic shit, y’know. Money, fame, health. Sick ass fiddle skills. Everyone wants that stuff. But when want turns into need, like beyond reason, just consuming you? That’s when we show up.” Ronan ate some consolation cereal. “You needed to go the fuck to sleep. You needed to not freeze to death or burst a pipe in your dorm. You needed to finish that stupid midterm before you could do the other two things, but you couldn’t, because you’re a stubborn shithead and you pushed yourself so far that you blacked out. You needed things, and you couldn’t make them happen. So I made them happen.” More cereal. The car filled with the sound of muffled crunching.
Huh. “I thought you made me black out.”
“Nope. That was all you, sweetheart.” Ronan laughed a loud, sudden laugh. Adam couldn’t quite track why. “Hey, it doesn’t have to be a McDonalds. We could stop at a gas station and get slushies. What’dyou think?”
“I think it’s thirty degrees outside.” Adam merged onto the interstate. Here, at least, there was traffic. “I can’t help but notice that you said demons give people what they want for a price . Obviously the price for my questions is driving you to a place I don’t want to go to do something I don’t know how to do.” Adam maneuvered them into the lane farthest to the left in order to drive as fast as possible. If he really had to do this, he didn’t want to take his time. “What was the price for last night?”
The song on the radio changed to some slightly different noisy music. It sounded basically the same to Adam, but Ronan must have felt differently because he set himself upon the dial with extreme focus. AC/DC. Matchbox Twenty. Katy Perry. Something jouncy and Celtic that he left playing. “That sounded a lot like a question. Ask me again in forty-five.”
*
The drive from Cambridge to Henrietta, Virginia was not Adam’s favorite drive to take, it turned out. He could have guessed. He had never actually gone back to his hometown from Harvard, and had hoped he would never have to. Sometimes, though, a person just didn’t have a choice.
At a gas station somewhere in Connecticut, Adam pumped gasoline and thought about all of the questions dividing and multiplying inside him. He thought about how the smell of motor oil and the feeling of a car beneath him always made him think of Boyd’s garage, where he had worked in high school. He thought about the impossible creature that was Ronan.
Ronan and Adam did not always agree on what constituted a sufficient answer in their game of Twenty-Minus-Fourteen-Questions. When Adam had said What do I owe you for your help? and Ronan had replied Nothing, don’t worry about it , that was not what Adam thought of as a real answer. When Adam had asked Is God real? and Ronan had shrugged in response, and declared that his mother had always told him God was real so it must be true, Adam wasn’t thrilled with that, either.
When Adam had given the capital-Q Questions a rest and asked a lowercase-q question, one he thought was pretty simple-- Is there somebody following us? --Ronan had only leveled a shifty look at the rearview mirror and directed Adam to the nearest Sunoco fuel station.
Adam shivered. He was only wearing his hoodie, because his jacket was thrown over Ronan’s head. It hadn’t seemed like a good idea to let any unsuspecting people see him up close. From a distance, Ronan could maybe pass as a weirdo in a seasonally inappropriate costume, but in high-def there was no denying the truth of the dark stubble on his scalp and jaw, or his real actual pores, or the way that the insides of his ears were scarlet.
Having Ronan’s face covered gave Adam one less thing to worry about, at any rate, because he was now certain that they were being followed.
The machine spat out a receipt while Adam resheathed the pump and surreptitiously watched the champagne-colored vehicle that had pulled into the parking lot behind them. Adam couldn’t say exactly why he was so sure this car didn’t simply contain a fellow roadtripper. It was something about the careful distance the other driver had kept between himself and them, never on their bumper, never lagging too far behind. It was something about the front-and-center parking spot the car took up outside the convenient store even though the driver had yet to exit the car. It was something about the fact that Adam had noticed an identical car parked outside his dorm building when they left Cambridge.
In one precise movement, Adam slid back into his seat, pulled the door shut behind him, and thumbed down the manual lock. Seat belt buckled. Engine started. Speedbump, stripes of tar, rocksalt circling innumerable muddy puddles, a gray and endless sky. Adam merged back onto the interstate, and a short but respectable time later, the champagne car appeared behind them.
“Can I take this off now?” Ronan complained.
“Only if you tell me how worried I should be about the guy that’s been tailing us all morning.”
“Not worried. Not very worried.” Ronan swiped Adam’s crumpled coat off of his face and shook his head sideways to unhook it from his horns. If he was supposed to give off an air of evil, he sucked at it. “Maybe I’m not supposed to be in the real world for this long, is all. Maybe there are certain parties who would make an effort to escort me out.”
Out of habit, Adam sent up a prayer: thank you for being with us. Please keep us safe. The person--the thing?--following them was cautious, always far enough away to obscure any identifying features or license plate numbers. “I don’t get it. Why be here, then? Why make a deal with me at all, if you’re not supposed to?”
“Wait,” Ronan said.
“Excuse me?”
“ Wait .” Ronan watched the radio clock. It read 12:19. One long minute later, 12:20. Ronan blinked the time away. His eyelashes were long and delicate. Finally, at 12:21, he said, “Okay, new hour. I’m counting that as your question. If you have to know, I’m here because you can help me, and I’m also here for the same reason I was here last night.”
The car smelled like faded laundry detergent and cereal, and the familiarity of the scent pulsed a pang of longing for his room and schedule into Adam’s chest. He was getting tired of everything, of all of it, of driving to a place he hated with a cryptic supernatural being and of being stalked all the way there. Had he really spent his whole life trying to get to this moment? “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what that reason is?”
Ronan fixed his eyes on Adam’s face. His gaze was so serious that it made Adam uncomfortable. “Because I owe you.”
Another question, and a thousand more after that, sat on the edge of Adam’s tongue. Before he got a chance to ask any of them, the first bullet tore across the roof of the car.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph-- fuck .” There was no one in front of them, so Adam slunk down in his seat and slammed the gas pedal. “Put your fucking head down, Ronan, it’s like a giant target. Holy shit .” Another bullet, this one through the passenger side mirror. A shower of glass shards glittered in a trail behind them. A third bullet went through something that might have been a tail light. Another one sparked off the blacktop by the left front tire.
“I didn’t think he would actually try to shoot us--fuck, I’m sorry, Adam--”
The car was starting to shake. The next bullet nearly went through the back windshield. “We have to get away, God, we’re gonna die.” Adam was struggling to breathe. His foot was plastered to the floor, and fuzzy terror was clouding his head. “I can’t get away from him on my own, Ronan. I need you to do something .”
“I’m completely useless! I can only do cool shit if it’s for other people!”
And, oh. Of course. “I want it.” The car was shuddering so loudly that Adam had to shout to be heard. “I need this to stop, I need him to go away. I’m asking.”
Adam reached blindly to the side, and there was Ronan, waiting for Adam’s hand.
Just like every time before, the first moment of contact felt like relief. The noise and the motion, the panic, it all receded into a dim backdrop. Ronan’s hand was hot and large, callused in strange places, and Adam had a shining moment of clarity where he understood that Ronan was really a whole other Thing, a complete entity with a unique, inscrutable history, a life that had led to those calluses on his hands. Adam wanted to know Ronan. He wanted Ronan to be safe.
Behind them, the champagne-colored car exploded.
For one perfect second, nothing could hurt them, though they could have handled it if something tried. Ronan squeezed Adam’s hand for no other reason than to offer comfort. Time stuttered in its path like a record hitting a scratch, a brief hiccup that nonetheless allowed the full force of Ronan’s soft, open expression to fill up the car, allowed him to face Adam and look his fill. Allowed Adam to look back.
And then the record hurtled forward. All of the loud, harsh sounds caught up with them in a rush while Adam slowed gradually to something resembling the speed limit. The exploding car was there, and then gone.
A big, blue sign outside read Pennsylvania . The clock said 1:21.
*
Adam Parrish limped his unfortunate car down the dwindling road to Virginia. An hour had spent itself without his permission, though it did seem like a worthy sacrifice in exchange for not getting shot. There were several new bullet holes that made the shitbox even more pathetic, and gave the cold new opportunity to worm its way in, but Adam had his coat back on. He also had Ronan, who was crowding into Adam’s space as politely as he could over the middle console and gear shift in order to act as a heater. Not touching, no skin against skin. Just a demon’s body temperature to warm the air.
Adam had used his fifth question to find out the exact nature of the favor he would be performing when they reached their destination. What he had learned was that they were not, in fact, going to Henrietta like he had assumed. It had just made sense to Adam that a demon would want to take him to the worst place he knew, but it was apparent by now that Ronan was not with him on any mission of torment.
They were headed to Singer’s Falls, which was more of a dense mess of trees and greenery than a town. It was twenty-five minutes outside of Henrietta, which seemed like too much of a coincidence to be one. Adam knew the place, though he didn’t know about the property he was meant to find, a place Ronan called The Barns. This, Ronan had said, was where Adam would earn his questions. This was where he would find Ronan and wake him up.
“What does that mean?” Adam had asked, mentally folding down another finger on his six-fingered hand of curiosity. “Wake you up?”
Ronan had used up several long minutes to consider this question. He tapped out some inaudible beat on his knees, and scratched his sharp, dark nails against the denim there, and finally said, “This is me.” He gestured vaguely toward himself, his face and chest and legs. “But this isn’t my body. It isn’t even a body. I can only be like this--like a person--for a little while.” Ronan looked at Adam, to make sure he was listening. “I always had a talent for dreaming. One day, I started dreaming, and never stopped. The part of you that dreams and the part of you that eats and shits and breathes are two different things. When one part gets too far away from the other, you can end up in places you didn’t mean to be.”
That, at least, Adam understood all too well.
“When you get there, you’ll want to go for the biggest barn. The one with the sleeping cows. You’ll see what I mean.” Ronan hovered his hand over Adam’s forearm, his bicep, his shoulder. A film of heat followed his movement. “As for the waking me up part, I’m not too clear on the specifics.” He laughed, a sarcastic, bitter sound. “If I knew how to do it myself I would have done it.”
There was not much time before Ronan’s six hours were up. Somehow, Adam did not feel any more enlightened than he had before Ronan arrived. Demons were not what he had imagined they were, if Ronan was anything to go by, and they didn’t seem to know any more than Adam did about the larger secrets of the universe.
Adam had one question left, and five minutes until 2:21 pm, when Ronan would have to leave. It was difficult to know what to ask; there was an entire world to question, Ronan’s entire undefined breadth of experience to shove under a microscope. Why did Ronan think he owed Adam? Why hadn’t any of Adam’s other moments of desperation pulled forth a demon? Why did Adam suddenly care less about all of that than he did about the fact that Ronan couldn’t stay?
It was disturbing to realize that the loss of Ronan himself was more distressing than the loss of this long awaited opportunity. Maybe Adam could pull a third demon through--he was always reaching for more, after all, always wanting for something--but he did not want another demon. He wanted Ronan, who he did not think had lied to him, who only had to be told once to let Adam call the shots, who was there when he didn’t have to be.
“There is one thing I haven’t told you yet.” Even now, Ronan was not solid in his seat. He was a splash of negative space with eyes. “When you get to the Barns--when you try to go in--the place won’t want you to. It’s probably going to hurt.” Ronan’s hand ghosted above the side of Adam’s face. His deaf ear. “It won’t hurt you. But it will hurt.”
“That’s okay,” Adam replied. “I’m good at things that hurt.”
Ronan was starting to congeal. The inside of the car smelled like burning tires, like cars on fire and overheating electronics, every bad thing for a car to smell like. Ronan turned his head to look over his shoulder, and the skin on his neck split into little jagged shards along the crease lines.
“Don’t look now,” Ronan said under his breath, “but I think our friend from earlier might be back.”
Adam looked. There was a champagne car, unexploded and wholly intact, behind them.
They had two minutes.
The return of their unscathed pursuer sent a spike of fear through Adam’s chest, but mostly it just pissed him off. What did this guy think he was going to get from killing Ronan, or from filling Adam’s car with holes?
The flesh on Ronan’s arms shivered into spiky layers. His jaw bubbled inward and became a mass of black, coin sized scales.
No, not scales. Feathers.
One minute.
The champagne car was closer. Almost close enough for Adam to make out the driver’s features in the rearview.
“You’re gonna be okay,” Ronan hissed. His mouth was not so much a mouth as a bristly oil slick. “He’s only here to rein me in. After I’m gone you’ll be okay.”
Thirty seconds.
Ronan’s tank top and jeans, everything but his heavy stupid boots, smoked up into nothing. Adam’s passenger seat contained a puddle of Ronan, which was to say a puddle of black feathers.
Adam brushed a finger against the part of Ronan’s face that most resembled a face, which was the feathered crest of bone beneath one luminous blue eye. It was soft and smooth, one thousand little edges with tiny solid cores. That tender point of contact filled Adam with longing and rage and purpose and a deep, frigid sense of calm. “Oh,” he said.
Ten seconds.
Ronan closed his eyes.
“It was you,” Adam whispered. He was trying to watch the road behind him and the road ahead and Ronan all at once. “That night. Did you come into the trailer? Was it you?”
There was no answer.
"You don't owe me at all."
Ronan and his feathers oozed away into nothing.
*
Adam had four hours left to drive, and he needed gas.
That was just fine with him.
He pulled into the first gas station he saw, and got busy swiping his card and settling the pump into its slot.
Right on time, the champagne car followed.
The thing about Adam was that he had more practice at being scared than most. He had been scared, and now he was done being scared and was ready to be angry. When Adam Parrish was angry, he was a devil just like his father. This was something Adam had always hated about himself, this inherited defect. But he was pretty okay with it as he waited for the gray-eyed, gray-blond man in the gray suit to roll to a stop.
The Gray Man stepped out of his ugly champagne-colored car. He held his hands up, as if to indicate that he was not dangerous, which he and Adam both knew was a lie.
“You still have time to get out of it,” the Gray Man said. “Whatever he’s making you do.”
“Nobody makes me do anything anymore,” Adam replied. The dollars and cents ticked up on the screen as his car drank its fill. Adam hated spending money, but gas here was much cheaper than in Massachusetts.
“It’s not what you think. I don’t know how he looked to you, but he’s a demon. A trickster. I just want to remove you from that danger.”
Adam replaced the nozzle in the machine, and accepted his receipt. He twisted the gas cap into place. And then he opened his driver’s side door, reached in and over to the floor on the passenger side of the car, and took up one of Ronan’s boots. After that, Adam took the boot, walked to the Gray Man and his car, and smashed the boot’s steel toe into the Gray Man’s windshield again and again and again and again until the car’s interior was a glittering tsunami of bluish glass.
“Stop following me,” Adam said.
Adam drove away. The Gray Man let him.
*
The hours ate themselves away under Adam’s tires. The world grew dark around him as he moved; he was filled with dread and anticipation. There was a single black feather on his passenger seat.
Adam wondered if, after all of this, he should change his major.
After skimming the greater part of the Eastern United States, Adam began to recognize his surroundings. He knew that he was getting closer to the home that was not his home when the mountains turned ghostly and blue, and the dirt became spare and brown beneath the patches of snow, and Adam’s heart shivered into his throat.
He drove into Henrietta, and out of it. It couldn’t touch him. He was not here for Henrietta.
It was only twenty-five minutes from there to Singer’s Falls, and Ronan’s instructions had been helpful, but not specific. Adam waited for the turn to the Barns to jump out at him from around every curve and corner, but he needn’t have worried. Adam could tell when he was getting close by the unbidden urge to turn back, speed forward, leave in any way possible.
Adam braced himself for pain. He was used to pain. He knew how to do pain. At 6:21 pm, he saw a driveway that tried to skitter out from under his vision, and he turned onto it
and was sick to his brim with disgust and horror and shaking, acidic terror, because he was thirteen years old and kneeling on the floor of his father’s kitchen. Adam Parrish had just seen a demon, which he had thought might be the worst moment of his life, until that moment passed and the next one happened.
There was that, and there was also Adam, who was an adult and could turn his car around, turn around right now, turn around , he didn’t have to be driving now and throwing up then, shifting into first gear to crawl through the mounded misery of the moment his life changed.
He didn’t have to, but he did.
The bubble of disgust stretched and stretched and threw Adam out on the other side into a perfect summertime idyll of grass and flowers, trees and winking lightning bugs. It was clear that he was no longer playing by the rules of religion, that maybe he never had been. The Barns and its confident wonder was a fairytale place with fairytale rules.
All Adam had to do was find Ronan. He knew how to get Ronan to do what needed to be done; he knew how fairytales ended.
The largest barn was unmistakable. Its roof angled itself over the dimming horizon in a peak above every other barn, the long ones and colorful ones and the ones that shimmered in the corner of Adam’s eye.
Adam parked his car at the end of the driveway, and began to walk toward that largest barn. Tiny, invisible things rushed around his ankles. Every breath in was clean and endless. Adam had a black feather clutched in one palm. When he arrived, he used the other palm to push open the wide wooden doors of the barn.
The air inside was warm and living. It cupped Adam to its face like he belonged there, like he was small and in need of comfort, an animal with more heartbeat than room in his body. It smelled like cows; as promised, there was a herd lumped across the floor, sleeping. Adam picked his way through the still creatures, looking for someone or something that might be Ronan.
The guidelines of good and evil were constantly shifting and impossible to divine. Acknowledge your sins; study and learn and share; become a lie in the model of the Great Pretender; pray from the bottom of your lungs. But fairytale rules were simple.
Adam figured that he deserved something simple.
Pillowed against the rising and falling flank of a black, glossy cow was a boy, and that boy looked an awful lot like Ronan. He was dusted over with over a decade’s accumulation of dirt, frozen in time, a pale sleeper with dark brows and dark jeans and a shredded tank top and boots that looked like they belonged on a motorcycle rather than on a farm.
Black, hooking tattoos of beaks and claws and feathers crept over his back and onto his exposed shoulders, his neck.
When Adam looked at this boy who was Ronan, he missed him and wanted to meet him and was annoyed by him and could feel the spirit of his callused hand. He needed to know Ronan. He needed it like he needed sleep or work or money or food. The need clawed into his throat and filled his mouth like blood.
Adam kneeled on the hard-packed dirt floor beside Ronan’s body, and pressed his hand and the feather against Ronan’s warm cheek, and kissed him. It felt like a comfort and a fading ache and a question being answered, like all of those things, all at once.
Against Ronan’s mouth, Adam whispered, “Wake up.”