Page 36 of Succubus

My heart stops. My brain powers down.

“Hello? Are you still there, Ms. Dunlap?” says the customer service rep on the phone, picking that precise moment to check on me. “I’m still on hold with the claims department at the provider.”

“Thank you,” I say like a robot.

“Please keep holding.” The tinny music starts up again for the ten thousandth time.

Ella is suddenly crying. “I can’t figure it out! I’m so bad at this! Titi! Can you read to me instead? Titi!” The math program makes a snorting sound.

“Not right now,” I say.

“I don’t want to do any more math,” she moans, sliding crosswise down her chair until she’s draped over the seat, her hair trailing on the floor. “I’m done with math! I only want you to read to me now! I’m not a math girl anymore. I’m only a books girl.”

A books girl who will only read a single book on her own. “If you were in school you would just do your math,” I say, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t hold school over her. “You wouldn’t get to discuss it. You’d do what the teacher says.”

“Please don’t make me go back to school,” she whines with abrupt ferocity. “And don’t make me do math!”

“Shush, Ella, give me a second!” I snap.

She bursts into additional tears, hurt.

I reread the message. I know who it’s from. In that moment, I’m positive.

The demon hunter has found me.

CHAPTER 12

I drop Ella off at homeschool coding class in Plainsboro— she’s only going because it’s a class of four students, all girls she knows from Blossom and Twig—and check my phone the second I’m back in the car. I have a new email from a potential client who introduces herself as a friend of one of the homeschool moms. She is hoping to have a home birth, working with a midwife I really like. I will respond to her in a minute, but first I have to check all the places Grub might have written to me.

He would just video chat me, of course.

I check the local news in his area again. I read through the police blotters of a couple towns.

And then I see it.

I don’t believe it the first time my eyes pass over it.

An announcement from a funeral home. A service for James Ash, who tragically passed at the age of sixteen. Remembered by his mother, Deanna, and his stepfather, William.

William.

Bill.

Who bought the bike even after all Grub’s years of pushing him away.

There is a time for a service. It is happening right now. There is a link for donations. It’s for a suicide prevention charity.

I am screaming.

Alone in the car in the parking lot of a beige office complex under some power lines behind the strip mall with the Indian grocery store and the pizza place and the dry cleaner.

“No,” I am gasping over and over.

I am screaming like vomiting up all my horror, but still it comes and it won’t stop coming. I am stuffed with it, there is nothing else in me, it is coming through me like lava, coming from somewhere underneath, somewhere much deeper.

I never met him. Not in person. I will never meet him.

My brother. Named James.