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He moved his mother aside, already drawing his gun, and said to me over his shoulder, “Protect her. Please.”
Stellan looked at me as if he needed me, as if he trusted me, and he didn’t fucking deserve me but I nodded anyway. This was Sophia’s mom, too. I’d look after her for Sophia’s sake.
Stellan disappeared inside and searched through the house. He returned with a grim look on his face. “You’d better see this.”
“Be careful,” she begged, grabbing him again. “Stellan, if anything happened to you… I wouldn’t survive it. I can’t take any more. You’re all I have left.”
Her face crumpled. Stellan’s posture was rigid, ready for a fight, and it took effort for him to stop and wrap his arms around her. But he did, hugging her despite the gun still clutched in his hand.
“It’s going to be all right, Mama. Nothing’s going to happen to me,” he promised her. “I’ve got to tell you something.”
I was itching to know what had happened, but Stellan got her a glass of water and she sat down on the porch swing, her hands shaking. The rain streamed from the gutters, the constant pounding on the porch roof droning and monotonous.
I sat down next to her and picked at a streak of hot pink nail polish with my thumbnail, then stilled. I remembered sitting on the swing with Sophia on a warm summer day when we’d just met and I’d spilled the nail polish. I’d been nervous, afraid her mom would be mad. Sophia had looked at me like I was crazy. Then her mom had parked the van in the driveway and walked up carrying a bag of groceries, and Sophia had run to hug her and tell her she’d dropped nail polish on the wood swing. Her mother had sighed dramatically and said, “You don’t deserve popsicles,” and then handed her the box of Klondike bars anyway. Eating our melting ice cream on the swing on a sunny day, I’d felt a rare sense of peace.
Stellan said gently, “Nothing is going to happen to me, because I’ve got backup. I’ve got a fantastic team behind me, including my partner here. Because we’re federal agents. We’re investigating what happened to Sophia.”
I schooled my face, even though I was pretty sure Stellan had just lost his mind.
“You are?” she asked, as if she wanted to believe.
He nodded. “We’re getting close, and that’s why the kidnapper left that message. I need you to go stay with Aunt Julie, all right? Just until we find Sophia. So I know you’re safe, and the team and I can focus on Sophia.”
Her eyes flooded with tears. “My boy. You’ll bring her home, won’t you?”
“I’ll bring her home,” he promised, and then she hugged him again. His eyes misted over as he held her tightly, patting his back, and something inside me melted.
Stellan got her to leave almost right away. He was all confidence and reassurance, tall and sure of himself, until her car had turned out of sight beyond the trees that lined the street.
Then his shoulders sagged, just slightly. “Come on.”
I followed him through the house into the bathroom. A message was painted in what looked like blood across the white wall, and an instant chill settled into my stomach.
“Can you read it?” Stellan frowned at the words. “The blood ran everywhere… and he ran out of room to write. I don’t think the killer ever did this before.”
“Very junior varsity,” I agreed, as if I weren’t terrified. “Let me translate from the original psycho.”
Cleans yourself before your wedding day
Cleans or die
“What’s up with them and their obsession withcleansing?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have brought upcleansingwith them like it obviously involved shoving your tongue down my throat.” But bantering with Stellan was making me feel steadier despite the evidence the cult had been in the house where I was staying. I shuddered. I wouldn’t sleep here again.
“This is where it would be nice to actually have a forensics team,” I said. “I’d like to know whose blood that is.”
“Unfortunately, we don’t,” Stellan said. He took careful photos of the mirror, then searched under the sink for Windex and sprayed it clean. “Like it never happened.”
“But it did,” I said. I chewed my lower lip. “They were here for me, Stellan. They know where we are.”
“Let’s figure out how to end this,” he said. “Then you never have to come home to this town again.”
He held out his hand to me, and I took it. The two of us walked across to the Demon’s house, although I couldn’t shake the feeling we were being watched now that I knew we’d been found by the cult.
"Now, how are we going to get in?" he asked. "You don't by chance have a key with you, do you?"
I rolled my eyes. "Maybe I would if you’d given me a little more heads up than the trunk of your car," I snarked at him.
