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He draws a flask from a pocket of his duster and takes a deep swig. He stares into the distance, at the hotel lit up on the horizon, and I know that he’s thinking about Levi.
Levi, Orion, the crossroads… We have so many problems bearing down on us at once, I feel like a tiny bug being ground into the dirt by some large boot.
We have to find a way out of this. Wehaveto.
I think back to that dream I had about Levi. Something about it nagged at me. Levi said that he wasn’t the demon, and I know enough about demon lore to know that demons love to take credit for their work. And from the way he spoke to me, he sounded almost…caring.
Thinking about Levi makes a hard lump form in my throat. I liked him, more than I care to admit. He made me feel like I was a normal twenty-three-year-old girl, like I could be fun and flirty and attractive. He was supposed to be my no-strings fuck to get me over the Bellua boys, and now it turns out he doesn’t just have strings—he’s an entire ball of demon yarn.
Brooks must be thinking along the same lines because he says. “We have to do something about Lily’s boyfriend.”
“Do I detect a hint of insecurity, Brooks?” I shoot back, but there’s no bite to it. We have bigger things to worry about than Brooks’s ego. “Levi’s not my boyfriend, and now that we know about the crossroads, his pattern makes sense. He’s here to collect his debt, but someone hasn’t paid. That’s why he’s been taking people in the honeymoon suite. That’s why he writes the number six on the wall. The timer is for every six weeks until his debt is paid.”
“We have to stop him.”
“Exactly.”
“But how? We can’t kill him. We don’t know how to trap him, and we don’t have his name.”
“Orion said that he thought he’d figured it out, but…” Brooks glares at the cabin.
But obviously he’s in no state to tell us.
I turn to Brooks. “Did you keep Orion’s phone?”
Brooks fishes around in his pocket and hands it over. “We can’t let him take things like this into isolation with him. We learned that lesson the first month when he destroyed his laptop and months of research on our case.”
I peer at the screen. It flashes, asking for a four-digit pin. “What’s his password?”
Jackson won’t meet my eyes. “Your birthdate.”
My heart stutters. I key in the date, and the phone opens up. I pause, my fingers hovering over the main menu. Orion has a picture as his background. It’s a picture of me.
Or rather, a picture of the four of us. I remember the day we took it—we hiked down to the little stream that ran behind our homes with a picnic lunch. I brought my bow and a quiver of arrows, and we made a target on an old fallen log and took turns shooting.
I remember how Brooks devoured four of the brownies I made, the crumbs sticking to the stubble on his chin. I remember Jackson spinning me around so fast that my daisy-covered sundress flared out like a parachute. I remember laughing until my sides hurt, and I remember Orion leaning his phone up against a tree and taking this photo of all of us together, on probably the last happy day we shared before Brooks left on my sixteenth birthday.
Tears prick the corners of my eyes, but I owe it to Orion not to fall apart. I pull up the last thing that Orion was looking at on his phone—it’s part of the Vault’s hidden database. Orion had been hunting through a catalog of demons.
Even though the demon catalog isn’t as complete as some of the other Vault resources—they simply don’t know enough aboutdemons—I’d give my right arm for a couple of hours to riffle through it in case it has anything about the demon who took my parents.
I scroll past some pretty hellish-looking beasts—Leviathan, Ba’al, Mannon, Asmodeus, Lilith—and stop on the demon Orion highlighted.
“Mephistopheles,” I whisper.
Levi’s real name is Mephistopheles. According to the notes, he is the demon of the crossroads in this part of the world, a being who can be called upon to make a bargain, but he cannot be swindled out of collecting his due.
There is a note about how Mephistopheles has come to earth once before at the behest of a famous musician who sold his soul for fame, but when the musician refused to pay up, Mephistopheles took an innocent soul, and then another every six weeks until it became six days, six hours, and when it got down to seconds, the musician’s hometown was nearly completely wiped out.
The only way the Vault could get rid of the demon was to hunt down the musician who made the deal and hand him over.
Just like what’s happening here at the Bridgemont Hotel.
And right next to the name is the demon’s sigil—his name written out in demon-tongue.
Orion found it. He found the demon’s name!
I grin at Jackson. “Your brother is a literal genius. I can’t believe he found this. This is exactly what we need.”
