something kicked in my stomach, and my heart launched into hyperspeed. Blood caked her swollen and bruised face, her hair a rat’s nest. My dad held a tight fistful of hair, and his other hand was clamped around her throat. He wrenched her around to look at me, his face twisted with violence and a look so savage it took me a moment to recognize him. My mom’s eyes were wide and wild with terror and pain.
“Dad?” I choked, my eyes shifting from his to my mom’s and back. “What are you doing?”
“Your daddy’s been dead a long time, sweetheart.” He jerked my mother to get a better grip on her. His lips curled into a smile too sinister to be human, and then he began to change. His fingernails grew into talons that dug into my mom’s tender skin until more blood popped and she squirmed. Four pairs of fangs slid from his smile, and spikes tore through the back of his shirt, casting monstrous shadows across the floor in the porch light pouring in from behind him. “I should know. I tore out his rib cage myself.”
“Who are you?” I breathed, the words struggling to escape as if claws were around my own throat. Will’s words echoed in my mind: “If you come across a vir, you may not know what he is until it’s too late. They’ll shape-shift to take the form of a human in order to infiltrate.”
“That’s not very important. But it’s been fun. Good times, kid. Sorry for calling you a slut.” He looked up at the ceiling thoughtfully. “Actually, no. I meant that.”
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. I could only stare at the reaper, at the terror and disorientation on my mother’s face. I couldn’t move.
“What? How? Why?” he gasped in a mocking tone. “Speechless, are we, Ellie?”
The way he said my name felt so invasive. The demonic only called me the Preliator. But this one knew me. Lived with me. With my mother.
He took his hand off my mother’s throat and pulled the collar of his shirt down to reveal a strange tattoo over his heart, a circle with an Enochian symbol within it. “This is what you’re wondering. The magic is old, so ancient, that only Bastian could have learned of it. It lets me walk in the sun without harm. You know, all those little complications that would have given me away. The spell was difficult, but he pulled it off. You never knew a thing, did you? I was good, so good.”
He jerked my mother’s head back and met her wild, frightened eyes. “By the way, I didn’t get that tattoo at your cousin’s bachelor party. I didn’t even go to that. You’re a moron, Diane.”
She whimpered and turned her face away from his. He looked back at me and grinned a mouthful of fangs.
“Anyway, Bastian sends his affection,” the reaper crooned in a malicious voice, his face no longer anything like my father’s, but belonging to an entirely different creature. “And he told me to leave a little something for you. Let’s say it’s a belated seventeenth birthday gift.”
He snapped my mother’s neck. She hit the floor with a dry, cold thud. Dead.
My pulse flooded my ears, drowning out the reaper’s next words. I stared at my mother—her body—at his feet. Fire crackled from my fingers and toes, devouring my body to my core, burning away like the wick of a stick of dynamite. The edges of my eyes spun and filled with white, and my power throbbed. Visions came to me, the missing pieces belonging to thousands of years of memories, as Gabriel’s presence and power overwhelmed me. The darkness churned and exploded, taking me with it. I was gone, and all that was left of me was rage.
I launched myself at the reaper, pushing off the floor with my toes, my power detonating behind me, demolishing the wall and shattering the tile floor. The reaper was too slow for me. I swung my elbow across my chest and pounded the bone into his skull. He crumpled to his knees. I kicked the back of his head and his palms hit the floor. He tried to rise, but my power erupted into his face, sending him flying across the foyer and crashing into the staircase. Wood splintered and exploded, the cloud of dust almost blinding. The reaper staggered to his feet, stumbling down the steps. I stepped up to him, the torrent of rage swallowing me and