By car, it would take an hour—or more, during rush hour—via the 26, but Azazel flew the distance in less than thirty minutes.
He touched down in the yard behind a house in the craftsman-style so typical for the region. It wasn’t a big house...but still larger than my mom’s bungalow. Familiar, old resentment stung me. I’d grown up in a house like that, when I thought we were a normal, happy family. Before I found out that the people closest to you can lie to your face for years and years, keeping secrets that are ticking bombs.
Clenching my ghostly fists at the poisonous bite of old anger and hurt, I took the steps to the back porch and walked right through the closed door into the kitchen. I swept my gaze through the room, noted the little signs of family life strewn about the surfaces—a used plate on the table, a school book—math—on the countertop, notes and photos on the fridge.
Pulled by inevitable, self-destructive curiosity despite myself, I stepped up to the refrigerator and took a closer look at the pics pinned there with magnets. Two girls laughed from most of them, at different ages, some photos showing them as toddlers, some newer ones revealing that they were now teenagers.
Their hair was lighter than my dark brown, but their eyes...hazel like mine. Like my father’s.
I’d never seen my half-sisters.
In the initial chaos after the separation and divorce, there was no room for a weird kind of family meeting, and in the years that followed, I was determined to ignore my father’s repeated attempts at contact, and to pretend I had no blood relatives on my dad’s side at all.
Seeing them now, even if only in photos, was like a knife to the heart.
They looked like me, and yet not.
The soft sound of the door opening and closing behind me shook me out of my contemplation of the most painful kind of mirror I’d ever faced. Azazel’s energy brushed my back, his presence like a bulwark of calm in the roughening sea of turmoil threatening to capsize me.
A female voice came from somewhere toward the front of the house. Dread filling my soul, I stepped out of the kitchen and followed the short hallway to the living room. My gaze snagged on the woman sitting on the couch—blond, in her forties maybe, I immediately knew her to be Olivia, my dad’s second wife. Not just from the one photo on the fridge that showed her and the girls, but from how her features were reflected in her daughters’ faces...while those same faces still managed to be eerily similar to my own.
Dressed in black jeans and a black sweater, she held her phone to her ear and took notes on a pad.
“Yes,” she said, her voice soft. “And how much for the larger wreath?” She wrote something down. “Okay. What’s the word limit for that one?” Again, she scribbled a note. “Uh-huh. When do you need the text finalized?” Another note. “Thank you. I’ll be in touch.”
She hung up, laid the phone on the table and rubbed her eyes.
Something loomed over me, ice-cold and dark, like a giant wave in a stormy sea, building, building, building so high that it blocked out the sky.
“Megan,” Olivia called and rose from the couch. “Emma.”
Footsteps thundered on the stairs behind me, and I stepped aside just as a teenage girl walked past me into the living room.
“Em’s not coming,” she said.
“Did she find something in her closet?”
“No.”
Olivia sighed then raised her voice and said, “If you’re not down in a minute, we’re leaving without you, and I’ll pick a dress for you, and you’ll wear it so help me God.”
“No, I won’t!” came the shouted reply from upstairs.
“Yes, you will!” Olivia yelled back. “I’ll not have you wear jeans and T-shirt to your father’s funeral!”
The wave crested.
I trembled, trembled, a tiny speck in a furious sea of darkness as the ice-cold water crashed down with a roar, cutting off light and sound and warmth, and dragged me under.
Chapter 16
When I resurfaced, I was lying on the bed in my new suite. I had no recollection of Azazel taking me back to Hell. Of reconnecting my soul with my body. I wasn’t really there, mentally.
Staring at the gloomy ceiling, I drifted in and out of sleep. I was dimly aware of something big and furry snuggling up to me with a whine. Of someone talking to me. Azazel? Azmodea? I didn’t have the presence of mind