Pandemonium

side, unable to move. She was only two feet away from him, her back to him, and still he couldn’t move.

He must have made a noise. The little girl glanced at him over her shoulder. She frowned. The syringe slipped from his fingers and clattered away.

The girl turned her attention back to Frederick and Dr. Wolff. “I just want to help her,” the girl said. She reached out her hand. “But mean people are always stopping me.”

Suddenly the girl squealed in pain. She wheeled around, turned again, as if the needle were still stuck in her behind. “What did you do?” the girl said.

Margarete held the syringe between two fingers like a cigar. “Nighty night,” she said.

The demon stumbled, and Frederick caught her before her head struck the ground.

“Oh my goodness,” Dr. Randolph said. “She was going to kill us. Kill us all.”

Frederick made a face. “She wasn’t going to go after you.” He looked at Dr. Wolff. “But you, Doctor. I didn’t like the way she was talking. If she comes for you—”

“Summoned or not, the god will be there,” Dr. Wolff said. “Now, before she wakes up, Margarete?”

“Already on it,” Margarete said, and snipped the air with a pair of scissors. She kneeled beside the unconscious girl, lifted up one of the long, springy curls, and clipped it off near the base of the skull.

“Is that necessary?” Dr. Randolph asked.

Margarete smiled up at him. “The Little Angel has a thing about hair. Won’t go anywhere without it.”

“Ah,” Dr. Randolph said, though he wasn’t sure he understood. “What’s going to happen to her?”

“First we try to find her parents,” Dr. Wolff said. “And then the hard work begins.”

11

I woke to darkness and thumping bass and synthesized strings: an eighties funk power ballad. The male falsetto had to be Prince—

nothing compares to Prince—but I didn’t recognize the song. The woman’s voice singing along with the recording was breathy and keening at the same time, threatening at any moment to veer off key. The thing in my head was quiet. Still there, though: it breathed warily, an animal crouched in the corner of a dark room. I lay there inhaling the powdery, foreign scents of an unknown bed. I had no idea how long I’d slept. It’d been almost 2 a.m. before I’d gotten out of the hospital—the nurses hadn’t wanted to let me check out, but O’Connell was formidable. I’d fallen asleep only minutes after getting into her truck, and had woken up briefly to navigate through a series of small rooms. She’d insisted I sleep here, rather than on the couch, and I hadn’t argued.

There was a window above me on the curved wall to my right, but it was dark on the other side—which meant that the window looked out on another room, or that it was still night, or worse, night again—

and the deep ache in my arms and legs told me I’d been sleeping too long in one position.