I sit up suddenly, startling Aaron back. He looks at me with a question in his eyes.

“We need some weed,” I blurt, sliding out from under him and off the bed. When I open the door, I find Oscar standing there. “Peeping in on us, huh, perv?”

He just stares right back at me and then presses his forearms to either side of the doorjamb.

“You and I must exist in different realities,” Oscar says mildly, his new white glasses parked on his face as he stares down at me. “Where on earth would you get an idea as stupid as that? No, I’m actually here to let you know that your little sister was having a nightmare. She woke up screaming.” Oscar steps back before I get a chance to shove him out of the way, grabbing my arm in a hard grip at the last second and yanking me into him. “A shirt might be nice,” he purrs, and then he’s shoving one over my head and pushing me in the center of my back so that I stumble.

As soon as I have the shirt pulled on, I look back at him and find that his gaze is liquid, like molten silver. My nostrils flare and I find myself exhaling sharply. There might be demons in this house, but they aren’t Kali Rose-Kennedy.

“Go. I’ll watch over sweet, little Aaron for you while you’re gone.” Oscar stares at me until I turn and leave, pounding up the stairs to find Hael in the girls’ room. He’s stroking Heather’s hair back as she lies there with a cool compress on her forehead. She’s so enraptured by whatever it is that he’s saying that she barely notices when I come in.

“Bernie,” she finally says as I step up next to the bed and Hael lifts his head to look at me. As soon as he sees me, the genuine smile on his lips turns into something dark and wicked. “Hael was telling me about his mom’s favorite recipe. It’s got crawdads in it.”

“That’s fantastic,” I say, adjusting the sagging waistband of my borrowed boxers. I feel obscene, standing before my sister like this. Doesn’t matter. I crouch down beside her bed, pulling in a deep breath and trying my best to postpone the rush of hormones in my system. “I hear you had a nightmare?”

Hael and I look at each other, but he doesn’t say anything, leaving it to Heather to fill in the blanks.

“I miss Mom and Dad a little,” she says, but with utmost hesitancy. She’s afraid I’m going to be mad at her for that. But I’m not. I can’t be. Even when you’re supposed to hate someone, sometimes the few good memories you have get in the way. It’s not easy to despise someone you once loved. Or feel like you’re supposed to love, even. The only name left on my list is Pamela, and that terrifies me.

Of the seven people I sicced Havoc on … four of them are dead. Two of them are maimed. Only one is left standing, as whole as she was when this started. I bite my lip.

“I know you said Dad isn’t safe, but … he’s fun to be around.” He was. Sometimes. Pedophiles can be charming; it’s part of their ruse. I give her nothing but a sympathetic smile in return. “And Mom has her good days.” She sounds so much older than eight. That’s a failure on my part. I should’ve done a better job protecting her.

“Mom and … Neil,” I start, because he isn’t my dad. Never was. I can only thank the stars that Penelope and I didn’t share DNA with that monster. Glancing from Heather to Hael, I see that he has no more idea how to handle this than I do. He’s an only child, that motherfucker. Then again, despite the heartache and the worry, I wouldn’t trade having a sister for anything. There’s something special about that bond, something you can’t possibly understand unless you have a sister of your own. “We’re not going to see them for a little while. Was that what the dream was about?”

Heather shakes her head at me, curling her fingers around the edge of the blanket and sinking into the pillow just a little further. Her eyes peek out at me from beneath the old Star Wars blanket that’s so faded, it must’ve belonged to Aaron’s mom or dad as a teen.

“In my dream, you were bleeding from the mouth.” Heather pauses as my lips part in surprise. How the fuck do I respond to that one? How do I tell my sister what she needs to hear, reassure her that I’ll be okay? Even though that’s probably an awful, awful lie. “Bernie, in my dream, you were dead.”

“It’s just the dream of a stressed-out kiddo,” Hael says when I lean against the wall in the hallway, waiting for him to close the girls’ bedroom door carefully behind him. He puts his ass against it and lights up a joint. He puffs it twice and passes it my way. I stare at the damn thing in my fingers for a minute before I take a drag. “Don’t sweat it.”

“The GMP,” I start, thinking of the dead gang members back in the woods. “I want to know everything there is to know.”

Hael sighs and shakes his head.

“Not tonight, Blackbird. You need to fucking rest.” Hael pushes up off the door and comes to stand in front of me, lifting the edge of the t-shirt so he can see the stab wound in my side. It could’ve easily killed me, if Kali had moved the blade an inch in any direction. Isn’t that funny, how you can have the shittiest luck in the world until you just don’t? “It’s winter break, yeah? Try to lean into it. We’ll deal with the GMP, but you know as well as I do that you cut the head off the zombie to keep it down.”

“Ophelia,” I breathe with a sigh as Hael drops my shirt back in place and takes the joint from me again. He smokes it for a second, and then laughs in that loud, raucous way of his. His red hair looks like blood against the beige of the hallway walls and my heart constricts painfully in my chest.

“Ophelia,” Hael agrees, reaching up to play with my hair. I want to tell him that I’m going to dye it the same color as his, but then I look into his brown eyes and I’m falling so hard and so fast that I can’t even remember what I was going to say. When I swallow, I swear I can taste honey and almonds on my tongue.

The sound of Victor’s boots coming up the stairs draws both our attention.

I can always tell it’s him in the house because he’s either silent as a mouse or, when he wants you to know he’s coming, has the loudest footsteps in the Pacific Northwest.

“Heather okay?” he asks, and I nod, offering him the joint. He comes up the last two steps, towering over me with his six-foot-five frame. Many men will try to become Vic. They’ll see him and they’ll think they can copy his vibe, that they can be more vicious or more brutal and somehow they’ll encompass that very unnamable thing that is Victor Channing. It’ll never happen.

He smokes the remainder of the joint, but Hael’s already moved into the boys’ room and come out with a glass pipe. He loads up some flower and lights the bowl.

“She’s fine,” I say finally, knowing my response is incredibly delayed. I take the pipe from Hael. Everything is better when you’re high. Food. Music. Sex. I’m smoking specifically for the last reason on the list. Oh, and because I hurt. All over, heart and body and soul. So bad that I’m seeing ghosts that aren’t real.

My eyes slide over to Victor. Looking at him, I feel like I should have every confidence that life is going to work out. That’s how he stares back at me, how he reacted when Aaron was gone.