He’d been asking me the same question all morning. Over and over. Kind of like what I’d been doing to Jared.

“Glitch,” Brooklyn said from atop her perch on the end of the bed, “if you ask her that one more time, I will stab you in the head.”

“No, you won’t.” He turned back to me. “But really, what’s it feel like?”

He wanted to know what it felt like to be possessed. To have a demon living inside me. “I don’t know, Glitch. I don’t feel any different today than I did yesterday, except for the fact that now I know. Please, Jared.”

“No.” He said it with the same inflection, the same gentle tone he’d been using since I started the conversation. Apparently, he was not as easily swayed by my obnoxious repetitive behavior as my grandparents were.

“But it’s not in you. It’s in me. And I trust you completely.”

“Lorelei McAlister,” he said, his voice soft with understanding, “we can’t risk your life by trying to exorcise it. Like I said before, you’ve somehow absorbed it. It’s there, but it’s lying dormant. I’ve never seen anything like this. Most humans don’t live a month with a demon inside them.”

Wonderful. “Brooke got to be exorcised.” I crossed my arms and stuck out my tongue at her. “She gets to have all the fun.”

She laughed with me and tickled the bottom of my foot through the blankets.

“The reaper’s right,” Cameron said. He was standing at the foot of the bed, hood up, hands stuffed into pockets. I had a feeling Brooklyn had dragged him there, and Glitch seemed none too happy about it, if the parade of glares he continually cast Cameron’s way were any indication. “It would fracture your soul. Even if you survived, you would never be the same again.”

Brooke turned back to him. “My soul isn’t fractured, and Lorelei’s strong. I think she could handle it.” She winked in support.

Cameron hunched his shoulders and lowered his head. “Actually, it is.”

“What?” She raised her brows in question.

My grandparents looked at him askance as well. For all of their knowledge, even they couldn’t see what Cameron could.

After taking a draught again, he said, “Your soul. It’s fractured.”

She scooted around to him. “What do you mean?”

“That’s why it’s so different. So amazing.”

“Amazing how?” she asked, her suspicion growing.

He offered a one-shouldered shrug. “I don’t know. I’ve just never seen anything like it. It’s broken. There’s a crack down the middle and while the aura all around you is normal, a light projects out of the fissure, so bright that when you stand just right, you’re blinding.”

“So,” Glitch said, his head bowed in thought, “you’ve been checking out her crack?”

After a tense moment of silence, we burst out laughing. Well, most of us. Apparently Glitch wasn’t trying to be funny. He glared at Cameron accusingly. Naturally, Cameron glared back. Someday I would find out what had happened between the two of them, but for now, the uneasy truce between the two supernatural beings in the room was enough to tide me over.

Grandma had filled me in on the events since last night. Apparently, Jared was being hailed as the town hero after saving Tabitha’s life and thwarting an attempted kidnapping. She told me that, in fact, most of the townspeople did not know about the Sanctuary or the ancient society, which made sense because my grandfather never mentioned it in his sermons. It really was a secret, made up of believers from all over the world, about fifty of whom lived in Riley’s Switch.

My grandparents already had men fixing up the apartment behind the house for Jared, and I could tell they were getting used to his presence. My grandmother wasn’t nearly so jittery, and she’d even joked with him a couple of times. But she still insisted on calling him Your Grace.

So all this was going on while I lay waiting to be discharged from our urgent-care facility after staying all night for observation. I’d suffered a concussion at the hands of Mr. McCreepy. I almost felt bad that he’d died, but Jared said his soul no longer belonged to him anyway. He’d sold it long ago. The sheriff’s report confirmed everything, and I was beginning to see the bright side of having him in our secret club. The fact that he was in on the whole thing, even in Mr. Davis’s office that day, freaked me out. The guy could act.

Mr. Davis, on the other hand, was going to be a problem. He had not been shown the secret handshake and was apparently growing more suspicious by the moment. We would have to walk on eggshells around him for a while.

I sobered and asked Jared the other thing that I couldn’t let go of: “Do you know what happened to my parents?”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay.” I couldn’t help but be disappointed.

With a knowing smile, he added, “But I do know that if your parents were pulled into the lower dimension, Lorelei, if that’s what happened, even the gates of Hell cannot hold the righteous. They would not be there still. There are rules, remember?”

I took a deep breath, determination guiding me. “That may be true, but I have to know, Jared. I have to find them.” A quick glance toward my grandparents revealed the emergence of hope in their eyes. They were thinking the same thing. Surely, with the help of an archangel, we could find my parents, their daughter and son-in-law.