“You just recalibrate the thermometer and put a heating pad on your face before Nurse Rizzo gets there.”

I laughed softly.

“I did it too much one time, and it said I had a temperature of 112. Apparently I should have been dead. Or in a coma.”

“See?” I said, grinning at her. “Brave. You risked a lot to stay here with your brother.”

“Not really.” Her breath hitched in her chest.

“Can I see him? Like, incognito-style?”

“You mean, can I sneak you in to see him?”

“Yes.”

Her expression morphed into one of determination. She nodded, told me to go to the bathroom and wait for her there.

“I’ll be right here. Don’t get into trouble for this. I can come up with all kinds of reasons to be lost in the wrong area of the building.”

She hurried off. I thought about using the facilities since it was so close, but not knowing how long she’d be, I decided to hold it.

“Ready?” she asked about thirty seconds later.

I nodded. She quickly led me down one hall and then another, and I no longer thought I would need to make up an excuse that I got lost. I really was lost. My sense of direction was like my sense of moderation. Nonexistent.

“In here,” she said, slipping inside a darkened room.

There were six beds total, and three of them were occupied.

“There,” she said, pointing, but she needn’t have bothered. I spotted her brother the second we stepped inside the room.

We walked quietly toward him, but before we got to his bed, he sat up and looked at us. At me. And my fears were confirmed.

A demon sat inside him. Twelve feet tall even though the boy was no taller than five. But as Reyes had said, the rules of this world did not apply. It fit. Somehow the demon, all black scales and razor-sharp teeth, fit into his small body. They always fit. Fuckers.

I sat on the cot beside him, but the boy only stared at me, his gaze empty. He had the same incredible eye color as his sister, his large irises smoky and shimmering and feverishly bright.

“Hugo, what’s wrong?” Malaya asked her brother.

“You’re right, love,” I said to her. I took her hand into mine. “He has the curse, but I can get it out of him.”

She threw her free hand over her mouth.

“You’ll have to trust me, okay?”

She nodded.

“I’m going to talk to the curse inside him. Whatever I say, and I might be mean, is not meant for your brother.” I looked back at Hugo, at the demon inside him, and placed her hand on her lap. She sat on the next cot over, gripping the edge of the mattress, her knuckles white. He was probably the only real family she had.

“You are not being very nice, are you?” I asked the creature.

One corner of the boy’s mouth slid up.

I shifted a little farther onto the otherworld.

“I can snap its neck,” it said through the boy, but it was speaking Aramaic. Though Malaya had no idea what he said, I felt her still.

I spoke back in the same language. “Leave now and never come back, and perhaps I’ll let you live.”

“You leave,” it said as though this were a game. “And perhaps we’ll let you live. Though I wouldn’t count on it.” It wasn’t stupid like most of them. It knew the moment it left the protection of the boy’s body it wouldn’t stand a chance. I hadn’t actually expected it to. I just took the opportunity to lower my hand toward the ground and wait until Artemis rose up into it.

She scurried under the bed and took up position. She’d bared her teeth, yet stood completely silent behind him, ready to attack. The boy tilted his head, wondering what I was up to, when I froze time and nodded. Artemis jumped through the boy’s chest and dragged out the demon.

It was frozen in time at first, stiff and incoherent as it oozed out into the open, but the second my light hit its skin, it snapped to the current time zone and started to shriek and writhe in her jaws. It bucked and lunged forward to bite me, its teeth like rows of needles, razor sharp and deadly. It missed. Then it threw its massive head back, bending its spine so far I could hear it crack. Or that could have been Artemis’s bite.

“Why?” I asked it.

It had started to dissolve. To dissipate. To scatter into thin air.

“Why would you do this?”

With one last effort, it looked at me again and said, “To live while we wait. There are so many more in the shadows.”

“What?” I asked, but it lost its hold and evaporated like ashes on the wind. “Wait for what?”