“Guys… this is a lot bigger than a wine cabinet.”
Priest and Jared walked toward me, Priest’s eyes glued to his EMF. “Hopefully, whatever’s living in there isn’t. The needle’s going crazy.”
Jared’s eyes locked on mine, and my heart sped up. Until his expression changed, and I realized he wasn’t looking at me anymore.
He was looking behind me.
“Kennedy, move!” he shouted.
A rush of cold air burst from the box, knocking me over. It swept past me and stopped in front of Alara—the torso of a man with bare milk-white skin marred by black bruises. But this thing wasn’t a man. Its head was shaved and the vertebrae in its spinal column strained against the skin as if it was a size too small.
But where the bones ended, so did the human form—and its waist disappeared into a thick blur of white smoke.
I forced my legs to move, stumbling over the clutter.
The dybbuk whipped around, following the sound. I pressed my hand against my mouth, stifling a scream as I stared into the blackened recesses where its eyes should’ve been.
It reached for Alara. Her body rose off the floor as if the dybbuk was using some kind of telekinetic power to control it. She screamed, and the force slammed her against the wall. Alara’s head banged against the concrete, and she slid to the floor without a sound.
Jared ran toward her. The dybbuk ripped him off his feet, using the same supernatural power that had allowed it to lift Alara without touching her, and hurled him into the metal shelves.
“Screw this.” Lukas aimed and fired round after round of liquid salt. The bullets passed right through the dybbuk’s pale torso and dropped to the floor.
I scrambled around the edge of the room toward Alara. She had managed to sit up, but she was still disoriented when I reached her.
“Are you okay?”
“It’s so strong.” Panic clung to her voice—the fearless girl I found so intimidating suddenly replaced by one as vulnerable as the rest of us.
Lukas and Priest knelt next to Jared, who lay on the floor amid a sea of severed doll limbs.
He’s not moving.
There was only one way to help him. “Alara, how do we stop it?”
She stared at me blankly.
I grabbed her shoulders. “How do we destroy it?”
The dybbuk laughed, and the menacing sound echoed through the room.
It focused on Lukas and Priest, and their bodies rose in the air simultaneously. They hovered above the floor for a moment before their backs smacked against the wall, halfway between the floor and the ceiling. Their bodies slid the rest of the way up the wall, shoulders and elbows cracking against the corners of the metal shelves.
“Alara, tell me what to do,” I pleaded.
Her eyes darted from the dybbuk back to me. “We have to bind that thing inside the cabinet and burn it.”
“How?”
Alara blinked hard. “A binding symbol.”
“Like the one from your journal?” I remembered it perfectly.
She nodded. “The Wall is the easiest. But I can’t draw it without my journal, and it won’t bind that thing unless the symbol looks exactly the same.”
Boxes crashed to the floor as Lukas dropped onto the concrete not far from where his brother’s body lay, crumpled unconscious. Lukas struggled to sit up, but he looked unsteady.
“Screw you.” Priest thrashed wildly, still pinned halfway up the wall.
The dybbuk threw its pale head back and demonic laughter filled the air like a thousand pins pricking my skin.
“I can do it,” I said automatically. “I remember what it looks like.”
Alara shook her head. “If you make a mistake—”
The symbol formed in my mind as clearly as if I was still staring at the page. “I have a photographic memory. I won’t make a mistake.”
“You’re serious?”
I nodded. “Completely.”
Alara slid the black marker out of her tool belt and handed it to me. “I’m going to distract it, but you’ll have to work fast. Then I’ll find a way to lure it into the box.”
The dybbuk stepped in front of the wall where Priest was pinned. It let Priest fall and jerked his body back and forth across the floor like a rag doll without so much as a touch.
I ran for the cabinet.
I stepped inside and my eyes burned from the stench of ammonia. The snake’s open mouth was only inches away from me, shards of mirror forming perfect fangs. And something else—two round pieces of green glass edged in silver stared back from the centers of its eyes.
Tiny splinters pushed their way underneath my nails as I worked one free. In the dim light, it looked exactly like the disk from inside the doll. Unfortunately, so did the other one. I slipped them both in my pocket and glanced behind me.
Alara opened the plastic bottle of holy water holstered on her belt, and dumped it over her head.
This was her plan?
I closed the cabinet door, pitching myself into darkness. Within seconds, panic set in and it felt like I was five years old again, hiding in the tiny crawl space in my mother’s closet. Waiting for her to come back.