The quaint fishing village I was romanticizing just a few minutes ago has turned dark and sinister as we enter the back alleys. Gone are the cute kids running around, the glowing lights, and the happy faces. The alleys are like a labyrinth of shadows and corridors as we give chase.
“Where is it?” Lucio cries. “Can you still see it?”
“There!” I point toward the creature as it ducks around a corner. We run after it, not pausing to consider whether chasing a nightmarish demon down a dark alley is actually a good idea. Or at least I’m not thinking about it; maybe Lucio is. But I doubt it. He’s not slowing down either.
As we get closer, the demon comes into focus. It’s a dark color but not black, more like the color of dark, rusty water. It runs on all fours like a goat, complete with hooves, but it sprints along the cobblestone alleys with ease. A real goat would slip and slide across a surface like this.
We round another blind corner. We are getting closer to it. I don’t stop to think it might just be letting us get close, leading us somewhere. Suddenly a shabbily dressed man stumbles out of one of the shadows and crashes into Lucio, barely missing me as well. Lucio and the man fall to the ground, and the man groans in pain. I don’t look back because I don’t want the demon to hide in one of the shadows while I’m not looking.
It takes a sharp left and enters a room off the alley. I slow down and cautiously look inside. The room is covered in pale green tile, and mold is growing in the corners and on the ceiling. An old, dirty fluorescent light hangs from the ceiling, flickering over a few pieces of garbage on the floor.
We’re not alone. A woman sits in the middle of the room. She looks exhausted and her face has that same blank stare I sometimes saw on Mom’s face when the water demon possessed her.
I can see the demon clearly now. Its fur seems to be soaking wet, but I don’t think it’s sweat or water because it reeks like it’s been doused in gasoline. It has a short, pointed tail and horns that twist up behind its face, which is more human than goat, although its eyes glow yellow. It takes one look at me and leaps toward the woman.
She opens her mouth to a disturbingly unnatural size and easily swallows the demon’s head. The rest of its body flails about, forcing itself inside this woman, kicking off the sickly green tile below it. First the front legs and eventually the back legs, so only the tip of the tail is hanging out of her mouth. She turns her focus on me, smiling after she consumes it.
Lucio bounds into the room. “Where’d it go?!” He pants heavily. All I can do is point at the woman. She stands and walks toward us. I reach for the knife in my back pocket, only it’s not there.
The woman’s grin grows larger as she approaches us. Maybe this was a trap. We need to run.
“Run,” I whisper loudly, backing into the alley. I pull Lucio’s arm, and in an instant we’re going as fast as we can. Only we’re not the ones giving chase this time. Much to my surprise, the possessed woman doesn’t follow us for long, though. Instead, she stops and laughs, a high-pitched cackle that echoes through the narrow walls of the town’s back alleys and makes my skin crawl.
We run through the maze of alleyways at top speed. As we round one of the corners I catch a glimpse of a man lurking in the shadows, wearing a long black coat and black hat, surrounded by darkness.
It doesn’t take us long to kick-start Clementine awake. We jump on, and Lucio gases it. Soon we’re climbing the hill we descended earlier. I hang onto Lucio as I look back at the town—not so cute and peaceful anymore.
Things don’t calm down much when we get back to campus. Before Lucio can even bring us to a full stop, Aidan bursts out of a stucco building directly across the courtyard from the mansion. I can tell Lucio’s eager to fill Aidan in on what happened, but Aidan doesn’t want to listen right now. Instead, he scolds Lucio for taking me off campus. I hear phrases like You know it’s not safe and Do I need to remind you what’s at stake? Lucio argues that we stayed on Llevar la Luz land, but my brain tunes out most of it because it’s still stuck on what happened back at the town, on that poor man the demon killed, on the sound of that horrible laugh as we ran away, and on the man in black. Why did he look so familiar? Was that the same man I saw at the airport back in Washington?
The sound of Lucio’s voice saying my name breaks through the thoughts racing around my brain. “Sunshine, you have to tell him.” I look up and see Aidan and Lucio staring back at me.
“Is it true?” Aidan asks.
“Is what true?”
“You can see spirits, both light and dark?”