CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The last thing I remembered after the bathroom scene was my parents taking me to my room and trying to get me in bed. They wouldn’t listen to what I said about the spiders, they wouldn’t believe me when I said I didn’t make the Xs on my body. They didn’t listen and I got angry and threw the book on demonology at my dad.
It nearly hit his head, and when he picked it up and read the title, he went whiter than snow.
I’d say I didn’t mean to throw the book. That I was acting without thinking. But part of me wanted to hurt him. Bad enough so that he would see how serious this was. And I wasn’t joking.
Then Ada was at my side, trying to placate me with tears. It must have worked because a few hours later I came to again. My mother gave me several yel ow pil s, anti-anxiety drugs, and al three of them watched me as I took them, then watched me as I relaxed in bed and watched me as I fel asleep into a lucid dream world.
But now I was awake.
I was cold.
And before I pried my eyes open, I knew I wasn’t in my bed.
I was outside, on al fours, along the spine of my house.
On the roof, the fucking roof.
It was black as al hel , with the winter wind whipping around me, moving dark clouds in front of the moon and stars so I could barely see anything except the faint glow from the windows below that lit up the nearby trees.
My hands and feet rubbed against cold, rough shingles.
It didn’t feel like any of this was real. How could it this be real? I was on the roof!
Why was I up here?
Was this another dream? If I jumped off the edge of my house, would I fal like I fel into the river? Fal and then wake up in Maximus’s bed? Or would it hurt? Would I die?
I tried to stand up but I teetered to the side. My balance was off. The pil s would do that.
I crouched low to the roof and looked around, keeping my fingertips on the shingles for security. There was only one way to get up here and it was the only way down. I slowly crept toward the western edge, taking quiet steps in my bare feet, so careful not to alert anyone below. Once I got to the edge it sloped off a bit and eventual y came close to a lower part of the roof that was below my bedroom window. There I could sneak along and get back inside without anybody knowing.
I was near the edge and about to make my way down when I heard something THUMP behind me, like a giant bird just landed from out of the sky.
I didn’t want to turn around. Up until that moment, I had been happy just going with the motions. I wasn’t panicking.
Sure, I was blacking out and ending up on the roof of al places, a place where I could fal off and die, a place where some part of me wanted to go and I didn’t know why, or even worse, a place I had been summoned to. But if I didn’t think about it, if I kept it at the back of my mind and treated al of this like just another dream, maybe I wouldn’t lose my mind. Maybe I could just shrug it off.
But the thump changed everything.
Because I wasn’t afraid before. I wouldn’t let myself be.
And now I was terrified.
I wasn’t alone on the roof. I was up there with something that wanted me there. This was part of the deal al along.
And this fear, the fright that shattered my nerves and made my tongue buzz like metal, it was more real than any dream. Sometimes it was only the strongest, most palpable terror that real y made you feel alive.
I paused, keeping my hands and feet strong and balanced against the roof, and turned my head to face the visitor.
At the other end of the house, lit up by the spotlight-like moon that pierced through a thin cloud, was a… thing.
An infant-sized creature. Black as coal with two legs and two arms. And two leathery wings that sprouted from its furry back. Stormy red eyes. Burnished teeth. A wet, gurgling laugh.
I heard a voice inside my head. A most terrible, horrific, depraved voice. A voice that sounded like it was washed with bones and lit with smoke and fire. It was beyond deep and sounded a mil ion years old, like it had crawled out of the bowels of the earth, before the first insects crawled on its shores.
Jump, it said. Its words reverberated in my head, bouncing around my skul .
My mouth dropped open and I grew increasingly slack, like someone had applied a paralyzing move to my neck.
Jump.
Jump before I make you.
It didn’t give me much time.
Like a shot, the beastly thing sprang forward, running on two legs first, then al fours, while wild wings flapped. The tips of each wing were armed with what looked like a silver oversized bee stinger and it shone fiercely in the moonlight.
I screamed, then found the strength and agility to turn and leap onto the area below.
I hit the shingles hard. They slid out from under me and I was sliding down the sandpapery slope, my window out of reach. I dug my fingers in and kicked with my feet, trying to stop my descent, until I was almost al off, my armpits digging into the gutter that moaned and creaked beneath my weight.
My bedroom window was slammed open and Ada was first on the scene.
“Perry!” she shrieked when she saw me hanging below, as she leaned out the window.
“Help me!” I cried out, trying to lift myself up and onto the roof as much as I could. My arms and abs strained ferociously under the pressure.