Chapter 1
THE DRAWER
My phone buzzed on the granite countertop. Dani.
“Hey, since you’re over there, can you see if Mom’s old KitchenAid is in the pantry? I need it for the bake sale on Tuesday. Also, did you call the plumber about the leak in my guest bath?”
I stared at a pile of rusted whisks. “I’m a little busy, Dani. And no. Call your own plumber.”
“You’re so much better at talking to contractors,” she said breezily, the voice of someone who hadn’t touched a cardboard box in a decade. “Just check for the mixer. Thanks, love you!”
She ended the call before I could remind her I had a job, a mortgage, and a spine that was currently filing a grievance.
That was the pattern. A pipe burst, a house needed selling, and I was the one holding the clipboard.
Thirty-eight years old, and my entire personality was “available for logistics.”
I shoved my phone in my back pocket and moved to the hallway linen closet, digging past moth-eaten blankets until I hit a built-in drawer.
The wood groaned in protest, matching my knees.
I pulled it open too hard, and childhood debris slid forward: a fossilized glue stick, a summer camp lanyard, an assortment of broken pencils, and something plastic and egg-shaped.
I pulled it out. My Tamagotchi. Its screen was scratched and the buttons worn down to gray nubs, but the purple casing was still whole.
I remembered the exact Tuesday in sixth grade I decided I was too old for it.
Sarah Miller had called it a baby toy at lunch, so when I got home after school, I’d tucked it into the drawer and hadn’t looked back.
I’d let it starve in the dark because I wanted to be the kind of girl who didn’t care about digital pets.
Twenty-seven years later, the guilt gnawed at me.
The plastic was warm against my palm. It shouldn’t have been possible. No battery could still hold a charge after twenty-seven years. But the casing hummed, faint and rhythmic, less like electronics and more like a pulse. I thumbed the middle button out of pure habit.
A jagged red line cut across the LCD. The toy didn’t beep.
It shrieked a raw, grinding sound that found every filling in my molars.
Smoke that smelled like burnt sugar curled out of the battery compartment.
I tried to drop it, but my hand wouldn’t obey.
The plastic clung to my palm like a magnet clinging to the fridge door.
The air in the hallway went still. The screaming from the device climbed and climbed and then cut off, the way a call drops when you lose signal mid-sentence.
A shadow spilled out from the open drawer and crawled up the wall, longer than the drawer, longer than the hallway had any business allowing.
The shadow twisted and morphed until a man was standing where there hadn’t been one ten seconds ago.
My ears rang. The hallway tilted half an inch to the left and stayed there. Every warning I’d ever absorbed about strangers and empty houses and doors that shouldn’t open fired at once, a full-body klaxon with nowhere useful to send the alarm.
Oh, fuck.
I didn’t scream. I’d like that on the record for whoever eventually writes my obituary.
What I did do was drop the flashlight I’d been holding in my other hand and take a step back so fast, hitting the wall and knocking the framed 1994 Sears portrait of my parents crooked.
My free hand found the first thing on the shelf that felt like it might do damage, which turned out to be a rolling pin.
I held it up like a baseball bat, ready to defend myself.
He was tall, dressed in a charcoal gray suit that cost more than my car.
The suit was so stiffly pressed, it looked like he’d stepped off an elevator instead of materialized out of a linen closet.
He held a leatherbound book in one hand and a pen in the other, and the overall effect was less nightmare and more a man about to tell me I’d miscalculated a deduction. Somehow that was worse.
“Nora Elizabeth Hadley?” His voice was dry and even, entirely too calm for someone who had just walked out of a wall.
“Get out.” It came out steadier than I felt, which I credited to eleven years of telling contractors no over the phone. “I don’t know how the hell you got in here, but I have a rolling pin, and a neighbor with a shotgun, and I will use both.”
He looked at the rolling pin, raising one eyebrow. Something crossed his face, there and gone before I could decipher it, and he didn’t offer to explain it. “You won’t need either. Statistically, your odds of connecting with that are somewhere around six percent, and even then—”
“Who are you.” Not a question. A demand, in the same tone I used on realtors who tried to lowball us on my parents’ house.
My heart was slamming so hard against my ribs I could feel every thud in my teeth.
Some very small, very loud part of my brain was already composing the missing-persons flyer, while a much larger, much more tired part of it was furious that today, of every day this month, was the day this happened.
“Vassago,” he said with more than a little boredom in his tone.
“Infernal Familiar Welfare Board. I’m here regarding Asset 774-Purple.
” A small nod toward the device fused to my palm and pulsing a low, ugly red.
“There has been a significant breach in the custodial care agreement. Specifically, a twenty-seven-year period of total abandonment.”
Infernal. The word landed a full second after everything else, and my brain, apparently more interested in taxonomy than in staying alive, ran with the idea without asking permission: the shadow that had crawled up my wall like it owned the place, a suit that hadn’t so much as wrinkled walking out of a linen closet, an entire human being who clearly hadn’t used the door.
Add it up and there was only one answer.
There was a demon standing in the hallway.
I looked at the rolling pin, still raised, still doing exactly nothing. I looked at him. I looked at the Tamagotchi, which throbbed once like it was following the conversation.
“Okay,” I said. “I need a second. This isn’t... I’m not on anything, if that’s relevant. I haven’t slept great but I am not on anything, so if this is a stroke, somebody call 911 for me, and if this is a joke, I swear to God I will end Evan.”
“I understand this is disorienting. Most guardians require a moment.”
“Guardians.” I grabbed onto the word like it might explain something. “I’m not. Guardian of what? It’s a toy. It’s a plastic egg from 1999.”
He crossed the hallway and crouched to retrieve the flashlight I’d dropped.
He set it upright on the shelf, perfectly balanced, and in the specific, useless way a brain focuses on the wrong detail when it can’t handle the big one, I noticed he’d left no footprints in the dust I’d been stirring up all day. None.
That did more to me than the shadow, or the shriek, or the smoke.
“You won’t find a rational explanation standing in this hallway,” Vassago said, not unkindly.
“I could walk you through the metaphysics. I could also let you finish deciding whether to swing that rolling pin. Either way, the facts don’t change: you are Nora Elizabeth Hadley, you formed a primary bond with Asset 774-Purple in 1999, and the bond just reactivated because you pressed a button out of habit. ”
“You keep saying ‘asset.’ Is the toy the demon? You are a demon, right? I need full sentences. I’ve had a very long day.”
A muscle in his jaw moved, almost a smile, gone before it could form fully.
“I’m the auditor. The Board employs demons in administrative roles.
Someone has to process the paperwork, and it’s historically beneath the interest of anything more senior.
Sparkle-Cloud”—he glanced down at the pulsing purple thing glued to my hand—“is a familiar. An infernal creature bonded to a human host through sustained emotional attachment. You attached. Then you stopped. The Board calls that neglect.”
I opened my mouth to argue and nothing came out.
My legs, apparently, had decided this was a sitting-down conversation, because I found myself lowering onto the overturned laundry basket without choosing to.
The rolling pin stayed in my grip. It felt stupid there now, but I wasn’t ready to put it down.
“I was eleven,” I said defensively. “You can’t audit an eleven-year-old.”
“You are no longer eleven,” Vassago said, checking a silver watch on his wrist like this whole conversation was cutting into his schedule.
“And the asset has just reactivated. By touching that button, you formally reopened the file. Which means, per Section Two of the Welfare Act, I am now your court-appointed co-guardian for the duration of the rehabilitation period.”
“I never agreed to this. I would remember agreeing to something like this.”
“You signed a contract in blood at age eleven on a playground during recess. The Board doesn’t require you to remember agreeing. Only that you did.”
“That’s...” I stopped, because there was no version of that sentence that ended anywhere good.
I looked down at my hand instead. The device had stopped pulsing red and gone to a duller, more contemplative orange, like it was waiting to see how I’d react before deciding whether to be furious about it.
“This is insane. This is actually insane. People don’t just...
Demons don’t just show up in linen closets over kids’ toys! ”
“They do when the toy is worth years of accrued infernal interest.” He said it the way an accountant might mention a mildly interesting quarterly report.
“I’d estimate you have somewhere between forty minutes and an hour before the shock wears off and the questions get more useful.
I’d rather not waste the interval watching you reconsider the rolling pin. ”