I hung around the house for about an hour, making a nuisance of myself, hoping she’d cave. But she carried about her business without giving me a second glance.

I almost gave up. Then I realized that there was more than one way to get information out of her. If she was going to ignore me, then I had free range of the house—including my dad’s study, where I swear he keeps every piece of paper that has ever crossed his path filed, indexed, and cross-referenced.

When my mom went to the kitchen to start dinner—which, seeing as she was Suzie Homemaker, was three o’clock in the afternoon—I didn’t follow her.

Being anal as hell, my dad had always kept his study door locked. When Andy and I were kids, we’d briefly made a game of trying to breach the fortress of the Forbidden Zone. That had ended when I was six and Andy was nine. We’d finally found a way to get in, Andy having appropriated a copy of Dad’s key. While Dad was at work, we let ourselves in. There wasn’t a thing in there that was of any interest to children our age, but it was such an exciting, forbidden thrill to be inside that we’d stayed far too long. Long enough for Dad to come home and catch us.

Now I don’t want you to get the impression that my dad is abusive. Really, he’s not. But he definitely believes in the old “spare the rod, spoil the child” philosophy. At age nine, Andy had thought himself far too old for a spanking. He found out the hard way he was wrong. It was an impressive thrashing that discouraged him from sitting down for a couple of days, but it wasn’t the pain that had made the strongest impression on him—it was the humiliation of it all, being spanked at that age, and in front of me.

Even at six years old, I was something of a stoic. I watched Andy struggle not to cry, and eventually lose that struggle. My own eyes welled with sympathy as I waited my turn, but when Dad took me over his knee, I was determined to be brave.

In the end, I’d broken just as my brother had, but I’m sure my dad was surprised at how hard he had to work for it. Andy was cowed by the whole experience, his spark of childish mischief extinguished. You can’t say the same about me.

Since there were no children in the house anymore, I was gambling my dad no longer locked the door. Even so, I held my breath as I tried the knob, letting out a sigh of relief when it turned in my hand. I slipped inside and closed the door behind me. Hopefully, if my mom started to wonder where I was and came to check on me, she’d assume I’d gone home like a sensible girl.

I smiled faintly as I looked around the room, realizing I still felt a thrill at doing the forbidden.

There’s hardly a bare patch of wall anywhere in my dad’s study. Two walls are taken up by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, the shelves crammed to bursting with books, grouped by subject matter, then alphabetized by author name, because this is Anal-Retentive Man we’re talking about. The other two walls are dominated by his massive mahogany desk, and more file cabinets than you’d see in a lawyer’s record room. These, too, were grouped by subject matter, with convenient labels on the outside so that prying eyes like mine could find the most likely candidates for interesting reading.

His personal files were on the bottom, right next to the door. I wasn’t entirely surprised to discover there was one entire drawer devoted to each member of our immediate family.

For some reason, my palms went clammy when I imagined pulling my own file open, so I started with Andy’s. Inside, there were folders for every aspect of my brother’s life. His birth announcement. A yellowed piece of paper with tiny baby footprints on it. Even the ID bracelets he and my mother had worn in the hospital. Then there was a file of all his report cards starting with kindergarten. Art projects that in a normal home would have been tacked up on the refrigerator but in ours had gone straight from Andy’s hand to storage. The homemade Christmas cards he’d given our parents every year until he turned twenty-one and was lost beneath Raphael’s personality.

I stopped myself from looking any further, feeling like a voyeur. My throat felt strangely tight as I realized that for all of Dad’s deficiencies, for all his coldness, he must love Andy somewhere deep down. Otherwise, why would he keep all this stuff?

I slid Andy’s drawer closed, then wiped my sweaty palms on my pants legs before taking a deep breath and opening my own.

I wasn’t surprised to discover my drawer was very different from Andy’s. That didn’t stop the hurt that stabbed through me when I saw that whereas Andy’s file was so full of memorabilia you could barely pull anything out, mine was positively sparse. No birth records. No cutesy, childish art. No report cards, though I could hardly blame him for that. I don’t think there’s a report card in existence that didn’t mention how much of a pain in the ass I was, even though I was smart enough to get good grades without having to work too hard.

The first thing of interest I found was the record of the paternity test, which was conducted when I was about a month old. I saw in black and white that Dad and I were not related. I swallowed hard and shoved the folder back in the drawer.

My files, being much duller than Andy’s, were organized by year rather than subject matter. I skipped forward to the year of my possibly mysterious hospitalization. I laid the file open on my lap and started flip-ping through it, looking more carefully than I had at anything previously. My hand—and my heart—came to a stop when I found a letter with the Spirit Society’s logo emblazoned at the top. It was from Bradley Cooper, although he hadn’t risen to his exalted rank of Regional Director yet and was merely a Team Leader.

Dear Mr. Kingsley,

We are sorry to hear about the difficulties you and your wife are experiencing with the child. We understand your frustration, and thank you again for the heroic efforts you have made for the Cause.

Our suggestion is that you have the child speak with one of our psychiatrists. He will examine her and make a determination as to the likelihood that she can be turned at this late age. It is possible that the resistance you are experiencing is nothing more than the rebellion of a normal teenager. If so, we would ask that you continue on as you have at least for the next couple of years until we can make a determination as to whether she will join with us of her own free will.

If our doctor determines that she is, in fact, intractable, then other, more desperate measures may be needed. We will discuss those measures when and if they become necessary so that we may come to a mutually acceptable arrangement.

Once again, I thank you on the behalf of the entire Society for your loyalty to our Cause, and for service above and beyond the call of duty. If you are amenable to our suggestion, please give me a call and we will set up an appointment.

My stomach flopped like a fish out of water. I could only assume this “teenage rebellion” of which Cooper spoke was my insistence that I would never, ever host a demon.

My parents had begun the recruitment effort on my twelfth birthday—the same age that they’d started working on Andy. But while Andy had immediately succumbed to the allure of becoming an all-powerful hero, I had balked. And more than a year of dragging me to Society meetings and shoving Society propaganda in my face had only made me dig my heels in deeper.

I remembered that trip to the psychiatrist. It had been the first of many. With trembling fingers, I turned to the next page, and saw the psychiatrist’s report. I was still reading through it, simultaneously fascinated and appalled to read this stranger’s impressions of me, most of which seemed surprisingly accurate, when the study door opened and my dad walked in.