Megan wished she didn’t have to see or smell it either. But three months before she’d become leader of the local Yezer Ha-Ra—the personal demons, tempters and misleaders of mankind—and it was her responsibility to take care of them as best she could.

Three times in as many weeks, one of her demons had exploded like this. No warning, no explanation. Just…gone, reduced to bits of squishy flesh, and she had no idea how or why.

“Maybe he was trying to call more of you and he did it wrong?” she asked, just as if she and Rocturnus hadn’t gone over every possibility in every discussion they’d had already.

“I don’t think so. I think…well, you know what I think.”

Megan shivered. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

She walked into the kitchen to find some cleaning supplies. The demon’s body, such as it was, would be sent back to the demons’ home on the astral plane. But the blood, and the mess…

She couldn’t just leave it, even if the occupants of this house would never know it was there. The thought of them unwrapping gifts under that abomination of a tree made her stomach churn.

“You’re going to have to make a decision, Megan,” Rocturnus said. “You know I don’t think this is your fault, but—”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it.” The butcher knife clattered to the counter—she didn’t trust herself to put it back neatly into its slot. A minute or two of hunting through the cabinets produced garbage bags; they rustled in her shaking hands.

“It’s a simple ceremony.”

“And it turns me into some sort of human-demon hybrid, Roc. I don’t want to do it. I don’t want any of this!”

She clutched the bags to her chest, turning her back on the grisly scene and the small demon watching her. She didn’t want to see his beady eyes go black as he tasted her pain.

Every human had a personal demon. Since before humanity became capable of complex speech and higher thought the demons had existed, tempting people into the kind of petty meanness that made life such a joy, then feeding from the misery they caused.

Every human except Megan. She’d managed to kill hers at the age of sixteen, to bind it somehow to the Accuser, a minor Legion of Hell who’d nonetheless almost killed her twice. Now he was gone—but a piece of him still lived inside Megan, a ghastly souvenir of the time he’d possessed her.

It was that piece of demon inside her that connected her to the Yezer Ha-Ra. It was that piece of demon inside her that forced her to be here today.

But her humanity still defined her, and her emotional pain—like any human’s suffering—still nourished Rocturnus; Rocturnus, who’d become her unofficial personal demon. He didn’t mislead her or tempt her to sin, but he couldn’t stop being what he was either, and what he was treated her negative emotions as food.

“At least he managed to warn us,” Rocturnus said. “So his human already has a new demon.”

“Of course.” Megan wiped her eyes and turned around. “I knew there had to be a bright side.”

“It is a bright side, Megan, it’s what we do, what we need to do to survive. If things start to slip—”

“I know!” She threw a bag at him. “Help me clean this up.”

Not wanting to get her coat dirty, she removed it and set it on the kitchen’s little breakfast bar, then grabbed a roll of paper towels. Whichever demons had been assigned to the house’s occupants would keep them out as long as possible and would let Megan and Roc know when they were on their way back. She had some time. She hoped it would be enough.

“We need to do this fast, too,” she said. “Can you…can you take care of the big pieces?” Her stomach gave a warning lurch.

Rocturnus started moving, his little hands waving in the corners of her vision as he transported chunks of the dead demon back to the Yezer’s house. Megan sopped up blood, wrinkling her nose against the smell, shoving the used paper towels into the garbage bag as fast as she could. If she pretended it was just Kool-Aid or something, maybe a red-wine spill…

But Kool-Aid or red wine didn’t coagulate like that, didn’t smell like that. She gritted her teeth and kept working.

Three dead in three weeks. Rocturnus said in the old days Yezer Ha-Ra were killed by explosion as punishment, and from what Megan had seen of demon punishment she had no trouble believing it. But she wasn’t punishing them, and she was supposed to be in charge, so who—or what—was doing this?

Who had so much power over demons who were supposed to be hers? How much power did she actually have over them herself?

She managed to take care of the worst of the largest blood pool, but there were more. The smaller splotches she’d worry about if they had time, just like the stains. For now, she half-crawled a few feet to her right and started on another puddle.

The front door burst open. Five large bodies invaded the room, guns drawn. Five uniformed police officers.

“Get down! Get down!”

Megan obeyed, dropping the garbage bag in front of the couch. A splotch of blood she hadn’t cleaned yet seeped through her trouser leg, but she ignored it. Guns were pointed at her, big, real guns, and a strong hand gripped the back of her neck and forced her all the way down.

“Please,” she said. “There must be some misunderstanding.” Her mind raced. What kind of cover story might explain why she’d entered a stranger’s home and started cleaning?

She didn’t even know whose house it was.

Rough hands held hers in the small of her back while cold metal snapped around her wrists. She was being arrested, she was really honestly being arrested and her entire career flashed before her eyes as those hands started patting her down. She was a psychological counselor, she was supposed to be sane and normal and well adjusted, not some sort of tidiness bandit.

“She’s not armed,” one of the cops said. Megan tried to look up at him but all she could see were feet. Armed?

“Get her up.”

Aided by two men, one on each of her arms, she struggled to a stand. Was it normal for five policemen to come to a simple breaking and entering? That’s all this was, right? A response to some sort of silent alarm maybe? Or perhaps one of the neighbors had seen her enter the house and had called?

She hadn’t even broken, really. Rocturnus had opened the door. She’d just entered.

“Officers, please. This is all a big—”

They ignored her. One of them opened the garbage bag and pulled out a handful of wet towels. “What is this?” he said. “You’re stealing balled-up paper towels?”

“I’m not stealing anything. I just—”

“You just tore up these people’s yard, abandoned your car in the middle of it, broke into their house, and started throwing away paper towels,” the cop said. “Was it padding for the things you planned to steal?”

“What? No, I wasn’t—”

“Hey, you’re Dr. Demon Slayer…Megan Chase,” another officer said. “I recognize you from the papers.”

“The radio lady?”

“Yeah. She caught that guy, you know, the Satanist guy from the hospital.”

“Right, right.”

The eyes regarding her now were slightly friendlier, but only slightly. “So what are you doing in here?”

“I…I must have the wrong house, I was coming in to surprise a friend—”

“We got a call that there was a body here.”

Megan blinked. “What?”

Two officers came down the hallway now, their guns holstered. Relief flooded her body. “There’s nothing here, Jim,” said one of them. “It’s clean.”

“So why did you break in?” The first policeman—Jim?—held up the bag. “And what’s all this?”

“I thought this was my friends’ house,” Megan repeated. “I was cleaning as a favor. Something to pass the time while I waited for them.”

For the first time in months she actually wished she hadn’t asked all the personal demons to hide themselves as a matter of course. It might be nice to see some smiling faces, even if those faces did have too many teeth. But not so much as a spot of color showed in the air above the policemen’s shoulders.