My Stepbrother Is a Demon novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: Room 9

Nobody moved.

His face was already sliding back, the horns sinking, the coals going dark.

Within moments he was just a tall Englishman in an apron again.

But it was already too late.

"Roxanne," he said, in his own voice.

My mother took one step backward.

Then another.

"Mom," I said.

She looked at me.

She looked at my face very carefully, like she was checking it for horns too.

"You knew," she said.

"Yes."

She turned and walked out the back door.

I ran after her.

She was already in her car with the engine on.

I yanked the passenger door open and threw myself in before she could lock it.

"Get out, Ramona."

"No."

"Get out of my car!"

"I'm not letting you drive like this alone. Go. Drive. I'll shut up."

She looked at me with her mascara already running.

Then she put it in reverse and spat gravel all the way down the drive.

Ivo stood on the back steps watching us go.

Augustin didn't come out at all.

She drove for forty minutes without saying anything.

She stopped at a motel on Route 1 with a broken V in its VACANCY sign.

She paid cash for Room 9.

The bedspread was brown and orange.

Mom sat on the end of the bed with her purse still on her shoulder.

"Tell me," she said. "All of it. I don't care how it sounds."

So I told her.

I started with the foyer ceiling, and she didn't blink.

Then I turned my left wrist up and showed her, a gray smudge like a pencil mistake.

"That's from Zane?"

"It's his name. Under there. Ivo can make it show."

I told her about the crowd release.

I watched her remember that night, two years into being Mrs. Huxley, at his first big show, holding a plastic cup of champagne in the wings.

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