My Stepbrother Is a Demon novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Thing on the Ceiling
Ramona sees a pest no one else can, kills one with her Nike, smashes another off her mother's wrist at dinner, and at midnight her stepbrother Ivo tells her someone sold her soul and it comes due in sixty days.
"Ramona! The powder room has a bidet!"
My mother grabbed my arm in the front hall.
"A bidet, baby. In a powder room. Who even thinks of that?"
I wasn't looking at the powder room.
I was looking at the ceiling.
Something clear and wobbly was stuck up there next to the chandelier, the size of a beanbag chair.
It had two milky eyes.
They blinked at me.
The movers walked right under it with Mom's seventh suitcase.
The housekeeper stood by the stairs with her hands folded and didn't look up once.
"Mom. There's something on the ceiling."
She glanced up and squinted.
"That's a chandelier, honey."
"Next to the chandelier."
"There's nothing next to the chandelier." She patted my cheek. "You drove four hours. Go find your room. Third floor, east wing. Augustin says it has a reading nook."
She floated off toward the kitchen.
Her new husband was in there making espresso in a pressed linen shirt.
Augustin Mordaunt was a billionaire and a widower, and she'd met him buying tomatoes at a farmers' market.
Tall, silver at the temples, a face you trusted right away.
My mother had three divorces behind her.
I wanted number four to be the one that stuck.
The thing on the ceiling dripped.
A glob of clear slime landed on the marble two feet from my sneakers.
Nobody else even turned around.
My room had a bed the size of a boat and a window seat full of pillows.
I sat down on the mattress and stared at my phone without reading it.
Something squelched under the bed.
I got down on my hands and knees and looked.
A smaller one was sitting on my good Nike, the white Air Max I'd saved two months for.
It pulsed, slow.
I was twenty-six, and I killed bugs for a living.
I grabbed the other shoe and brought it down hard.
It burst.
It went up my forearm, my elbow, my good T-shirt.
"What the actual hell!"
The door was open, and the hallway carried it.
Footsteps came, quick and quiet.
My new stepbrother leaned in the doorway with his arms crossed.
I'd only seen Ivo Mordaunt from across the driveway that morning.
Up close he was tall, dark-haired, his father's face with all the soft parts cut away.
Twenty-nine, Mom had said in the car. Never married. Doesn't talk much.
He looked at me on the floor, dripping, shoe raised.
"Impressive aim," he said. "Terrible follow-through. You'll wreck your shoulder swinging like that."
"There was a thing under my bed."
"I know."
"I killed it with a shoe."
"You did."
"What was it?"
"A pest."
"That tells me nothing."
"It's what you're getting." He nodded at the slime on my arm. "Clean that up before your mother sees."
"She can't see them," I said.
It came out before I'd finished thinking it.
The movers. The housekeeper. Mom squinting straight at it.
"Can she?"
"No," he said. "She can't."
"But I can."
"Apparently."
"Then I'm telling her."
"Telling her what? That on her first day in the house she's been happiest in for years, you're seeing jelly on the ceiling?" He didn't say it mean. "She'll think you're cracking up."
He was right, and I hated it.
"Then you explain it."
"Not now. Your mother's on the stairs."
I heard her sandals on the marble.
He stepped in close, closer than he had to.
He smelled like burnt sugar and something older under it.
"Midnight," he said, low, by my ear. "Kitchen."
Then he was gone.
Dinner was in a dining room with sixteen chairs, and we used four.
Augustin had made tiramisu from scratch.
Mom kissed his cheek and said, "Isn't this wonderful?" and he looked at her like she'd hung the moon.
Ivo ate without talking and watched me the whole time.
Under the table, something squelched.
I ate faster.
Then a pest the size of a cat slid off the sideboard and onto the tablecloth.
It crawled straight to my mother.
It wrapped one clear tendril around her wrist, right over her new wedding band.
She laughed at something Augustin said and didn't feel it at all.
Her eyes went a little dull, just for a second.
I stood up and grabbed the cake server.
I brought it down on her wrist hard enough to knock her hand flat.
The pest popped.
The glass tiramisu dish went off the table and shattered on the floor.
Mom screamed.
The housekeeper came running from the pantry.
"Ramona! What on earth is wrong with you?"
Mom was holding her wrist and staring at me.
"There was something on you."
"There was nothing on me! That dish was his wife's!"
Augustin's dead wife.
The housekeeper knelt and started picking up glass without a word.
Mom's eyes were shining. "Say you're sorry, honey."
I looked at Augustin instead.
He hadn't moved.
He was looking at the slime on the tablecloth, right where it had burst.
"I'm not sorry," I said. "You saw it too."
The whole room went quiet.
Augustin set his fork down very gently.
"Roxanne, leave the glass, love," he said.
Then he looked at his son.
"Ivo. Midnight. Tell her all of it."
Mom looked from him to me.
At midnight the kitchen was dark except the light over the stove.
Ivo was leaning on the counter in a black T-shirt, barefoot.
"Give me your left hand," he said.
"Why?"
"Because you just broke a dead woman's dish, and you deserve to know why."
I held it out.
He turned it over and laid his palm across the inside of my wrist.
His hand was hot as a coffee mug.
When he lifted it, there was a gray mark on my skin that hadn't been there that morning.
Thin lines.
"Those things aren't here for the house," he said. "They're here for you."
"Why me?"
He didn't let go of my hand.
"Because someone sold your soul ten years ago," Ivo said. "And it comes due in sixty days."
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