Chapter 9: The Lab

The office door banged open behind Zane.

Ivo filled it.

He took one look at the fog, the pests sliding off the walls, and Zane's face.

"Out," he said to me.

I grabbed the oldest file box under my arm and walked past Zane.

He didn't stop me.

Not with a phone still pointed at him.

We were on the road before the wind chimes stopped ringing.

"Your father," I said, "put something in my fogger."

"I know. I smelled it in the truck."

"What is it?"

"Him."

I looked over.

Ivo was holding the file box on his knees.

"Ink," he said. "Our kind of ink. It's blood."

By the time we got home, the staffer's live video had forty thousand views.

Zane in white, teeth bared, snarling "you stupid little" at his own employee.

The comments were split.

Half said it was edited.

Half said the fog had a glitch in it, a weird shape on that kid's neck, did anyone else see it.

Nobody said demon.

But nobody said he looked like a saint, either.

Augustin was waiting in the greenhouse behind the kitchen garden.

He'd cleared the orchid tables.

On one was a row of glass beakers, a scale and a pipette.

A captured pest sat in a big pickle jar, glaring at us with its milky eyes.

"I'm sorry," he said before I could yell. "I should have asked."

"Yes, you should have."

"Would you have let me?"

"No."

"There you are, then." He rolled up his sleeve. "Three drops gave you barely a flash. Shall we see what thirty gives you?"

So that was how I spent the next week.

Days, I worked.

Nights, I was in the greenhouse with my stepfather, a pocketknife and a pickle jar.

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