The Devil Knows Her Name

The motel’s neon had lost its vowels years ago. VAC NCY, it said, in a pink that buzzed against the dusk, and under it the town of Harrow’s Rest went about the business of dying.

Emma Blackwood sat on the hood of a car that was not hers and watched it happen. Half the storefronts on Main Street had plywood where their windows should have been. The grain elevator at the end of the road leaned a little more each winter. A feed store, a church with a sagging steeple, a diner called Dot’s that was still open because somebody had to be. Montana in late October smelled of woodsmoke and cold iron and something underneath it all that she had learned to recognize the way other people recognize rain.

Sulfur. Faint, and a day old. Maybe two.

She’d been in town for three days. Her rule was one, but the smell had kept her.

She slid off the hood, shouldered her duffel, and crossed the lot toward room 9, where she had paid cash for a week she didn’t plan to finish. Her boots were two sizes too big, bought off a dead man’s porch in Wyoming, and they made a sound on the gravel like someone chewing. Her hair, long and so dark it read as black until the light caught it, was tied back with a bootlace. She had not looked in a mirror since Idaho. The eyes were the part she didn’t like to see: red-brown, the color of rust in water, and in the wrong light, something more than that.

The knock came as she fit her key into the lock.

Three raps. Even, unhurried, and not on her door.

On the door of room 10, beside hers.

Emma stopped with her hand on the key.

Room 10 had been empty since she arrived. She’d checked, because she checked everything: the curtains were open, the bed stripped to the mattress, no car in front of it. The knock came again from inside it, three slow raps on the wood, the way a polite person knocks when they know someone is home.

Never open a door that knocks three times.

She had not been taught that rule. It had simply been in her one morning at sixteen, whole and unarguable, like knowing which way was up. Nobody had ever told her why. She hadn’t needed the why. She needed only the rule, and the rule had kept her alive for seven years.

“Emma,” said a voice from behind the door. It was a woman’s voice, warm as a hand on the back of the neck. “Emma Blackwood. Sweetheart, I can hear you breathing.”

Never trust a stranger who knows your name.

She turned the key, stepped into room 9, and shut the door. She slid the chain. She stood with her back against the wood and her heart going hard, and listened to the knock come once more, patient, against the thin wall between the rooms.

Then nothing. Then, very faintly, laughter, receding, as though whoever it belonged to were walking away down a long hallway that the motel did not have.

Emma let out her breath. Her ribs were warm.

She pulled up the hem of her shirt. On the left side, curled under the last rib like a brand, the mark had begun to glow, a thin line of ember-orange tracing a shape she had never been able to read. It wasn’t a letter, or a sigil from any book she’d stolen. It looked like a spiral that had been interrupted. It had been there as long as she could remember, and it had never once been warm without a reason.

“Not tonight,” she whispered to it.

It pulsed, as if in answer.

She dropped the duffel, took the knife from her boot, and went back out through the window.

* * *

Dot’s Diner closed at nine, and by nine-fifteen Main Street was the color of old pewter. Emma kept to the shadows along the buildings and let the heat in her side steer her. It was a crude compass, but it had never lied. It pulled her past the feed store, past the dark windows of the pharmacy, toward the gap between the hardware store and what had once been a bank.

The alley was narrow and stank of wet cardboard. A single bulb burned over a back door, and under it a man stood with his hands in the pockets of a gray work coat, facing the wall.

He was whistling. It took her a moment to place the tune. It was “Amazing Grace,” slow and wrong, every fourth note bent flat.

“You’re out late,” Emma said.

The whistling stopped. The man did not turn. “So are you.”

“I live out late.”

“I know.” He tilted his head, and the bones of his neck made a sound like a dry branch. “That’s what’s so exciting.”

He turned. He had a nice face, a tired schoolteacher’s face, with gray in the stubble and reading-glasses pushed up into thinning hair. Then the eyes went black from lid to lid, smooth as spilled oil, and the face stopped looking like it belonged to anyone.

“They said you’d be hard to find,” the demon said. “They said you’d be smart. Nobody mentioned you’d walk right up to me.”

“You were whistling. It was rude not to say hello.”

He grinned. Somewhere under the borrowed face, a person was screaming. Emma could always tell. It was one of the things she’d never been able to explain to herself, the way the meat-suit flinched around its passenger. She was sorry for him, whoever he’d been. She was always sorry.

“Let him go,” she said. “Ride out, and I won’t hurt you.”

“Hurt me?” It laughed. “Little girl, you don’t even know what you are.”

“No,” Emma agreed. “But I know what you are.”

He came at her fast, faster than the schoolteacher’s body should have allowed, and she was already moving. She did not think, because thinking had never been part of this. Her body knew a hundred things her mind didn’t. She ducked under the swing, caught the wrist, turned it until something cracked, and drove the knife up under the ribs and into the black thing nested there.

The knife was ordinary steel. It shouldn’t have mattered. But the mark flared hot as a coal against her side, and the demon’s mouth opened on a sound that wasn’t a scream. Light spilled out from under his skin in veins, orange and bright, through the cracks of his face, through the glasses still perched in his hair.

He gripped her shoulders. Not to fight. To hold on.

“Eve,” he whispered.

Every one of them said it. Every one, since the first, in a barn outside Tulsa when she was sixteen and had woken with a stranger’s blood on her hands and no memory of how it got there. The word rose out of them at the end like a last breath, and it never came with fear. It came with something closer to reverence. As if the dying had seen a face they’d been waiting for.

“Who is she?” Emma said, and hated how small it sounded. “Tell me. Who’s Eve?”

But the light went out of him, and the body folded, and the man who had been whistling a hymn was just a heavy, middle-aged stranger lying in the wet, breathing, alive, with no idea where he was. His glasses lay cracked on the asphalt beside him.

Emma knelt and pressed two fingers to his throat. A pulse. Weak and ragged, but there.

“You’re all right,” she told him, though he couldn’t hear. “Somebody’ll find you. You’re all right.”

She wiped her hands on her jeans. They came away dark and slick. Demon blood was always black in the end, whatever it looked like going in. It stank of struck matches and old pennies, and it would not wash out of the lines of her palms for days.

Her ribs were still burning. Not pulsing now, but steady, a hot pressure like a hand laid flat on her side, pointing.

Pointing past the end of the alley.

“No,” Emma said quietly. “I’m done tonight.”

The mark did not care. It dragged at her, a leash around the bone, and after a moment she gave in and followed.

* * *

The church at the end of Third Street had a lit window.

She noticed that first, because nothing else in Harrow’s Rest was lit. The steeple leaned against a sky gone starless, and the double doors stood open an inch, letting out a thin yellow wedge that lay across the steps like something spilled. She stopped at the bottom of them with the knife loose in her hand.

“Hello?”

The wind answered, moving a rusted gate on its hinge.

She climbed. She pushed the door with the toe of her boot.

The smell reached her before the sight did. Sulfur, but under it something sweeter and worse, meat left too long in a warm room. The pews had been shoved to the walls. In the open floor before the altar, someone had drawn a circle in chalk and then, apparently, run out of chalk and finished with something else.

The man in the center of it lay spread-eagled on his back. He was young, thirty at most, in a flannel shirt and a church-supper name tag that read **TOM**. His eyes were open. They were very clear and very empty, and nothing at all looked out of them. Not fear, not pain. Not even the stillness of the dead, which Emma knew well. Dead people were *finished*. Tom looked unfinished. He looked like a house with the lights taken out of it.

Symbols covered him. They had been carved, not painted, into the skin of his face and throat and bare forearms, into the palms of his open hands, a dense, looping script that crawled and doubled back on itself and made her eyes ache to follow. Enochian. She knew the word the way she knew the rules, without remembering where she’d learned it. The cuts had stopped bleeding hours ago. Whoever had done this had taken their time.

“Oh, Tom,” she said.

She made herself step closer. She made herself look, because looking was the only courtesy left. There was no soul in him. She couldn’t have said how she knew. It was the same sense that told her when a demon rode a man, only turned inside out, a silence where there should have been a sound. Whatever had lived in this body was gone. It hadn’t been dragged to Hell, or lifted to Heaven. It had been *removed*, cleanly, the way you’d take a stone from a ring.

Her ribs flared hard enough to make her gasp.

She followed the heat, and the heat led her past the body to the wall behind the altar. There, above the splintered wooden cross, someone had painted a message in letters as tall as her arm. The paint was red and still tacky, and it ran at the bottoms of the letters in long, slow drips.

BRING US THE GIRL

Emma stood very still.

The church creaked around her. A loose shutter knocked somewhere, once, twice, and she flinched before she could stop herself, waiting for the third. It didn’t come. It was only wind.

The girl.

She told herself it could be anyone. There were girls in the world. There were girls in this town, in the trailer court out by the highway, behind the counter at Dot’s. It was a big word, *girl*, and it could cover a lot of ground.

But the knock on room 10. The warm voice, saying her name. The demon in the alley who had been waiting, who had said *they said you’d be hard to find.* And Tom, who had been emptied, laid out, and carved like a page, so that someone would walk in and read.

She had been led here. Not by the mark. By them.

“They wanted me to see it,” she said, aloud, to nobody.

The smell of sulfur thickened. In the dark above the nave, something shifted, a weight settling in the rafters, and Emma did not look up. She had learned long ago that the things in the rafters were not always things you could see.

Seven years of motel rooms and bus stations and bloodstained hands. Seven years of leaving town an hour before the thing she’d killed was missed, of never staying, never answering, never letting anyone close enough to learn what she was. Her whole life was an engine built to keep moving. And she had been so *sure* the movement was working.

It occurred to her, standing in the wreck of that church with the dead man’s empty eyes on her, that she had never been running from anything. She’d been herded.

Her knife hand had begun to shake. She closed her other hand around it until it stopped.

“All right,” Emma whispered. The words scraped in her throat. “All right. I hear you.”

Outside, an engine rumbled to life, low and unfamiliar, far down the road where the highway came into town. Headlights swept the stained glass and threw a long colored shadow across the floor, red and blue and gold, and across Tom’s still face. It might be nothing. A rancher. A trucker lost on the wrong exit.

Her ribs said otherwise. They had gone from burning to singing, a high, thin note she felt in her teeth.

Her first rule said run. Her second said to stay out of other people’s doors. Her third, the one she had never once been tempted to break, said no Winchester would ever learn what she was, and she did not even know why she had that one, only that it sat at the bottom of her like a stone.

She looked at the message again, at the red letters bleeding down the wall, and for the first time in seven years, Emma Blackwood understood there was nowhere left to go.

Whatever was coming had already found her.

She tightened her grip on the knife and turned to face the door.