“Wrath, what was that?”

  I say the words out loud before I even open my eyes. The room stops spinning after a minute. The rest of the world takes longer.

  None of the dishes in the cabinet are broken. The chairs are upright, along with the table. The only thing in disarray are the two bodies, one of which is mine, and the noticeable silence coming from the coffee maker.

  The last thing I remember is the sound of its screech right before the world imploded.

  Ow.

  I try to sit up, but my back is a single gravestone of pain. It feels like the grim reaper started handing out drive-by rug burns.

  “What happened?” a voice mumbles from across the room. Nico is already upright and shaking off the worst of it, while I can barely lift my head.

  “Wrath,” I call again, surprised he hasn’t already appeared in the aftermath of… whatever that was. Something raw stirs to life below floorboards broken open in my spirit.

  I manage to pull myself to a sitting position. Nico gets to his feet. He looks around the room strangely, noticing the same thing I did: nothing is disturbed and yet we were thrown with a level of force that should have wrecked more than just our hair.

  “Who’s Raf?”

  I ignore him, pulling myself all the way up by using the kitchen island. “Wrath, this isn’t funny.” But the demon doesn’t answer. He doesn’t do anything at all. Which has… never happened before.

  This is impossible.

  Something cracks open in my chest; an empty chasm so deep and so wide it can never be filled. I’m alone.

  I’ve never been alone. I’ve had Wrath at my side ever since I can remember. When my parents held me at arms length, discussing their plans, he was there. When they left, first my father, and later my mother, Wrath was there. I only know my birthday because Wrath always celebrated it with me.

  My first year of college, I brought him along to class because the idea of going by myself proved to be too monumental. People laughed when I called the stuffed animal my “emotional support demon” but by the end of the semester dozens of kids brought something from home with them and it stopped being so weird.

  “This isn’t funny,” I call.

  “I think your house might be haunted,” Nico says. At first it doesn’t even register he’s speaking to me. He looks around the kitchen apprehensively, as though a a ghost is going to just walk up and bop him on the nose. Like the ghosts of Morecroft Manor are that obvious.

  I leave the kitchen, heading for the parlor, then the entryway, the living room, the dining room, the sun room. No matter where I go downstairs, Wrath is nowhere to be found, either in his demonic form or the stuffed animal variant.

  “Wrath,” I call again. I head back to the foyer as Nico catches up with me. Something groans behind me, one of the doors maybe, but I barely pay attention to it. A breeze trails down the stairs from the upper levels, heading down past the foyer and out the open front door. I barely have time to notice before the door slams shut with enough force that the entire house shakes.

  Then I hear the lock turn.

  “Wrath? Did you leave?” I jog to the front door, try to flip the deadbolt open, but it’s wedged in place.

  “Here, I’ll do it,” Nico says after watching me fumble with the door for several minutes. He also tries to unlock the deadbolt without success. He jiggles the handle like it owes him money.

  That’s not where it ends though. A shadow turns across the room, the sun smothered by the onset of a storm cloud. Wood crashes down around us, and I head back to the dining room, where the wooden shutters slam closed, blocking out the majority of the morning light from outside. When I cross the room to pull one open the latch refuses to give. Nico follows me as I try one set of windows after another. In every room of the house the windows are nearly sealed shut.

  The house has gone into lockdown, and my best friend is nowhere to be found. It takes a moment, but I can still feel something nearly imperceptible. A tiny quivering in the floorboards, as though the house is terrified. I put my hand to one wall, feeling the same vibration. I rub my hand against the wooden grain absently but it doesn’t soothe the house’s nerves.

  Nico doesn’t panic, which at some point in the future I will reflect on and realize there’s something more there, but he follows me as I check room after room, and even when I switch gears and head upstairs looking for a certain demon who should know what’s going on.

  “It’s like we’re being quarantined.”

  I grunt an affirmative, barrel into my bedroom and then out to the empty bedrooms that we don’t even use. That’s most of the second floor, if I’m being honest. Wrath and I don’t take up a whole lot of space, and Morecroft Manor has a way of seeming much larger than it appears.

  “Wrath, where are you?”

  “Wait, did you say Wrath? Is that your roommate? Does he play in a punk band… from back in 1984?”

  “Yes, that’s his name. No, and you’re a dick.”

  “Are you even allowed to use words like that? Do your parents know you talk like this?”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  The mention of my parents is just the icing on the annoying cake. “Do you see parents around here anywhere? No? That’s probably because we live here by ourselves.” I snap over a shoulder. I head back to the kitchen, where all of this started. Is this because of Nico? Wrath’s words echo in my head. “I said something’s wrong.”

  Even the kitchen sink is silent now. That feels like a bad sign. I stare at it for a moment, waiting for a gurgling prophecy of decaffeinated doom, or childish infantile auguries. But nothing emerges. While I focus on the sink, Nico is absorbed by a different appliance.

  “Oh, no,” Nico says, “you poor baby.” For a moment, I think he’s talking to me, and I can feel myself warm. But I look over and he’s by the coffee maker. Thick black char marks spider in all directions around it. A power surge of some kind. He flips the power switch, but nothing happens. “I think it shorted out.” He’s showing more emotion for the coffee maker than he’s wasted on me.

  The floor vibrates slow at first and I can feel it carrying up into my legs. Again, nothing inside the house seems to move but even the walls tremble. Static electricity rises in the air, and it feels like a thunderstorm is about to strike down inside the Manor.

  “This isn’t an earthquake,” Nico says assertively. “There aren’t any fault lines within a hundred miles of here.”

  Why is he so knowledgeable about what’s near here? I don’t even know that information.

  Then another shockwave rolls through the house, but this one sounds like the church bell in my dream. A deep, chthonic rumble of a bell. The kind of bell tone that isn’t a sound at all, but something more ephemeral than that. The heaviness and depth of it rushes through the house like a wave more massive than this plane of existence, ripping through everything and passing it carelessly behind. The ripples of it shake through my body like the name of it. DOOOOOOOOM.

  I nearly drop to my knees. Nico actually does, his legs fully giving out. He presses his hands to the floor. As the remnants fade, everything feels like it relaxes. Like a breath finally released.

  “What was that?” Nico asks, but it’s not a question. It’s a statement laced with… something. Like he already knows exactly what it is. His tone becomes more hushed, “That was a psychic scream. And a potent one at that.”

  I answer without thinking. “I think it was the Doom Clock.

  Nico doesn’t react in the way that I would expect. The obvious reaction would be to ask “What’s a Doom Clock?” But instead he turns around, and it’s like he’s reassessing everything he knows about me. That calculating, shrewd look goes blank as he says confidently, “You don’t have a Doom Clock.”

  I tilt my head just a fraction and stare at him. This is not just a boy next door. He is a —

  “Why did you say you moved to Hollow Hills?” But even as I ask the question, I’m on the move. Nico doesn’t have the flashlight in hand anymore. Where did he leave it? Probably in the kitchen. I head in that direction.

  Suspicion shadows the arch of his brows. “Why do you think it’s a Doom Clock?”

  “Tell me what you know about them.”

  “There are thirteen. Most aren’t any big deal. They’re ornamental, party favors. A way for people to remind themselves how fleeting life can be.” He falls into a lecturing tone easily, like it’s a force of habit. His gaze sharpens. “What did you do?”

  I take a step back on instinct. “I didn’t do anything. The first time I even heard about a Doom Clock was last night.”

  “They’re usually tagged and monitored; collectors certainly aren’t stupid.” He exhales. “Mostly due to the one that got stolen…”

  I finally spot the flashlight where it rolled under the table. “That’s the one,” I reply weakly. “Stolen by a group called The Order, I guess? And then stolen from them.”

  “You know about…” Again he looks like he’s reconsidering everything he’s decided about me. His next question, though, is laced with something judgmental that I really, really don’t like. “What are you?”

  I stand there, facing him for a long moment while I debate exactly how to respond. For a moment I even forget the panic that is rising up from the depths at Wrath’s disappearance. I am utterly unimpressed. When I finally respond, I summon my most contemptuous tone, “Taurus with Scorpio Rising.”

  I can tell he’s trying to figure out if I’m messing with him or not. I’m unsettled, first with whatever that pulse coming through the house was, then with Wrath being MIA. The vibrations of the Doom Clock are still echoing in my arms and legs, though, and I don’t think there’s enough time for this.

  He looks down, and I realize he’s got a good five or six inches on me. “Do you even know what kind of house this is? Who the Morecrofts were?”

  “Do you?” and I’m more skeptical than anything at this point. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of books in the Morecroft library, but from a time when it wasn’t pop culture but penny dreadfuls. They’re all over the library. But not a single one has ever mentioned anything like a Doom Clock, whatever that is.

  “The Morecrofts and the Wakefields hated each other, but they relied on one another to defend the area against things exactly like The Order. They would never intentionally bring something like a Doom Clock to this place. The Wakefields would have fired a warning shot the moment they even considered it.”

  “The Wakefields?” I vaguely remember the engraving outside the house across the street. Wakefield Manse. A less interesting and cool knockoff of Morecroft Manor, certainly.

  “Now that they’re both gone, no one has been watching out for this area for a long, long time.”

  “‘Watching out for this area?’ It’s not like there’s a drug cartel running the streets.”

  “Not anymore, at least.”

  I give him a quizzical look.

  “The last Wakefield disappeared around the same time as the Morecroft heir, according to the stories. Everything I read about this town said both houses have been abandoned for the last hundred years. But I show up and find a neighbor that ‘grew up here.’”

  “What do you mean you read about this town?”

  He gives me a level look that I can’t interpret. His tone leans towards condescending again, but I can’t figure out why. “People moving to a new town do research.”

  “‘People’ don’t spend time researching Doom Clocks.” I retort but have nothing to back up that knowledge. I know that it’s probably something most of Hollow Hills wouldn’t know something about, but maybe there are more people out there who know about weird things than I assume. Maybe Hollow Hills is unusual in how mundane its people are.

  I wouldn’t know. I’ve never actually been anywhere else. I press on, trying not to think about it. “Wrath dealt with the Doom Clock once before. He’ll figure out what to do about it. I just have to find him.”

  “We’ve checked out both floors and there’s no sign of your ‘roommate’” Nico says, using air quotes.

  Agitation rises like a cobra’s tail up my spine. “He’s not imaginary.”

  A telling pause. “I never said he was.”

  I see the mistake I made. I can’t make another. “I thought you were going to. He must have gone to the store or something, and now he can’t get back in.”

  He nods, as though that’s a reasonable explanation. And who knows, maybe it is. I don’t remember a time the house went into actual lockdown like this.

  Wrath isn’t the co-dependent one. I am. He could keep himself busy in a dusty corner of the Manor, reading a book or watching reality television, but I only leave the house by myself sometimes for school. And only because I can’t do remote learning. The house seems to be against it. The Wifi drops every time I’ve tried.

  That’s when I remember something he said earlier. “I went down into the basement and dealt with it. End of story.”

  “It’s in one of the basements,” I mumble.

  “‘One of?’” Nico asks.

  “Yeah,” I sigh, scratching the back of my neck. “I’m not sure how far down they go. I remember making it to the seventh level. I got back just fine, but vaguely remember leaving my babysitter down there. Wrath says that you can still hear him screaming.” I pause. “I’m pretty sure he’s joking.”