Morecroft Manor has no need of alarm clocks when there is a demon who hogs the covers once he decides it’s time for me to wake up. Demons don’t even need to sleep but apparently they need proper burrito comfort after dawn.

  Wrath is a seven-foot-tall hellfire red demon, my best friend and the closest thing I have to a brother. A very, very old brother. To hear him tell it, he’s been bouncing around the universe since the Big Band was just a little indigestion. He acts like he’s my age most of the time, and I only ever notice when he falls back into old patterns. He stubbed a claw on one of the stairs and started ranting in something that sounded like if hacking a lung was a language for example.

  He swears my bedroom is the only one that’s properly heated in the manor.I think he just likes to cuddle inside my comforter.I don’t mind sharing a bed with him, especially in the winter when the heat gives out.Hellfire demon keeps the bed really cozy.

  “I’m the one that sleeps,” I mutter as I kick him on my way out of bed.

  “I choose to sleep, Theo.” Then as if he realizes he can’t fake being asleep and simultaneously talk to me, he immediately tries to snore. He’s terrible at it.

  “Humans have to sleep.It’s a biological imperative.”

  The ruse fades. He cracks open an eye, glaring up at me. “That sounds made-up. How often are you up all night tossing and turning? Humans always say they can’t do this or that. You know what? Most of the time you totally can, you just want to be dramatic.”

  I resist the urge to smother him with the pillow. He doesn’t breathe so it’s pointless. “Just because you saw one documentary about a woman who survived sky diving after her parachute didn’t open, does not mean humans can do that.”

  “How do you know if you won’t even try? I would absolutely throw you out of a plane, no questions asked.”

  I grunt and head for the door, and maybe some trace of normalcy. Today is a big day. An auspicious, cursed day.

  ***

  Not that normalcy is easy to find in Morecroft Manor.

  Morecroft Manor is named after one of the first families in Hollow Hills. The Morecrofts lived, and more often died, in Hollow Hills for generations. They built themselves a house that would be remembered.

  In nightmares.

  The house is a morose, old sentinel craggy and gray and looming down upon the city.The Manor sits near the top of the serpentine valley that makes up Hollow Hills. It wins the town’s annual Halloween decorating contest every year without ever entering.

  Maybe it once was a normal Victorian, but over decades, each generation of Morecrofts expanded it. Like some kind of living thing, each addition caused it to bulge outwards, growing wings and rooms and even stretched upward with new floors like fiendish limbs. The vast grounds are separated from the street by a thick wrought-iron fence with sharp, spear-like points. Every so often when getting the mail, I see a trace of slickness on one of the fence posts that looks a bit like blood, but it’s probably just mourning dew.

  To the town, I’m sure the house is something frightening, but to Wrath and I, it’s always just been home. I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t the two of us, roaming around Hollow Hills, making our own fun.

  My parents have been gone for years.I have a handful of memories of my mom, and none whatsoever of my father.There’s a picture of him on the mantel, a small and frail man sitting in a high-backed chair like it’s his throne, face hidden in the hood of his robe.There are quite a few more of Mom: her dark eye makeup, red hair streaked with black and penchant for Gothic-inspired black lace gowns she always wore.

  My parents brought me here shortly after I was born.There’s a grainy photograph of me in a Rosemary’s Baby-meets-Hellraiser bassinet out on the front porch.It was in shades of black broken up by chrome spikes and blades, straps, and piping that might have been made out of actual bones.

  In the picture, I’m staring dead into the camera, and the lens flare of red in my eyes is the only color in the whole image. Neither of my parents are anywhere to be found. I look abandoned, annoyed, and a bit infernal. I don’t even recognize myself, but Wrath assures me that I was every bit as crabby as a baby as that picture suggested.

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  There’s only one picture with all three of us together, and I’m fairly certain it was an accident.Mom was in a normal black gown, but I remember the lace-like sleeves scratched at my skin whenever she brushed too close.I was dressed in a tiny little suit, and couldn’t have been more than two years old.Wrath said it makes me look like a baby undertaker, which I think he meant as a compliment.And there, in the corner of the room like a ghost, the barely corporeal form of my father, face hooded like a tyrant in an old space opera.

  Every morning I pass the picture of the three of us, and I never know quite how to feel.Today is no different.I head for the kitchen while I hear Wrath beginning to stir upstairs.

  The new coffeemaker is a giant monstrosity of a machine that takes up an entire section of the counter, weighs more than a hundred pounds, and has the look of something post-industrial. It seems like something that you enter nuclear launch codes on. The last time I pressed the wrong button, a red light began flashing and klaxon warning bells rang loud enough that I nearly lost my hearing. If Wrath hadn’t shown up and talked the machine down, I don’t know where we’d be. Maybe scorched from the face of the earth.

  “I don’t trust you,” I whisper at it. I’m almost certain that it glared back at me with the same intensity.

  “Stop arguing with the coffee machine,” Wrath says as he breezes into the kitchen.It’s easy for him to say.We could be out of water and coffee grounds, and the machine would still brew him up a cup of something delicious.I look at it the wrong way, and it goes into lockdown mode.“I don’t have time to counsel the two of you today.”

  Despite the thoroughly modern - if not futuristic - coffeemaker, the kitchen is still a relic of a previous age.The oven is a wrought-iron monstrosity that takes up half of one wall and has compartments large enough to bake small children in.Thick black pipes run up the wall and disappear into the bowels of the house.There’s a sink, though it’s an old stone thing that has a small crack along the bottom. Sometimes, if you’re very quiet, a voice will call up from the drain, but I wash dishes with my headphones on and it’s doesn’t bother me. Mom always said that old houses have quirks.

  A few minutes pass before the coffemaker lets out a tiny, cute little chirp. Once Wrath pours a cup and hands it to me, though, the chirp suddenly becomes a fart sound.

  I point at the thing immediately, because there’s proof that it hates me, but Wrath just waves me off.“He knows what today is and he’s trying to get under your skin. He’s not used to being around humans.”

  “I’m not used to being around humans,” I grumble.

  Wrath smirks, then begins to collect a number of pill bottles from a cupboard, setting them down in front of me. “What a great reminder.Take your pills.”

  Some are orange pill bottles filled by the drug store in town.Others are deep black-crystal vials as thick as my wrist, and one is a bottle filled with something that looks like starlight: endless black and bright sparkles.These are specially ordered and arrive during the midnight hour only after I’m asleep. I’m not sure what they all do exactly - it’s been explained to me before, but I’ve taken so many medications all my life that they blur together. There are SSRIs and benzos, laudanum and something called Blood of a Titan, and another called Witchbane.

  I dutifully gather up all of the pills in a little row, as Wrath holds my coffee for me, pouring in just enough creamer and sugar to tranquilize an elephant. Off to the side, the coffeemaker grumbles to itself as I scoop up all the pills, swallow them down with a swig of coffee, and follow it up with the dropper of liquid stars, which has to sit under my tongue until it dissolves, which it does in a matter of seconds.

  “That tastes like something you’d feed the monster under your bed.”

  “You should thank the unholy constellations that you have a demon around.” Wrath says loftily.“What if there really was some horrifying angel under your bed waiting to grab your little toe-sies?”

  “You wouldn’t save me.You’d just gloat about finally getting all the covers to yourself.”

  Wrath reaches out and ruffles a clawed hand through my hair.“Drink your coffee. Big day today.”

  I’m trying not to think about that. I shudder anyway, then take my coffee and head for the front of the house. Over the last month, it’s become a habit I can’t help. Ever since I noticed the FOR SALE sign across the street.

  The abandoned house across the street, a mansion just as big and decrepit as Morecroft Manor has been empty for my entire life.Then a month ago, the sign appeared.Then, a day later, the red SOLD above it.

  “Who do you think it is?” Wrath asks, though he sticks to the doorway.

  I shake my head.“They’ll probably tear it down, right?Build something new in its place.”

  “I don’t think so,” Wrath says absently, jutting his pointed chin.“Look.”

  In front of the abandoned manor is a brand new Jeep. The boy who climbs out of it is tall, with broad shoulders and a tiny waist, wearing sinfully tight jeans and a white tee shirt. His hair is thick and black and droops down over his eyes.

  “Oh, he’s cute,” Wrath muses, slinging an arm around me.I feel my palms already getting sweaty, and my heartbeat quickening.“You need a boyfriend.”

  “He’s okay,” I manage.It’s been a long time since I’ve dated.“And stop trying to sell me off to the first boy you see. You’re not a matchmaker.”

  “I don’t see a ring,” the demon continues amiably.My sweaty palms grow slick. “That’s good news.No, wait. I see one.”My heart drops.“Wrong finger, ignore me.”

  “You’re a menace.”

  “You adore me. I make sure you have coffee.”Which is true, but unfair.Using caffeine against me is not love. “Besides,” Wrath says eventually, “what are the odds you’re both monsters?”

  My hands grow clammy and despite the coffee my mouth is suddenly dry. I open my mouth to say something but no words come ready.

  “Kidding,” he breezes.“It’s more likely he’s a murderer, but even that couldn’t happen. Again.”