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“Oh, hell no.” Without hesitation, Owen pushed in after.

Trey glanced back at Sonya. “I have to,” he said before he leaped in. And the door slammed shut.

“Shit! Shit. Hold her.” Cleo shoved the hissing cat at Sonya. “I have something that might help.”

When Cleo ran back to the studio, Sonya stood with two growling dogs and an angry cat.

“Fuck it. Just fuck it.” She fed on fear and misery, Sonya remembered. So she wouldn’t give Dobbs either. She strode forward, and her phone played Santana’s “Evil Ways.”

“Yeah, she’s got them. She’s also got my goddamn boyfriend, my cousin, and a dog in there.”

“Wait!” Cleo ran down the hall with a smoking stick of white sage.

“Really, Cleo? Against this?”

“My grand-mère made it herself. Don’t dismiss it. Believing’s half of it. Jesus, Sonya!”

The door beat, and a cold wind seeped around its edges to lash through the hallway. What beat and crashed behind it sounded like a war.

“What the hell’s happening in there?”

“We have to stay calm.” As her hair blew back, Sonya set the catdown, took Cleo’s free hand. “It’s the opposite of what she wants from us. Calm.”

“Working on it.” She began to circle the smoking sage at the door. “Ah, here is light against the dark. Peace against violence. Love against hate.”

Inside the room, the wind rose to a gale. Smoke billowed up to fly like birds out of the windows.

The bed rose six feet off the floor, then dropped like a stone. Under it, the floor cracked in jagged black lines.

And the walls bled.

“Do you see her?” Owen snapped it out while his breath expelled in white vapor.

“For a second. Not now.”

“I see her.”

She stood, a foot off the floor, arms outstretched. Her long black dress whirled around her, and her hair streamed like black smoke.

Her dark eyes fixed on Owen, gleaming with glee and madness, while Jones, teeth bared, barked below her.

“A Poole.” Her voice came silkily through the wind. “You’ve the look of him, rougher, but the look of him who pumped his lust into me one night, then cast me aside for a biddable little whore. Be damned to him, to you, to all Pooles. I rule here.”

“All this over a one-night stand? Bullshit, pathetic bullshit. Go haunt hell.”

Though Trey didn’t see Dobbs, when Owen charged forward, he moved with him. Then Owen’s head snapped back, and Trey grabbed his arm to keep him upright.

As Owen swiped at the blood streaming from his nose, as the dog leaped, snarling, he saw her hands curl like claws and braced himself for another blow.

A drop of his blood fell on the floor. White smoke trickled under the doorway.

Rather than strike, Dobbs screamed. Rather than strike, she whirled like her hair, like her dress. And vanished.

The room was just a room.

“What the fucking fuck?” Trey demanded.

“She clocked me, and I tell you she was going to do it again. Then poof. Goddamn it. Jones, you asshole.” But he said it with pride as Jones strutted toward him.