Back from the Dead

Holly Tarpi runs the same gravel road every morning, past the neighbors' Dobermans and the long-abandoned shack nobody has touched in decades. Then one morning the shack's splintered door is standing open, and inside lies a corpse.

It should be rotting in the summer heat. Instead the maggots are dead, the wounds are closing, and the body is coming back. The 911 operator hangs up on her. Her father would have her committed. So Holly does the only thing left: she goes back, again and again, cleaning the shack, bringing supplies, confessing her loneliness to the dead boy in the kitchen — until the morning the corpse is breathing.

His name is Mike. He wakes with no memory and a head full of rules: meatless food is a sin, touching a woman is a sin, and every sin must be paid for in his own blood. He was raised in a compound in the woods by a master and his elders, where boys are locked in sheds at night and their blood is collected in glass jars. Holly hides him, teaches him the modern world one rule at a time, and tries to pretend the black-eyed thing he becomes while he sleeps isn't real.

Then the neighbors living between Holly's house and the shack are murdered, their three sons vanish, and a note appears on her windshield: The devil lives in him. A desperate rescue saves the boys, Mike stays behind to hold the master off, and Holly buries the entire summer in silence, telling no one, not even the police.

A year later, a pair of fuzzy purple dice turns up in a college alleyway, and Mike is back — homeless, burn-scarred, and running from what lives inside him. He is not the only one who found her. The master wears a new face now: Randall, a millionaire benefactor who names a campus greenhouse after the middle name Holly never uses, and then offers her a deal with no exit. Marry him, or watch everyone she loves die.

The wedding is a cage. The ring on her finger stays ice cold, and the skin beneath it turns gray and dead as something is slowly drained out of her. The truth is worse than cruelty. Randall is doing it for love — of an old friend who needs a living body, and he has already chosen Holly's. Mike has known for months and never told her.

Cornered in that greenhouse over a plastic tarp, Holly is handed the demon's true name and a knife wound: speak the name and live as Randall's wife, or refuse and die clean. She speaks it. What rises inside her body is finished being anyone's prize — and it turns the knife on the man who wrote the deal.

The fire that follows destroys everything, and the cover story holds. But Randall's dying words promise that the others are coming: patient watchers who count, and wait, and collect anything that survives.

This time, Holly intends to be the result that bites.