A Crooked Mark

CHAPTER

1

I don’t know how it feels when the Devil scratches a soul. My father says He must have the lightest touch, because no one ever notices His crooked claw leave a stain on something that should belong only to them. They smile their old smiles, crack the same jokes, eat and play and work and laugh just as they used to, but the Mark festers inside, growing and feeding like a parasite. By the time anyone notices something is wrong, it’s too late. Lucifer has already won.

Not tonight, though.

I brace myself in the passenger seat as the car bounces down the moonlit road. Dad killed the headlights a mile back, and if we hadn’t driven this way hundreds of times before, we would have run straight into a tree by now. Yet nine months of careful work have given us plenty of hours to prepare. By the time we finished documenting sweet Mrs. Polly’s chilling descent from lucky survivor of a restaurant explosion to heartless killer Marked by Lucifer, Dad had it all planned out.

The matches sit in the console between us.

My mouth turns sour as my stomach gives another heave, and I clamp my teeth together, waiting for it to pass. Nine months of getting to know someone has a way of bleeding into an accidental friendship, making an already impossible job even harder. In the dim light, the determined line of Dad’s jaw holds only cold certainty, but doubt shrieks at me like a knife on glass.

It’s not easy to judge a soul.

I have to give Lucifer credit. There might not be any serpent in the tree or horned man with a pitchfork, but He’s still banging on our door. He’s just gotten a lot more creative. Clever bastard found a brand-new way to wreak havoc in the human world.

Accidents.

The semitruck bearing down on your car. The train you think you can beat across the tracks. The safety harness that snaps halfway up the mountain. One moment you’re in this world, and then—

Bam!

Hello, afterlife.

There’s a split second, however, when you aren’t quite in either. You’re right in the middle of the jump, eyes squeezed shut and both feet in the air, so you never see Lucifer extend a slender finger. It’s a delicate scrape, the smallest Mark on your soul, and then He sends you back. You’re alive, and everyone calls it a miracle, but God had nothing to do with it.

It’s something much, much worse.

Of course, not everyone who survives an accident is Marked. Some people really do get lucky, but you can never tell the difference just by looking at them. The Marked appear as normal as you or me, and that jump from this world to the next makes anyone fair game. A life filled with kindness and charity offers no protection. No shield. If Lucifer feels like leaving His couch at the moment you ski into a tree, all bets are off, and no one knows whether luck or the Devil saved you in that second you nearly died.

I’m still not certain which saved Mrs. Polly. But Dad is.

The house comes into view—a modest cottage on the isolated road, the familiar porch swing motionless in the shadows. Blackness bleeds from sleeping windows, and the single light beside her door offers the only glow in the surrounding darkness. Dad turns off the engine, and silence falls like the thud of a gavel.

Ready, Matthew? he asks.

Not at all.

Maybe we should give it more time. I brace against the frown growing on Dad’s face. Just to be sure. She volunteered at the animal shelter yesterday—

And the sign over the door fell and crushed Jessa Barney’s skull twenty minutes after she yelled at Mrs. Polly for driving too fast in the parking lot, Dad finished. If we had acted sooner, Jessa would still be alive.

The chains holding that sign were old. One had already broken, remember? My voice rises, and I fight to steady it. Jessa’s family plans to sue the shelter for not fixing it sooner.

And it just happened to break the moment she stood under it? Dad shakes his head. Matthew, we’ve been over this. You saw the changes.

The deaths and injuries that surrounded Mrs. Polly these last months had filled the pages of my notebook and made Dad’s fingers tap faster each night. The accidents started small: Little George Winton fractured his arm after he left his skateboard lying out for Mrs. Polly to trip over, and Vicky Becerra slipped and fell off the stage as she went to collect her first-place ribbon for the blueberry pie that beat Mrs. Polly’s in the annual fair. But then the brakes of Edward Fisher’s car failed the day he insulted Mrs. Polly’s new hairstyle, and Marian Wong choked to death on her steak as she laughed at Mrs. Polly for toppling a stack of dishes. A few more bodies dropped, and when a flowerpot finally fell off a balcony and killed Eileen Patterson minutes after she shorted Mrs. Polly at the cash register, Dad knew.

Too much coincidence, he said, and I agreed. Verdict rendered.

But now . . .

I think of the afternoons spent in her kitchen, trying new recipes and sharing apple pie, and force my mouth open once more. What if we missed something? A few more days, just to be sure—

Dad interrupts. I liked Elisabeth Polly too. But waiting will only make this harder. He picks up the matches. Time to go.

My fingers dig into the seat, every part of me begging to turn the car around and drive home. But that’s not the job. The lessons that began almost a decade ago ring through my head, and the rule by which Dad lives—by which he taught me to live as well—incinerates any last objections.

When Lucifer Marks a soul and returns it to this world, all we can do is light the fire and make it burn.

We open the doors and climb out.

CHAPTER

2

I lean against the car, every breath a jagged inhale, but Dad doesn’t seem to notice. He opens the trunk and takes out the bag he prepared for tonight.

Play the clip if anyone comes, he instructs, referring to the coyote howl I recorded on my phone last week. Packs of them prowl the area, and the noise won’t strike anyone as unusual. He steps away in silence, and time slows to a trickle.

I could call someone. The police. The fire department. They would come, sirens blaring, and I could get Dad away in time to save Mrs. Polly. The disturbance might raise alarms, making our work harder, but the alternative creeping closer with each passing second feels worse.

Surely another week of watching can’t hurt. My fingers are clumsy, the humming in my head deafening, but I dial: 9-1—

And then it’s too late.

An orange glow blooms behind the cottage windows, and my chest squeezes so tightly I can’t breathe. The charred air hits me, churning my stomach and clogging my throat. Wood snaps in the rising heat, and growing flames lick the night as smoke seeps through cracks in the walls.

The screams begin.

I want to cover my ears, but I force myself to listen, straining to hear the smallest hint of what lurked under her skin. The voice might come from Mrs. Polly, but the woman I knew is already gone. All that burns tonight is the human husk Lucifer’s Mark left after rotting another person from the inside out.

I listen so hard my ears throb, and all I hear is her.

Bile creeps up my throat, and every shriek sends an ice bath over my bones. Behind those singed stucco walls, Dad’s smoldering cigarette must have ignited the couch, and those burning cushions torched the rug and curtains. The photographs of her grown son Mrs. Polly once showed me are now cinders, and her cozy kitchen table is nothing more than kindling. Trapped in her bedroom, the door wedged shut by the stopper Dad jammed beneath it, Mrs. Polly doesn’t stand a chance. Her windows won’t save her.

The glue I used to seal them shut had three days to dry.

A shadow moves, and Dad runs toward me. All clear? he pants.

It takes two tries before my jaw unclenches. Clear.

We drive away with our headlights off, and I catch the sound of a distant siren cutting through the fire’s roar. The neighbor must have called, though he won’t come speeding over the ridge to check on Mrs. Polly anytime soon. A faulty spark plug has made certain of that. By the time the fire truck completes the eight-minute drive over the winding highway, Dad and I will be long gone.

I rest my forehead against the window and listen for Mrs. Polly, but the screams have stopped.

They always do.

CHAPTER

3

Streetlights flicker over the motel parking lot as I slip out the door for my morning run, leaving Dad snoring in bed. Pockets of darkness litter the road, and headlights from passing cars throw shadows across the pavement. Every step I take carries me a little further from the thoughts I can’t shake, of smoke and fire and screams, though a quiet week has passed since the burning. We said goodbye to our neighbors and moved out of our apartment a few days ago, and not a police car was in sight as we crossed the town limits and kept going.

Nobody will ever miss us.

News outlets covered the tragedy briefly, always ending with a warning that smokers fully extinguish their cigarettes, and even Mrs. Polly’s son who lived a few states away sadly acknowledged his mother could be forgetful. He was right, since I often helped her hunt for her misplaced glasses, but Mrs. Polly was actually quite good about her cigarettes.

Don’t want to leave these burning! she told me a few months ago, cheerfully stubbing one out in the ashtray she kept on her counter.

It was how we got the idea in the first place.

The memory brings a whiff of smoke, so I push my legs faster until I’m flying over the sidewalk, lungs burning and brain bouncing with no room for thoughts or questions. I run until the sky lightens and my legs ache, and my mind finally clears.

When I return to the motel, I find Dad sitting at the desk, staring at his laptop and sipping coffee from a paper cup. Despite the fact we both pulled clothes from suitcases this morning, his outfit is crisp and pressed, while my T-shirt and shorts were a wrinkled mess even before my run. Mrs. Polly once joked I’m a younger, messier version of him, though he’s blue-eyed and fair while I inherited half my genes from my Chinese mother. My eyes are brown, and I stand an inch taller than his skinny five-ten frame, which is crowned by a head of meticulously groomed gray hair. I’ve got a dark brown mop that refuses to stay in place.

Not your looks, Mrs. Polly said, when I pointed all this out. There’s just something about the two of you. The professor and his apprentice, keeping secrets from the rest of us.

I laughed along as she placed a bowl of chicken and dumplings in front of me. She didn’t mean it in a bad way, but I didn’t know how to feel about it.

I still don’t.

Dad’s slight smile rises in greeting as he looks up at me. How was the run, Matthew?

Fine. I fill a cup with water and gulp it down. Feels good to get outside.

He nods. The room’s pretty cramped, but we won’t be here much longer.

His words send a jolt through me, since any move out of this motel will take us to our next project.

No rush. I shrug as casually as I can. It’s not that bad.

He adjusts his wire-rimmed glasses, examining my face though he tries not to be obvious. You sleep okay?

Yes, I lie. Mrs. Polly’s screams haunted those dark hours, but sharing my nightmares will only invite more questions. Besides, from the way he eyes the elephant I started carving from a bar of soap around three this morning, he already knows. What are you working on?

The final report for Elisabeth Polly. He picks up a black device lying beside the laptop, and I recognize the transmitter I fastened under Mrs. Polly’s bed the month before we made our decision. The electronic bug hadn’t yielded much—just that she suffered from insomnia—but restless sleep can be a sign of Lucifer. Though I suppose if that’s all it takes, Dad would find me Marked as well.

Not him, though. He sleeps as well as always.

He slips the bug into his suitcase. Almost done.

I stretch out on the mattress and reach for my knife. Dad gave me the blade years ago when I needed something to keep my hands busy during long stretches of surveillance, and my whittling soon graduated from sharpening sticks to shaping animals, complete with tusks and tails. My half-carved elephant leans against the framed photo that always sits at Dad’s bedside—him, Mom, and me as a baby in her arms—and I finish its trunk as he offers me the laptop.

Want to see? he asks.

No hangs on the tip of my tongue. After all, I know how the story ends, and it’s not the way I wanted. Instead, I nod, and approval flits across Dad’s face. My stomach clenches as I begin to read, but I scroll through months of careful work that inched us closer to the project until she called us friends.

I suppose I called her that too.

As usual, Dad’s documentation is thorough. Her baseline behaviors. The slow but terrible changes.

The burning.

Each neat bullet point showcases the descent that began nine months ago when Mrs. Polly walked away from a devastating oven explosion with hardly a burn. Her encounter with Lucifer would have been so fleeting she wouldn’t remember it, and since nothing suggests He stays to see the wreckage of His work, Lucifer likely continued along His merry way, leaving Mrs. Polly with a Mark on her soul and a new set of abilities. She couldn’t influence the living, but as the Mark within her grew, the objects in the physical world became her toys.

And Mrs. Polly played.

A brake cable, a piece of steak, a flowerpot—all it took was a simple thought to transform the ordinary into a weapon, and no one ever suspected the smiling woman in the corner.

That’s where we come in.

The Second Sweep hunts those who survive the accidents that should have killed them. Our leaders find the stories, uncover the names, and search out the addresses. Then they send people like Dad and me. We find an opening and settle into their town. We learn their habits, their quirks, their schedules. We gain their trust.

And if they change—if that Mark consumes everything that’s good in them and lets evil fester in its place—we bring the flames to destroy them. The Marked can be incredibly resilient to injuries from knives or bullets, so unless you have a match ready, all you’re doing is drawing their attention and making yourself an easy target. Those who escape the Sweep’s notice live on with that stain on their souls until old age finally sends them to their graves years too late, leaving behind paths of death and destruction. The sooner we find and stop them, the less damage they can do.

Mrs. Polly left quite a path.

I take my time reading Dad’s report. He included photographs as well, and something inside me flinches as Mrs. Polly’s cheerful face fills the screen. Dad cropped the other half of the picture so I’m nowhere in sight. I posed with her the first week we accidentally met at the ice cream shop, and the smiling image perfectly blends Dad’s real work as a professional photographer with our other job.

Her smile makes my heart pinch.

We didn’t know for certain, not right away. The shift between an ordinary life and one tainted by the Mark is always blurred. Souls don’t surrender easily, and things like coincidence and bad luck throw even more confusion into the mix. Within a year, however, we usually have enough evidence to render a judgment. If all we’ve seen can be attributed to normal living, we declare the project’s soul clean and move on, though we come back once a year to ensure they haven’t changed.

They rarely do. It’s those first twelve months that really matter.

Mrs. Polly lasted nine.

The accidents around her progressed from bruises to broken bones to bodies, and Dad’s final hesitation vanished with that flowerpot smashing into Eileen Patterson. Everyone else was running to the body crumpled on the sidewalk, but Mrs. Polly just stood watching, her smile bright and her gaze dark as she finally lifted the sunglasses she always wore near the end. Dad saved the photograph he snapped in that moment for the report’s last page, and the chill it sends over me feels as if Lucifer Himself reached out and tickled my soul.

Above her grin, Mrs. Polly’s pupils bleed black, the weeping midnight tendrils swallowing her blue irises like spilled ink. Ever hear the saying The eyes are windows to the soul? It’s true. When the soul dies, the window closes.

We made our decision on the way home.

My eyes twitch as I stare at the screen, waiting for the proof to overcome my last lingering doubts. Instead I see a trick of light, a shadow, a speck of dust on Dad’s camera lens. There’s even a medical condition called aniridia, where people are born without irises or with them only partially developed, so it appears as if their eyes are black. I looked it up. It usually manifests in newborns, though couldn’t eye problems develop later, especially if someone’s in, say, a kitchen explosion?

Doubt pulses at my temples, and a headache looms. Looks good is all I say, and hand back the laptop.

Dad nods, satisfied. He’ll print it out and mail it to a PO Box registered to a Mr. James Trainer, who doesn’t exist. Someone will pick it up and whisk it away to wherever the heads of the Sweep reside, their file cabinets filled with reports of the Marked. No email, no electronic trace. The only technology the Sweep uses is the emergency phone number Dad made me memorize, reserved strictly as a last resort for when sirens are screaming. We’ve never called it, and I hope this never changes. All that’s left now is to burn our notebooks, wipe our hard drive, and move on to the next project.

Your notes were very helpful, Dad says, scanning his report once more. You did a good job.

He means it as praise, but his words only sharpen the ache snaking through me. Hope dies hard. Mrs. Polly lasted five months longer than Mr. Whittmeier, the first burning I did with Dad, and I had begun to think she might be like Ms. Rivera, who lasted the entire year. There had been a few worrisome incidents in the beginning of that project as well—dropped ice cream cones by children trespassing through her garden, a bike accident involving an especially harsh critic of her paintings—but these soon stopped, which is why it’s so important not to jump to conclusions at the first sign of trouble. Our year ended with friendly conversations and regular surveillance that showed no sign of the Mark, and relief poured through me when Dad pronounced the verdict. Ms. Rivera had been outside the day we drove away, painting on her porch, and I wished every project could end like that.

But they don’t.

Dad reaches over and picks up my elephant, smoothing his thumb over it as the silence stretches. Then: Do you know what day it is?

Eight days since we burned Mrs. Polly. Saturday?

It’s September twentieth. Your birthday.

Seventeen years old, and I couldn’t care less right now. I don’t really feel like celebrating.

I know. But I have something for you. He picks up a long white envelope and drops it into my lap. Open it.

I turn it over, and the emblem of a torch stamped in the red wax seal sends a wave of dread through me.

The symbol of the Second Sweep.

My heart skips as I slice my knife through the seal. A single page sits inside. The paper crackles as I unfold it, revealing a printout of a news article.

FATAL CAR CRASH LEAVES SOLE SURVIVOR

Sixteen-year-old Rachel Winter walked away from a crash that left two dead, including her father, Timothy Winter. They were driving home Wednesday afternoon when, according to eyewitnesses, their car approached the quiet intersection of Haims and Drifter. They stopped at the crosswalk and had just pulled forward when thirty-year-old Malcolm Harrison collided with them. Mr. Harrison, whose blood alcohol was later found to be over twice the legal limit, died immediately. Mr. Winter was taken to Mills Creek Community Hospital, where he passed away an hour later.

Rachel, who had been sitting beside her father, escaped with only bruises. It’s a miracle she survived, said Captain Veronica Walsh, the first officer to arrive . . .

This one’s different. The paper trembles in my hand. The project’s only sixteen.

I know. Dad’s lips stretch in a grim line. But Lucifer wouldn’t care. If she’s Marked, someone needs to stop her.

It says she was wearing her seat belt. I hold the article up like evidence. The police think the other driver hit exactly the right spot so she didn’t get hurt.

And what are the odds of that?

I don’t say anything. I don’t need to. The answer is printed right in front of me: one in a million.

My stomach curdles, and I rub an old scar on my leg, its raised line smooth and reassuring. The stupid part of me hopes this will be another Ms. Rivera, with a quiet year of watching and waiting that ends with the matches still in our bag. The rest of me is already gearing up for a repeat of Mrs. Polly. Either way, someone has to do the work.

And maybe this time, I’ll finally see the Mark as clearly as Dad does.

The red torch pulses. So she’s our next project?

Not quite. He pauses. The Sweep would like to offer this to you.

My breath stills. By myself?

Dad nods. The project is yours if you want it. From start—his jaw twitches—to finish.

If I hadn’t already been sitting, the thought of that burning match in my own hand would have dropped me to the floor, where I’m pretty sure my stomach just landed. My first solo project.

A sixteen-year-old girl.

Looks like the Sweep decided to take the training wheels off. It’s a compliment, I suppose—the chance to observe Rachel Winter on my own, without Dad steering me toward the final verdict. The decision would be mine, and if I judge her Marked, it would be up to me to strike the match.

This is everything I’ve worked toward.

My throat tightens, blood pounding through my head like a tidal wave, but I lift my chin and hold his gaze. I’ll take it.

Dad hesitates, worry deepening the wrinkles on his brow. Are you absolutely certain? You need to understand, Matthew: This solo project is a test. There won’t be a second chance. Accept it, and it’s yours until the end—whatever that brings.

The concern etched on his face almost makes the No pushing against my teeth jump out, but I swallow it down.

I can do it, I tell him, and those four words might haunt me more than Mrs. Polly’s screams.

Dad’s head dips, hiding his face. When he finally looks up, his expression is impossible to decipher.

I’ll let them know. He hands me a file containing everything the Sweep prepared on Rachel Winter’s accident: articles, maps, pictures.

This is the worst birthday present ever.

CHAPTER

4

Mills Creek lies an hour east of San Francisco, though the small suburb feels about twenty years behind the big city. I drive past the welcome sign and ease up on the gas pedal to match the lazy crawl of cars around me. Thick trees rise on either side, their branches heavy with leaves, and beneath them slope the streets: cracked sidewalks lined with houses, small shops, and a six-screen movie theater that—like the rest of this place—could use a fresh coat of paint.

In the rearview mirror, the afternoon sun bounces off the windshield of Dad’s silver SUV, which he picked up at a used car lot yesterday. That’s one perk of this solo project: Our old sedan is now mine. He trails me down the main boulevard and onto a shady side street. A few more turns, and the road ends in front of a rickety two-story house.

The weathered wood lost its shine long ago, and dusty windows break the lines of dingy brown planks. With a bent weather vane poking out of the roof and weeds sprouting from an overgrown front lawn, the place looks more like a haunted house than the creatively named vintage home described in the rental ad. At least we won’t be staying inside, though the comfortable and cozy guesthouse we rented in back probably won’t be much better. I park at the curb, and Dad pulls in behind me.

Mr. Garrett said the key would be under the mat, I remind him as he climbs out. I grab my backpack and lead the way around the side of the house. A leaning gate blocks the path,