PrologueThe girl was handcuffed to the bed. For hours she had been screaming, but now her voice was gone and she merely panted, exhausted but not resigned. Her eyes were huge and sunken in her pale, strained face. Her white nightgown was soaking wet, and so was the bare mattress underneath her; she shivered in the breeze from the open window. Lit by candles arrayed on the dresser, her skin seemed to writhe from underneath, like something was crawling inside her.
The small bedroom felt crowded with five people in it. The girl’s parents sat near the head of the bed, clutching each other’s hands, not touching their daughter. In the far corner, a woman recited the rosary in a low, droning voice. Beneath the monotonous Hail Marys, the girl’s parents whispered to each other.
The immobilized girl breathed loudly, but said nothing. Neither did the man at the foot of her bed, wearing the black vestments of a priest. His hands were clasped before him and his eyes fixed, blue and ferocious, on the girl.
Brigid watched from the hallway, her eye pressed to the gap in the doorframe where the wind whistled through. It was the dead of night and she should have been long asleep, but when she closed her eyes, all she could see was the demon, waiting to be cast out. She didn’t want to miss the miracle.
The girl on the bed squirmed in her bonds. Her wrists and ankles were horribly bruised and abraded, blood seeping onto the dingy gray-white of the mattress in a sickening stigmata. Brigid remembered the soft curves of her body when her parents first brought her to this house. Now, only a few days later, skin hung from her bones like a secondhand jacket, too tight in some places, too loose in others. Her cheekbones and brow loomed, shadows swirling beneath. Her lips were chapped dull white, except in the corners of her mouth, dark red with more old blood.
Brigid thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world.
Father Angus, Brigid’s uncle, raised his hands and the parents fell silent. Out in the hall, Brigid held her breath. Only Brigid’s mother, Adelaide, continued speaking, endless streams of prayer without pause or inflection.
“Demon,” Father Angus commanded over his sister’s recitation. “Leave this child’s body. Release her soul.”
The girl spat at him, or tried, but her mouth was too dry. “Fuck you, old man,” she rasped. Her mother, an arthritic knuckle of a woman, sobbed and buried her head in her husband’s neck.
Unmoved, implacable, the priest circled the bed until he stood near its head, his shadow falling over the wretched figure of the girl. From somewhere in the folds of his robe, he produced a flask of holy water. With one hand, he forced the girl’s jaw open, his hard fingers digging into the papery skin of her cheeks, and with the other poured the water in.
The girl struggled, but Father Angus clapped his palm over her mouth and held fast. Her whole body spasmed, choking and coughing, arching off the bed with the strength of her resistance.
Brigid watched and knew her soul was bound for hell, because in that moment she wanted the girl to win. In her nine years of life she had never seen anyone defy Father Angus. It was wrong: her uncle was a man of God, speaking in God’s stead on earth, and to disobey him was to hate the true and the good. But the girl was so beautiful, and she fought so hard. Brigid wanted her to break the chains that held her, rise into the sky, and strike them all down in hellfire.
The girl on the bed finally went limp, and the priest took his hand away.
“You can’t have her, you son of a whore,” said the demon inside the girl’s body. “She’s mine.”
Copyright © 2025 by Lindsay King-Miller. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
