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accent?” he asked Colin.
    Colin turned his scowl toward Dylan. “Because the universe thinks it’s funny, apparently.”
    “ Oh, Colin, you need to get over this. Women love Irish accents, you know. Combine it with a gorgeous man like yourself, and it’s a good thing you’re already married to me, or I’d be quite jealous of all the attention you get.”
    But Colin had only ever cared about one woman, and his ancestry, his homeland and ethnicity had made him an outcast and, in many of her family’s friends’ eyes, not worthy of her affection. He would spend his five hundred ten years on this planet since meeting Anna feeling like he’d never been good enough for the woman who had inexplicably agreed to marry him. And she’d spend those same years remonstrating him for feeling that way.
    “So we’ve got an hour to kill,” Dylan exhaled impatiently, “and I’m guessing you don’t have any other experiences that could shed some light on how to track down this Jeremy beast and separate it from the archdemon that’s obviously protecting it.”
    Anna chewed nervously on her lip and Colin asked her to stop before Dylan noticed, but Dylan was smart and observant. He noticed. And he knew Anna and Colin were keeping something from him.
    “What?” he asked, but it sounded like a demand.
    “It’s so silly, Dylan. I don’t even know if it’s useful,” Anna protested.
    “Anna, everything at this point is useful information to me, because I’m working on zero knowledge here.”
    “Truthfully, we didn’t think anything of it at the time. We thought it was a scam, like one of those faith healings or something, but now, we’re not so sure.”
    Dylan spread his hands open and waited. “And? Con or not, we see some weird shit, Anna, so what did y’all see?”
    Anna glanced at Colin and he just shrugged, telling her she may as well share this story then she looked at Dylan. “We may have seen someone becoming possessed.”

Chapter 4
     
     
    Cane Ridge,180 1 . Colin and Anna found empty seats at the back of the tent on a wooden bench where a couple of men had pressed together to make room for them. They had arrived after the start of the revival and several ministers were already preaching. There was so much noise from the crowd that neither of them could make out what any of the preachers were saying. The men they sat next to didn’t seem as perturbed by their inability to hear; their faces were marked by the rapture of the hysteria sweeping this crowd.
    Anna wasn’t particularly interested in anything these Presbyterian or Methodist ministers had to say anyway. She’d wanted to see what the people were doing and experiencing, and they’d been following the stories of Finney’s revivals in New York. Colin and Anna sympathized with some of his initiatives like abolition and allowing women to pray openly with men, but claiming five thousand million souls had already been condemned to Hell and scaring people into his reforms and beliefs didn’t sit well with Anna and Colin. They knew better.
    But people never wanted to hear how easy salvation really was. They always seemed to want to believe it was for those who lived a lifestyle that almost no one could actually live. So Colin and Anna watched these Awakenings with a growing sense of regret and sorrow. They’d left New York and traveled to Kentucky, following the wave of religious revivalism on the Eastern coast. Ironically, it had brought with it plenty of opportunities for demons to exploit those humans who felt overwhelmed with guilt and shame by those ministers who made them feel hell-bound anyway. And these revivals had kept Colin and Anna busy.
    Anna was watching a woman near one of the ministers on a stump. She kept clutching at her chest and pulling at her hair. Anna had seen people fake this sort of healing or mystical union before. It still fascinated her. She wasn’t sure if these people wanted the attention of the crowd nearby or the minister