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orders, I distracted myself by getting on the Internet and seeing what information I could scrape up on the Brewster family.
    I wasn’t expecting to find anything particularly interesting, or even particularly relevant. All I really hoped was to keep my mind off Lugh. But I found a lot more than I bargained for.
    Claudia Brewster was exactly what she looked like—an extremely successful career woman. She’d gotten an MBA from Harvard and had eventually brokered that into a position as vice president of a management consultant firm here in the city. Her husband, Devon Brewster III, was old money, and I could see no evidence that he’d ever worked for a living.
    But that wasn’t what caught my interest. It turned out there was a hell of a lot about Tommy Brewster that Claudia had failed to mention. Starting with the fact that he wasn’t her biological son.
    It appeared no one knew for sure who Tommy Brewster really was. When he was three years old, he was found at a horrific crime scene in Houston, where a rampaging demon had killed four people. A cop had heard the screams and come running. The demon had grabbed Tommy and was about to smash his head against a wall when the cop reached them. The cop had shot the demon in the head, killing its host and saving Tommy’s life.
    The story got stranger from there. The police were unable to identify any of the four people who’d been slaughtered, though blood tests proved that two of them were Tommy’s parents. Tommy was too traumatized to tell the police anything except his first name. He’d gone into the foster care system and had eventually ended up with the Brewsters, who’d adopted him when he was ten, after he’d lived with them for several years.
    The police weren’t idiots. They knew the demon who’d killed Tommy’s parents wasn’t dead—the only way to kill a demon is to burn its host alive—and they knew it was possible it would return to the Mortal Plain to finish the job it had started. When Tommy had gone into foster care, social services had been very careful to cover their tracks and make it impossible for the demon to locate him.
    So, how did I learn all this information about him if it was such a secret? Because Tommy had posted the whole sordid story on his MySpace page, along with enough anti-demon invective to get his profile deleted if anyone bothered to complain about it.
    It was possible the story was a load of shit. I’d looked up the stories about the slaughter, and there was no denying it had occurred, and that a small child had been found at the scene. That didn’t mean Tommy was that child. Still, if it was true, that would explain Tommy’s devotion to God’s Wrath.
    I knew Adam would find out for sure if Tommy Brewster was who he said he was. And if his story turned out to be true, then his case became even more suspicious.
    Who was the demon who’d slaughtered those four people and would have slaughtered Tommy if not for a policeman’s timely rescue? Why had the demon gone on such a rampage? And could it possibly be a coincidence that shortly after Tommy Brewster turned twenty-one—the age at which he could legally register to host a demon—he turned up possessed?
    The demons had shown far too much interest in this kid’s life. My gut instinct said it would behoove me to find out why.

Chapter 4
    It was a Saturday, and Adam was on duty, so I wasn’t surprised not to hear from him. Whatever research he was planning to do on Tommy Brewster would no doubt be off the record, and he probably wouldn’t even get started on it until tomorrow. Even understanding this, I chafed at the delay. Of course, some of my impatience was probably due to my desperate desire to find an excuse to cancel my evening’s planned activity—dinner with Brian.
    I’d barely spoken to him since he’d helped Lugh kill my father. He’d called a number of times, and I’d even picked up once or twice, but my emotions had been far too raw to handle an actual