The Beast that Rises Up
The FBI men are gone, and the lawyers are gone, and the maids have come and gone when the devil looks Lara in the eye and says, "I can bring your brother back."
The door frame closes in around her; the house settles against her shoulders, heavy and warm. She has always hated this house, has never felt at home here even when James was alive in the next room, but suddenly everything slips into place. The house fills her empty spaces with gaslight and velvet drapes, and old lullabies on the piano. Fairy lights in the living room. James. The boxes she'd been packing that afternoon, Lara knows, will be empty by evening.
"But first," the devil says, dropping his voice, "I'm afraid I'll need a favor."
Lara smiles, a quick, foreign twist of her lips. She can feel the house at her back, and draws strength from its history, the lives they have taken here - and from a memory that seems like a lifetime ago now, of James's warm, chapped lips against hers.
"I'll do it," she tells the devil.
She'd expected nothing less.