“Anyone who holds it becomes an ORBMASTER. You’re an ORBMASTER right now. There, keep it, put it in your pocket. D.C. ORBMASTER.”

Declan reached out and scuffed Ronan’s shaved head. “You’re such a little asshole.”

The last time they’d stood on this roof together, their parents had both been alive, and the cattle in these fields had been slowly grazing, and the world had been a smaller place. That time was gone, but for once, it was all right.

The brothers both looked back over the place that had made them, and then they climbed down from the roof together.

Depending on where you began the story, it was about Neeve Mullen.

Neeve had the sort of career that most psychics longed to have. Part of this was because she had a very easily monetized variety of clairvoyance: She was good with specific numbers, specific letters, pulling telephone numbers out of people’s wallets, birthdays out of people’s heads, accurately pinpointing the times of future events. And part of this was because she was single-mindedly ambitious. Nothing was ever enough. Her career was a glass that never seemed to get full. She started with a phone line, and then published some books, landed herself a television gig that came on very early in the morning. She had respect within the community.

But.

Outside of the community, she was always going to be just a psychic. These days, this century, even the very best psychic had the nose-wrinkled stigma of a witch and none of the awe.

Neeve could put her hands on the future and the past and other worlds, and nobody cared. And so she’d done the spells and dreamt the dreams and asked her spirit guides for a path. Tell me how to become powerful in a way people can’t ignore.

Henrietta, whispered one of her guides. Her television screen stuck on weather maps of Virginia. She dreamt of the ley line. Her half sister called. “Come to Henrietta and help me!” Mirrors showed her a future with all eyes on her. The universe was pointing the way.

And here she was in a blackened forest with Piper Greenmantle and a demon.

Neeve should have guessed that her fixation with power would bring her to an opportunity to bargain with a demon, but she hadn’t. She wasn’t 100 per cent on ethics, but she was no idiot: She knew there was no happy ending to such a bargain. So this was a dead end. Probably literally.

Morale was low.

Piper, on the other hand, remained enthusiastic. She had replaced her tattered rags with a perfect sky-blue dress with pumps to match; she was a shock of colour in an increasingly colourless landscape. She told Neeve, “No one wants to buy a luxury item from a hobo.”

“What are you selling?” Neeve asked.

“The demon,” Piper replied.

Neeve wasn’t sure if it was a failure of imagination or psychic perception on her part, but she hadn’t anticipated this either. A rush of bad feeling accompanied Piper’s answer. Neeve attempted to articulate it. “It seems to me that the demon is tied in with this geographical location and exists for a specific purpose, i.e., in this case unmaking all energy artefacts associated with this place, and so it seems unlikely to me that you would be able to move it without considerable har—”

“Is time weird here?” Piper interrupted. “I can’t tell if we’ve been here for a couple of minutes or not.”

Neeve was fairly certain they had been here far longer, but that the forest was manipulating their sense of time in order to stall Piper. She didn’t want to say this out loud, though, because she was afraid that Piper would then use that information in some dreadful way. She wondered if she could kill Piper – what. No, she didn’t. That was the demon, whispering into her thoughts as it always was.

She wondered what it was whispering to Piper.

Neeve looked at the demon. It looked back. It was beginning to look more at home here among the forest, which was probably a bad sign for the trees. In a low voice, she said, “I do not see how you expect to sell this demon. This is an exercise in arrogance. You cannot control it.”

The lowered voice was pointless, as the demon was right there, but Neeve couldn’t help herself.

“It is favouring me,” Piper said. “That’s what it said.”

“Yes, but in the end, the demon has its own agenda. You are a tool.”

The demon’s thoughts whispered through the trees; the trees quivered. A bird cried out, but it was a sound in reverse. A few feet away from Neeve, a mouth had opened in the ground and it was slowly opening and closing in a hungry, neglected way. It was not possible, but the demon didn’t care about possible. The forest now lived by nightmare rules.

Piper seemed unfussed. “And you are a downer. Demon, make me a house. House cave. Whatever you can do fast around here. As long as I can have a bath, I’m on board. Let it be thus, or whatever.”

It was thus, or whatever, according to the word of Piper.

The demon’s magic was unlike anything Neeve had ever used before. It was negative, a magical debit card; a psychic proof of energy was neither created nor destroyed. If they wanted to make a building, the demon would have to unmake part of the forest. And it was not an easy process to watch. If it had been a simple deletion, Neeve might not have had such a hard time with it. But it was a corruption. Vines grew and grew and grew, flowering and budding with ceaseless growth until they strangled themselves and rotted. Delicate thorn trees grew razors and spines that twisted and curled until they cut the branch growing them. Birds began to vomit their guts, which became snakes, which ate the birds and then devoured themselves in thrashing agony.

The worst were the big trees. They were holy – Neeve knew they were holy – and they resisted change for longer than anything else living in the forest. First they bled black sap. Then, slowly, their leaves shrivelled. The branches fell against each other, collapsing in black muck. Bark sloughed in peeling slabs like ruined skin. The trees began to moan. It was not a sound a human could produce. It was not a voice. It was a tonal version of the sound a branch makes groaning in the wind. It was a song of a tree falling in a storm.

It was against everything Neeve stood for.

She made herself watch it, though. She owed it to this old holy forest to watch it die. She wondered if she had been brought to this forest to save it.

Everything was a nightmare.

Piper’s new home filled a massive deep cleft in the rocks, suspended and secured by means magical. The structure was a strange marriage of both Piper’s desires and the stuccoed-wasp-nest sensibility of the demon. In the very centre of the main room was a deep, tear-shaped bathing pool.