Finale

this since I was five. That should say a lot about this game!” I added.
    “Nora hasn’t had a blind date since she was five,” Marcie said, misinterpreting my meaning and adding her own commentary.
    “You are
so
next up,” I told Marcie, glaring at her from my knees.
    “If there is a next. Looks to me like you might be sucking face with apples all night,” she returned sweetly, and the crowd howled with amusement.
    I plunged my head into the tub, snapping my teeth at apples. Water sloshed over the rim, drenching the front of my red devil costume. I came
this close
to grabbing an apple with my hand
and pressing it into my mouth, but figured Marcie would disqualify the move. I wasn’t in the mood for a do-over. Just as I was about to come up for another breath, my front teeth crunched
into a bloodred apple.
    I surfaced, shaking water out of my hair to the sounds of cheering and applause. I chucked the apple at Marcie and grabbed a towel, patting my face dry.
    “And the lucky guy who gets a blind date with our drowned rat here is . . .” Marcie pulled a sealed tube from the center of the cored apple. She uncurled the scroll of paper inside
the tube, and her nose wrinkled. “Baruch? Just Baruch?” She pronounced it like
Bar-ooch
. “Am I saying that right?” she asked the audience.
    No response. Already people were shuffling away now that the immediate entertainment had ended. I was grateful that
Bar-ooch
, whoever he was, appeared to be a fake entry. Either that,
or he was too mortified to own up to a date with me.
    Marcie stared me down, as though expecting me to admit I knew the guy.
    “He’s not one of your friends?” I asked her as I scrunched the tips of my hair in the towel.
    “No. I thought he was one of yours.”
    I was on the verge of wondering whether this was another one of her bizarre games, when the lights in the house flickered. Once, twice, then they shut off completely. The music faded to eerie
silence. There was a moment of stupefied confusion, and then the screaming started. Baffled and jumbled at first, rising to a hair-raising note of terror. The screams preceded the unmistakable thud
of bodies being thrown against the living room walls.
    “Nora!” Marcie cried. “What’s going on?”
    I didn’t have a chance to answer. An invisible force seemed to smack me back a step, rendering me paralyzed. Cold, crisp energy coiled up my body. The air crackled and flexed with the
power of multiple fallen angels. Their sudden appearance in the farmhouse was as tangible as a gust of arctic wind. I didn’t know how many there were, or what they wanted, but I could feel
them move deeper into the house, spreading out to fill every room.
    “Nora, Nora. Come out and play,” a male voice singsonged. Unfamiliar and eerily falsetto.
    I drew two shallow breaths. At least now I knew what they were after.
    “I’ll find you my sweet, my pet,” he continued to croon in chilling tones.
    He was close, so close. I crawled behind the family room sofa, but someone had beat me to the hiding place.
    “Nora? Is that you? What’s going on?” Andy Smith asked me. He sat two chairs behind me in math and was Marcie’s friend Addyson’s boyfriend. I could feel the heat of
his sweat rising off him.
    “Quiet,” I instructed him softly.
    “If you won’t come to me, I’ll come to you,” the fallen angel sang out.
    His mental power sliced into me like a hot knife. I gasped as he felt around inside my mind, probing every which way, analyzing my thoughts to determine where I was hiding. I threw up wall after
wall to stop him, but he plowed through them like I’d constructed them from dust. I tried to recall every defense mechanism Dante had taught me against mind-invasion, but the fallen angel
moved too fast. He was always two—dangerous—steps ahead. I’d never had a fallen angel have this effect on me before. There was only one way to describe it. He was directing all
his mental energy at me through a magnifying glass, amplifying the effect.
    Without warning, an orange glow flared in my mind. A great furnace of energy blasted across my skin. I felt the heat of it melt my clothes. Flames chewed through the fabric, raking my skin with
hot torment. In unimaginable agony, I coiled into a ball. I tucked my head between my knees, grinding my teeth to keep from screaming. The fire wasn’t real. It had to be a mind-trick. But I
didn’t really believe it. The heat was so blistering, I was sure