What if the devil’s mark doesn’t exist?
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from A Crooked Mark by Linda Kao, a young adult horror novel publishing with Razorbill on June 20th.
Rae Winter should be dead.
Some say that walking away from the car crash that killed her dad is a miracle, but seventeen-year-old Matthew Watts knows that the forces of Good aren’t the only ones at work. The devil, Lucifer himself, can mark a soul about to pass on, sending it back to the land of the living to carry out his evil will.
Matt has grown up skipping from town to town alongside his father hunting anyone who has this mark. They have one purpose: Find these people, and exterminate them.
After helping his father for years, Matt takes on his own mission: Rae Winter, miracle survivor. But when Matt starts to fall for Rae, to make friends for the first time in his life, he’s not sure who or what to believe anymore. How can someone like Rae, someone who is thoughtful and smart and kind, be an agent of the devil? With the lines of reality and fantasy, myth and paranoia blurred, Matt confronts an awful truth…
What if the devil’s mark doesn’t exist?
CHAPTER 1
I don’t know how it feels when the Devil scratches a soul. My father says He must have the lightest touch, because no one ever notices His crooked claw leave a stain on something that should belong only to them. They smile their old smiles, crack the same jokes, eat and play and work and laugh just as they used to, but the Mark festers inside, growing and feeding like a parasite. By the time anyone notices something is wrong, it’s too late. Lucifer has already won.
Not tonight, though.
I brace myself in the passenger seat as the car bounces down the moonlit road. Dad killed the headlights a mile back, and if we hadn’t driven this way hundreds of times before, we would have run straight into a tree by now. Yet nine months of careful work have given us plenty of hours to prepare. By the time we finished documenting sweet Mrs. Polly’s chilling descent from lucky survivor of a restaurant explosion to heartless killer Marked by Lucifer, Dad had it all planned out.
The matches sit in the console between us.
My mouth turns sour as my stomach gives another heave, and I clamp my teeth together, waiting for it to pass. Nine months of getting to know someone has a way of bleeding into an accidental friendship, making an already impossible job even harder. In the dim light, the determined line of Dad’s jaw holds only cold certainty, but doubt shrieks at me like a knife on glass.
It’s not easy to judge a soul.
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A Crooked Mark
I have to give Lucifer credit. There might not be any serpent in the tree or horned man with a pitchfork, but He’s still banging on our door. He’s just gotten a lot more creative. Clever bastard found a brand-new way to wreak havoc in the human world.
Accidents.
The semitruck bearing down on your car. The train you think you can beat across the tracks. The safety harness that snaps halfway up the mountain. One moment you’re in this world, and then—
Bam!
Hello, afterlife.
There’s a split second, however, when you aren’t quite in either. You’re right in the middle of the jump, eyes squeezed shut and both feet in the air, so you never see Lucifer extend a slender finger. It’s a delicate scrape, the smallest Mark on your soul, and then He sends you back. You’re alive, and everyone calls it a miracle, but God had nothing to do with it.
It’s something much, much worse.
Of course, not everyone who survives an accident is Marked. Some people really do get lucky, but you can never tell the difference just by looking at them. The Marked appear as normal as you or me, and that jump from this world to the next makes anyone fair game. A life filled with kindness and charity offers no protection. No shield. If Lucifer feels like leaving His couch at the moment you ski into a tree, all bets are off, and no one knows whether luck or the Devil saved you in that second you nearly died.
I’m still not certain which saved Mrs. Polly. But Dad is.
The house comes into view—a modest cottage on the isolated road, the familiar porch swing motionless in the shadows. Blackness bleeds from sleeping windows, and the single light beside her door offers the only glow in the surrounding darkness. Dad turns off the engine, and silence falls like the thud of a gavel.
“Ready, Matthew?” he asks.
Not at all.
“Maybe we should give it more time.” I brace against the frown growing on Dad’s face. “Just to be sure. She volunteered at the animal shelter yesterday—”
“And the sign over the door fell and crushed Jessa Barney’s skull twenty minutes after she yelled at Mrs. Polly for driving too fast in the parking lot,” Dad finished. “If we had acted sooner, Jessa would still be alive.”
“The chains holding that sign were old. One had already broken, remember?” My voice rises, and I fight to steady it. “Jessa’s family plans to sue the shelter for not fixing it sooner.”
“And it just happened to break the moment she stood under it?” Dad shakes his head. “Matthew, we’ve been over this. You saw the changes.”
The deaths and injuries that surrounded Mrs. Polly these last months had filled the pages of my notebook and made Dad’s fingers tap faster each night. The accidents started small: Little George Winton fractured his arm after he left his skateboard lying out for Mrs. Polly to trip over, and Vicky Becerra slipped and fell off the stage as she went to collect her first-place ribbon for the blueberry pie that beat Mrs. Polly’s in the annual fair. But then the brakes of Edward Fisher’s car failed the day he insulted Mrs. Polly’s new hairstyle, and Marian Wong choked to death on her steak as she laughed at Mrs. Polly for toppling a stack of dishes. A few more bodies dropped, and when a flowerpot finally fell off a balcony and killed Eileen Patterson minutes after she shorted Mrs. Polly at the cash register, Dad knew.
“Too much coincidence,” he said, and I agreed. Verdict rendered.
But now…
I think of the afternoons spent in her kitchen, trying new recipes and sharing apple pie, and force my mouth open once more. “What if we missed something? A few more days, just to be sure—”
Dad interrupts. “I liked Elisabeth Polly too. But waiting will only make this harder.” He picks up the matches. “Time to go.”
My fingers dig into the seat, every part of me begging to turn the car around and drive home. But that’s not the job. The lessons that began almost a decade ago ring through my head, and the rule by which Dad lives—by which he taught me to live as well—incinerates any last objections.
When Lucifer Marks a soul and returns it to this world, all we can do is light the fire and make it burn.
We open the doors and climb out.
CHAPTER 2
I lean against the car, every breath a jagged inhale, but Dad doesn’t seem to notice. He opens the trunk and takes out the bag he prepared for tonight.
“Play the clip if anyone comes,” he instructs, referring to the coyote howl I recorded on my phone last week. Packs of them prowl the area, and the noise won’t strike anyone as unusual. He steps away in silence, and time slows to a trickle.
I could call someone. The police. The fire department. They would come, sirens blaring, and I could get Dad away in time to save Mrs. Polly. The disturbance might raise alarms, making our work harder, but the alternative creeping closer with each passing second feels worse.
Surely another week of watching can’t hurt. My fingers are clumsy, the humming in my head deafening, but I dial: 9-1—
And then it’s too late.
An orange glow blooms behind the cottage windows, and my chest squeezes so tightly I can’t breathe. The charred air hits me, churning my stomach and clogging my throat. Wood snaps in the rising heat, and growing flames lick the night as smoke seeps through cracks in the walls.
The screams begin.
I want to cover my ears, but I force myself to listen, straining to hear the smallest hint of what lurked under her skin. The voice might come from Mrs. Polly, but the woman I knew is already gone. All that burns tonight is the human husk Lucifer’s Mark left after rotting another person from the inside out.
I listen so hard my ears throb, and all I hear is her.
Bile creeps up my throat, and every shriek sends an ice bath over my bones. Behind those singed stucco walls, Dad’s smoldering cigarette must have ignited the couch, and those burning cushions torched the rug and curtains. The photographs of her grown son Mrs. Polly once showed me are now cinders, and her cozy kitchen table is nothing more than kindling. Trapped in her bedroom, the door wedged shut by the stopper Dad jammed beneath it, Mrs. Polly doesn’t stand a chance. Her windows won’t save her.
The glue I used to seal them shut had three days to dry.
A shadow moves, and Dad runs toward me. “All clear?” he pants.
It takes two tries before my jaw unclenches. “Clear.”
We drive away with our headlights off, and I catch the sound of a distant siren cutting through the fire’s roar. The neighbor must have called, though he won’t come speeding over the ridge to check on Mrs. Polly anytime soon. A faulty spark plug has made certain of that. By the time the fire truck completes the eight-minute drive over the winding highway, Dad and I will be long gone.
I rest my forehead against the window and listen for Mrs. Polly, but the screams have stopped.
They always do.
Excerpted from A Crooked Mark, copyright © 2023 by Linda Kao.
