by SM Reine
The time until she responded dragged on. It couldn’t have been longer than a moment or two, but the sudden racing of Anthony’s heart made it feel like hours, and Elise’s expression was unreadable.
She didn’t smile at his suggestion, but she didn’t laugh at him, either, which had to be a good sign.
“Yeah,” Elise said. “That sounds good.”
Relief washed through his body. The next second, it was replaced with nervousness. “Cool,” Anthony said, jamming his fists in his pockets. “Cool. Since I’m just in the duplex next to yours, we could go together. That way, only one of us has to drive. With the price of gas and parking and stuff.”
“Oh yeah. Gas is a huge concern from here to downtown,” she said. “I have things to do tonight, so I don’t have time for dinner, but I can meet you for the concert.”
“Then it’s a date,” he said.
Elise nodded, turned back to her laptop, and started typing again.
Why did he feel even more nervous now than before he had asked her out?
The door between the rooms opened, and the coven emerged. James exited first, accompanied by a leggy strawberry-blond.
“We’ll need more information on Lucinde before we decide to do a cleansing,” the woman said. “I don’t feel comfortable performing a ritual unless we’ve ruled out a health problem.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Lucinde has had extended hospital stays, so her medical records should be there,” Stephanie said. “I could look at them.”
James cast a glance at Elise. “We should discuss this somewhere quieter. Come upstairs.”
Ann trailed behind the last of the coven. Her ratty brown hair was pulled into a ponytail at the nape of her neck. She hauled a heavy backpack over her shoulder and wandered over, waving at Elise.
“Hi guys,” she snuffled, digging through her pockets and coming up with a packet of tissues.
He gave a weak wave. Through Betty’s chronic inability to dislike people, she had managed to collect some bizarre friends over the years—Elise included—but Ann might have been the weirdest. She was an undergraduate at the university where Betty worked on her thesis. They met at the library while researching obscure blood diseases, which led to Ann joining the coven, and now she was Betty’s latest pet project.
“Weird stuff, huh?” Ann asked Elise.
She didn’t look up. “Yes.”
“What do you think about this whole thing with Marisa’s daughter?”
“I don’t think much about it at all.”
“Just seems too bad, you know?” Ann stepped closer to allow Morrighan to pass, and Elise rolled her chair a few inches back. “Poor kid. Still going to the gym tonight?”
Anthony stole a look at Elise. She had finally given her attention to Ann. He had no idea what her expression meant, but if Elise ever looked at him like that, he would have run in the opposite direction. “Yes.”
“Guess I’ll see you there. Bye!” She lurched out of the studio. The heavy backpack on her shoulder gave her a lopsided walk.
A squealing golden blur struck Anthony in the side, and he staggered.
“You came!” Betty exclaimed, squeezing her cousin tight. Anthony made a gurgling noise.
Elise’s cold look dissolved. “Did you leave any espresso at the Starbucks you violated?”
“I only had two triple fraps this morning,” she said, and then she gave Anthony another squeeze. Betty was not a small girl—she was equal to Anthony in both height and weight, and he had to struggle to breathe.
“Why does Ann know we’re going to the gym tonight?” Elise asked.
Betty released Anthony. “Ooh. I invited her to come along. That’s okay, right?”
“The gym is a public place.”
“Yeah, but I invited her to come, you know, work out with us. She looks like she could use some exercise, and I know she’s got to be lonely going to college so far from her parents, so please tell me you were nice to her.”
Elise chose not to respond, turning back to the computer instead.
“She was…polite,” Anthony said. Betty rolled her eyes.
“Elise! Did you have to scare her?”
“I said she was polite,” he protested.
“Yeah, but I know my roommate better than that. Look, if it’s a problem, you can skip the gym tonight and I’ll just hang out with Ann. Okay?”
“I don’t mind,” Elise said, although it sounded like she did mind very, very much. “I have to take these papers back to my office before we can work out. I’m going to go.”
“Yeah, yeah. I should change clothes anyway. I’m not exactly exercise-appropriate right now.” Betty pointed at her breasts, which were very prominently displayed in what was probably a continuing attempt to get James to look at them. “Ready, cuz?”
“Sure,” Anthony said reluctantly. “Let’s go.”
“Cool,” Betty said. “See you later, Elise!” She dragged him away by the elbow. “Come on, I want time to shower, too.”
Anthony sighed. “I don’t see why you want to shower before you go get sweaty.”
“One day I’ll explain the concept of ‘looking sexy for hot guys at the gym’ to you,” she said, ruffling his hair affectionately. “I heard you making plans with my foxy best friend. What are you guys doing tonight?”
“What? Nothing,” Anthony said, reaching in to unlock Betty’s door.
She shot Anthony a sly look. “Don’t give me that. I heard you flirting with Elise.”
His cheeks heated. Oh God. Now Betty was never going to let him forget it. “I was helping her find some papers, and we talked a little. That’s all. We were talking.”
“Shopping amongst the cougars, huh? I thought I’d raised you better than that.”
“You’re sick, Betty.”
“What were you talking about?”
She was staring at him, and Anthony had to say something. He thought of the gashes on Elise’s arms, and her long legs, and James confronting Elise about her injuries. He thought of her smile and the Knitting Factory, and secretive high priests with exorcists on-call.
But he only shrugged.
“Just the usual stuff,” Anthony said.
A half an hour later, Elise hadn’t left for the office. She was still staring at the same cell on the spreadsheet with her fingers poised over the number pad.
Anthony had asked her on a date. It was…well, weird. Elise had only dated one guy before—another kopis, back when she was eighteen. He turned out to be a total waste of oxygen, but Elise’s life had been too dangerous to share with anyone anyway. A normal guy like Anthony wouldn’t have stood a chance.
Things had changed since then, but she still hadn’t been on a date in years. Sex was nothing but a distant memory. Elise wasn’t sure if she was excited, confused, terrified, or all of the above.
James wandered back inside the entryway, Stephanie at his side.
“Thank you for your help,” he said.
“It’s for Lucinde,” the doctor said firmly, twisting a key off her key ring. Her fingers lingered on his when she passed it over.
“I’ll return this to you tonight.”
“I look forward to seeing you.” She strode out of the room, three-inch heels ringing out against the wooden floor. Stephanie smelled like she bathed in Victoria’s Secret perfume, and the scent mingled poorly with the odor of incense.
“The doctor has a great bedside manner,” Elise remarked.
“We’re going to retrieve Lucinde’s hospital records tonight. Stephanie wants to be certain that there isn’t some other problem we need to address before taking care of the metaphysical end of things, but she can’t walk out with Lucinde’s records for no reason.”
“She’s a better candidate for it than we are.”
“She also has a meeting with the board scheduled. It’s more convenient if we take them.”
“That’s called stealing, James,” Elise said. “She could get a slap on the wrist for taking them.
We’ll get arrested.”
James pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “We have the key to the records room, which is usually unattended at night, so we won’t get caught if we’re quick about it. You don’t have to come.”
She gathered the papers on the desk. “This is a bad idea.”
“Fine, then I’ll—”
“I’m not going to let you do it alone. I’ll come along.” Elise hugged the folder to her chest, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. “Look…you know I don’t care about stealing, but we can’t take long. I have plans.”
“Plans?”
“Yeah. I’m about to go to the gym, and then I have a date.”
James took a few seconds to respond.
“A date. I’m glad to hear it.”
Elise’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not mad? You hated my last boyfriend.”
“You were eighteen and he was an idiot. You should have fun.” He checked his watch. “When do you want to go over to the hospital? I was thinking seven.”
“That’s fine.”
James left to clean up the altar in the other room. “If he’s so certain dating Anthony is okay, then why aren’t I?” Elise asked the empty entryway. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t respond.
She stopped by the bank to deposit David Nicholas’s check before going to the gym. It made her feel warm to look on his signature and recall his expression as he slashed it underneath that large number, and Elise couldn’t wait to turn those warm feelings into her half of rent for the month.
“This check is bad,” the teller announced.
Elise had been drifting in a daydream of being able to pay off her credit card, but this announcement brought her back to reality as quickly as a blow from a hammer.
“What?”
“This check is bad,” he repeated slowly, one word at a time. “There’s a twelve dollar fine for attempting to cash a bad check. If you go down to the office of the—”
“How the hell is it bad?”
He typed at his terminal, looking bored. “This account number belongs to our bank, but it’s been closed for a year. No money. Bad check. Twelve dollar fine. Understand?”
Elise made two mental notes: Firstly, that she should use a credit union instead of a bank apparently staffed by pure evil, and secondly, that David Nicholas was going to die.
The teller shredded the check as Elise watched, and her heart dropped into her stomach.
“Have a nice day,” he said with a big smile.
V
After tolerating the most tedious hour at the gym of Elise’s life, she met James in the parking lot in front of the hospital. The sun dropped behind the mountains, setting the sky aflame. A wet chill lowered the temperature several degrees. She shivered and shrunk into her coat.
“Nice summer we have coming along,” she muttered.
James locked his car. “Let’s get inside.”
They passed through the hospital doors and all sound died. It felt as though the volume on life had been turned down low in the empty halls.
James glanced down at his watch. “Stephanie said the records room is empty during shift turnover. If we head down now, we should have enough time to get in and out before someone comes down.”
“What happens if we get caught?”
He smiled mirthlessly. “We get arrested.”
Her forehead throbbed with the first signs of a headache. She shut her eyes and pressed the heel of her palm against her temple. “That doctor of yours better help us out if we get in trouble. It’s her fault we’re here in the first place.”
“But it isn’t her fault Augustin Ramirez refused to cooperate with us,” James said. A sharp pain lanced through Elise’s skull, and she gave a small gasp. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t know what’s wrong. I feel strange. Almost as though…”
Almost as though there was something that didn’t belong in a hospital.
She let out a slow breath and stretched out her senses, probing the strange presence.
“Elise?” James asked when she was silent for too long.
“It’s a demon,” she said. “Faint. Weak.”
“An actual demon, or one of the Gray?”
She tilted her head to the side as if trying to catch the faint strains of a distant song. It made her ache from crown to jaw. “Hellborn.”
“What’s it doing in a Catholic hospital?”
“I would love to find out.” Elise punched the down button.
The elevator began to lower, and Elise’s sense of the hellborn grew stronger by every inch they dropped. She covered her eyes with the heels of her palms, pressing gently, as though she could squeeze the uncomfortable itch out of her skull.
The doors opened on the basement level, and James consulted a map Stephanie had scribbled on the dance studio’s stationary.
“The medical records office is over here,” James said, peering through a door with a window. “There should be a fax machine inside.”
“Okay,” Elise said. “Watch the hall.”
She slipped into the records room. It was a long room filled with shelves, and at the far end stood a desk and plastic chair.
It clearly wasn’t designed to be comfortable for human occupation: the walls were concrete and water-stained, and the carpet was hardly in better condition. The only lights were harsh and unsteady, flickering on when Elise flipped the light switch.
She went along the side of the room, searching for the records that began with R. She found them quickly, but locating Lucinde’s records in particular was much more difficult. There were so many folders all over the place—she couldn’t imagine how the hospital hadn’t moved to digital records yet.
She thumbed through the names. Rand. Randall. Ramirez. Success.
Elise skimmed Lucinde’s records as she began feeding them through. She continued to skim the second part of the stack, which contained duplicate records from Lucinde’s general practitioner. Chicken pox, a case of the flu, referrals to several cardiologists over the years. Elise didn’t see anything about psychoses.
Each sheet of paper seemed to take forever to feed through the machine, and slow inch by slow inch she grew more nervous. She strained to detect any noise from the hallway, half-certain she would hear James failing to ward off a nurse outside. With David Nicholas’s bounced check, she definitely couldn’t afford an attorney.
The fax kicked out the rest of the papers and beeped. She put them back in the folder.
A pulsing noise throbbed between Elise’s ears. The pit of her stomach dropped, and a familiar nausea crept through Elise’s body. She slid the folder into place and headed for the door, holding her stomach.
And then the pulse burst.
She staggered, slamming against the wall. Her dinnertime snack of yogurt and granola rose into her throat. She took slow, shallow breaths, trying to hold off the urge to vomit—and failed. The sour tang of bile flooded her mouth.
There was something in the hospital, and James was alone outside.
She spat into the trash can, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and threw open the door.
James was not waiting for Elise outside.
For a second, all she could do was stare at the naked man standing where her aspis should have been. He wasn’t breathing. In fact, he didn’t look like he was alive at all. A toe tag dragged on the ground beside him.
She would have been sure he was a corpse, except that he was standing, and staring, and drooling. Corpses couldn’t drool.
Someone whispered behind Elise. “Take care of her.”
She spun, but the hall behind her stretched empty. A light flickered several feet down.
A heavy weight slammed into Elise’s side, and all the breath rushed out of her body. She struck the floor an instant later. Pain exploded in her shoulder.
Elise squirmed out from under his body, freeing her legs so that her foot could lash out. The kick landed in his face. He reeled, unable to get his balance. An
other kick, and he collapsed.
His shoulders twitched, and a shudder ran through his body. His mouth flopped open, and his tongue rolled out, covered in thick green mucous.
“Elise,” he said from the floor. His mouth didn’t move to articulate the words, and the voice was garbled and echoing. He almost sounded…feminine. “I wish you hadn’t become involved.”
She stared. “What?”
The hallway lights flickered once, and went out completely.
Elise backtracked and hit the wall. She blinked rapidly, trying to make out shapes in the darkness, but the only light came from around the corner, and it wasn’t enough.
Something moved, slipping across the floor, scraping on the linoleum.
She spun, trying to face the source of the noise. It moved behind her, and she raised her fists. “Who’s there?” Elise said, trying to sound calm. Adrenaline sang through her veins.
More noises. Almost like…claws.
To her right.
She twisted, but not quickly enough. Pain flamed across her torso.
She cried out, clutching her stomach. Elise could almost see bulbous eyes sparkle in the darkness, but it darted away before she could focus.
She threw herself at the motion and barreled into something living.
They rolled. Elise punched blindly and was rewarded with the shriek of something inhuman, something terrible. Another fiend. She threw her body weight to roll it over, grabbing at what she hoped was its neck and pressing against the linoleum.
“Who do you work for?” she demanded.
It choked.
Something struck the back of Elise’s head. A gong chimed in her skull, shooting pain down her spine, and she fell.
The fiend scrabbled away. It sounded like the footsteps moved all around her, up and down, inside her skull.
The noise faded. She floated in a sea of her own pulse, trying to feel her limbs. Her fingers twitched, and then her toes. Thank God.
Where had they gone?
“Elise?”
Lights flared on. Elise moaned, covering her eyes. The pressure in her head had suddenly disappeared, and despite the pain in every inch of her body, she felt better. The fiends—and the body—were gone.