“I already told you,” Talon said. “It’s a sickness of the soul. They’re being possessed.” His expression turned grim. “Fully now.”
“Whoa,” Lauryn said, putting up her hands. “Are you for real? Like The Exorcist ‘I’ll swallow your soul’ for real?”
Talon frowned, confused. “I’m not familiar with the reference, but I am speaking of demonic possession.” He scowled through the tiny window at the things outside. “I don’t know yet how the green substance Black used is involved, but all of the patients who were fighting it before have now been pushed fully into the arms of the enemy. If we are to have a hope of saving them, or ourselves, then we need to determine why.”
Lauryn stared at him blankly for a moment before turning to Will, who was circling his finger next to his head in the universal symbol for “cuckoo.” Unfortunately, that was a reference Talon did seem to understand, and he shot them both a quelling look.
“If you have a better explanation, I’ll listen,” he said, resting his sword on his shoulder. “But until then, you both might be better served if you opened your minds.”
Considering they were cowering in a closet from something that looked a hell of a lot like a full-on demonic zombie outbreak, Lauryn was ready to give him that one. “Okay,” she said with a deep breath. “I’ll play. You called this ‘a sickness of the soul.’ I don’t know jack about demons, but curing sickness is my job. How do we cure this one?”
“It would be easier to show you,” Talon said, beckoning her over. “Come look.”
Lauryn shuddered. “I’d rather not.”
“Just come here,” he said gently. “They can’t hurt you.”
She thought she heard the implied “yet” at the end of that sentence, but Talon was just standing there, looking as smooth and supremely confident as he always seemed to be. Biting her lip, Lauryn crept over to join him, standing on tiptoe to peek through the window as much as she dared.
“Look carefully,” Talon said, pointing over the scrabbling claws of the ones trying to get in. “Do you see how they’re all different?”
Lauryn didn’t. To her eyes, the things waiting outside all just looked like crazed human patients who all happened to be exhibiting the same horrifying symptoms of bloody eyes, blue-gray skin, hallucinations, violent psychosis, and so forth. It was the same combination of symptoms she’d observed in Lenny last night, but while that was enough for the doctor in her to diagnose the problem, Talon was still waiting, so Lauryn dutifully forced herself to look beyond the obvious. To really look at the patients shambling beyond the door, and the more she looked, the more she realized Talon was right.
When Lenny had changed, he’d gotten huge. That definitely seemed to be happening to some of the victims outside—one in particular was so tall his head was pushing up the drop ceiling—but plenty of others were scrawny or bloated or simply deformed. They weren’t all acting the same, either. Until now, Lauryn had been focused on the predatory ones that attacked, because they were the obvious threat. But while there were definitely several of these clustered around the door, just as many of the victims were hanging back in other parts of the room. Some looked to be searching the remains of their clothes for food or even prescription-pill bottles, which they devoured like they’d never get another. Still more were lying on the floor sobbing, their bodies shrunken and withered, like they were starving before Lauryn’s eyes.
“I don’t understand,” she said at last, dropping away from the window. “They were all exposed to the same thing, and yet they all have different symptoms. How is that possible?”
“Because they are not all the same,” Talon said, placing his hand on his chest. “In here.”
Somehow, Lauryn didn’t think he was talking about variations in biology. “You mean they have different souls,” she whispered, her eyes going wide. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Exactly,” Talon said, flashing her a proud look. “Evil enters through whatever doors we open for it. Rage, addiction, despair, selfishness—these are all weaknesses the enemy uses to break through our defenses.”
Lauryn frowned. “You keep saying that—what enemy?”
“He means the devil,” Will said, exasperated. “You know, big red dude? Horns, cloven hoofs, the whole nine yards.”
“Go ahead and mock him,” Talon said curtly. “But the devil is as real as any other force in the universe that drags man down. He preys on our faults and mistakes, exploiting whatever weakness we give him to pry his way into our hearts, and unless we cast him out again, he will never leave. Remember, ‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.’”
Will rolled his eyes, muttering under his breath about crazy people and the idiots who listened to them, but Lauryn was no longer so sure of herself. She didn’t believe in the devil any more than she believed in the tooth fairy, but it was just as stupidly dogmatic to dismiss reasonable explanations simply because they went against your preconceptions as it was to blindly believe. She wasn’t willing to go so far as to accept that they were dealing with actual agents of hell, but she couldn’t outright reject what Talon was saying, either.
Especially not when the evidence was clawing at the door.
“All right,” she said slowly. “Let’s assume for the moment that you’re right and those people are possessed. How do we fix that?”
“For real, Lauryn?” Will cried, his voice furious. “You’re buying this? What are you going to do next? Call in a young priest and an old priest?”
“I just want to hear what he has to say,” Lauryn snapped. “It’s not like we’ve got another option.”
“Hell yes we have another option,” Will said as he pulled out his phone. “I’m calling in backup. Let’s see how these things handle a SWAT team in riot gear.”
Lauryn smacked his phone away. “Now who’s crazy? We’re dealing with an unknown contagion that passes by touch! You can’t bring a bunch of nervous, gun-happy cops into that.”
“That’s still better than his plan,” Will said, glaring at Talon before lifting his phone back to his ear. “Demons my ass.”
Lauryn gave up after that, shaking her head as she turned back to Talon. “Please go on.”
For some reason, her willingness to listen seemed to gratify Talon enormously. He actually cracked a smile, which seemed wildly optimistic as the monsters began to bang on the glass again. “It’s a matter of scale,” he explained, bracing his broad back against the door. “Most people can never be fully possessed by the devil even if they offer themselves to him. We are God’s creation, and he has guards in place who protect us from such invasions.”
“Protections,” Lauryn repeated, remembering what he’d said on the street in front of her dad’s house. “You mean . . . you?”
“I play a small part,” Talon said with a calm that could have been humility or simply telling it straight. “And there are others, too, but we’re not usually called upon to prevent possession. As I told the detective earlier, true possession is rare. Not because the enemy is not active—he is always looking for a way in—but because hell is very far away, locked beyond death at the bottom of the pit. Traditionally, only those who invite the enemy with open arms can offer their bodies to his lieutenants. In such cases, the lesser demons possess their hosts fully, using their human bodies to do horrible, terrible things. That said, I don’t think that’s what we’re dealing with here. Traditional full possession takes years of focused effort and depravity, and lost as many of these addicts seem, I don’t think it’s possible for so many to have fallen so far all on their own all at once.”
“I see,” Lauryn said. “You think they were pushed.” She thought about that for a moment, and then her eyes went wide. “Is that what the green stuff does? Do you think it could be some kind of demonic kick start?”
“I don’t know,” Talon said. “That’s my best theory so far, but I fear this is bigger than what we’ve seen so far. Lincoln Black called the emerald liquid a catalyst, but thes
e people were sick well before he arrived. Whatever he did merely sped up the process. A process, I’m certain, that was done to them.” He glared over his shoulder out the safety-glass window where the patients’ black claws were still scraping. “Whatever other sins they might be guilty of, these people didn’t invite this evil. They were merely weak, and that weakness allowed someone to push them over the edge. But if they were pushed in against their will, that means we might be able to push them back out.”
He was talking about an exorcism, Lauryn realized with a start. Even more surprising was how much the pieces were starting to click together in her head. As if what he was saying actually made a certain kind of sense.
“This possession,” she said, following the logic. “We’ve already determined it’s contagious through fluid contact—bites and so forth. If that’s true, then this thing is acting like more like a disease than a drug.”
Talon nodded. “A sickness of the soul.”
“Right,” she said, getting excited. “And diseases can be cured. We just need the right medicine.”
“It’s not the common cold,” grumbled Will, who was apparently still listening.
“Good,” Lauryn said. “The common cold still isn’t cured, but I’ve already seen something work on this once.” She turned to Talon. “Back in the alley, you saved Lenny and my hands by pouring something over us. What was that?”
“Blessed water.”
Even when she was trying her hardest to roll with it, that was enough to make Lauryn wince. “Of course it was,” she muttered, taking a deep breath. She couldn’t quite believe she was actually going to say this, but in for a penny, in for a pound. “Got any more?”
Will finally looked up from his phone. “Holy water, Lauryn? Really? Are you going to try and tell me they’re vampires next?”
“I’m not saying I believe in all this,” Lauryn said quickly. “But I was there last night, and it worked. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but I saw it happen, and I’ve got the burns to prove it. You know the saying: if it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.”
“This is,” Will assured her.
Oddly, Talon looked just as doubtful. “It’s not a bad plan,” he said. “But there’s a problem.”
At Lauryn’s questioning look, he reached into his coat and pulled out the plastic bottle he’d used on her fingers yesterday, turning it sideways under the fluorescent lights so she could see just how little water was left inside. “I haven’t had time to refill it from yesterday,” he said. “But even if it was filled to the brim, there wouldn’t be enough for all of them.”
“Gee, too bad this didn’t happen near the reflecting pools out front, then,” Will said sarcastically. “You could have baptized them all. Just dunked their sins away.”
Talon looked deeply offended by that remark, but it gave Lauryn an idea. “For this,” she said, tapping Talon’s empty bottle. “What do you need besides water?”
“Just prayer and faith,” Talon said, puzzled. “Why do you ask?”
Lauryn turned and reached into Will’s jacket pocket. Sure enough, the lighter she remembered him always carrying around back when they were dating was still there, and she pulled it out with a grin.
“If I get you water,” she said, flicking on the flame, “can you do the rest?”
She hadn’t even explained her plan yet, but Talon’s face broke into a triumphant smile. “Through God, all things are possible,” he said proudly, straightening up to his full height. “What do we need to do?”
Lauryn pointed through the door’s glass window at the automated sprayers for the hospital’s fire system attached to the ceiling outside. “We use those.”
“No,” Will said automatically. “Absolutely not. I put up with this soul-flu-possession nonsense because you wanted to hear it, Lauryn, but this is where I draw the line. You are not going out there and risking your life for some holy water hocus-pocus!”
“Better than sitting in here waiting for those cops you just called to come in and shoot up my patients!”
“Exactly!” Will shouted. “They are your patients because you are a doctor, and doctors don’t believe in this crap!”
“But they do believe in saving the people under their care,” Lauryn said hotly, clenching her fist around his lighter. “I don’t know if Talon’s telling the truth or not, but I absolutely believe that whatever is happening to these people is not their fault. Even if it was, it wouldn’t matter. The moment they entered this hospital, they became my patients. If there’s a way to help them, any way, then I have to try. That’s the whole reason I became a doctor!”
By the time she finished, Will looked like he was going to explode again, but Lauryn didn’t give him a chance. “Let’s go,” she said, turning to Talon.
“Are you sure?” he asked quietly. “The detective is right—this is going to be dangerous. I’ll do my best to keep them off you, but even I can’t be everywhere at once.”
“Then I’ll have to be fast,” Lauryn said, trying to sound confident. “But we have to do something, and quick, because there’s only two ways this ends when Will’s SWAT team shows up: the patients bite the cops, or the cops shoot everyone. Either way, lots of people are going to die, and I’m not about to let that happen on my watch. Not if there’s any possible way of avoiding it.” She glanced down at the lighter gripped in her hands. “I say we give it a try. I mean, what have we got to lose?”
“Our lives,” Will snapped, grabbing her hand. “You’re not going, Lauryn.”
“She is free to go wherever she wants to go,” Talon said, dropping his own hand to his sword hilt. “God commands us to ‘be strong and courageous, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.’”
Will sneered. “Yeah, well, God also had some very different things to say about the role of women.”
“God’s word has been misinterpreted from time to time,” Talon said calmly, ignoring the barb. “She is free to go, Detective. You may not yet believe, but if you try to stop her from following what she knows to be right, believe that I will stop you.”
There was no anger in Talon’s voice when he said this. No malice at all. Only a conviction as stalwart and solid as the cement floor under their feet. Even Will must have heard it, because he looked away with a curse. Lauryn, on the other hand, had started to grin. She’d always had a love-hate relationship with Will’s protective streak, but having a guy with a sword on your side definitely made it more bearable, even if he did talk like a walking Bible.
“That settles it, then,” she said, her grin fading as the grim reality of what she was about to do set in. With a final bracing breath, she walked over to place her hand on the red fire alarm lever beside the door. “In or out, Will?”
Will swore again, and then he stomped to her side. “Fine!” he said, gripping his gun with both hands. “You’re both crazy, which means I’m outnumbered, so let’s just get it over with.”
Lauryn flashed him a final, thankful look before turning back to the fire alarm. “On three,” she said. “One, two—”
She flipped the lock and pulled it on two, an old doctor trick. She wasn’t sure going early would work as well with this as it did with giving shots, but it was too late to change her mind. The alarm was already blaring, filling the tiny room with flashing strobes. Talon grabbed the door at the same time, yanking it open so fast the monsters outside tumbled in, landing at his feet in a scrabbling mass. Even thought it had been her idea, seeing them right there—inside the room that had been their sanctuary—was enough to make Lauryn freeze. She was still staring dumbly when Talon’s deep voice thundered in her ear.
“Go!”
The order worked, and Lauryn charged forward, jumping over the piled monsters even as they pushed off the floor to grab hold of her coat. If she’d been alone, that would have been the end, but as he’d promised, Talon was at her side, swinging his sword like a bat to knock the transformed patients away from her. She had a vague thought
that maybe she shouldn’t be happy Talon might end up chopping off the body parts of her patients, but she had other things to worry about. At least she didn’t hear Will using his gun. She couldn’t check to look, though—she just kept running toward the nearest sprinkler.
Somehow she got there. Hands shaking, she clambered up on top of an empty gurney and held the lighter over her head, flicking on the flame and pushing right up against the mechanical heat detector in the sprinkler’s nozzle. She wasn’t actually sure how much heat was needed to set it off, but the answer was clearly less than she’d thought. Seconds after she pushed the lighter against it, the sprinklers went off. All of them, all at once, drenching the whole room in a spray of water so powerful, it felt like a rain of needles.
“Got it!” Lauryn shouted, ducking her head against the pounding water. “Do it!”
“Not alone!” Talon shouted back, grabbing her hand. “You have to pray with me.”
Lauryn couldn’t believe this. This wasn’t information he could have given me before we were surrounded by monsters? “Are you serious?” she screamed. “I can’t pray! I don’t even believe in God!”
“You have to,” Talon said, yanking her down off the gurney. “You wanted a miracle, remember?” He stabbed his sword in the floor in front of him and fell to his knees, dragging her down as well. “If you want something, you have to ask. Pray, and you shall receive.”
Feeling like an idiot, Lauryn dropped to the ground.
“What the hell are you doing, Lauryn?” Will screamed.
I wish I had a clue.
She hadn’t even gone through the motions of prayer since her father had stopped forcing her to in the eighth grade, and before then she’d never actually said a word to God on her own precisely because she’d never believed in him. Or, at least, she’d thought she hadn’t. But down there on the ground next to Talon with an army of wet and extremely pissed-off maybe-demons bearing down on them, Lauryn discovered that the old adage about there being no atheists in foxholes was truer than she’d realized. So, with nothing else for it, she ducked her head, squeezing her eyes tight as she muttered the first real, sincere prayer of her life.
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