Now this is truly unbelievable. “I called. When the fuck did I call any of you? I didn’t even call Poe or Khi—”
“Stop!” shouts Nachiel with an intensity that instantly silences me.
He takes a breath. “You have to be very careful what you say. You have more power than you realize, wearing that ring. Never say a spirit or demon’s true name unless you’re ready to meet them. And when you give a command, watch how you phrase your sentences. Do you remember what you said at Aspinwall before all hell broke loose?”
Not exactly at the top of my mind; something about spirits… doing something? “I said—”
“For fuck’s sake, don’t say it again. Seriously, got enough to deal with. But you do remember?”
“I think I get general the drift. So that made all this… happen?”
He sighs, like I’m an idiot finally catching up. Which I am. “Exactly. You opened the door to anything supernatural that had touched that place. Poe came through, possessed Maddy—”
“Then the floor gave way, but she wasn’t possessed afterward.”
“Because you told her to leave Maddy alone. Nice bit of intuition there. But the whole thing rang a pretty loud bell in the spirit world. Sorath sensed your connection with Lisa. He needed to find a host, someone he could use to emotionally manipulate you, and he’d already possessed Daniel once. Makes it easier.”
“Once?”
“Daniel found The Book of Fiends, or what there was of it, at Aspinwall. He conjured Sorath… thought he’d be smart enough to control him. Of course he wasn’t. After he tried to kill Lisa, your father was able to perform the exorcism. But it was his last. It… drained him. He never fully recovered.”
I lean the back of my head against the cement wall, fighting a wave of dizziness. It all fits, but then that’s what bothers me. It’s too perfect.
“And you didn’t just tell me all this in Sacred Heart because…?”
“You hadn’t called me by name yet. Rules of engagement. If seraphs could just walk around telling people what they should know, it’d be a different world. You have to admit though I dropped you a pretty serious hint.”
In a very odd way, probably because my life is very odd at the moment, it makes sense.
“And my father. Why the fuck didn’t he bother to tell me? Didn’t think I could handle it?”
Nachiel pauses for a moment.
“Honestly, your father didn’t want a son.”
I burst out into laughter, the bright, bitter kind. “Oh well, that makes me feel so much better. You’re an amazing help, Nachiel. Wish I’d conjured you before. Could have used some help slitting my wrists.”
Nachiel sighs, then joins me on the cold cement floor. “Look,” he says quietly, “this is dark, dark stuff. Not the kind of stuff you’d ever wish on anyone, not your worst enemy, certainly not the people you love. You can exorcise demons, but once they’ve connected with someone, they’re more accessible. Easier to find.”
I think about Daniel’s victims. How each of them in some way had been touched by Sorath. None fared well.
“A lifetime exorcising demons isn’t much of a life,” he adds grimly.
“Who wouldn’t want to be a part of all this?” A bout of serious coughing starts then, making me double over again with pain. Nachiel reaches into his pocket and pulls out a flask. He hands it to me, and I choke back a swig of liquid fire. It takes out the cough but does nothing for the dull ache in my heart.
“He was hoping it would end with him. But then there was the fire. He rescued your mother, nursed her back to health. They both became different people. Better people. But because they grew close, and Delia had been possessed once… Well, Delia would have been too tempting of a target for Sorath if your mother ever returned. She was devastated of course.”
“I was her consolation prize.”
“One I know he never regretted.”
I know then, by the sickening drop in my stomach, that it’s true. All those years I was angry at him. Wasted. And while I now have one living relative, she suffers from dementia and I’ll never be able to meet her for the same reason our mother could never see her.
“My inheritance,” I mutter. Suddenly I remember how pale my father was after his unexplained trips, how he’d be in bed for days, as though he were suffering from cancer. Even dealing with Poe gives me a splitting migraine. I’ve finally found out what my father’s “thing” was. Exorcising demons. It’s an empty victory.
Nachiel looks at me intently. “He was ready to move on, knew he wasn’t much use anymore in the demon-exorcism department. They planned to come out and visit you. He was going to give you the ring, pass it on as his own father, Rasputin, did before him.”
“Funny, I found it under the dresser.”
“Well, your mother, she had other ideas. Slipped the shoebox out of the car when he wasn’t looking.”
Click, click, click go all the pieces of my fragmented life.
“But she didn’t get old.”
“Not as quickly as she would have,” says Nachiel. He slips the flask back in his pocket. “Time is just another force of nature. One that with a little education you’ll be able to… adjust is probably the best way to describe it.”
“And the grimoires?”
“Your father left The Book of Seraphs with Lucy for safekeeping during his trip. She happens to own your favorite store. If you define favorite as bad, kitschy religious memorabilia.”
“Sacred Heart Collectibles.”
“You disappeared after the funeral and she didn’t know how to get it to you. Funny, because she reads the Devonshire Eagle every day, but your byline is D. Peters. By the way she doesn’t know about all this. Would be dangerous for her if she did. But The Book of Fiends is a little more tricky.”
I give him a hard look. “Define tricky.”
“Well, your father separated the Book of Fiends—never kept the pages for conjuring demons and exorcising them in the same place. Young Archibald Bennet, not knowing how to read at the time, stole the half for conjuring demons, and we all know how that went.”
“So the other half for exorcising demons…?”
“Unknown,” Nachiel says. “Which makes me very, very uneasy. Your father always stashed those pages in the strangest places. You didn’t run across them when you cleaned out the house?”
“I would have mentioned it.”
“Well it doesn’t mean you don’t have them. Probably in something you’d take with you if something happened. Think about it for a sec. What would you never leave behind?”
“Wish I’d known when I packed my boxes, because what I took was random.”
“I said think about it, not complain about it.”
I groan. “Poetry magnets. High school yearbook. Bunky.” Wait—Bunky was heavier than he should have been. But what kind of sick bastard would stuff their son’s favorite stuffed animal with a grimoire?
Oh, right. Probably the same kind of sick bastard who’d steal a grimoire from his girlfriend, along with her mother’s gun. Like father, like son.
Nachiel says nothing then, watching me carefully, and I’m overwhelmed with the impossible weight of it all. All I want to do is quit, find a corner somewhere to curl up and sleep, let it all fall away. Enough.
But then where would that leave Lisa?
Wincing with pain, I grab my jacket, slip the gun in my pocket, and shakily get to my feet, using the cement wall to hold myself steady.
“So how do we save Lisa?”
Nachiel though doesn’t move, doesn’t stand to join me. “That’s just it, Dimitri. We don’t.”
I hobble up the Aspinwall stairs as quick as I can, ignoring the pain that’s like a fire burning in my rib cage. Ignoring the useless sales clerk behind me. Protective spirit, my ass.
“You still don’t understand…”
I pretend I don’t hear him.
“She’s just a pawn, collateral to force you into a trade. He wants you, Dimitri�
�he wants you to invite him in. Then he’ll possess you and the powers of the ring through you. He’ll be able to conjure any demon or angel, make them do whatever he wants.”
I storm through the basement door and into the remains of the kitchen. Christ, it’s nearly as dark upstairs as it was in the basement. How long was I in the well? “Then we need to save her so I won’t be tempted.” I click on the Maglite.
“Fuck, Dimitri, it’s not that easy. He’s killed five people—”
“Five?”
“Ernest. After you left.”
I slam my fist against the wall of the foyer, cracking the plaster. “It is easy. We kill him.”
“He only needs one more by the end of the night and then you won’t be able to touch him. It’s a win for him either way. You have no idea how evil—”
“I think I do.” I stumble out the front steps.
Nachiel pulls the sleeve on my jacket. “Look, if it was your father, maybe—”
God, I’m so sick of this shit. I pull out my gun and point it at his chest. “Try. You can try.”
Nachiel puts up his hands. “Whoa. Take it easy. Think carefully, Dimitri, and you’ll see that I’m right.”
“Maybe I don’t care if you are.”
Nachiel strangely doesn’t seem fazed; he doesn’t even blink as he says, “I can’t let you do this. There’s more than just Lisa’s life at stake.”
He takes a cautious step forward, coolly appraising me. Slowly he reaches out a hand, as if he’s going to put it on the barrel. “You’re not going to shoot me.”
But it’s his casual dismissal of just how serious I am that causes a wave of pure unadulterated rage to wash over and through me. My hands—seemingly of their own accord, because there’s no thought behind what they do next, like they’ve gone rogue, like they’re a separate consciousness—it’s my hands that make the call to pull the trigger. I do shoot him.
The only thing more shocking than the loud crack that almost shatters my eardrums is that the bullet seems to have no effect whatsoever. Nachiel doesn’t flinch.
The reality of what I’ve done sinks in. “Holy shit, holy shit,” I say, rushing to his side. “I didn’t mean…”
Nachiel sighs a deep, world-weary sigh and unzips his jacket. I see a small bloom of blood starting to stain his T-shirt, which he pulls up, revealing a ragged, oozing hole. Casually he digs into his chest with a finger, winces slightly, and then pulls out the slug. Blood now spurts with serious intent.
“Christ, I just got this body,” he mutters irritably, like I only spilled coffee on his shirt. “You have no idea how hard it is to come across one legit.”
I frantically look around for something to press against the wound—nothing but snow in all directions—and then I realize I must be delirious. Because where the bullet hole was just a few seconds ago, there’s now a healed, smooth stretch of brown flesh. Only the blood on his hands and T-shirt remains. They’re still wet.
“How?” I gasp.
Nachiel pulls his shirt back down, wiping his bloody hands on his jeans. “When an immortal spirit possesses a body, the body can’t die until it leaves. In about three seconds that’s going to lead you to a depressing realization.”
A realization? Then it does hit me. Sorath has possessed Daniel’s body. Which means his body is immortal. Which means my gun is just a useless toy, a prop.
“Even if I wanted to help,” adds Nachiel more softly, “I wouldn’t know where he’s taken her. I’m sorry, Dimitri. We have to go.”
I don’t doubt him, not now. Which leaves me only one remaining card in my very small playbook.
“Khioniya Gueseva!” I scream at the top of my lungs. The words echo through the barren woods, startling an owl into flight. I let my arms drop to my side, raise my face to the clouds above like I’m calling the sky itself to fall on me. “I said it! I said your name! Khioniya Gueseva!”
Nachiel closes his eyes. “We are so fucked.”
There’s a crack like thunder, and a powerful wind blows through the trees, causing them to sway and scattering snowflakes that swirl into a cloud that hovers above us before it drops. The air before me shimmers slightly, the way hot air over asphalt shimmers in the summer, and gradually I see a shadow behind it, wavy like something caught beneath ice. Another loud crack and then a foot, delicate and deathly blue, steps through the shimmering air, followed by a leg, which reaches unsteadily for the ground, as if it’s accustomed to a different gravity, the gravity of water. As soon as the foot reaches the snow, the rest of Poe—Khioniya—falls through, along with a wave of water. She collapses onto the frozen earth in a fetal position.
It’s like witnessing some kind of ethereal birth.
Crouching on the ground she looks up at the sky, at the moon glowing through the clouds—her long blond hair hangs in wet clumps around her face. “I forgot,” she whispers in a Russian accent. “I forgot the moon. How do you forget something like that? The moon?”
Now what do I do?
Nachiel crosses his arms over his chest. “Don’t even look at me. This is your brilliant idea.”
But I remember his instruction to keep the orders simple. “Stand,” I say. Seems relatively safe.
As if her body has no choice but to obey, she jerks to her feet, and for a moment she wobbles, holding her arms out for balance. She puts one hand to her face and touches her own cheek. “I’m cold.” A burst of dark laughter. “I did not think I would ever feel cold again. I have had so many years of heat. Burning, blistering heat. Here,” she says, reaching out her fingers to me. “Touch me. Do I feel so cold to you?”
I regard her warily. “I think I’ll pass.”
“Of course,” she says, observing me closely with glittering blue eyes that raise the hairs on the back of my neck. Her eyes flit to Nachiel, and she quickly tries to hide a look of disdain.
“You have good reason not to trust me. I am bound to the dark one. But you could change that.” She takes a soft step forward. “You could bind me to you. Or you could give me my freedom.” She looks wistfully at the snow. “Imagine that, free will. I would not be so careless with it again.”
At this Nachiel snorts. “Free will? So you can try to kill him again?”
“I do not try to kill him,” she says tersely. Then to me: “You ask me who I was. You say, what the fuck does this all mean? So I show you. And you see now, yes? You see.”
Nachiel takes a step toward her. “What were you trying to show Rasputin when you stabbed him?”
“Oh, that is different,” she says calmly. “I do try to kill him. Most definitely. I was angry person then.”
“That’s kind of an understatement,” I say.
“You would be angry too,” she replies hotly, “if you had been prostitute as girl no more than ten. I was not born bad person. No one is. I have regrets,” she adds bitterly. “I have almost a hundred years of hell for regrets.”
If that’s true then she might have a point, and for a fleeting moment I almost get a sense of her, Khioniya, as a person. Maybe she’s just a victim, another notch on Sorath’s belt of destroyed lives.
But she mistakes my silence for a no.
“Men.” She spits the word, like a curse.
Then again, maybe this isn’t the time to have empathy for my grandfather’s would-be killer. Which means it’s time to ask my question—the reason we are here after all, in this place, this moment.
“Where is Lisa?”
Poe backs away fearfully, shaking her head. “Nachiel is right. No matter what you do, he will kill her.”
Nachiel appears visibly shocked.
“He wants you, Dimitri,” she continues. “He wants your power. You do not know what he is planning—”
“Tell me,” I say, not a question—an order. “Tell me where Lisa is.” She glances nervously overhead as if someone—or something—is listening in. Then she takes a step closer to me and whispers quickly, “The garden. Where your father grew roses. Do not step on the…
”
But suddenly the words are choked off, her mouth tries to form them but there’s no sound. And there’s no mistaking the genuine panic in her eyes as she tries frantically to speak, to no avail. Suddenly she makes writing motions with her hand, looking around for something to use, and I see a lone stick. I grab it and toss it to her.
“Quick, write it down.”
I step closer as she scratches furiously on the snow: “Do not step on the numbers.”
Suddenly she drops the stick, her face racked with pain, and she clutches her neck with her hands, as if someone or something is choking her.
“What’s happening, Nachiel, what’s happening?”
“I don’t—”
The air behind her seems to rip open then, there’s a slice of red flames, and behind it I see another form, a dense, looming shadow with demonic horns. An invisible force knocks Poe hard to the ground and then starts to drag her by the legs backward, into the dagger of red light.
“Stay!” I command. But still she slides toward it, clawing desperately at the frozen earth, looking for something to hold on to.
I grab her frigid hands.
“They’re trying to take her back,” says Nachiel quickly.
She looks me directly in the eyes, and I get a brief flash—a glimpse of a little girl in a ragged dress, barefoot; she’s pushed against a brick wall by a soldier in a neatly pressed uniform, and he smiles lewdly at her before pressing a small brass coin into her dirty palm.
“Nachiel!”
“Dimitri, don’t be stupid. She tried to kill you, your grandfather—”
There’s a cacophony of growls, and a scaly arm reaches out of the flames, wraps a claw around Poe’s left foot, dragging her harder. I’m losing ground as my boots slide in the snow.
Should I let her go? A part of me—more than I would like to admit—agrees with him.
But then the sickly sweet smell of rotting flesh wafts by, and I hear a high, inhuman clicking sound, something bestial and unnatural. Poe silently mouths one word: “Please.”
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