although her shirt is covered with blood, her face is peaceful, almost like she’s sleeping.
I trip over a rock, nearly slamming hard into a tree face first, but Nachiel doesn’t miss a step. He takes the next hill with long steps and momentarily disappears from view.
“Hey, Nachiel, wait up!”
I’ve got a migraine so fierce that I might need to stop sometime soon to vomit, but I’m so euphoric I don’t care about that either. Lisa is alive. Lisa is breathing. Lisa is—
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” mutters Nachiel as I catch up to him.
“I’ve saved Lisa’s life?”
Nachiel glares at me.
“Okay, yes, I understand that we have a small technical difficulty with Poe, but Lisa’s breathing, okay? Her heart’s beating. You told me yourself a body possessed by an immortal spirit can’t die. So this is like life support. Only—creepier.”
Nachiel stomps down through a small gulch. “That’s a pretty big technical difficulty. Think Poe’s going to give up a nice human body after all those years in hell so you and your girlfriend can go live happily ever after? Sound like something she’d do? But I guess you know her so well, after what? Talking to her for five minutes? Or was it ten?”
“I am an excellent judge of character,” I reply hotly.
“You shot me in the chest.”
“I’m almost an excellent judge of character. But I apologized. Plus we can exorcise her if we have to.”
“We don’t have the missing Fiend pages,” says Nachiel tersely. “And even if we did, you remember what happened to the first Dmitri?”
Oh right, those minor details.
“If I remember correctly,” I reply, “my great-grandfather or whoever said usually the body dies when a bad spirit vacates someone we love. Usually. Usually isn’t always.”
“Usually is usually. As in almost all the time.”
“Okay, give me the percentage,” I say, panting as I try to keep up.
“Ninety percent. Ninety percent of the time people die.”
My heart does skip a beat at that news. “But that’s still a ten percent chance of surviving. Ten percent is better than zero percent. What was I supposed to do, just let her bleed to death? No way. Not gonna happen. Besides, I’ve got a good feeling about this, and—”
“For all you know, as soon as she regains consciousness Poe will stab herself in the neck and save Sorath the trip.”
“She’s not like that anymore.”
Nachiel snorts derisively. “Changed her colors that fast after nearly a hundred years on the dark side? I don’t think so.”
“Plus she has to do what I tell her to. Right?”
“What you have is the spirit of a psychotic murdering fool who despises every fiber of your being in complete control of your girlfriend’s body.”
“Well when you put it that way… So how do we get her out of Lisa’s body?”
“By any means necessary.” Nachiel plunges ahead of me into the thick brush, disappearing again.
“Well everything happened so fast,” I say, pushing my way past a low-hanging branch, “I didn’t exactly have time to think things all the way through. Easy enough for you to criticize now—”
But I’m stopped short at the sight of a hunter who is standing four feet in front of me, completely frozen, his mouth hanging open in shock. He wears one of those stupid L.L. Bean plaid flannel caps that cover your ears, a puffy bright orange coat that any deer with a lick of sense would steer clear of, and a large, well-oiled rifle is slung over his shoulder. I look down and realize the degree to which I’m covered with Lisa’s blood.
And great, there’s no sign of Nachiel—he’s vanished entirely, leaving Lisa curled up neatly on the snow. And to someone who didn’t just see her turning blue a few moments ago, she probably looks like a fresh corpse.
The man nervously reaches for the tip of his rifle.
“Hey,” I say, holding up my hands and taking a step forward, which makes him take two back. “We—I mean I—just found her. She’s alive but badly hurt. But we need to get an ambulance. Fast.”
The man twitches his finger toward his gun, keeping both eyes firmly on me. “Were you talking to someone?”
“No, just a bad habit. I talk to myself when I’m freaked out.”
He stares at me closely, assessing.
“Please,” I say with the ache of truth in my voice. “She’s the love of my life. I just want to get her to the hospital. I just want to get her help.”
Slowly the man’s hand drifts down from the gun to his right front pocket. He pulls out a cell phone, but he keeps me dead center in his sight. He presses a few buttons, slowly raises it to his ear.
“There’s a girl here, seriously injured. We need an ambulance…”
But I don’t hear the rest of what he says, because I’ve dropped to my knees, utterly spent. I press my forehead to the cold ground, and when I sit up on my heels I reach out for Lisa’s hand, the faint pulse in her wrist an echo of my own beating heart.
After I’ve given my statement to the police, a strange amalgam of truth and lies needed to cover what they’d never believe—“Yes, I went to Aspinwall to see if Lisa was there”; “No, I didn’t see anything suspicious, I just found her lying in the snow”; “Yes, she was unconscious, and it looked like she’d been bleeding from her nose”—I’m finally allowed to visit, or at least look through the glass of (with police supervision), the hospital room where Lisa is hooked up to a series of machines I’m familiar with. After a blood transfusion, her lips have gone from deathly white back to their normal rosy pink, and there’s even a faint glow in her cheeks. The doctors have given her a serious dose of sedative drugs—something I’m grateful for, because who knows what Poe would say or do if she was conscious.
But my 10 percent chance of getting Lisa back feels smaller with every passing minute. I press my finger to the glass and wish I could go sit beside her, but they’re not letting anyone but family in.
The police pointedly asked me for my bloody clothes, which I was more than happy to get rid of anyway, and I was finally given a blue set of surgical scrubs after I flat out refused the offer of another ducky hospital gown. I’m sure they’re wondering how on earth anyone could lose that much blood from just a nosebleed, but given the lack of any visible injury, there is no other explanation yet. They’ve got a series of MRIs and brain scans planned, and there’s serious talk among the doctors about a tumor or possible hemorrhage, which is good because it will give them something to do instead of look at me oddly, like I’m surrounded by an invisible haze of bad juju.
Suddenly I’m almost knocked over by what feels like a small bear gripping my legs. I look down into the beaming face of Amelia and see she’s actually wearing loosely tied sneakers. One red, one blue.
“Are you a doctor now too?”
“Yes,” I say seriously. “My specialty is shoe removal. It’s a very complex operation. Many people suffer greatly when their feet are confined by shoes.”
Amelia holds up one foot hopefully.
“Oh no you don’t,” says a warm voice behind me. I turn to see Elizabeth, looking relieved but also haggard. “It took me two hours getting her into them.” She leans forward and gives me a dry kiss on the cheek. “You look like shit, by the way. You should get some sleep.”
“Nana, you said the S-word. Do you have a record deal?” asks Amelia slyly, obviously happy to have caught an authority figure breaking a rule.
“Not today, love,” replies Elizabeth in a distracted tone. She gazes into the hospital room, a few years of sleepless nights recorded in her distant stare. Along with Lisa, there are two others hooked up to machines: an elderly woman who was just wheeled in from Crosslands making her next stop in the Quadrant of Death; and a blond teenage girl who, I understand from overheard snippets of conversation between nurses, is a runaway in a vegetative coma after a drug overdose.
“You can go in,” I say. “I�
�m just stuck in the nonfamily zone. Give her hand a squeeze for me.”
Elizabeth swallows hard and looks at me closely. “You didn’t see him? Daniel?”
There’s no passing a lie by this woman—she should have been a detective. I try for a moderated truth. “I thought I did. For a second.” And I do think I got a glimpse of the real Daniel in that brief moment before Lisa was able to break free.
Elizabeth nods weakly. And I realize that while one child is safe now, the empty loss of the other still aches fiercely. The manhunt for Daniel is on now. Rumors of the video were leaked to the press, so it’s headline news across the nation.
“Go on,” I say softly.
“Can you watch Amelia?”
“I want to go in too!”
Elizabeth quickly hugs Amelia’s tiny body tightly; tears bead her eyes, as if she can somehow hug Daniel through her.
“C’mon, Amelia,” I say, grasping Amelia’s small hand in mine. “This floor’s no fun, and it smells like pee. Let’s grab a gurney and find an empty hall to race it in.”
“You said pee,” says Amelia, covering a giggle with her hand.
Elizabeth quietly mouths thank you, and then gently opens the door to go sit next to her daughter. Or at least her daughter’s body possessed by the spirit of a dead Russian woman with a penchant for knives and conjuring demons.
Something I plan on rectifying as soon as the night shift starts.
A couple of hours after I call Nachiel, he shows up. Somehow he’s managed to snag some surgical scrubs himself, along with a white lab coat and a fake ID with his picture clipped to his front pocket. Of course he didn’t bother to knock before entering the closet-sized break room, which somehow accommodates a twin-sized bed that the real doctors use to sleep between shifts. I finally managed to get a couple hours myself—deep, beautifully unconscious sleep.
“Did you find Bunky?”
“Just so we’re clear,” he says, unzipping a duffel bag and tossing a Coke and a Snickers in my general direction, “I’m only here to make sure you don’t make things worse. But I take no responsibility for what happens to Lisa tonight.”
That means he did.
“Nice to see you, too,” I say, cracking open the Coke and taking a deep sip. “Thanks for bringing dinner. Very thoughtful.”
Nachiel glares at me, locks the door, and props a folding chair under the knob—I guess he really doesn’t want someone walking in inadvertently. He sits down sullenly while I peel off the wrapper of the candy bar and take a bite. It’s the first thing I’ve eaten in I don’t know how many days, and for a moment I just bask in my caffeinated sugar high.
“So what’s next?” I mumble through the caramel.
“I don’t know. You’re the man with the plan. Why don’t you tell me?”
“Oh come on. Don’t pretend you haven’t done this whole exorcism thing before.”
“You’re right. I have done this before.”
Oh dear Lord, I feel a lecture coming on.
“To start with, I can’t remember anyone in the entire history of your family who has ever done anything as idiotic as invite an evil spirit to possess the body of someone they love…”
I was so right about the lecture. I wonder if the ring has given me some psychic mind-reading side benefits.
“… with the asinine idea that they would then be able to successfully exorcise that spirit—”
“Okay!” I interrupt. “Okay, I get it. My bad. So given this terrible situation I’ve created, what would you recommend we do next? Tell me.”
Nachiel fumes, but unfortunately for him I’m the one who can command spirits. He pulls an assortment of items from the duffel bag, some of which I recognize and others I don’t. There’s a vial with leaves, a small stone mortar and pestle, Bunky, The Book of Seraphs, a long white candle, a cigarette lighter, and a large container of salt. Finally he slowly pulls out a very ominous-looking needle containing clear liquid of some sort.
“Is all this really necessary?” I ask.
“Make yourself useful and grind the leaves,” he says in a tone that doesn’t leave much room for discussion. I reach out for the mortar and uncork the vial, then make the mistake of taking a whiff—the leaves are beyond rancid; they smell like a skunk that just crawled out of a sewage tank.
“Are you serious?”
“Do I look like I’m serious?” He pulls off poor Bunky’s head without even a hint of remorse and removes the rolled pages.
“Yes,” I say, reluctantly pulling out a leaf with the tips of my fingertips, “you look like you’re serious.” So whether this is really necessary, or I’m just being punished, I crush the leaves with the pestle, creating a fine granular ash and a pungent vapor that would probably stop the heart of a fully grown elephant.
“The fact is we don’t know what we’re dealing with here—which side Poe’s operating from. The exorcism to release a good spirit is completely different from the one used to exorcise a negative one.”
“Well, she seemed—”
“Seemed isn’t good enough. Seemed will take your ten percent chance of getting Lisa back alive down to zero. You think someone who spent the last hundred years in hell is going to tell you the truth?”
“Well when you put it that way—”
“We have to know,” says Nachiel. He picks up the lethal-looking needle and points it at me. “Which means you can’t get squeamish at the last minute.”
“You’re not sticking me with that.”
“You’re right. You’re sticking Lisa with it.”
I smile until I realize he isn’t kidding. “What is that? Some kind of truth serum? I thought those were bunk.”
“Nope. Epinephrine. You need to inject it right into her heart.”
A thought that makes mine skip a beat. “Wouldn’t that be… dangerous?” What if I miss and hit her kidney? I’m starting to think that maybe it wouldn’t be too awful letting Poe stay. Maybe she and Lisa could work out some kind equitable body time-share.
“Define dangerous,” says Nachiel, leaning back in the chair. “Dangerous to me is inviting an evil spirit to possess someone I care about—”
“I know,” I say, holding up my hand. “Okay? I heard you the first time. I’m just wondering why.”
“Her body is heavily sedated, and we need to jolt it suddenly into consciousness without giving Poe time to think. Once she’s awake I’ll be able to tell whether she’s for real, or if she’s still reporting to Sorath.”
“All I’m saying is that this seems a little extreme.”
“Extreme,” says Nachiel, leaning forward and taking the mortar and pestle from me. He taps the crushed leaves into one of the vials. “You haven’t even seen extreme yet. But you will. You will.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: A HARD TRADE
It’s late. the hospital is deathly quiet, and we pass unnoticed through the hallways with relative ease until we get to the sixth floor, Lisa’s floor. As we step out of the elevator, a thin and very intimidating nurse sitting behind a desk watches us closely. Her gray hair is pulled back so tight it actually stretches the skin on her cheeks, and I can feel her scanning Nachiel’s fake ID. Her eyebrows furrow slightly at the surgical mask I swiped from the break room. But just as she’s about to push a button on the phone, something starts beeping down the hall in the opposite direction, and she has to jump up to investigate.
“Did you do that?” I whisper from behind my mask.
Nachiel pointedly ignores me. We are apparently past the lecture phase and have moved on to the passive-aggressive silent-treatment phase.
I sneeze, causing another nurse to glance up as we pass her in the hallway. The mask makes my nose itch, but without it I’m way too easy to recognize—morgue guy with the mysteriously anemic girlfriend. I give her what I hope passes for a professional surgeon’s nod.
“You know, I was thinking,” I say quietly to Nachiel’s impenetrable wall of silence. “I’d feel a whole lot better about stabbing
Lisa in the heart with a needle if we got a second opinion. Are there any other spirits I can call? Maybe a recently deceased pulmonary surgeon?”
Nachiel glares at me.
“Just to make sure we’re, you know, headed in the right direction with this. Not that I’m questioning your obvious exorcism experience.”
“You don’t just call spirits whenever you want.”
“I think—”
“And you’d know that if you’d been paying attention. You see more, but more sees you, too. But if you want to shoot a flare gun into the spirit world announcing your location at the present moment, be my guest.”
Oh yeah, I’d forgotten that part.
“I know what I’m doing,” says Nachiel tersely. “So just shut up and do exactly what I tell you.”
I’m wondering what Nachiel’s definition of “good spirit” is; he’s starting to get a little totalitarian. But as we slip into Lisa’s hospital room, I don’t care, because there she is—or there she is almost. In body if not soul. Her heart’s hooked up to a monitor, and there’s an IV with clear fluid connected to her right arm, but otherwise she looks remarkably healthy, like she might wake up at any moment and start deriding my taste in music.
Nachiel quickly starts to pull out his exorcism gear, dropping it onto a beige metal rolling table. “Pull the curtain.”
I do, cutting us off from view of any nurse who might pop open the door. Probably a good precaution, since the candle Nachiel lights is definitely against hospital rules; he places it right in front of a sign that says OXYGEN IN USE. NO SMOKING. NO MATCHES. NO OPEN FLAME WITHIN 50 FEET.
“Is that a good idea?”
Nachiel pointedly ignores me and briskly takes out the container of salt and pours it in a circular line around Lisa’s gurney, until he’s encircled it completely.
“Do I want to know why?”
Finally he glances in my direction. “Prevents any interference. If we have to perform the exorcism, then we don’t want some other demon jumping in.”
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