“Well, that’s helpful,” Anna muttered. She set a cup of coffee in front of Colin then grabbed her phone to check on Jeremy. It went to his voicemail.
“He’s probably still sleeping,” Colin said, glancing at the clock. It was only eight in the morning.
“Let’s bring him breakfast,” Anna suggested. She still felt guilty about what had happened to all of them the day before, but Max had a family at home to take care of him, and Dylan hadn’t been badly hurt.
Colin sighed and reluctantly agreed to shower so they could go, then added the whole process could be sped up if she joined him.
Anna crossed her arms and smirked, “That is the exact opposite of speeding up your shower so we can leave.”
“Incentive then. To be nice to Jeremy. Or something like that.”
By the time they left for Jeremy’s apartment, it was far past breakfast time, but he still wasn’t answering his phone. Anna called Dylan instead, who told her he hadn’t been able to reach him either and was about to go over to his apartment as well. Colin and Anna met Dylan in the parking lot of the complex and they listened at Jeremy’s door for any sounds from within. It was quiet and all of the lights were still off.
Anna was getting nervous. “He can’t be dead.”
Colin bit his lip. Jeremy hadn’t seemed that badly injured the night before, but what if they’d missed something? What if there was internal bleeding? Or some major concussion they didn’t know about? Dylan was still knocking, but nothing was stirring inside.
Dylan’s features transformed from concern to panic. “I don’t have a key. Tell me in all those years you’ve been running around kicking demonic ass, you learned how to pick a lock.”
Colin stopped biting his lip and looked back at Dylan, puzzled. “I’m a hunter, not a burglar.”
Anna rolled her eyes. “We could knock the door down, Colin. Maybe if we concentrate, it won’t destroy the whole building.”
Now it was Anna’s turn to get the surprised and puzzled look from Colin. “That’s awfully risky. We don’t know how to do that.”
“What if he’s still alive? What if he still has time?”
Colin knew they had few options. They could call the cops, but between explaining why they were concerned and waiting for them to show up and hoping they actually opened the door, they could waste too much time.
Colin slowly inhaled and turned to Dylan. “Stay back.”
Dylan remembered what happened both times he’d seen this power used. He walked away from Anna and Colin and waited on the stairs.
Colin’s fingers found Anna’s and she gripped his hand tightly, apprehensive about the collateral damage they were surely about to cause and who might get hurt.
“There must be a way to use just a little of this power,” she guessed.
If so, Colin didn’t know how to limit it either. But thinking about it made that tingling rippling sensation flow again, and they felt it, spreading like that feeling of stepping into warm sunshine from a cold room.
“Think about it like whispering instead of yelling,” Anna suggested, and Colin didn’t have a better idea, so he focused on trying to whisper this power instead of yelling it.
“On the count of three?” Colin asked. Anna was ready, so Colin counted.
They tried to restrain this gift but the power was too strong; it burst from them once more, blowing out the windows, the door, knocking Jeremy’s pictures off his walls. Some of the neighbors’ windows were destroyed as well, and their doors hung crookedly on their hinges.
Dylan ran back up the stairs and into Jeremy’s apartment. “We need to hurry before the cops show up,” he said.
Colin and Anna followed him inside, stepping over broken glass and knocked over lamps and picture frames. They walked around the upturned chairs and headed toward Jeremy’s bedroom. Dylan stopped suddenly in the doorway and Colin and Anna almost walked into him. A strange snoring snuffling sound made them all hold their breath and listen, straining their eyes in the darkness to see inside Jeremy’s bedroom. They could only see the dark gray shape of his body lying in the bed.
“Should we turn the light on?” Anna asked.
Colin reached around Dylan to find the light switch on the wall. His fingers brushed against it, and the light flickered on. The snoring snuffling sound stopped. From the doorway, they could only see the back of Jeremy’s head; his body was covered in thick blankets, which seemed odd to Colin and Anna considering how warm it was in his apartment. But then Jeremy threw the blankets off of him and sat up, facing them, glaring at them.
Anna screamed and backed away, but Colin and Dylan stood transfixed in the doorway. Jeremy’s face had broken out in grotesque bony nodules running along his jaw and forehead, his lips curled back over pointed teeth that glistened with the odiferous stench they’d encountered so many times lately, and his eyes settled on them, no longer his eyes at all, but two orbs of goldenrod that burned bright with a loathing for them. Jeremy, their former group leader, was possessed.
Chapter 21
The hunters backed out of Jeremy’s doorway slowly, and he watched them, eyeing each one with those golden eyes, but knowing he couldn’t take on all three. But it was Jeremy. However the demons were masking their presence here, Jeremy was no exception, because no one had felt him. And none of the hunters could bring themselves to drawing their daggers and killing him now.
Maybe they should have. Maybe it would have been the humane thing to do, what a good friend would have done for someone they cared about, but none of them could forget that just last night, they had sat with Jeremy on this same bed and tried to calm his fears and offer him the reassurance that he would be fine.
Anna really needed out of this apartment. She felt nauseated and lightheaded and was certain she’d never be able to close her eyes again without seeing Jeremy’s deformed face, those almost human eyes studying her with so much deadly malice. They reached the doorway to his apartment where a crowd of neighbors had gathered to investigate the explosion, and Colin and Anna frantically thought of a convincing reason to get them away from this place.
“Gas leak,” Anna gasped. “The whole building needs to be evacuated. Now!”
Most of the people hesitated for a moment before deciding to get the hell out of there. From inside the apartment, they could hear Jeremy moving.
“We need to leave, too,” Dylan said quietly. Dylan had known Jeremy a long time. Anna couldn’t even begin to imagine the kind of shock he must have been in.
“Meet us at Anna’s apartment,” Colin told him. “We’ll call Max and we’ll need to let the others know.”
Dylan just nodded and climbed into his car. Anna watched him as he drove away. On their way home, she called Max and tried to explain what had happened to Jeremy but she had to keep stopping to steady her voice, to calm herself down, to force herself not to cry. Max insisted on meeting them at their apartment as well, and even though Anna knew he’d been pretty beat up from getting thrown into the ditch, she didn’t argue. She wasn’t ready to call the other hunters, yet, though. They would all need to be warned because if Jeremy retained any of his human memories, he would know exactly who to look for, but someone else could make those calls for her. She didn’t think she could have this conversation over and over again.
Dylan had beaten them to Anna’s apartment and was waiting by her door, his face stoic and unreadable. They sat in the living room in silence waiting for Max to show up. He wasn’t far behind them. But even with Max there, no one seemed to know what to say. Anna’s trembling fingers wrapped around Colin’s hand and he gently held onto her, but he didn’t have any thoughts he could comfort her with.
Finally, Dylan looked up from the spot on the floor he had been staring at absentmindedly and asked, “Which one of us is going to kill him?”
Startled, Anna shot back angrily, “What?”
Dylan fixed her with his dark eyes. “Exorcisms only work in the movies. There isn’t a goddamn thing we can d
o for him.” He let his gaze fall back to the spot on the floor.
Max exhaled a weary breath. “How exactly did this happen? I’ve never heard of people actually becoming possessed. I thought that was something that only happened in the movies.”
Colin shook his head. “It’s incredibly rare. It can happen voluntarily by talking a person into it, but demons don’t usually need a human’s body. Most can mimic a human. To be honest, I’m not sure how else it happens. We know Jeremy didn’t allow it to happen, so something else…”
He trailed off as a horrible thought occurred to him, and of course, that meant it occurred to Anna, too.
“Oh, God, Colin, you think we did this to him?”
“I don’t know. But we killed that demon just as it was killing Jeremy. What if we… fused them or some crazy shit like that?”
Anna’s nausea grew worse. “Excuse me,” she muttered and she stumbled into the bathroom to throw up.
Max and Dylan looked at Colin, concern for Anna now piled on top of all of the other chaos in their lives.
“She ok? She’s not pregnant or anything, is she?” Dylan asked.
Colin flinched. Dylan couldn’t have known how badly those words hurt him, or worse, how badly they would hurt Anna. Even before they became hunters, Anna couldn’t have children, and the painful aching longing in her eyes every time they passed a mother and her child on the street hurt Colin just as deeply as Anna’s knowledge she would never be a mother. Even now, it was still physically impossible. Immortal servants of Heaven didn’t have children, and it was still the one thing Anna wanted most and could never have.
“No,” Colin answered softly, “she’s not. We’re just afraid what we did in the field may have caused this somehow.”
“Y’all had no way of knowing that. And that demon was kicking all of our asses. He was dead either way,” Max replied.
Anna stood in the doorway of the bathroom watching him, and Max blushed and looked down at his hands. He obviously hadn’t realized she was listening.
“I would much rather be dead than turn into one of those monsters,” Anna said. “And I would much rather die than have to kill someone I once considered a friend.”
Colin thought she may be exaggerating a bit by calling him a friend, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to correct her.
“I’ll do it,” Dylan said suddenly, still staring at the mysterious spot on the carpet underneath Anna’s coffee table.
Max took a quick, shaky breath. “I’ll help you.”
“What is wrong with you? This is Jeremy!” Anna shouted.
“Not anymore,” Dylan reminded her. But Anna didn’t want to listen to him. She didn’t want to hear them discussing Jeremy’s murder.
“What other choice do we have, Anna?” Dylan asked, not quite yelling, but he was just as frustrated. “He’s not Jeremy. Jeremy is dead.”
“So you’re just going to kill him?” Anna yelled back.
“If it were you or Colin, what would you want us to do?” Dylan asked, lowering his voice.
Anna stared back at him, but he was right. They couldn’t let innocent people get hurt because of what Jeremy had become, and they owed it to Jeremy to stop whatever he was now.
Max lifted his head from his hands where he’d buried it and looked at Colin and Anna hopefully. “Is there any way out of this for him? Have you ever met someone who’d been possessed before?”
Anna sank onto the sofa by Colin and took his hand again.
“Once,” she sighed. “Only once, and we had to kill him.”
Chapter 22
Nanjing, 1858. Anna and Colin hid beneath a pavilion outside the walls of the Palace of the Heavenly Kingdom. A column of soldiers passed in front of them and they waited until the last red jacket was out of their sight before emerging from the shadows. Foreigners had never been welcome here, but this civil war had been particularly brutal and now more than ever, people were suspicious of Europeans and often hostile to them.
Colin and Anna had tried to stay out of the city as much as possible, but the demon they had been chasing for two days had followed the army back to the capital so they’d had no choice but to trail along after it, too. As Europeans, they shouldn’t have even been in Nanjing at all, but demons didn’t care about details like port treaties and rebellions and civil wars. Those were human concerns, and as it turns out, those kinds of things just made demons’ jobs much easier anyway.
There was no blending in here. They were hopelessly out of place in a world they didn’t understand where people were fighting a war they couldn’t make sense of. People in the countryside suffered from famine and epidemics, and everywhere they’d traveled throughout this strange country they’d never been in they encountered entire villages decimated by the effects of this war. This was child’s play for Hell.
There was something peculiar about this demon though; something was different. It didn’t take the forms of multiple creatures like most demons, but preferred this ivory colored misshapen form, much like a hairless crouching dog. Its face, though, betrayed this wasn’t a pitiful aberration of nature, but something sinister and evil.
Anna and Colin had lost track of it when they’d hidden from the passing Taiping Army. They hurried through the crowded streets in the direction they’d last seen the demon, mostly ignored by the people on the streets who had far bigger problems than a couple of westerners running past them.
“It’s there, in the market.” Colin noticed it before Anna, but she sensed it now, too.
“We need to get it out of there. We can’t fight it in a crowded space.”
They had honed in on it now and wormed their way through the dense stalls. They were attracting more attention here than they had on the street, and they needed to get out of here quickly.
“It’s under the stall.” Anna’s focus was on a fish stand about a hundred feet in front of them.
She could feel Colin’s frustration seeping off of him. This bastard wasn’t stupid. It had found a good hiding place where Anna and Colin couldn’t touch it without alerting the entire city that not only were two westerners running around Nanjing, but two armed westerners were running around Nanjing.
“Let’s try to flush it out,” Colin suggested.
Anna noticed how many people were watching them already. “I think we’re going to have to leave China after this.”
Colin agreed, but he’d had enough of China for a while. This civil war had been one of the worst he’d ever seen. They approached the fish stand and pretended to examine what was on display, much to the astonishment of the vendor. The demon was still under the table.
The vendor was talking to Colin – angrily, it seemed – but they were both trying to concentrate on the monster crouched near their feet. It was sidling back and forth, trying to decide if it should run, stay where it was, or attack them. Anna leaned over the stand to look at a particularly bloated fish and felt a tugging at the hem of her dress. Because Anna felt it, Colin knew about it, too. The demon had apparently decided to fight them.
Colin pulled her back and saw the sickly white appendage retreating under the table; he crushed it beneath his boot and a sickening screech drowned out the other noises from the market. Nobody else heard it. The demon rushed out of the stall away from them, limping on its injured limb, and Colin and Anna chased it again, only this time, it wasn’t able to dodge them as easily.
As it led them down another crowded street, Colin noticed an empty alley as they ran past it. “I’m going to get in front of it, try to send it back here, so we can herd it down that alley.”
Anna kept her eyes on the beast. She’d gotten a closer look at its face in the market and its orange eyes had almost looked human. She’d never been this scared of a demon before.
Colin had already run ahead of her and his long legs soon overtook the wounded demon. He turned on it and forced it to turn around. Anna had dropped back beyond the deserted alley, hoping it would detour as soon as it realized it was t
rapped between them.
As Colin chased it back toward Anna, the milky white demon caught sight of her and dove into the empty alleyway, just as they’d hoped. By the time it realized it was cornered, Anna and Colin had blocked its path back out. It turned its odious orange eyes on them and Anna shuddered again. She couldn’t shake the feeling they were almost human, despite the bizarre color and the same fearsome loathing that lurked behind all demons’ eyes.
The beast was making that terrible screeching sound again and they were worried it might be calling for help. They needed to act quickly. Colin stepped closer to it and it lunged at him, knocking him to the stone ground of the alley. Anna dug her dagger into its back and that screeching noise reached new decibels that made her ears hurt. Its orange eyes rolled in their sockets toward her and she threw her elbow into the side of its face to try to get it to look away from her. She didn’t want those eyes on her ever again.
Colin’s dagger connected with its belly and as he rolled out from underneath it, eviscerating the creature as he did, the milky white cloud that gave this demon its power started to ooze out and it slowly sank to the ground. Just to make sure it was dead, Anna opened another incision in its back, and it was only then she noticed the strange marking on its side.
“Colin, isn’t that the mark of one of Mammon’s?”
Colin had noticed it, too, and it certainly did look like it, but they’d never seen it on a demon before, only on their victims, and considering Mammon’s minions preyed on those who were greedy and power hungry, they saw this marking often. Colin dragged his fingers along the vermillion inscriptions underneath the creature’s forelimb.
“They’re definitely the same.” Colin rolled the monster onto its back and Anna instinctively backed away from it. Its eyes were still open, glassy and vacant, and even though the orange hue was still creepy as hell, Anna was sure they looked more human now without the evil malice behind them. Colin studied the deformed body but agreed with her.
“It couldn’t change. It stayed this shape, even when we were killing it. And I hurt it by stepping on its… arm? Anna, I think this thing used to be human.”
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