Demon Inside

Chapter 25

Malleus took point, while Maleficarum and Spud flanked Greyson and Nick on either side of Megan. Snow stung her bare face and blurred her vision; it trickled down Greyson’s cheeks as water when it melted. They could have been the only people in the world, pioneers heading for the old homestead, but they weren’t. And they weren’t alone.

In all that blinding white she imagined they must stand out like black ants crawling across a wedding cake. It was only a matter of time before someone—or something—found them.

She just hadn’t expected them to come from straight ahead. The shapes moving from the snow looked ordinary, or close to it—just people trying to make their way home by taking a shortcut—until they got close enough to realize that these people weren’t wearing coats, they weren’t bundled up. One woman wore a summery strapless dress that revealed the bones of her left arm showing through holes in her skin. Another woman’s evening gown would have glittered if it hadn’t been dulled with snow. Two men in identical dark suits completed the little group.

Megan didn’t even have a chance to react before they were aflame, falling to the snow, horrible confused sounds escaping their closed mouths. They rolled, leaving dark marks in the dusty white ground where the snow and ice melted from the heat, their arms waving, like insects on their backs. The fire flared higher, blue-white, and the zombies stopped moving entirely. Megan glanced at Nick, who shrugged. “Told you,” he said. “When fire is handy, zombies aren’t—shit!”

Whatever sound the beasts made was lost in the wind, so it seemed to Megan that they flew across the snowy grass, great dark shapes with pinpoints of red where their eyes should be. She froze, her mouth open, unable to move as they drew closer.

Maleficarum sidestepped, giving Nick a clear shot. The gun’s report was muffled by the blanket of white around them, but one of the dogs jerked sideways, a momentary pause before he headed for them again.

Flames burst around them, haloing them as they ran, but again, the hounds barely paused. Megan could see how shaggy they were, how pinkish saliva dripped from their long, sharp fangs even as the fire went out.

Maleficarum leaped, grabbing one of them by the neck and toppling it into the snow. Its yowl of fury pulled an echoing scream from Megan’s throat, a scream that seemed to go on forever. Nick’s sword sliced through the air and down, hitting the back of the second hound with a horrible thunk. The beast fell, snarling, its teeth snapping the air only a foot or so from Megan’s ankles.

Greyson grabbed her and pulled her back from the squirming thing, while Spud picked up the third dog and lifted it above his head, his squat face set in grim concentration. He heaved the dog back toward the road, where it landed with a yelp on the cracked edge of the hole in the pavement.

Maleficarum still shouted, wrestling with the first dog, but as Spud moved to help him an ugly crack sounded, like a twig breaking at the bottom of a well, and the dog subsided. Maleficarum was bloody, his shirt was torn, but he stood up with a broad smile as if he’d just been on a wonderful amusement-park ride.

“Right, ’oo’s next then?”

He and Malleus haw-hawed for a minute over that one, while Megan tried not to scream. This wasn’t fun. This wasn’t a great night out on the town. This was a precursor to her possible death, and she failed to see the chance to hurt some hellbeasts as an upside to that.

They resumed formation and walked on, trudging through the rapidly deepening snow. Over the whistling of the wind gunshots sounded in the distance, but stopped before Megan had a chance to figure out where they were coming from. All the while her skin crawled, prickled with the power around them, itched with the despair that had taken over the town. She could feel people crying in their houses, could almost hear medicine cabinets opening and bottles of pills and packages of razor blades being removed from shelves.

Red lights, festive in the snow, flashed off the windows of the strip mall nearby as an ambulance passed on a side street at the far side of the square, its siren blaring. It shouldn’t have been reassuring, but it was. Somewhere in this place was sanity, somewhere the normal order of life continued.

They’d almost reached the center of the park, where the benches squatted next to a few halfhearted pieces of playground equipment—a wooden swing set, a dented slide, one of those tents made of bars that Megan could never figure out what children were supposed to do with except sit on—when something whispered off to the right.

They all stopped, turning, but it took a moment for Megan’s snow-blind eyes to catch on to what she was seeing.

They slithered up the great elm tree by the fence and swarmed over the white earth, their bodies like oozing black stains. Snakes. Serpents, sliding toward them, moving with a speed Megan couldn’t fathom. It was so cold, it was too cold for them, too cold…

Greyson grabbed her right hand, Nick her left. She saw flames erupt over the spreading mass of snakes but knew it was futile even as they started to run, heading for the far end of the park as fast as they could manage on the icy ground.

Malleus and Spud veered off to one side. Megan started to follow them but Greyson and Nick yanked her back, keeping her moving forward even as something yowled and screeched to her left. She dared a glance and saw the brothers fighting with something, a beast that reminded her vaguely of the Nepalese mountain demon who’d attacked her in a different park months before. That had been a sunny fall afternoon. This night was as if winter had a personal vendetta against them.

It wasn’t a yaksas, though. She realized it when they reached the far fence and looked back. The snakes were still spreading, moving as inexorably as the tide, getting closer to Malleus and Spud as they struggled with the thing. It was black or green or dark blue, she couldn’t tell, but it was huge, and she screamed when it swung a great fist and sent Spud flying. He landed on the grass and stayed there, motionless.

Megan’s heart stopped. Beside her Greyson jerked, ready to run to Spud, but another scream rent the air. They turned toward it to see a woman leap from one of the windows on the square. For one sick, dizzy moment Megan thought she was flying, the way her body seemed to hang there, before she plunged to the ground and bounced once, twice, before settling in the middle of the road.

Megan’s hands flew to her face, covering her eyes, her mouth. Greyson’s coat muffled her cries, his arms like a vice around her shoulders.

She didn’t understand when he shifted and gripped her neck hard enough to bruise, when he shoved her violently down to the ground at his feet and stepped sideways. The edge of his overcoat brushed against her face as she scraped her palms on the snow. In the same movement Greyson pulled his gun, aimed, fired, fired again. Off to the side Spud still lay silent. Malleus and Maleficarum were winning their battle with whatever beast had injured Spud.

How she was able to smell the alcohol on the men she didn’t know, but she could, just as easily as she could see them heading across the park. She even recognized one or two of them, from Kelly’s Tap the night of the fire at Maldon’s place.

That they recognized Greyson and her was obvious. That they carried a grudge was even more so, if the shotguns in their hands were any indication. With them came something she hadn’t felt in months, the slow malevolence of a person completely overwhelmed by Yezer. If they’d been making themselves visible Megan would have seen dozens of them, she knew.

What the fuck was Roc doing? Everything should have been taken care of by now, he was supposed to be here, trying to sneak some of her rubendas back to her, trying to get her as much power as he could. Instead she was looking at three guns, aimed straight at her, her bodyguards were injured or otherwise occupied, and all that stood between her and death were Greyson and Nick. The odds weren’t bad, but she would have liked better.

One of the men fell. Blood blossomed like a rose high on the right side of his chest, making his plaid shirt bizarrely effeminate, and poured from his mouth in a dark stream to stain the snow beneath him. Greyson’s second shot blew off the top of his head.

Nick twisted his body as she started to rise from the ground, so both of them stood in front of her. That was worse somehow, not being able to see, not knowing if the other men were running or taking aim.

Taking aim, apparently. Nick pivoted again, ducking, and came up with his gun ready. All she could hear were shots, louder than she remembered them from before, and it wasn’t until she thought of being in the car with Greyson while the witches attacked that she remembered she had a gun too.

Her cold, stiff fingers slipped on it, fumbled with it, but she managed to edge herself out enough to take aim. Nick stumbled against her so her first shot went wild, but he righted himself immediately before she squeezed the trigger the second time.

Pain exploded in her left arm, so bright and hard she didn’t know what it was for a moment. She screamed and dropped the gun as she fell, hitting her right shoulder hard against the wrought-iron fence behind her.

One last shot blared through the park, then screams, then silence. Megan tried to say something but her throat didn’t want to work. Nothing wanted to work, not her arms or her legs, or her head. She just wanted to curl up in a ball. It was so cold, if she huddled up she might be warmer.

“M’lady! Mr. Dante!”

Someone lifted her from the ground. She was too tired to help, too cold to care. Her arm felt like it was on fire.

One of the brothers held her, she wasn’t sure which one. She managed to look over his arm and saw Maleficarum holding Spud, moving quickly toward the gate just ahead of the sea of snakes.

When she opened her eyes again they were on the sidewalk opposite the park, standing just outside a high chain-link fence. Behind the fence lurked the hospital, gray and silent like a moldering ghost.

Semiopaque plastic bulged and receded in the empty holes where windows had been, moved by the wind. To Megan it looked horrible, the erratic beats of a dying heart.

Automatically she looked for Greyson, but saw the snakes first. They were still advancing, but more slowly now, as if they just wanted to urge her into the hospital. Like they were waiting for her to go in.

Maleficarum set Spud on the pavement against the fence and grabbed the links in his bare hands. They popped like cheap buttons, opening a jagged hole. Metal scratched her cheek as Malleus carried her through, but she couldn’t be bothered to even lift her hand to the wound. Where were Greyson and Nick? Where the hell was Roc?

The first question, at least, was answered a moment later. The two demons stumbled through the hole, their arms around each other. She couldn’t see them well; even with the white sky above it seemed dark here, on the land she now owned part of. Like all the light was absorbed somehow, all the warmth and joy sucked away by the building looming over them.

She saw them well enough to know something was wrong, though, and when they stepped closer to her she realized what it was. For the second time in a week Greyson had been shot, at least once—in the leg, she thought, from the limp—but as she looked more closely, squinting in an attempt to focus better, she noticed part of his ear seemed to be missing. The bullet must have passed only centimeters from his head. The thought made her knees weak. If she’d been standing she probably would have fallen.

As it was she caught only a glimpse of him before Malleus carried her farther away, stopping on the crumbing steps of the hospital building. Wind swirled and eddied around them, lifting Megan’s hair and snapping the heavy corrugated paper of a torn cement bag to their right. She’d been wrong in thinking the hospital was like a ghost. She was the ghost, intruding on a world that had nothing to do with her, a world she should have left behind ages ago.

Her legs were steady enough beneath her when Malleus set her down just in front of the empty door frames. Once the doors had been etched glass, with TRUBANK MENTAL HEALTH CENTER printed in block script on each panel. Once the atrium had been painted an institutional pale green and filled with modular furniture and plants to take away the ache of that soulless color, and the light had poured in across terrazzo floors.

Now their feet crunched on litter and broken glass as they picked their way through. It smelled in there, like dead things and mold and rotten food, mixed with the fainter, more lingering fragrance of despair. The misery this building had absorbed! The walls still fairly throbbed with it. She could feel them close around her, like dogs sniffing out which hand held the treat.

But there was no hand to choose. She was the treat, and it wasn’t just the building that waited for her to feed it but something inside. Maybe more than one thing. Ktana Leyak could very well be here already. The entire room seemed to sigh when she walked farther into it.

Off to her right were the remains of the reception desk, broken and jagged. It had been bolted down, which was probably the only reason it hadn’t disappeared completely, along with the other furniture. A few disintegrating boxes littered the floor, along with some animal bones and piles of lint and cardboard that could only be rodent nests. That was another smell in the air, one she hadn’t identified until then. Droppings. She sneezed. Just that small movement sent fresh pain shooting down her arm.

A loud sniffle made her turn around. Maleficarum, shaking his head, wiping his eyes.

“Spud,” she said, ashamed of herself for not having asked already. “Is he—”

“He’ll be all right, m’lady,” Maleficarum said. His voice sounded strangled and lost in the empty space around them. “He’s tough, he is. But you—you been shot, and Mr. Dante, and Mr. Showtin…” He covered his face with his beefy right palm, and after a moment of surprise—Spud was usually the emotional one—Megan went to him and took his left hand. Even now they were separated by rank, but the touch meant more to him for that and she knew it.

Greyson cleared his throat. “Meg, we need to get that bullet out of your arm.”

To their left rose the wide, sweeping staircase leading to the second floor. Above that were only fire stairs, horrible dark shafts at the corners of the building. But this stairway was for show, this stairway was meant to reassure those leaving family members in the care of medical staff that Trubank was a nice place, a healing place, instead of the bowels of the Accuser.

Greyson slipped her coat off her shoulders and sat down, pulling her carefully to sit on his left thigh with his left arm tight around her waist. His damaged ear wasn’t far from her face; she refused to look at it, focusing instead on his eyes, his lips moving, telling her what she didn’t want to hear, about holding out her arm and it would only hurt for a minute.

Nick squatted in front of Greyson and took her hand. “Squeeze as tight as you want, Megan, you won’t hurt me.”

“Hold on a minute, guys, I don’t think this is really necessary,” she started, but it was too late. Greyson squeezed her so hard she almost couldn’t breathe, and Nick pulled her arm taut while Malleus produced a long silver pair of tweezers from somewhere on his person and plunged them into the wound in her arm.

She didn’t want to scream but screamed anyway. Her fingers ached from squeezing Nick’s hand with her left, Greyson’s with her right, while she buried her face in Greyson’s chest and cried, and begged him to stop. Deep below the pain was shame, the knowledge that she should be braver than this, should be stronger than this, but somehow the fear of what was to come made it all so much worse. It felt like Malleus was trying to remove her actual bone, like somehow the tweezers could grow and bend and tug out her demon heart as well.

As abruptly as the pain had started, it ended. Fresh blood spilled down her forearm to her hand, still held in Nick’s, and covered both of them as though they were being hand-fasted.

Malleus showed her his palm, where three bloodied bits of metal lay among the calluses. No wonder it felt like he was trying to dig out her intestines through her arm. Apparently the bullet had shattered when it hit her bone.

She wanted to laugh. It was the adrenaline, she guessed, buzzing through her body, shooting like champagne straight to her head. Now it was over she felt like she could fly, and while it lasted she wanted to savor it.

Instead she ended up wandering around the ghost town of the lobby while Malleus took care of Greyson and Nick. Both men cursed and gritted their teeth manfully; she felt their eyes on her and tried to pretend she didn’t find it amusing, although she suspected they were hamming it up for her. She’d seen Greyson take much worse pain without being quite so noisy, and she had the distinct feeling that Nick was just as tough if not even tougher. But she appreciated it just the same. For a minute—right around the time Greyson moaned, “By the fiery gates of Hell!”—she was even able to forget where they really were and why, and imagine they were on some sort of crazy Halloween dare.

Too bad the jokes, like the adrenaline rush, couldn’t last. By the time they were finished her hands were shaking and her fear was flooding back. She needed something hidden in this place, and it wasn’t just Ktana Leyak threatening her. It was this building, this place, the memories of the unhappy teenager she’d been, the nightmarish, vague recollections of her time spent here while the Accuser shared her body.

And knowing her father had done that to her. The one man who was supposed to love her more than any other man ever could, who was supposed to teach her how to relate to men and how to expect to be treated by them for the rest of her life, had discarded her without a second thought.

Did that color her relationships? Was she now in love with an emotionally distant demon because her father had never been there for her? It was ridiculous, she knew. It wasn’t as though she was an open book emotionally either, or didn’t keep secrets, and Greyson was nothing like her father.

And yet…he’d gotten where he was today in part by stepping directly on the heads of people who’d helped him. He’d worked his entire life to become Gretneg, and she knew he’d kill to stay there.

Would he discard her, as her father had done, if she became too much of a threat to his position? If dumping her would cement another deal, strengthen an alliance, bring him more power and money?

It wasn’t simply the cold that made her shiver. For a moment she just stood there, feeling more lonely than she ever had in her life.

Then he stood in front of her and heat radiated from his skin, and she didn’t care anymore what was wrong or right. If the last months had taught her anything, it was that no matter how hard you tried to guard against the unexpected, you couldn’t do it. And if her work had taught her anything, it was that feelings and emotions could be coped with but not stopped. She’d deal with whatever fallout happened when it happened. If it happened.

He held her for a minute, then pulled away, stroking her cheek with his fingers. “Ready?”

“My arm still hurts.” It did too. He took her hand, and she felt the smooth rush of his power over her skin. The pain lessened a little.

“I don’t want to use too much energy,” he said. “We’ll probably need all we can get. But that should be better.”

“It is, thanks.” She looked up and caught his eyes with her own.

The others were pretending not to watch them, but Megan knew they were. She cleared her throat and glanced at the floor. “What do we do? I mean, can you feel anything, do you know where it—whatever we’re looking for—is?”

“No. This whole place feels like demon.”

“Start at the top, work our way down?”

“Probably better the other way around. I’d rather not climb more stairs than I have to.”

She’d almost forgotten about his leg. With a concerned little sound she leaned down, but he touched her shoulder to keep her where she was. “It’s fine. Listen, Meg…”

“What?”

His fingers twined in hers, warm and comforting, while she waited for him to speak. Finally he shook his head. “Never mind. Is this the bottom floor, or what?”

Her heart sank. “There’s a basement.”