Pandemonium

away, Mr. Pierce.” The corner of the ground floor was taken up by a café.

“What?”

“Black, two sugars.”

She stood there, waiting to see if I’d move. No, waiting until I moved.

Maybe it was the Priest thing, maybe the Woman thing. Maybe it was the Woman Priest thing. I obeyed.

The line at the counter stretched almost to the door, and I suddenly remembered that for thousands of people—millions of people—

nothing unusual had happened last night. They’d woken up in the same bed they’d gone to sleep in, next to the same people they’d slept with for years. Now it was just another coffee break, another venti latté

and lemon honey seed muffin, then back to the cubicle to delete an hour’s worth of spam. Poor deluded sheep. They weren’t any safer from demons than the poor fuck who’d gotten taken by the Truth last night, but they refused to admit it. They weren’t immune; they were just undiagnosed.

The line moved quickly, and in a minute the venti paper cup was burning my fingers. (But only the fingers: I held the cup in my left hand, but my palm was too thickly wrapped to feel the heat.) She wanted two sugars, but there weren’t any cubes. Of course not; when was the last time I’d seen sugar cubes anywhere? I poured some sugar into the cup, but that didn’t seem like enough, and I poured again. Now it seemed like too much.

What the hell was I doing?

I snapped down the plastic lid, then sidestepped the tables and incoming customers until I was outside again. Mother Mariette was leaning against the wall, eyes closed.

“Your coffee,” I said.

She opened her eyes, took the cup from me, and held it up to her lips, but didn’t drink. She closed her eyes again and let the steam from the slit mouth of the cup pass over her face. Her breathing slowed; her body grew still. I realized that from the moment I’d seen her in the lobby she’d been in a state of high excitation, an electron ready to jump. And now, moment by moment—praying, meditating?—she was dumping energy. Blowing off steam.

She opened her eyes again.

There were a dozen things I needed to tell her. About the Hellion, my slipping control, the solution I’d worked out from Dr. Ram’s research. But Dr. Ram was dead, and I was running out of time.

“I need your help,” I said. “When I was five years old I was possessed by a demon. And ever since then, it’s stayed with me. Inside me. And when I read about Dr. Ram, I got an idea for a surgical technique—”

“We wrestle not with flesh and blood,” she said. Not looking at me.

“But against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness in this world.”

I waited, but she didn’t say more.

“See, that doesn’t really help,” I said.

She sighed. “I know where you’re going with this,” she said, not unkindly. Her anger had dissipated, and now she seemed merely tired.

“You’re not the only person to see the possibilities of Dr. Ram’s work. Spiritual amputation, chemical inoculation, surgical exorcism . . . at the very least a method to positively identify cases of possession. And thanks to Dr. Ram’s death, his line of research is closed, and I doubt anyone will pick it up.”

“What do you mean, closed? If anything, this proves he was on the right track. The demons feared him so much they killed him to stop him.”

She looked at me, smiled faintly. “The demons have no master plan, Mr. Pierce. They don’t work together toward some agenda. Each of them is an obsessive, each of them wants what it wants. If the Truth killed Dr. Ram, it was for one reason—he said he had a cure, and he was lying.” She shrugged. “That’s the Truth’s job. Punish the liars.”

She grabbed the handle of her bag. “Good day, Mr. Pierce. This is the last day of our acquaintance.” She stepped off the curb, between the bumpers of the stopped cars, and the roller bag dropped and bounced behind her.

“Wait! You’ve got to help me! What am I supposed to do?”