“Delia, do you know why I’ve brought you here?” Mordechai asked.
“To tell me about the boy in the house?”
That part was true, real. That part I remembered. But in this reality, Rabbi Mordechai kept talking, his eyes steady on me, as the lines on his face sank deeper.
“I have prepared all I can,” he said. “Look at me?—”
“No,” my shout seemed ripped out of my lungs, the cry of a wounded animal. He must not speak; he must not speak! I stared at Mordechai, knowing I needed to get away, but my feet wouldn’t move.
“Why do you trouble this young woman, blessed by the Creator?” he demanded of me—of the thing inside me.
But I wasn’t the one who answered him. Instead, the demon within me spoke, harsh and mocking.
“She is blessed by no one!” I opened my mouth too wide to laugh. I felt it, and it hurt, but I couldn’t stop the words pouring out of me. “Her mother was a drunken whore when this one was conceived. But she prayed, oh how she prayed to let birth pass her by. She prayed first to God, then she prayed to the angels. Then she prayed to any god who would have her, did you know that? She wouldn’t, couldn’t take responsibility herself, was too damned stupid to kill it, to let this spirit sicken and die like so many others did. In the end, she gave birth. And she regretted her words, regretted her prayers. But it was too late by then. Wealwayslisten.”
I was hissing the words now; they felt like steam and fire in my belly. “Always.”
“The Creator listens too.”
“Not as closely.” Laughter curled and twisted. “As you well know.”
Mordechai bristled, his face going redder. “You are wrong. This choice you think you made? It was made for you. But no more, servant. Begone!”
“Oh,now you want me to go? After all this time?” The demon’s words were out before I could stop them. Out of the mouth of theme I was watching in my dream, and out of my memory before I could clamp down hard on the impossibility, the horror of it.
Rabbi Mordechai didn’t flinch, didn’t back down. He nodded.Nodded. “I hoped you would not grow beyond the tiny seed of doubt and darkness placed within such a strong soul.”
“And yet you didn’t root it out?” I demanded in my own voice. “You didn’t take it from me when you had the chance?”
I couldn’t understand who was talking now, the me in the dream or the me in my mind or the me who was sleeping in the bed, tears beginning to leak down my face as the horror of truth slowly filled me.
“You knew?” I squeaked, and this time my voice was high, thin, manic. I clawed at my own belly, thinking of the writing on the walls, the writing on my own skin. It wasn’t possible—itcouldn’tbe possible. Mordechai had known me for fifteen years! Had I been possessed all that time?
“Why did you really want me around?” I demanded. “Why did you stay my friend, why did my mom—” All of the air whooshed out of me. “Sheknew, didn’t she? You told her.”
“Delia.”
“She knew,” I said again, my voice raw. A lifetime of my mother’s fear clicked into place—the drinking, the distance, the relief when I left with Mordechai. She hadn’t been protecting herself from the world. She’d been protecting herself from me.
My tirade should have penetrated Mordechai’s benevolent exterior, but nothing seemed to. It was like rainwater battering against a steel door. But the last accusation made something shift in his expression. Something hard and fierce. And betrayal warred with crowning achievement in the deepest, darkest part of me.
“Youneededme, didn’t you?” The thing inside me accused, my words coming out in short, gasping fish breaths. “You trapped me.”
“I didn’t know your name. Didn’t know that Delia could identify you.” Mordechai shook his head. “I know it now, though. And understanding is all it takes.”
I smiled in the dream. I could see myself. It wasn’t a good smile. “Not all.”
Mordechai held up his hand with its gleaming shofar. “Begone from her.”
“And how shall I leave?” My voice channeling the demon was silky smooth now, my shoulders back, my hands loose. Not like me at all…or more like me than I ever understood. “How shall I leave this dear girl. Through her eye? She would be blinded. Through her hand? She would be crippled. How would you have me leave this vessel you have allowed me to fill for so many, many years?”
Fifteen years—and that was just the years that Mordechai had known me. How long had I been carrying the spark of this evil inside me, the seed that was growing into rotted fruit? No friends. My own mother afraid of me. The one adult to ever care about me actually using me for?—
“Is it true?” The voice that spoke was mine again, only I sounded young, way too young, and Mordechai looked deep into my eyes. I didn’t know what he saw there, but he didn’t bend. He wasn’t weak. I may have been breaking apart in front of him, but he stared at me with eyes that were not intended for the supporters of the afflicted, but for the afflicted herself. And when it got to this point in the exorcism, the afflicted saw what I now saw. A soldier of God.
“You have done this before, dark one,” he said, his voice like distant oceans and faraway shores. “You and your brethren but especially you. And now you shift, you turn like a snake in the grass, rooting out your own, sending them into oblivion, crippled and fleeing. I know you do it. I’vewatchedyou do it.”
I smiled, my voice like polished ebony. “Do you want to know why?”
