“Sonillion,” I gasped, as the truth blasted through me with fire and rage, a wind whipping up out of nowhere. “Begone, Sonillion, and take your servants with you.”
Another round of chaos raged. All Joe’s suck-ass carvings were lifted off the low table in the middle of the room and thrown at me, like I was being stoned. I stumbled back, crouching down behind a couch, so they hit the far window, breaking it.
The roar of the wind grew louder as it screamed over and out of the house, a houseful of creatures banished not to hell, never to hell. I didn’t know where the demons went, but mine was notthe power to rid this earth of them. Just from thisplace, for all eternity. Only this place.
And also from me-who-was-in-this-place, me who was power and truth.
I dragged myself to the shattered window, leaned out. Because I wasn’t done yet. I still had one more demon left to exorcise.
“Begone,” I whispered into the howling wind, my heart a stone lump in my chest, my hands numb, my blood slow and sluggish in my veins. “Begone, Palemerious. You must leave now, too.”
My mind seemed to crack wide open, and with my inner eyes, I saw a different storm, a different night. I was back in the cemetery next to Mordechai, who raised blistered hands as I backed away from him in horror. And I was here, in this broken house, confronting the thing he left behind.
“Begone,” I said again.
Time stopped, hung, and quivered in abject terror and pain. In a moment of brutal clarity, I saw what awaited me without the demon I carried. It was a world of emptiness. I would see only with my own eyes, I would feel only with my own touch. I would relate to others only with the experience of a woman who knew nothing about anything, whose experience with the world failed in every way, circumscribed by poverty and ignorance and bone-crushing loneliness.
Mordechai was dead, and it was not as if Ethan was going to let me work with him. I would be cast aside, adrift, as cursed at twenty-five as I had been at seven months, my mother bending over her swollen belly, pleading for God, the angels, for anybody to deliver her from the sin that was my corruption in her body, the life force that was even now ruining hers, sucking it dry, using it up, leaving her to face decades of privation and fear because of something she wanted no part of.
“Begone! You cannot stay here!” I still cried out, a thin, high cry, the cry of a child. The shift in my belly was like my stomach being scraped out from the inside. The rush of anguish in my blood nearly dropped me to my knees, but I couldn’t stop—couldn’t back down. I had no other choice but to move forward, or I’d never be free. “Go!”
For one terrible, infinite moment, I felt him hesitate. Felt something in him reach back toward me—not with rage or possession, but with something I had no name for. Something that felt almost like?—
No. I couldn’t think that. Wouldn’t.
“Go!” I roared again.
It went. Through one of the countless wounds on my arms, my belly, with a screaming, howling rage, a blowing wind of a thousand storms that punched up and through and out of me, Palemerious burst into the broken world, blending with the shedim, screaming through the lake house and out into bright and endless day…
And all was lost.
“Delia!”
Max was at my side, and I felt something unchunk from my shoulder, pain lancing me back to awareness as he threw something away from me. He pressed a thick pad of cloth over a dark and wet place on my shoulder, and I looked at him, afraid to speak. Dreading what might come out of my mouth.
“Delia, what is it? Talk to me.”
I blinked up at him.
“They’re gone,” I finally rasped.He’s gone. Forever gone and away from me. Empty. Wrenching. Gone.
I blinked harder, this time desperately trying to keep the tears that burned behind my lids from falling. But my thoughtswere mine, no one else’s. My heartbeat was only heard by me. My skin stretched too tight over my own hollow shell, and I was alone, my demon vanquished and evermore gone.
I had won.
I had lost.
Everything.
“I can see that. Jesus.” Another person squatted down beside me, her worry and concern flowing over me like an unexpected balm. A person I remembered—but didn’t know right away, as ancient names and places rippled through me, cities and villages, castles and kings, flowing through me and out of me in a spreading stain, whisked away by the wind.
“We need to get her to a hospital,” the woman said gently.
“No…no,” I managed, pulling myself to a sitting position. I’d started to shiver uncontrollably, but I welcomed that new, harsh pain, focusing on it while the whispers and knowledge of a thousand years swept away from me. “Just a church. And a…a Catholic one, this time.”
Chapter
Thirty-One
