I waved my hand and only then took note of it. My fingers were blistered, I realized. The lining of my palms had gone red and torn. I frowned at the skin, the edges turning black even as Frank’s scream pulled my attention back to him. Why was I still harmed by holy icons? What evil worked in me still?
“No!” He wailed as his finger split in front of me, the skin tearing away from the nail as a cold wash of sickness poured out onto the carpet, once again like smoke. It spat and sizzled, and Frank shook his hand feebly, trying to get it all out, but only able to hold it out from his body, lank and broken.
“That was messily done,” I sneered, and the coldness rushed through me again, but there was nowhere for it to go but up the flue, nowhere to go but past the holy water-soaked cloth that Max had carefully laid over the chimney. These possessor demons could not escape without the taint of blessed protection upon them. The ritual was an ancient one, the rites mostly magic themselves. But they would do the job. These dark spirits would be crippled for a few lifetimes, if they’d ever recover at all. Good.
Then I turned and looked at Emily, who scowled back at me.
“I know you,” she hissed. “I know what you did.”
“You think so?” But something within me twisted, just a hint—a shiver. Then the lightest touch on my soul withdrew like a whisper and was gone.
Emily didn’t get the memo, though. “Why do you come to torment your own?” She undulated toward me, not quite contained by her own skin. “You have no quarrel with any of us. So why?”
I felt my arms go loose, like a fighter’s might. I sensed the age of the thing inside of her, remembering its name. I didn’t know much about Naamah, the seducer. There were so many demons of lust and avarice that it had been only a shot in the dark that had led me to that name. But she’d responded to it. So, good enough.
Officer Hernandez still stood at the door, gun drawn and pointed away from her at the floor, but Claire was back, I realized dimly. She’d come into the room to take the wailing Sam up in her arms. Steve held his glass up like a weapon, as if he could blind any demon that came his way—and maybe he could. He’d been treated poorly by those assholes in the club, but he hadn’t been possessed. What if that meant something? What if there was a whole lot left for me to learn about Steve—about everyone?
Max, for his part, had moved along the sides of the room until he’d reached his parents. They were blubbering, in tears, and I felt their weary moistness all the way across the room. I flicked an irritated glance his way and opened my mouth to speak.
Everyone but Emily shut up at whatever I said, as if fire had come out of my mouth, but I couldn’t really bother with that. Emily was circling closer, and she seemed too strong, despite the booze. Happy. Too happy? Doubt sliced through me, quick and cold.
But I didn’t have the luxury of doubt anymore.
Emily laughed, only it was a strange laugh, a double laugh, a triple. I looked at her harder and realized the problem. Not just Naamah was here. Not just Naamah. The things swirling around inside Emily were more than one creature, more even than two. “What have you done, Emily?” I whispered.
“Sheopened me up, you know,” Emily spat back. “I had no idea. The strength, the possibility.”
“The damage.” I was still reeling from Frank and Judith, but deep inside myself I sensed the wrongness of what was happening inside Emily. Another something skittered in her eyes, and I sharpened my gaze.Another one? “Ashtaroth.”
“We can do this all night.” Her voice now sounded like an unholy choir. “You cannot defeat me, even if youhavebound Palemerious. Not and have her live. Which isn’t exactly winning, is it? Killing this broken creature to get us out? Poorly done. Poorly done.” A roll of voices added to the first—how many demons were in her? Just what had Carol Ann Graham done to her aunt who made her so jealous, all those long-ago years?
I smiled into their faces, reveling in their rage, their joy, and decided to lean into their misbegotten belief. It was the demons who believed, after all. So much more than humans. “It’s not only Palemerious working here. Remember that.”
It was the first time I’d said the demon’s name aloud, and I shivered with another roll of forbidden power. My voice was strong, epically strong, and somewhere deep inside her own mind, lost behind a keening wall of darkness, Emily heard it too. Heard it and cried out for help from me. And I would give her that help.
Because there was power in props.
I walked over to the table between the two wingback chairs. The chairs where Mr. and Mrs. Graham had sat like sentinels, not feeling what was between them—or perhaps they had. Maybe that was the reason behind their docility.They wouldn’t remember this terrifying night. They probably wouldn’t remember a lot of things from these last seven years.
I opened the ornate box on the table and lifted out a crucifix. Then a rosary. Gifts from Father Neismeth. My fingers smoked a little, but they’d already been blistered black—I’d long since stopped feeling them. That was worrisome, but I wasn’t about to stop. If I still had demon goo clinging to my soul somehow, causing me to react to holy icons, so be it. It might take a while to shake off fifteen years of possession.
Behind me, the things within Emily croaked a collective laugh. “You think that is going to bind me? You think I care about trinkets and beads?”
“You don’t.” I smiled, realizing that Rabbi Mordechai never had me hold these tools during an exorcism. Only he held them, he and the people he was helping. The people who looked at him with fear and terror and doubt and desperation. Only it wasn’t the desperation of man that was emanating out of them. It was the desperation of the creatures who sought refuge in man. “But I don’t care about you.”
My fingers slick with my own blood now, cracked and smoking, I placed the crucifix on Emily’s forehead, and she flinched back, hard, but I followed her even as she stumbled over the table and collapsed onto the couch. She screamed with abject terror, her mouth hanging open, elongating into a rictus of pain. I could feel the arrival of other people at the door. Some of them coming in? I couldn’t tell. I draped the heavy rosary over Emily’s shoulders, and she growled, feral, scrabbling back on the couch. I was reminded of the lesser demon that had plagued Iris. That had not required so much effort.
This did.
“Naamah and your servants, leave this woman, never to return.” The words sounded gnarled and ancient, and my mouth felt like dust. Suddenly, there was a second person at my side,and another cross was pressed into Emily’s arm. Her eyes were wild as she tried to jerk away, but Claire didn’t budge. And it wasn’t just any cross she was using. It was her own delicate cross from her necklace.
“Leave her alone!” Claire shouted. Max was beside me on the other side, his face resolute as he lifted a thermos of holy water. As Emily screamed, he poured the whole thing’s contents on her head.
“No!” Emily clapped her hands to her forehead, and I got down to whisper in her ear.
I don’t know what I said, then. I was in pain, terrible pain, a touch once more on my soul—one I both welcomed and reviled. And I whispered things to her that my mind didn’t want to fully comprehend. I told her of what was waiting for her, when she and her fellow creatures came out of Emily. The long life ahead of her, the pain and the tears and the waiting, always the waiting.
I told her of the emptiness too. Because when I was done with them, if they didn’t leave her right then, and in the manner of my choosing, they would not be able to enter another soul for amillennium. And what lay in wait for them before that millennium struck was anyone’s guess. The world was an uncertain place. God was an uncertain master. And I had learned so much in my long life?—
