Griffin’s already putting the van in gear, pulling out of the parking lot with enough force to make the tires squeal. Zoey refreshes the map again. No more data points come up. He must have turned off his phone.
“How fast can the van go?” I ask.
“Fast enough.” Griffin floors it.
The van lurches forward. DJ yelps, and Bob slides across my lap with an indignant yip. Other cars become obstacles to weave around. The van zips around an old lady who’s taking her sweet time in the fast lane.
“It won’t befast enoughif you get us pulled over,” DJ yells at him.
Griffin eases off the gas just enough to drop us below felony speeds.
“How far are we from the hospital?” I ask.
“Thirty-two minutes,” Zoey says.
DJ whips out her phone, hits call, and snaps it into the phone mount on the dashboard. She connects the phone to the speakers, and the ringtone comes through loud.
“Talk to me,” Nico answers, sounding weary and rough and so him. The sound of his voice rumbles through my body like heavy bass on a song, and I close my eyes for a second to absorbthe sound. Bob cranes his head up to look at me, probably wondering why I just stopped breathing.
“We’ve got a situation,” DJ says, and fills him in.
Nico swallows audibly. The ensuing silence familiar and comforting because I know he’s composing himself. “Who’s with you?”
“All of us.” DJ glances at me in the rear-view mirror. “Even Bob.”
This pause is so long that I wonder if the call dropped.
“DJ and Griffin move in,” Nico says. “Zo on comms. Benji, stay behind and engage if they need backup, and Eden… don’t engage.”
By the time we pull up to the hospital, I’m wound so tightly that Bob has started licking my hand. We pass the sedan parked outside the side entrance and drive to the other end of the building to park.
“Are you sure it’s a good idea for you to follow him in there?” I ask DJ and Griffin as they get out of the van. “He has cameras in there. He’d have the upper hand.”
“He could have more victims in there,” DJ says. “Plus, we need a remote location to do the extraction.” DJ pulls her goggles over her eyes.
Griffin does the same and gives me a theatrically solemn nod. “We try not to perform exorcisms in public unless it’s an emergency. People come around asking questions.”
There were a couple of people in the Walmart parking lot when Nico and Donny extracted William Caine, but none of them seemed to have any questions or even wanted to step in and help me. I guess that case would’ve qualified as an emergency since I was actively being murdered.
Griffin hefts a bag of iron chains to his back. He and DJ sling shotguns over their shoulders and slide earpieces in.
“If anything goes wrong, call us for backup,” I say.
“The only backing up you will be doing is away from this building,” Griffin says.
“Be careful,” I tell them.
They duck through a gap in the chain-link fence and disappear through the door.
CHAPTER 53
I thought mental institutions would be full of undiscovered sensitivities. Most patients I spoke to were genuinely ill. Only one ever made it onto my team.
—Journal of Donald Dellman, February 2025
Zoey monitors the audio feed. Nico is still on the phone with us, but is saying nothing as we wait.
Five minutes go by.
