Linda knew in her gut, no question, the shadow was coming for her.
A woman walking her Bolognese screamed at the top of her lungs, thesound muted by the sedan’s closed windows. Linda pulled away from the curb and banged into an SUV parked behind her, setting off its alarm. She adjusted her car and barreled into the street. She drove fast as she could, having no idea how quickly the thing could move. If it could pass through physical barriers like windows and a roof, stood to reason that it could pass through car doors. If it could…
Linda looked at her rearview mirror. The thing vanished for a moment, shot past her sedan, and veered into the thick of traffic. She eased on the gas, frantically scanning intersections and crosswalks to see if there was a side street she could turn into to leave the traffic behind, to lure the shadow away. Several pedestrians were staring and pointing at the thing in the sky. A few began to run.
The shadow gathered in the distance, momentarily becoming a murky cloud before it reshaped itself into a long, sharp point… a missile that swooped back toward Linda. It collided with the front of her sedan, into the windshield, cracking the glass.
Becoming wispy and fluid once again, the shadow recoiled and weaved in between cars. Several vehicles began to veer from their lanes. A man in a convertible ducked down as the entity flitted above his head. The shadow spun around and shot itself back into Linda’s windshield, once, twice, three times. The glass finally shattered and flew into her face right as she covered her eyes with her arm.
“Shit… shit,” she screamed. She fumbled for the side of her blazer, tried to grab her gun without losing control of the car. “Motherfucka!”
The smoky thing grabbed Linda by her neck with a frosty tendril. Its blinding red eyes bored into hers. The heat from its gaze blistered her cheeks and mouth. She could barely see the road, barely see her proximity to other cars. She heard more shouting. Pedestrians.
Linda braced herself and brought forth her gift, pushed back with her empathy with all her might against the shadow. Imagined the thing beingstretched far and wide, so far and wide that it would be impossible for it to maintain cohesion.
The creature shrieked with an unearthly, ear-piercing sound. And then it blew apart, just as she’d imagined, its fiery eyes exploding in Linda’s face. She was truly blinded now, her face throbbing with pain as if she’d run into a wall.
Linda gripped her steering wheel tight. She heard a squishy thud. A man shouted in agony. She tried to imagine where the curb might be, tried to veer to the right before she heard another crash and felt herself flipped over, flung hard to the left.
And then… darkness.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
FONSI
After two nonstop days hunched over his desk, poring over pages of Gran Libro, reading and rereading various sections about ghostly possession and demonic possession, cross-referencing each section with other books from his (formidable) library, annotating everything that he’d read in a separate file, Fonsi was about to keel over. He was dog-ass tired.
He glanced over at Matteo sprawled out in bed. A light snore escaped his lips. Fonsi’s collection of orisha statuettes that he’d sculpted over the years rested on a shelf that overlooked his dude. Oshun, Shango, Yemaya, Orunmila, Erinle… all perched above slumbering Matteo with his fine bare-chested self. As if they were his protectors. Or as if he were one of them, an orisha brought to life getting much-needed rest. With old DC memories floating in his noggin, Fonsi realized that glistening Matteo could’ve also easily been an oiled-up dancer at Secrets. The type of guy he once thought he’d have to tip all night to give him any attention. And yet here he was.
For all his efforts, Fonsi still hadn’t found anything that would be useful to sussing out DC’s demon eyes. And he hadn’t helped matters muchby going on TV and trying to assuage public fears, though he did think it was the right thing to do, as did most other Guardianes. No more hiding in the shadows for his order. No more cryptic secrets about ghostly worlds. At least business with the botanica had gone through the roof, even though people had no idea that Fonsi was an actual medium. They were simply jazzed he’d been on TV.
Fonsi got up and stretched. He would shower, be nice and fresh. With any luck, he and Matteo could snuggle for the rest of the night uninterrupted. He glanced over at his phone, which he hadn’t looked at in hours. Linda had sent an early evening text.
Samuelson’s amulet. Call me, msg me, need intel on that ASAP ASAP ASAP.
Fuuuuuuck…Fonsi had completely forgotten about the object she’d photographed at Pastor Samuelson’s place.
He then noticed that Linda had sent two more photos, screenshots of someone named Rayo Courant both wearing the amulet and giving out what appeared to be replicas at public gatherings, exactly what they’d found in the pastor’s bedroom. Fonsi pulled up the photo of Rayo wearing the amulet and took a close look. He presumed it to be a ward of some sort. He looked even more closely at the amulet’s face, surrounded by an artist’s rendition of sunrays.
Actually…
He had a revelation.
Fonsi flipped back open the pages of El Gran Libro, searched for the book’s section on nineteenth-century manifestations found on various islands in the Western Hemisphere. He peered at the amulet again on his screen. He was sure he’d seen something that looked like this… maybe yesterday? Earlier today? Everything was a blur.
After several minutes, he stumbled upon it, the section he’d been looking for…
The dorlis of the Caribbean…
He dived into the passages, most of which he knew by heart from his yearslong devotion to the book. The dorlis existed on islands like Martinique and Guadeloupe, were known to be malicious, degraded demonic entities that preyed on people for sex, feasting on desire. Most of the world was familiar with the entities’ European counterparts, the incubi and succubi, but the dorlis were just as cunning, maybe even more dangerous.
Fonsi vaguely recalled first reading about the dorlis when he was a teenager, when he considered himself a Guardián in training. The passages about what they could do—in a nutshell, spiritual and sexual predation—way too frightening for him to read late at night. The violence of their assaults. The psychological trauma experienced by victims. To be violated by an entity whom you couldn’t reach, whom you couldn’t hold accountable in an earthly court of law.
Adolescent Fonsi wasn’t ready to handle that sort of intel about predatory spirits. Too frightening, later for that. But adult Fonsi was driven, knowing that he might be able to connect the dots by the next page, or the next.
He came across the passage…
From the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, some dorlis relied upon human accomplices in their quest to feast on flesh, memory, and desire, to further their goal of manifestation on the terrestrial plane. These accomplices were believed to be mystics who received promises of power—elongated life, additional arcane gifts, easier access to spiritual realms—in exchange for distributing portals through which the dorlis could feast. Such portalscould be disguised as talismans, amulets, or medallions but were, in fact, quite dangerous.
