“Poetry, every word,” I said, and her flashing eyes narrowed even further. “But even if I can’t kill you, I can send you back to the hell you—”
A knock interrupted my threat, and I groaned when a door opened at my back, halting my progress on the zip ties. “Deacon, reports are coming in from the south gate.”
Bennett circled me, headed for the hall. “Send Chief Kaughman in to watch her.”
The door closed, and I had less than a minute to twist my plastic bindings before it opened again, and Chief Kaughman settled into the chair across from mine. “Well, well, little girl. Looks like you’re in over your head.” His eyes shone, and his lips turned up in a leering grin.
I gave my hands one last, fierce twist, and the plastic snapped. I lunged across the table, my left hand already ablaze. Shackles bit into my ankles. The table slid beneath my weight.
Kaughman’s eyes widened. He stood and backed into his own chair. Then my glowing palm slammed into the police chief’s chest.
Smoke curled from the smoldering cotton beneath my hand, and meaningless, pain-filled syllables dripped from the chief’s lips as he hung from the bright force burning between us. His navy cap hit the table, then rolled onto the concrete. Seconds later, the light faded from my hand and I had to grab the front of his cassock to keep him from sliding to the floor. I laid Chief Kaughman across the table between us, facedown, then scrambled to search every pocket I could reach. The third held a set of keys.
My pounding heart counted the seconds ticking away while I squatted to try the keys in my shackles. When the fourth one slid home, I grabbed the chief’s gun—careful to keep my hands off the trigger—and examined it, wishing I knew how to check the clip. Or enable the safety. Or do anything with it other than aim and pull the trigger.
With my right hand wielding the gun and my left ready to ignite, I opened the door just enough to peek into the hall.
It was empty.
I tiptoed past several empty interrogation rooms, then peeked around a corner before silently searching another empty hallway. Anathema’s run on the south gate had diverted most police and fake-exorcist manpower from the courthouse, but one corner and another hallway later, I heard the echo of voices headed toward me.
Panicked, I ducked into the nearest room—an office lit only by a desk lamp—and flattened my back against the wall by the door until the voices passed. When I was sure they were gone, I rounded the desk and rummaged through the drawers, hoping to find more bullets for my stolen gun, or some clue as to where they might be keeping my sister, but I came up empty. I was about to resume my search for Melanie when the title of a document lying open on the desk caught my attention: “Annual Loss Report.”
“The insurrectionist Kastor continues to raid Church assets, leading to losses in excess of fifteen percent of the potential hosts. At the current rate of loss, Kastor’s strength will exceed ours within the decade. The most vulnerable point of attack remains the consecration caravan. The most notable loss was the assassin Carey James. Recommendations for future confrontations include…”
Carey James. Grayson’s brother.
If I understood what I’d read, the Church had taken Carey, but lost him in a caravan raid by an “insurrectionist” named Kastor.
Was Kastor an exorcist? Was he raising an army in opposition to the Church?
A bolt of excitement set my nerve endings on fire, but a second later logic doused the flames. If Kastor was an exorcist, why was he referred to as an insurrectionist rather than as an assassin? And if he wasn’t an exorcist, why was he stealing “hosts” from the Church?
Armed with more questions than answers, I folded the paper and stuffed it into my back pocket, then grabbed the chief’s gun and headed back into the hall. Three hallways and two hiding spots later, loud voices from the glass-walled office ahead and to my right told me I’d found the center of activity.
For a couple of minutes, I listened with my back pressed against a wall out of sight, trying to identify the speakers over the pounding of my own heart in my ears. But none of the voices was familiar, and their chatter was largely useless and self-congratulatory—as if they’d played some part in capturing me, when in truth, I’d surrendered.
Then someone asked for an update on the fight at the south gate, and my ears pricked up.
Two members of Anathema had been injured, another voice announced, but all had made it through the south gate and into the badlands, where they were currently being pursued by a full contingent of “exorcists.”
I listened, hoping for more details about the injuries, but none came.
With a bolt of trepidation, I realized that my time was up. The police would resecure the gate, then head back to the courthouse, and they’d move quickly once they heard about the chief’s death and my escape.
I peeked through the glass and counted the robed figures. Three gray. Four navy. One of each embroidered.
Four cops and three politicians, and all but two were human. Unfortunately, the demon in gray was Deacon Bennett.
Surely I could take on two demons by myself. But that left five humans, probably as dedicated to the Church as Anabelle was and as ignorant of its true nature as I’d been three days before. I’d never fired a gun and wasn’t sure I actually knew how. But even if I figured it out, I wasn’t willing to shoot a human unless he came between me and my sister.
Unfortunately, at the moment, that was exactly where the humans were standing, at least figuratively.
I sucked in a deep breath, steeling my nerves. Steadying my hands. I could think of only one way to avoid having to shoot anyone. One way that Melanie, Finn, and I could all emerge intact. So I double-checked the safety on the gun and slid it into my waistband, then waited until the consecrated cop stood with his back to the glass door.
When he was as close as I could expect him to come, I shoved the door open and pressed my glowing left hand to the center of the possessed cop’s back.
Air hissed as he inhaled sharply, and everyone turned to look.
The human politicians gasped, and all three of the human cops drew guns with barrels that looked stretched because of the built-in noise suppressors. But the demon that hung from the fire in my palm could only convulse as his life force was burned from his stolen body. In front of a live audience.
“Shoot to wound!” Deacon Bennett shouted, and as flames devoured my hand, I looked over the frying monster’s shoulder to see the demonic politician staring at me in mounting fury.
The cops blinked, obviously unwilling to look away from the threat—me. “What’s she doing? What’s happening?” the one on the left demanded, and every human in the room looked tense and near panic while they waited for the answer. That was when I realized they could see the glow. The flames from my hand were shining all the way through the consecrated cop hanging from my palm.
“Aim for her leg!” Bennett ordered.
“I’m doing my job!” I had to shout to be heard as I answered the question the deacon had ignored. “He’s possessed. I’m an exorcist. This is what a real exorcism looks like.” I paused to let that sink in, hoping that seeing really was believing. “This is the real purifying flame!”
For a moment, silence reigned, except for the soft crackle of the demon’s skin and clothes. Then the glow began to fade from my hand, and the dead cop thunked to the floor at my feet. Everyone stared at me, guns raised, eyes wide. Two jaws hung open. I searched their expressions for disbelief, but found only utter shock—the inevitable result of a brutal awakening.
I kept my arm extended, fingers spread, so they could see the last of the light—the reflection of my soul—as it receded into me.
“Any questions?”
For a moment, no one spoke. No one moved. Then one of the cops cleared his throat. “Captain Mitchell was possessed?” His focus dropped to the body still smoking at my feet, then quickly found my face again.
“Yes. As is every single consecrated member of the Unified Church.?
??
“She’s lying,” Bennett said. “She’s not an exorcist, she’s a demon, and she just killed an innocent man with some kind of demonic power!”
“Deacon Bennett is possessed.” I said it softly. Clearly. “Her sleeves are embroidered, her body is occupied, and her soul is being devoured as we speak. The demon inside her is scared, and it will say anything to protect itself.”
“Lies!” Bennett hissed. “She is the only demon here. The Church has declared her anathema. Shoot her in the leg!” When no one obeyed, the deacon turned on them in fury. “It is your sacred duty to follow my orders!”
I spread my arms slowly to keep from startling the men with guns, and my heart raced as I invited them to aim for my chest. “If you’re going to shoot me, why not just kill me?”
Two of the three adjusted their aim, pointing their guns at my heart. The third aimed at my head, while my pulse pounded in my throat.
“No!” Bennett shouted. “Wait for the exorcists. If you kill her, you’ll release the demon.”
All three lowered their aim, and I swallowed a groan. She was using the facts against me, and suddenly I realized she’d probably been manipulating people with their own beliefs since long before my grandparents were even born. I couldn’t convince my fellow humans that their revered leader was a demon. I would have to show them the truth—I would have to make her show them.
I took another deep breath and thought of Mellie, bound to the concrete on her knees, hungry and terrified. Then I lunged at the cop closest to the deacon.
His eyes went wide and he raised his aim. Bennett let loose an inhuman roar and sprang at him, blurring across my vision in order to protect me, because she couldn’t deliver a dead exorcist to Umbra. I’d expected her to snatch his gun with demonic speed and strength, but the reality was much more violent.
Blood arced over the front of my coat, spraying my chin with warm droplets. My focus dulled beneath a red haze and I froze, stunned.
Gasps echoed all around me. I blinked blood from my eyes, and Bennett’s form came into focus, bent over a body on the ground. Blood pooled beneath her, flowing around the soles of her shoes, soaking into the tails of her cassock. She looked up at me and hissed like an angry cat, but I hardly saw the lips curled back from her teeth or the inhuman gleam in her eyes.
I could only look at the man I’d just sacrificed to expose the deacon. He lay dead on the ground, blood still pouring through the gaping hole in his throat. He’d died so fast he never had a chance to drop his gun.
I reached for Bennett, my hand already glowing, but before I could make contact, guns thwuped from my left—one, two, three, four shots—and I flinched with each one.
Bennett convulsed with the impacts, then fell over dead.
“No!” I shouted.
My ears rang with the echo of suppressed gunfire, and the bright light faded from my hand. I blinked again, trying to make sense of the past two minutes, but the only things I was sure of were that I was still breathing and that Deacon Bennett was dead.
Well, evicted from her body, at least. The demon itself could be anywhere, in search of a new host.
I stared at the corpse, horrified to realize I’d lost the chance to exorcise the highest-ranking demon in New Temperance. To send the biggest threat to my sister’s safety back to the hell from which she’d sprung.
“She killed him,” one of the politicians muttered, wiping blood from the back of his hand onto his plain gray cassock, and I finally recognized him as one of Bennett’s clerks—I’d seen him standing behind her during several recent press conferences.
“She wasn’t a she.” I grabbed a tissue from a box on the unmanned receptionist’s desk to my right and finally realized I was in the front lobby of the police station. “She was a demon.”
“And you’re…?” The third cop still had his gun aimed at Bennett’s lifeless body, as if she might come back to life at any moment.
“An exorcist.” I wiped my face with the tissue, and it came away smeared with blood. “A real exorcist. I’m human, and so is my sister. If you don’t help me get her out of here, they’ll kill her.” That wasn’t exactly true, but I didn’t have time to explain the Church’s entire nefarious plot to a bunch of traumatized civilians.
And that was when I realized I no longer thought of myself as one of them.
They were citizens.
I was a soldier.
I glanced around at the handful of survivors and finally settled on the second cop—the one who’d holstered his weapon. His name tag read “Flores,” and he was the only one who didn’t look ready to either vomit or cry. “Take me to her. Help me get her out. Please.”
“I…” Flores blinked.
“Listen to me. My friends and I are the only things standing between you and a horde of demons hidden in plain sight.” I pointed at Bennett’s corpse for emphasis, acutely aware that I’d failed to vanquish that particular demon. “Do your part. Help me get my sister so I can go back to trying to save what’s left of humanity.”
He nodded once, hesitantly. Than again, more firmly.
“What about us? What about…” The other clerk hesitated, his focus skipping between the two dead demons. “What about them?” He turned to me, clutching the sides of his own plain cassock. “What about the rest of them? All the consecrated are possessed? How is that even possible? How do you know? How can you be sure?”
“I know it’s a lot to take in, and I don’t really know how to help you with that.” I could only imagine how much worse the shock and betrayal must feel for someone who’d unknowingly committed his life—not to mention his soul—to a Church run by monsters. “What I can tell you is that if they find out what you know, they’ll kill you. Or possess you. Your best bet is to pretend you don’t know anything about the consecrated or about what happened here. And put off your own consecration as long as you can.” I shrugged, already heading toward the hallway on the opposite side of the room. “If that doesn’t work…run. At least in the badlands you know who the monsters are.” Because they were rotting, drooling savages.
I turned back to Flores. “Let’s go.”
As he led me down deserted, labyrinthine halls, seemingly designed to confuse and disorient, Officer Flores pelted me with whispered questions about the secret demon occupation, and I answered as best I could.
“No, we don’t think it’s limited to New Temperance.”
“Yes, we think they’ve been here all along.”
“Yes, if you stay here, you will eventually be possessed. That’s the only reason they’ve kept us alive this long.”
When I got tired of answering and afraid of being caught, I grabbed his arm and pulled him to a halt. “The more you understand, the more danger you’re in.” I stared right into his eyes, letting him see the grave warning in mine. “You need to focus on feigning ignorance, or they will light you on fire on live television, just like they did to Adam Yung.”
“He was innocent,” Flores whispered, his voice half choked with horror.
I could only nod, my jaw clenched in some toxic combination of grief and rage. Then I waved toward the hallway, urging him on. “Do you have a car?”
He dug in an inner pocket of his cassock without slowing, then handed me a set of keys. “East parking lot, third row. I’ll tell them you stole the keys.” He stopped in front of an unmarked metal door and pulled another set of keys from another pocket. “Your sister’s in here, but she has a visitor. Someone they brought in to get her to talk. They’ve had her on her knees for days, but she hasn’t told them anything. She’s in rough shape. Strong kid, though.”
My heart ached. Mellie shouldn’t need to be that strong.
Flores unlocked the door, then opened it, but he didn’t put away his keys. The room beyond was actually two rows of steel-barred cells divided by a wide aisle. All the cells were empty except the one at the end on the left, outside of which stood a woman in a pale blue cassock and a cop frantically sorting through the
keys on his metal ring.
“Anabelle!” I whispered, and she and the cop both turned. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I recognized Officer Jennings, and the fact that he hadn’t pulled his gun told me Finn was still in residence.
“Nina!” Anabelle’s gaze slid from me to the cop behind me, and when she was sure he wasn’t going to prevent our reunion, she raced down the aisle toward me and nearly bowled me over with her hug. “Officer Jennings said you’re innocent.”
Officer Jennings obviously hadn’t mentioned that he wasn’t himself at the moment—not that we had time for such a complicated explanation.
Anabelle pulled away from me and stared straight into my eyes as if she could verify my humanity at a glance. “You’re still you, right?”
“Yes, and Mellie’s still herself. It was all a lie, Anabelle. So many lies, the whole time, and we never saw it. My mom was a demon. She was never sick or high, she was possessed, right under our noses.”
Anabelle’s forehead furrowed. “Since when? How is that possible?”
“Since forever. Since before I was born.” Seconds ticked away in my head, and I knew we were running out of time, but I needed Anabelle to understand, and I needed to keep her safe, somehow. I couldn’t let the Church claim her soul. “I didn’t know the truth about myself until I exorcised her—”