“You stay here, m’lady,” Malleus added, plunking his weight down on her other side. “You let ’im show you things.”
It was a reminder as much as a genuine desire to see her treated well, she knew. Malleus never forgot whose servant he was and what was expected of him in that capacity. Those rules apparently extended to her. The man now thrusting various garments at her wasn’t a demon, but just the same she didn’t need an interpreter to know what was going on.
It would be an insult not to smile and finger the clothing. It would be an insult not to finally select something and allow the man to box it up for her as carefully as he would the Hope diamond. It would be an insult to try and pay, especially when the little man kept grinning and telling her to remember him to Mr. Dante, to tell Mr. Dante how honored he was that Mr. Dante had sent Dr. Chase to his store and that if Mr. Dante ever wanted anything he shouldn’t hesitate to ask.
Megan finally left the shop with a designer gown, the shop owner’s business card, and a face bright enough to send satellite signals.
Tera smiled beside her. “Sure,” she said. “You’re not getting too wrapped up in the whole demon thing at all, are you?”
The bag with the gown in it banged against her leg like a toddler demanding attention as she walked into her house. She’d managed to have a good time, all things considered, especially when the conversation turned away from her and toward Tera’s various casual dates.
“Hi, Megan.”
The scream died in her throat when she saw Rocturnus lounging on her couch. “Damn it, I’ve asked you not to—”
“You asked me not to jump out at you and I’m not. I’m just sitting here.”
“You scared me.”
“Sorry.” He didn’t look sorry, but then demons never did.
She set down the bag and switched on the lamp by the couch. “Where have you been?”
“Checking on everyone.” His beady little eyes shifted. Not a good sign.
“And?”
“And they’re all alive. No more explosions.”
A breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding escaped. “Good.”
“But…maybe you should sit down.”
Megan knew people often told other people to sit down when they had good news for them too. It just hadn’t ever happened to her. There was no point in trying to put a brave face on things as she sat. Rocturnus would be able to feel, taste, and smell her every negative emotion anyway. “Okay, what?”
“Well…some of us aren’t very…happy. About the changes. And about what’s been going on. The deaths.”
“I didn’t think having your buddies explode would put you guys in the Christmas spirit,” she said, “but—”
“Actually we quite like the holidays. Lots of depression, feelings of inadequacy, jealousy…we’re very busy this time of year.”
“Mmm, just like Santa’s elves,” she said. “What about the changes?”
The frown on his wizened little face told her what he thought of the “elves” joke. “It’s confidence,” he said. “I know you don’t feel entirely comfortable with us. With what we do. But you have to remember, it is how we stay alive.”
“I’m not trying to kill anyone. I think it’s fair to ask you to exercise a little restraint, don’t you?”
“There’s another family.”
“What?”
“Another family. I mean, some of us have always had loyalties to other families. Not all of us in this city or even this country belonged to the Accuser.”
She nodded. He’d touched on this subject before, but she hadn’t paid much attention. It was enough to know several thousand demons in the city belonged to her. What the others did didn’t matter much, at least that’s what she’d thought.
Apparently she was wrong. “Another family is forming in the city. Some of yours…they’re uncomfortable. They don’t like your new way of doing things.”
“They’d rather be tortured and beaten?”
Rocturnus nodded. “And be able to live the way they always have.”
“But they aren’t giving it a chance!” She stood up—so much for sitting down—and started pacing, then realized she was still wearing her coat and scarf. No wonder she felt so warm.
“They don’t think you can protect them,” Rocturnus said. “They think you didn’t want us to begin with, and now you’re trying to starve us and you don’t care about the explosions.”
“That’s not true, you know it isn’t true. I do care. I went to jail last night for you guys; if I didn’t care I wouldn’t have bothered to go in that house and—”
“I know that.”
“Have you told them?”
He nodded.
“But they don’t believe you.”
“It isn’t all of them,” he said. “It’s not even a lot of them…yet. But enough to make me worry. They just—they don’t think you’re strong enough.”
She brushed aside the little voice in her head warning they they might be right. “I want to help them!”
“They want to be ruled, not helped. It’s the way demons are.” She raised an eyebrow and he amended, “It’s the way Yezer Ha-Ra are. The big ones, they have their own needs. They still want a strong leader though.”
She never thought she’d live to see the day when she was rejected by a bunch of little demons who fed on human anger and misery. By rights they should be drawn to her like flies to…well, like flies to just about anything. She’d never heard of a discerning fly.
They should be drawn to her like she was drawn to the bottle of vodka in her liquor cabinet. It sloshed into her glass, cracking the ice sticking to the bottom, turning a lovely jewel pink when she poured cranberry juice over it and added a splash of Rose’s lime. A tropical drink for a very cold and frosty night. Hey, something should be warm and tropical. Her insides certainly weren’t.
Half the drink was gone before she felt ready to talk again. “So who started this other family?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who started it? Who’s in charge? Is it one of you guys or is everyone joining a different Meegra or what?”
From the way his mouth twisted she almost expected him to say the others were joining Greyson’s Meegra. But that wasn’t possible, she knew it. Greyson wouldn’t betray her like that.
At least she thought he wouldn’t.
Shoving that disturbing little doubt out of her mind, she repeated the question. “Who’s in charge, Roc? Come on, if I’m going to be in direct competition with someone I’d like to know who it is.”
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “They wouldn’t tell me.”
“Can’t you—wait, what do you mean they wouldn’t tell you? Who wouldn’t tell you, the ones who left or the ones who’re still with me?”
He looked at his hands.
“Okay, so my demons—the ones staying with me—are now refusing to tell you where the demons who are no longer with me are going?”
“That’s the gist of it, yes.”
“Fuck.” She stood up and held out her hand. “Okay, then. Let’s go see them.”
“Now? They won’t be there.”
“Then I’ll call them there.” Why this was suddenly so important she didn’t know. Hadn’t she spent half the day wanting to be rid of the little demons, to be herself again? To come down to it, hadn’t she spent most of the last three months wishing this whole leader-of-the-personal-demon-pack thing hadn’t happened? As much as she liked Roc, being pulled in two directions like this wasn’t exactly comfortable.
But now she was hopping mad, fighting mad. It wasn’t that they were leaving, it was that they weren’t even telling her where they were going. That anger burned in her chest, burned through her entire body. If they wanted to leave, that was fine. But to not tell her where they were going, to treat her so disrespectfully…
It wasn’t until she’d closed her eyes and reached with her mind for the high-ceilinged room in the sky where they lived that s
he realized she was thinking exactly the way Greyson kept telling her she should think.
Chapter Five
She had no idea what to say.
Faced with a sea of little bald heads in a confusing Impressionistic variety of colors and squinty lash-less eyes, she started to regret her impulse. It would have been better to let it go. It would have been better to let the ones who didn’t want to stay with her just leave. If they weren’t even interested in trying things her way, in giving being a little less vicious a chance, they should go.
But the people…
And that was why. She couldn’t let them all just leave her and move on. Not when she’d spent so much time formulating a plan. Not when she was able to sleep easier at night knowing the humans her demons affected slept a little easier as well, because her first rule had been no more suicides, no more abuse. They could make their people miserable, but they were not to harm others.
Even that made her uncomfortable. But she couldn’t let the Yezer starve either.
“I called you here because I know some of you are leaving,” she said finally. “And going to a different house.”
The crowd shifted uneasily. She glanced at Roc, but his expression was unreadable. She hated not being able to use her gifts with demons. Having spent her early life getting hunches about people and then her entire life beyond her teen years being able to simply open up and know all sorts of things about what a person was feeling or thinking or doing, she felt disarmed these days. Naked, and not in a good hot-demon-in-bed kind of way, but in a showing-up-to-work-undressed-and-being-laughed-at way.
“I want to reassure all of you that I’m doing everything I can to stop the…ah…the attacks on you. I will find out who’s doing it, and I will make sure they’re punished.”
A ripple of interest moved through the crowd, and her spirits rose a little. “It’s happening in other Meegras too. Not just to you.”
“So if the others can’t protect their rubendas, how are you going to protect us? You’re not even a demon.”
“Yes, when are you going to do the ritual?”
The words echoed in the cavernous space for a moment, bouncing off the wooden cabinetlike doors of their bedrooms and the incredibly high ceiling. Normally this house felt oddly peaceful, a happy place despite the human despair its inhabitants fed on. But now…the demons were angry. With her. With the Accuser for having bound them to her. At the unseen, unknown killer stalking them.
“We’re not here to discuss that,” she said, then, remembering what Roc had said, “I didn’t come here to be questioned. I give my orders and you follow them.”
A few of them seemed to settle down, either at her strong tone or the words themselves. But unrest still hovered in the air.
“Do you doubt I have the power to protect you? Is that why you’re going somewhere else?”
Murmurs. Mutterings. But none spoke up.
“I’m connected to you. You’re connected to me.” Her face reddened. She felt like a bad actor in a melodrama. But Rocturnus nodded slightly beside her and the numerous eyes glinting in the white light from the ceiling were trained on her. Bad melodrama was just the sort of thing they liked, along with sugary snacks and twee home decor. They were like vicious little old ladies in that way. “Any more of you leave and you’ll all be—punished. Punished severely.”
The crowd sighed and shifted a little. Shit, Roc was right. This was what they wanted. Did they know it was bullshit? That she didn’t think she could bring herself to punish any one of them demon style? The only example of such treatment she’d seen had turned her stomach; she still woke up some nights alone in her bed with the image of Greyson’s bloody back in her mind, with the sound of the whip echoing in her ears.
What she could do, though, was hit them with her power. The telekinetic ability Tera had taught her didn’t always work; in fact, it hadn’t been working very well at all of late. Tera said it was because despite Megan’s abilities being so closely aligned to those of witches, she wasn’t a witch. She simply didn’t have the genetic power.
Megan suspected it was more than that, but she didn’t want to think about it. She’d been doing very well with it before the Yezer Ha-Ra had connected to her.
Demons weren’t telekinetic.
But she didn’t need to move any solid objects here. She just needed to let them know how strong she was, how capable. And since they were bound to her, it would be easy.
Deep inside her was a door and behind it lurked her power. Lurked the piece of demon lodged in her chest. Lurked the anger and the fear and—her heart pounded in her chest, red heat spreading from it through her body. In her mind the door bulged and shook, wanting, waiting, ready to—
She opened it.
For the first time since the night she’d been bound to them she opened it and power, shiny bright and cold-hot, burst from it, into her, through her, filling the room.
The little demons screamed in unison. Megan screamed too, but whether it was from triumph or fear she didn’t know. All she knew was her throat ached, her head fell back, and before she could stop it she was pulling the energy back in, pulling it in mixed with theirs, her body acting of its own accord just like the last seconds before an orgasm—
Their power thrust itself into her. Every bit of misery they caused, every shameful thought and deed that fed them, ran through her mind like a triple-speed film played on the backs of her eyelids.
And it was wrong, it was so wrong because it felt good, it felt better than anything, it was power and danger and food and sex and everything she’d ever wanted, and it filled her until she thought she might explode.
“No!” She fell, crouching herself into a ball, trying to fight. The door had to close, the flames inside her had to recede, had to, because if she stayed like this much longer she might decide never to stop it, she might go ahead and—“No!”
With a final, almighty mental shove, she slammed the door shut, locking it tight, and just before she realized she’d fled the Yezer and gone back to her house something came to her, words that turned her shivers into quakes of terror though she didn’t know what they meant.
Ktana Leyak.
“Megan, are you sitting down?”
It was so much like Roc’s question the night before that she shivered and gripped the phone more tightly. “Yes.”
“Gerald Caroll died.”
Megan bit her lip. She almost said “I know” before she remembered she wasn’t supposed to know. “Gerald?”
“Yes, your client Gerald.” Althea Sprite’s voice, full of compassion, made Megan want to cry. Althea was, at this point, the only one of her practice partners—except Neil Fawkes, and that was simply because Neil didn’t have an opinion about anything—who didn’t turn away from her in disgust when she spoke up at their weekly meetings. Her radio show had not made her popular with them.
Megan knew she was holding on to her membership in the group by a thread and that one of these days it would likely break.
So why not just leave? a voice said in her head. It sounded suspiciously like a certain demon she knew.
Because I don’t want to leave, because I worked hard to build that practice, because it’s something I’m good at…
“Megan, are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m just—how? Who told you?”
“The police called the service; they found an appointment in his diary but it didn’t have your name on it. The service called me and I said I’d call you.”
“Did they say how…it happened?”
“Heart attack, looked like,” Althea said. “They can’t be sure, of course, until the autopsy. The police want to meet you at the office tomorrow morning, to get a look at his file.”
“But they know I can’t just show anybody those records, it’s—”
“They’re bringing his next of kin. So technically you’re not.”
“That’s fine.” Her voice shook a little. Next of kin. Gerald had a sister, she remembered.
“Are you going to be okay? Do you want some company?”
Althea, despite being the closest thing Megan had had to a friend until Tera entered her life, had never offered to come to Megan’s house before.
Then again, Megan had never had a patient die on her before, had she?
“I think I’ll be all right. I just…” She took a deep breath. “I feel like it was my fault.”
“It wasn’t your fault, honey. It was just his time to go. Sometimes it’s fast and sometimes it takes a long time, but when it’s your time to go there’s nothing anyone can do.”
Megan tried to take comfort in this, but somehow the idea that Gerald’s end via demonic possession—whether it had caused a heart attack or had taken his life in some other, more sinister fashion—had been written in the stars just didn’t hold true for her.
“Yeah. Well. Thanks for calling me, Althea. Did the police say when they’d be there tomorrow?” With her luck it would probably be the same ones who’d busted her on Friday.
“They asked if nine was okay, but I told them eight’s better, that way there aren’t any clients in the office.”
“Great.”
“And, honey…I feel just awful springing this on you at a time like this, but…”
“Just say it, Althea. Don’t worry.”
“The partners…that is, some of us…”
“Which means everyone but you, right?”
Althea cleared her throat. “Some of us want to talk to you. About what happened Friday.”
“Do you mean my interrupting a session?” Did Althea’s refusal to answer mean she was included in this group this time? When the partners had suspended her three months before, Althea had been the holdout. She’d been the only one purely on Megan’s side. Was she not any more?
“Well, yes. And the, ah, arrest.”
“Jesus, does everyone in the city know about that?”
“Someone called us.”
“Someone?”
“She didn’t give a name. Just said you were in jail. By the time I got there, though, you’d been let go.”
“Nobody pressed charges,” Megan said. “It was a mistake.” Who the hell had called her office to tell them she’d been arrested? Nobody knew about that. Nobody but the arresting officers, Greyson, Hunter Kyle, and…