“What tore him apart?” I asked.
“The patient, but a person couldn’t do that.” She finally looked away from the doorway to stare up at me. “He can’t be human.” Her voice lowered and I watched her try to get control of her expression, so she didn’t look shocked. She did her best, but her eyes held all the horror she was trying to keep off her face. I gave her points for trying and changed my gun to a two-handed grip as I moved toward the room and whatever was inside.
“Mark Cookson is a nineteen-year-old college student, you can’t just shoot him,” Paulson said.
I stared at him. “What name did you say?” I wanted to make sure I’d heard correctly before I got too excited.
“Mark Cookson, do you know him?”
“Not personally, but he’s the person of interest in a rape homicide last night.”
“You just want me to let you shoot him,” Paulson said.
“I’m telling you the truth, and I can’t handcuff or Taser something that can tear a grown man to pieces. I’m out of options.”
“He’s not human,” Prescott said.
“He’s possessed; if we can get the demon out of him, he’ll get a chance to be an ordinary college sophomore. He’ll go back to his family and have a life unless we shoot his body full of holes that I can’t fix,” Paulson said.
“College sophomore is young for being a sorcerer,” I said.
“He’s not a sorcerer,” Paulson said.
I looked at him but kept the door in my peripheral, because I didn’t want any more surprises. “You don’t conjure a demon real enough to tear people apart unless you’re very well versed in the occult arts.”
“He didn’t conjure it, he is it,” Prescott said.
“You mean he shape-changed into another form?” I asked.
She shook her head, her fear fading because she was having to think and explain things to the cop who was asking stupid questions. “No, the demon was inside him. It crawled out of him like he was a Halloween costume.”
I was suddenly more hopeful.
“That is not funny, Detective.”
“Absolutely not,” I said.
“Then why are you smiling?” she asked.
“Sorry, but demons don’t crawl out of people like that except in movies. Physical possession can manipulate the human body but not to that degree.”
“I saw it!”
A deep bass voice called out, “Come see for yourself, Detective.”
I ignored the voice and turned back to the nurse in front of me. “What does the room look like? What does the body look like?”
She looked at me like I was crazy. “Blood, blood everywhere.” She said it angry; her eyes started getting that haunted look again, but that couldn’t be helped.
“On the floor?” I asked.
“Of course, on the floor!” She was just angry now because anger feels so much better than fear.
“Then why isn’t there any blood on your shoes? Why aren’t you leaving bloody footprints down the hallway?” I asked.
“She did not step far enough into the room to be covered in the blood of my victims,” the deep voice said.
“Why would she step into the room at all if she saw her coworker dead?” I asked, and by talking directly to that voice I opened myself up to it, but it was a calculated risk. If it knew intimate details of my life just from talking to me, then we were in serious trouble, but I was hoping it wouldn’t know me, betting it wouldn’t.
“She’s just a stupid bitch.”
I almost said out loud, Was Megan Borowski a stupid bitch, too? Is that why you killed her? But it wouldn’t have helped anything. In fact, it would have just given the demon something to play with, and there was a chance that Mark Cookson had committed rape and murder under demonic influence. Depending on how the demon got hold of him, he might be innocent. We’d have to see.
“I couldn’t see Ray from the door,” Prescott said.
Paulson asked, “Was the body in the bathroom?”
“No, no, it was beside the bed like he’d gone in to check vitals and it killed him.’
“Prescott, you can see the bed from the door. You wouldn’t have had to walk inside to see it,” Paulson said.
She stared up at the doctor and then at me, frowning. “I don’t understand.”
“Come in and play with me, Detective.”
Why was it still in the room? Why hadn’t it attacked us by now? “The nurse activated the wards in the room before she ran,” I said.
“It’s protocol to hit the panel on the way out,” Prescott said beside me.
“Nerves of steel, Nurse Prescott.”
“I couldn’t let it hurt anyone else.” She said it as if anyone would have taken the seconds to touch the panel and activate it before running for their life.
“You come out and let me send you back where you came from,” I said.
“You have no idea where I come from, Detective.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Why, I’m Mark Cookson, they’ve named me several times.”
“What’s your real name?” I asked.
“Now, Detective, that would be far too easy.”
“Was Mark Cookson ever in this hospital?” I asked.
A deep, rumbling bass chuckle spilled out of the doorway; whatever was making that noise sounded bigger than a human being. “Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t.”
“What have you done to my patient?” Paulson asked.
“Your patient? Don’t you give a damn about what I did to your nurse?”
“Prescott says he’s already dead; I trust her judgment, so I’ll move on to someone I can save.”
“Very pragmatic of you, Dr. Paulson.”
Had we said Paulson’s name out loud? Up to that moment the demon had only repeated what he’d heard us say in the hallway, but we hadn’t said the doctor’s last name, so how had he known it? An Infernal that repeated things was small fry; one that knew things it had no way of knowing was a bigger fish and, Heaven knew, more dangerous.
“You can’t get out of the wards, which means you didn’t use a human as a costume. If you had that kind of power, no insta-ward would contain you.”
“I don’t have to come to you, Detective; you’ll come to me to save the lives of the civilians in here with me.”
“All I have to do is wait for backup; you killed your only hostage.”
“Did I?” There was a scream, and I knew it was a man’s scream.
“They are both dead,” Prescott said. “I saw them dead.”
“Demons can mess with your mind and make you see things that aren’t there,” I said.
What little blood had come back to her face drained away. “Oh God, did I leave Ray and that boy in there with a . . . demon?”
“You thought they were dead,” I said.
The scream sounded again, higher pitched this time.
“God help me, I thought they were dead.” She was hugging herself tight enough that her skin was mottling with the pressure.
“It could be the demon imitating the voice,” I said.
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”
“No, it’s the truth. He fooled you into thinking he was Mark Cookson; using the voice is nothing compared to taking over the whole body.”
She gave a small nod, but her arms loosened their desperate hug, so that she could let go of herself and stand straight instead of hunched over her guilt.
I started to move toward the room with my gun up. Paulson said, “Don’t shoot my patient.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, but I didn’t change my shooting stance as I eased toward the room.
“The demon turned Mark Cookson into a weapon. He had no more control over what he did than the gun in your hand.”
That made me pause for a second, because there was a chance that it had been the demon that turned Mark Cookson into a rapist and murderer. Had he been a terrified passenger in his own body watching t
he demon do horrible things? Except I knew that demons couldn’t force us to do things that weren’t already inside us. They could manipulate us into acting on them, but it had to be a thought, maybe a dark fantasy we never intended to act on, but it had to be inside us somewhere for the demon to find. They didn’t create horrors without our help. I kept moving to get a better look inside the room. My gun stayed in both hands, tucked up tight to the front of my body with me able to sight down it to shoot if I needed it. It would have been great to save the teenager, but just because he was young didn’t mean he was innocent. I’d had more teenagers shoot at me than adults, and I still had the scars from the eleven-year-old who stabbed me with a kitchen knife, because I thought he was too young to be dangerous. I’d lived through that mistake and I never made it again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I didn’t have to move far to see Mark Cookson’s body standing just inside the doorway. I say body because the look on his face was all demon. The evil rolled off him in a wave that made my chest tight, but the body was still tall and thin with too much leg showing around the white hospital gown. If I didn’t look at the face, then his body seemed younger than I’d been told, like early teens when boys get their big growth spurt but before the rest of them catches up and fills out. I’d have thought he was in high school, not college, and then I looked at his face again. Whatever was looking out of his face was ancient and evil and happy about it.
“You still in there, Mark?”
“Mark’s not home right now, but leave a message and I’ll be sure and tell him before I take him to Hell with me.” The voice sounded like it needed a chest three times as wide as Mark’s narrow one; it was weird that the voice coming out of the body was more jarring to me than the rest of the possession. You never know what will bother you most until it does.
“The human host doesn’t go back to Hell when we cast you out of him. You know it doesn’t work like that, but Mark doesn’t. You’re talking so he won’t fight to be free of you. You’ve told him that if you go, he goes,” I said, and my voice was calm.
“Stupid cop, you don’t know shit about Hell.”
“I’m a detective with the Metaphysical Coordination Unit, I know a lot about Hell and Heaven. I know you can hear me, Mark; fight free, we can save you.”
“Liar!” the demon roared, and then he stumbled. For a second the expression on the face matched the rest of the body. Mark Cookson was in there and he’d been able to get to the surface for a split second. Paulson was right, Mark was an unwilling weapon. I’d worry how a nineteen-year-old college student got messed up with a demon later, after we’d saved his life. I holstered my gun, because if I wasn’t willing to shoot the body it wasn’t the right tool for this fight.
Charleston and security would be up here as soon as they walked up twenty flights of stairs. All I had to do was stall until backup got there. It was no coincidence that the elevators had stopped. The demons had started getting better at messing with modern technology lately. Proving that you could teach old demons new tricks.
“You put up your gun, does that mean you don’t want to shoot me?” the demon asked in that voice that seemed too deep for Mark Cookson’s body.
“I’d love to shoot you, just give up the boy’s body and let me see the real you.”
“The sight of me unfettered to flesh would drive you mad. I would enjoy watching you gibber and moan while your reality cracked and bled out your ears.”
I glanced around to make a hundred percent certain that no one else had a sight line to the room, just in case the demon changed form. I didn’t want another accident like Gimble because a demon in true form is madness, death, or in rare cases possession.
“I think you’re just some poor errand boy from the nether regions that saw a chance to get inside a little boy. Is that it, you like children?”
“He’s nineteen, old enough to make his own choices and to choose the way he will fall from grace.”
It was funny how even demons didn’t like being accused of being pedophiles, as if that were the lowest rung even in Hell. “But you didn’t deny the errand boy part; you’re hiding behind the boy because your true form isn’t impressive enough to scare anyone.”
The demon reached out to touch the wards. In the movies they sparkle, or fizz, or something even more dramatic, but the only thing I saw was the hand pressing against the air. He pressed against it as if there was something much harder and more solid than the clear air of the doorway. It wasn’t dramatic, it was just solid workmanship. I made a mental note to ask them who did their insta-wards, because you didn’t find magical craftsmanship that solid often.
“You can’t get out,” I said.
“I had to try,” the demon said, shrugging, and the gesture matched the body. I knew that angels could become more humanlike the more they dealt with us, but I’d never thought the same might be true of demons. Angels could begin to adapt to fleshly ways just by being near us; how much more impact would it be if the spiritual entity were actually inside us? Was that why it was rare for a demon to stay in the same host body by its lonesome? If it was a possession of long standing you had hosts of Infernal spirits inside them. One demon at a time was usually quick in and out like an Airbnb; regular possessions were like renting to own except it was almost never just one demon. Long-term leases were group events for demons, because they wanted to trash the “house,” not actually live in it. That one gesture meant either that the demon had been in the body longer than Mark’s family or college noticed, or that this demon had been on possession duty before with other hosts. It wasn’t that he was picking up Mark Cookson’s gestures, but just human gestures in general.
“How long have you been inside Mark?”
“A direct question, really, Detective? As if.” The look on his face was eloquent and a strange mix of the demon’s “personality” and Mark’s, just as the sentence seemed a mix of them both. Was it the boy fighting back or another sign that the demon was contaminated with humanity? Though saying the college student was contaminating the demon sounded backward and made me wonder what habits Mark had already picked up from his Infernal infestation. But I’d worry about that later, after I figured out a way to stop the demon from hurting anyone else without having to kill Mark.
Paulson’s voice answered from a little farther down the hallway. “His parents found him passed out on his old bedroom floor at home. He’d showered but left bloodstained clothes. That’s when they called the ambulance. Does that help you get a timeline?”
“He’s been on academic probation for a semester, so the demon has been in him for about three months, maybe a little longer.”
“Guesses are free,” the demon called out in a singsong voice.
I thought things were going well; all I had to do was keep the demon interested in talking to me until Charleston and the rest of my backup finished climbing up the twenty flights of stairs. The lieutenant was in good shape, he’d be here soon. The demon was contained. I got my phone out and hit the button for Charleston to let him know what he was about to walk into, but I heard a groan, and it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Paulson.
The demon turned its head and looked to the side of the room I couldn’t see. “Oh, you’re not dead yet, my bad,” the demon said, and walked out of my line of sight toward what had to be Gonzales.
I called out, “Alive he’s a hostage, and you have something to negotiate with; dead he’s just collateral damage.”
The demon’s deep voice sounded pleasant, happy, as it said, “The wound closed around the needle, let’s fix that.”
I yelled, “Don’t touch him!” As if the demon would give a damn. Charleston was on my phone yelling, “Havoc, Havoc, what’s happening?”
“Demon possession with violence, one hostage. Mark Cookson is the possessed.” Then I had to hang up, because I might need my hands free for my gun, or wrestling demons, whichever came first.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mark Cookson’s fragile-looking
body dragged the much larger Gonzales into sight of the door. The bigger man was holding his hand against the side of his neck, trying to stop fresh blood that was welling crimson around his fingers. He was a nurse, he knew how to hold pressure on a wound; that meant that the wound wasn’t going to be stopped by just the pressure of a hand. We had minutes to get him more medical help or he was going to bleed to death in front of us. Heaven help us.
A look of hatred snarled across Cookson’s face. “I guess I don’t need muscles after all.” He lifted the nurse upward by a handful of his uniform. It made the blood pump faster and cut off his air. The only thing that saved him was the cloth tearing so that Gonzales fell back to the floor, gasping for air and choking, but this time there was blood on his lips. What had the demon done to him to make him cough blood?
Paulson said, “Let me save him.”
I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or the demon. The demon replied first. “Why should I let you save him?”
“He has a family.”
Mark’s face gave him a look of almost pity. “You really don’t understand what I am, do you, Doctor?”
“You can’t appeal to his better nature, Doctor; demons don’t have one,” I said.
“Mark, if you’re in there, Gonzales’s son is only eight. Do you want him to grow up without a father?” The comment showed he’d been paying attention while I talked to the kid. He’d noticed what I’d noticed—that Mark seemed to still be in there.
“We don’t care,” the demon said.
Then the body kept talking. “Of course, he has a family, he’s tall and good looking, exotic. I bet he dated around and fucked everything in sight before he married someone beautiful.” The voice was still deeper than the thin body, but the tone and whine of the words didn’t sound the same. Mark was in there all right, but he wasn’t a sympathetic ear. Heaven help Gonzales.
“Let me treat his wound and then you’ll have two hostages,” Paulson said.
“Sure,” demonic Mark said.
“The more the merrier, Doctor, just cross the wards and come on in,” the demon said. The fact that they were using the same body to talk didn’t seem to faze the doctor any more than it did me. Apparently, we’d both seen similar shows before.
A Terrible Fall of Angels Page 5
