by Jenna Black
“I’m sure if they thought they could take me, Morgan and Dominic would try to stop me from lighting you,” Raphael said to Tommy. “Adam would even have been able to do it, but he’s not available to come to your rescue just now. So here’s the deal: you tell me where those children are, who’s holding them, and how many of them there are, and I’ll let Morgan exorcize you.
“Otherwise, I start toasting marshmallows and lead Dominic and Morgan in a rousing rendition of ‘Kumbaya.’ Which would you prefer?”
Tommy didn’t answer immediately. I think he was on the verge of hyperventilating. It seemed he hadn’t been prepared to face threats of death.
Raphael splashed some gasoline out of his flask onto Tommy’s lap. Tommy yelped and tried to get away, but Raphael held up the trigger.
“I wouldn’t if I were you. Who knows? The stun belt might not react well with gasoline. Now tell me where the kids are. If I have to ask you again, I’m going to light you.”
Tommy was trembling, and I didn’t think all the liquid that stained his jeans was gasoline. “If you kill me, you’ll never find those children,” he said through chattering teeth.
“If you’re willing to let me kill you rather than tell me where they are, you’re no good to us anyway.” He splashed out a little more gas, and Tommy started to cry.
“Okay, okay!” he said, and it was practically a scream. “I’ll tell you. Just don’t—”
“Don’t waste time telling me you’re going to tell me. Just tell me.”
“They’re in the basement of Claudia’s house.”
Raphael laughed. “Yeah, right. Try another one.”
“They are!” Tommy insisted, white showing all around his eyes. “We took them to a safe house overnight, but none of us wants to take care of a couple of screaming, sniveling brats. So we went back to the Brewsters’ place with them. That way Claudia can feed them and clean up after them while we keep them … contained.”
Raphael looked skeptical, and Tommy’s voice rose even higher. “I swear, I’m telling the truth! We’ve got a hostage to spare, so if Devon or Claudia try anything stupid, they know we can kill one without losing our leverage. They wouldn’t dream of risking those kids’ lives.”
“Hmm,” Raphael said, still not looking entirely convinced. “Just how long are you planning to keep them there, anyway?”
Tommy swallowed hard. “Three months.”
“What happens in three months?” I asked, though I already knew it wouldn’t be anything pleasant.
Tommy didn’t answer immediately, so Raphael splashed out a little more gas. That loosened Tommy’s tongue.
“After three months of Claudia seeming to accept me as legal, there won’t be so much of a spotlight on me.”
“That’s not what I asked,” I said.
Tommy wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. Maybe that meant he felt some remorse. “We were going to shut them up permanently. There was going to be a fire at the house. Since Claudia and Tommy would have been on seemingly good terms by then, no one would suspect me, especially when we left evidence that Tommy’s God’s Wrath buddies had targeted him.”
If Raphael felt any moral outrage at the plan, he didn’t show it. “How many demons are in that house?”
“There’ll be at least two or three demons in there with them at this time of night. If you try to rescue the girls, you’ll just end up getting them killed.”
Raphael sneered. “That’s not so big a deterrent when you’ve already admitted that you and your friends are going to kill them anyway. But thanks for the advice. You’ve been most helpful.”
It sounded exactly like what the bad guy would say before he carried out the threat he’d promised not to. Apparently Tommy thought so, too, because he closed his eyes and sobbed.
“Don’t you dare!” Dominic said from across the room. He was sitting on the floor with Adam’s head on his lap. He’d have to dump Adam back on the floor if he wanted to get to the fire extinguisher.
Raphael chuckled. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to light him. He might be helpful in getting to those kids.”
Tommy snorted, amusing Raphael even more.
“Oh, you won’t be in him when he does. Morgan will take care of that.” He frowned. “I suppose we might want to get you out of those wet clothes. Morgan uses candles for the exorcism ritual, and I think that might be a bad idea just now.”
Actually, I used vanilla-scented candles, and I didn’t exactly carry them around with me at all times. I wondered what the chances were that Adam and Dom had some lying around, but I figured they were slim. I bit my lip, wondering if I’d be able to get into the necessary trance state without my traditional trigger.
I averted my eyes as Tommy took off his wet clothes. My eyes landed on Adam and Dominic. Adam was beginning to regain control of his limbs, but Dom wasn’t letting him sit up yet. If Adam wasn’t strong enough to fight Dom’s restraint, then he wasn’t ready to sit up.
“Someone should get a trash bag for Tommy’s clothes,” I said to no one in particular. Raphael was busy menacing Tommy, Adam was still too weak, and Dominic wasn’t about to leave his lover’s side, so I slipped out of the room.
I made an educated guess as to where I might find trash bags and headed for the kitchen. It wasn’t until I tried to open the cabinet under the sink that I realized my hands were shaking. I supposed Raphael had saved us a lot of time—and, in a strange sort of way, saved Tommy a lot of suffering—by his methods. That didn’t mean I liked them. I shuddered and tried not to think about what it would have been like in there if Raphael had lit the fire.
I found the trash bags, but then took a minute or two to splash some cold water on my face and pull myself together as best I could. Yeah, I was a real badass, all right.
By the time I got back to the room, Adam had recovered enough to sit up. Dom helped him to his feet, and Adam struggled over to the big black bed, sitting down heavily when he reached it.
“You going to be okay?” Dom asked, and Adam nodded.
Dom took the trash bag from my hand, stuffed Tommy’s clothes into it, then took the bag away. The room still reeked of gas, and I wasn’t sure lighting candles would be a good idea, even if Adam and Dom had the requisite vanilla.
“We discussed logistics while you were gone,” Raphael said. “Dom’s going to get the candles.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve got vanilla,” I muttered at Adam.
He looked a little woozy from the Taser shot still, but he managed to smile at me. “Actually, we do. Candles can be a lot of fun, and vanilla’s an erotic scent.”
I must have looked as clueless as I was, because, of course, Adam had to elaborate.
“Think of it as a kind of erotic hot wax treatment,” he said, then waggled his brows at me.
Predictably, my face went hot. I admit I’m pretty naive where the practices of S&M are concerned, and I’d have been perfectly happy to stay that way. Dominic returned with the candles, saving me from having to think of the perfect reply.
“Move away from the wall,” Raphael ordered Tommy.
Tommy didn’t seem to have any fight left in him. He just did as he was told. Without me having to ask, Dom started laying out the candles in a circle around Tommy. The circle isn’t really necessary for the ritual, but I knew this was going to be a particularly tough exorcism, and I was happy to fall back on tradition.
I wasn’t overly concerned that I wouldn’t be able to exorcize Tommy’s demon. It was what would happen next that had my stomach tied into knots.
Would I really give Tommy over to another demon? In a rare flash of insight, I realized part of the reason I’d been so desperate to exorcize Tommy’s demon was my inability to exorcize my own. If I couldn’t be free of the demons, at least I could free one other lost soul.
Take one problem at a time, I advised myself, but I’m lousy at taking advice, even my own.
Considering what scum the demon who’d taken Tommy was, in all probability, h
e’d come out the other end of this exorcism brain damaged, maybe even brain-dead. Would it really be so wrong of me to let Raphael or Saul take him then? If he was going to be a prisoner in his own body anyway…
The scent of vanilla drew me out of my tumultuous thoughts, and I saw that Dom had started lighting the candles. Needing to do something, not just stand still and think, I took over the candle-lighting duties. Though I dragged my feet a bit, all too soon the last candle was lit.
Everything was ready for me. The only question was, was I ready myself?
Hell, no. But that didn’t stop me.
Trying to still the clamoring of my mind, I sat cross-legged facing Tommy. He looked much younger now than he had before, with his red-rimmed eyes and pale skin. He’d drawn his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, whether because he was cold or because he was trying to cover his nakedness, I didn’t know. I felt a tug of pity, then shook my head.
This wasn’t Tommy Brewster. This was a demon who’d taken over Tommy’s body. And I wasn’t going to hurt the demon—more’s the pity—I was just going to send him back to the Demon Realm.
Taking a deep breath and hoping my nerves would steady, I let my eyes slide closed. The warm scent of vanilla enfolded me, and I felt my muscles begin to relax—a conditioned response for which I was very thankful at the moment. It took me longer than usual to get myself into the trance and open my otherworldly eyes, but I managed it.
In my otherworldly vision, I can see only the living. They show up as patches of bright, primary colors in a never-ending sea of black. Demons glow bloodred, and I had a moment of primal terror as I cast my vision around the room and saw the three red auras that hovered so close to me. Only Dominic showed up in the human blue that I thought of as “normal.”
I shook off that moment of fear and concentrated on the aura I knew was Tommy’s. I gathered my will, my power, whatever it was that gave me the ability to exorcize demons, waiting until I’d drawn in every ounce I could find.
Every exorcist has an image he or she uses to help visualize casting out a demon. Mine is wind. I gathered that will into my body, and then all at once released it in a great gust of gale-force wind. The wind of my will slammed into Tommy’s demon-red aura.
For a moment, the aura clung stubbornly. Then the pressure of the wind became too much. The red aura shattered and was swept away, leaving only a very human shade of blue behind. Letting out a breath of relief, I opened my eyes.
But then I looked into a pair of hate-filled, obviously sentient eyes that bored into mine.
Tommy Brewster wasn’t brain-dead, or even brain damaged. And boy, was he ever pissed.
To show his great gratitude to me for freeing him from the demon, Tommy launched himself across the short distance that separated us. I’d been expecting a vegetable, not a homicidal maniac, so I was completely unprepared for the attack. Before I’d even managed a squeak of alarm, he’d knocked me flat on my back and wrapped both his hands around my throat. He started to squeeze, his eyes wide and hysterical-looking as he shouted Bible verses. It didn’t take a Biblical scholar to notice he was mixing and matching verses at random, but then most of his concentration was focused on the important task of choking me to death. I was starting to see spots by the time he suddenly screamed and went limp on top of me.
Holding the stun belt trigger, Raphael came to stand over the two of us, looking disgustingly amused. “You make a lovely couple,” he said, and I remembered that Tommy was naked. I shoved him away from me, and though he was conscious and tried to keep his hands on my throat, he was too stunned to manage it.
I lay there on my back and breathed. I was going to have yet another set of bruises if I didn’t give Lugh a chance to fix things. Tommy was shouting so loud I could hardly hear myself think. Something about hell-fire and brimstone.
If he’d kept that up, I might have been happy to give him to the demons just to shut him up. As it was, the invective gave way to sobs, and pity reared its ugly head. I didn’t know what Tommy had just gone through in the clutches of that demon, but clearly it hadn’t been a good time. It seemed like something of a miracle that his mind had survived. Perhaps his childhood trauma had left him stronger and more resilient than your average human. Or perhaps his fanaticism had served as some kind of shield. After all, there’s a reason we call people like him “closed-minded.”
“I am unclean,” I heard him hiccup among the sobs.
At first I thought he was talking about the gas and piss on him. Then I remembered what I knew about the World According to God’s Wrath. They hated human hosts as much as they hated the demons, because they believed that only a corrupt soul would allow a demon in. It even made a little sense, when you’re talking about legal demons. After all, they’re “legal” because they’ve been invited. But God’s Wrath hated even those who were taken by force, and despite his convictions, Tommy would never be able to return to them.
Fingering my aching throat, I sat up and stared at Claudia Brewster’s son. He’d faced more hardship in his twenty-one years than most people faced in a lifetime. Could I really condemn him to a lifetime of possession now that he was free? I wished he’d attack me again, or at least start raving like the lunatic that he was so I could stop feeling so goddamn sorry for him. But he didn’t. He just lay there on the floor in the fetal position and wept.
Raphael, still holding the trigger, squatted down to meet my eyes. I found I couldn’t look away.
“Let me take him,” he said softly, and only the dilation of his pupils gave away how eager he was. “He’s the only person in this room who could walk right into Claudia Brewster’s house without causing a raised eyebrow. He can get us in there, and we can get those children out.”
“You’re not doing this because you want to save those children,” I said. I didn’t know what Raphael really wanted, but he didn’t do much of anything out of the goodness of his heart.
“He’d be just as able to get us in there if he was hosting Saul,” Adam said.
I hadn’t heard him approach, but he was standing practically on top of me. I didn’t think this was a decision I should make sitting down, so I forced myself to my feet. Both Adam and Raphael tried to help steady me, but I snarled at them until they let go.
“Take a good look at him,” Raphael said, and we all did. He hadn’t let up on the sobbing yet. “Do you really think you can get him to speak the incantation to summon Saul?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You got me to summon Lugh!”
“Because I drugged you and knew you well enough to get through your defenses. Tommy wouldn’t be that easy, and you know it. How much time do you think those kids have? Enough time for me to break Tommy and to make him speak the incantation? I doubt the demons will keep them alive long when Tommy goes AWOL on them.”
“Shut up! You’ve made your point.”
“Besides, I bet we can find a good host for Saul.” He looked up at Adam. “Surely you can find someone at that club you’re so fond of. Someone who’s too homely to be a host, but would really like to be. And who shares Saul’s unique tastes.”
Adam didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was thinking it over. It seemed Tommy would not be Saul’s host. But it remained to be seen whether he would be Raphael’s. Raphael didn’t need an invitation to take him over. Once on the Mortal Plain, a demon can transfer from one host to another through physical contact. All it would take was the slightest brush of skin against skin, and Tommy would be gone once more. And my brother would be back.
“You have to decide, Morgan,” Raphael urged. “And the sooner you decide, the sooner we can get those kids to safety.”
I hated this. I was going to hate myself, whatever I decided. “Is this what Andy wants?” I asked, meeting Raphael’s gaze and wishing his face were as open as mine.
Raphael blinked as if startled by the question. Then he shrugged. “He would never admit to wanting it. He’s far too noble for that.” In Raphael’s
mouth, “noble” sounded like a dirty word. “But down beneath his civilized exterior, he wants it quite desperately. ”
I supposed that had been rather a silly question. Whatever Andy might choose if he actually had a choice, it was inevitable that deep down inside he would wish for freedom. So much for my attempt to put this decision on Andy’s shoulders.
I took another look at Tommy, tried to imagine what his life would be like if we just let him go home now. Then I shook my head at myself. It didn’t matter if his life would suck or not. I could justify this till the apocalypse, and it wouldn’t change the reality. When faced with the choice between my brother and a stranger, I was going to choose my brother—even if I thought my choice was morally wrong. I reminded myself to apologize to Brian for not fully understanding his decision to help Lugh kill my father.
I couldn’t force any words out of my mouth, but I managed a nod. My eyes burned, and I was gritting my teeth so hard my jaw ached.
Obviously, Tommy had been too sunk in misery to listen to our conversation or realize that it had to do with him. When Raphael came to squat beside him, he didn’t move.
“Wait!” I cried as Raphael reached out to touch him. I could see him fight the urge to ignore me, and was actually rather impressed when he dropped his hand away from Tommy’s bare flesh.
“I just want to remind you—if Andy comes out a vegetable, I’m going to skin you alive, and damn the consequences.”
Raphael’s shoulders drooped with relief. He must have thought I’d changed my mind. “Have no fear,” he said, his hand moving toward Tommy once more. “He’s fine. As he’ll tell you in a moment.”
My conscience screamed as Raphael’s hand brushed over Tommy’s shoulder. Instantly, Tommy stopped his sobbing. Andy looked up at me, and it was my brother whose eyes met mine, not Raphael. I guess I was relieved Raphael had been telling the truth for once, but I felt too guilty to rejoice. Andy, not looking any happier than I felt, lowered his gaze to the floor.
Raphael unfolded Tommy’s body and rolled to a sitting position. He didn’t seem to care that his new body was naked, but Dom said, “I’ll go see if I can find you something to wear.”
