Suddenly, Vespa was normal again. His eyes were still fucked up, but they were normal green. He lowered his head. Ah, ha. He was aware, somewhat at least. That will be helpful to know during the exorcism.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I sat down across from him at the table. “Listen, we’ve been in this long enough that we know when the demon is speaking and when it’s you.”
Might as well make him feel better. It wouldn’t do either of us any good if I flat out accused him of everything. This way, he still thought of me as a friend, thus someone he could trust.
He seemed to relax a little. “I just want this thing out of me so I can go back to normal.”
What was normal for him? Dealing with a fucked up family that stressed him out until he invoked a demon? Jesus Christ.
“What about your family?” Tabby asked.
He jumped up from the table. “You know what? Fuck my family. It’s their fault for making me think I had to be something I’m not.”
I didn’t comment. Him being an emotional wreck, sure let that blame fall to his family. Inviting a demon to possess him? Well, that was all him. They didn’t stand over him and force him to learn the rituals for God’s sake. He needed to take responsibility.
“What are you going to do if we get the demon out?” Tabby asked.
Vespa turned and looked at her. “I’m selling this house, leaving this place, and finding a different life.”
That was the most intelligent thing I’d heard him say. I swear, if he’d started talking about using the exorcism as a get rich scheme or something, I might have crushed his head. Just a little.
“Okay, Tabby,” I said. “Let’s go see if we can get a hold of Doc. I want to see if he has any information for us.” That was just what I needed—let him know just enough that he wouldn’t expect what I was doing. Or rather, think he had an idea of what I was doing without him knowing the full story.
Tabby nodded.
“Nick, why don’t you go take a nap?” I suggested. “You’re under a lot of stress, and it might do you some good.” I meant it. He had dark circles under his eyes, and he seemed paler than usual.
“Okay. Yeah. I think I will,” he said.
###
I led Tabby back upstairs. I didn’t want there to be any more of a connection to Lucy than there already was. If I could have, I would have snuck outside and checked on her, but there was no way. I was probably playing with fire enough by trying to get a hold of Doc. If there had been something wrong with him, Lucy would have told me in the car when we went to breakfast. Now, though, she had no way to get a hold of me. I needed to remedy this if there was going to be a next time.
When we got to the bedroom, I closed the door behind Tabby.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“I want to know what’s going on with that statement Lucy made.” I’d been stupid, and I was freely admitting it.
“Why not ask Lucy?”
“Because I don’t want him near her. If I go outside, you know he’ll be right on my tail, asking what I was doing.” I scratched my arm and sat down on the bed.
“He knows she’s there. It wouldn’t surprise me if he goes outside and watches her.” Tabby said.
I blinked. Shit. “She never said anything about that.”
“She didn’t have to,” Tabby said. “I can tell you haven’t been around little kids.”
“Why?” I was getting so confused.
“Because kids don’t always come right out and tell you what is wrong. They want to be saved, but they don’t know how to ask for help. Plus, they seem a little nervous when they shouldn’t be. Things like that.”
Lucy had said something, I’d just been too stupid to pick up on it. She said she wanted to go home. Fuck. “He’s messing with Lucy.” I was getting pissed.
“Maybe. I don’t know. I just felt weird.”
I took a deep breath. I needed to stay on course. “Okay. More reason to ask for Doc.”
Tabby looked at me. “What are you planning?”
I smiled. “I don’t know yet.”
###
“Doc? If you can hear me, I really need to talk to you,” I said. I didn’t yell or anything, that would have been stupid. If he could hear me, he’d show up eventually.
Tabby sat down on the bed beside me while I stared at the ceiling.
Yeah, it was stupid, but hell, I always expected him to come from there. Maybe because in my mind, with as much of a badass as he was, he still belonged in Heaven. Spirits floated down from Heaven, didn’t they? The priest part of me was about to give me a lesson in true theology, but whatever.
After a few minutes, I looked at Tabby. “Guess he isn’t coming.”
“Maybe he’s busy,” she said.
“I hope that’s all it is. I don’t think I can take much more excitement.” And I didn’t want to think about him being trapped somewhere because Vespa’s demon didn’t want to be spied on. If that happened, it would be my fault.
Tabby got up and put her hand on my shoulder. “I know.”
###
I figured Doc would get back to me when he could—if he could anyway. There was no sense in me jumping to conclusions when I hadn’t heard anything yet. I never heard anything about him not being able to enter Vespa’s house, so I doubted that was it. Still, it left me uneasy. I’d gotten used to him being around.
Of course, there was plenty about this to make me uneasy. It wasn’t the scary creature shit there’d been at Blackmoor. This was so much more subtle, but that was almost worse somehow. You didn’t know what was going to hit you next when it crept up behind you, whereas at Blackmoor, the creepy shit happened when you were awake. Well, minus the soul suckers that is.
Tabby and I headed back downstairs. I didn’t make any noise. I’d told Vespa to get some rest, and I was going to try to make sure he got it. His room was on the first floor somewhere in a hallway off the kitchen. I hadn’t been invited, so I hadn’t bothered looking specifically for it. Tabby and I sat down in the living room.
“Is it me, or is everything strained here?” Tabby asked.
“Worse than dealing with a failing marriage you mean?” I remembered how intense it had been at times when Tor and Will’s marriage was falling apart in front of our eyes. I thought that was bad. Somehow, Vespa’s weirdness was worse.
“Yeah. Here, I’m half afraid to talk,” she said.
“It could be the trust thing. Plus, this is the first time we’ve dealt with an active and productive possessed person. This demon wants to live on earth again. It doesn’t just want Vespa’s soul.” This was a different type of demon. He wasn’t any less evil because of it either.
“How can you tell?” she asked.
“It hasn’t taken full possession of Nick. He can still be himself. Lucy, however, was always demonic until her soul was separated from the demon.” If all the demon had wanted was Vespa’s soul, it would have killed him as soon as he’d been invited in.
“Good point. So, will the exorcism be easier since Vespa isn’t totally possessed?”
“A sort of logic would say yes, but I have a bad feeling that won’t be the case.” I needed a mentor to explain all of this stuff to me. Or a book. Or something. Flying by the seat of my pants was getting tiring.
“So, the contract,” she said.
“Yeah. I just don’t know anymore. We should be trying to figure it out, but I’m just lost.” And then there had been what Lucy said. Maybe she was right and it really didn’t matter, but I wanted to know why.
Tabby stayed quiet. I didn’t want to mention Lucy without being within our warded room. That kid was counting on me to protect her, and I was sure as hell trying. Nick probably knew everything anyway, but I felt a lot better being inside the ward before I did anything Lucy-related.
“I always thought that making a pact with Satan required a mark of some sort,” I said. They had all those old movies like The Mark of Satan and stuff like that. It had
to come from somewhere.
“Like yours?” Tabby asked.
I looked down at my wrist. In a way, I almost expected the mark itself to have some sort of special powers or something, but so far, there’d been nothing. It was virtually a tattoo. Only I knew it wasn’t normal, but you couldn’t tell by looking at it. “Yeah, I guess so. Do you think we should ask him if he has a mark?”
Tabby shrugged. “It couldn’t hurt. Maybe it would give us something to research. And maybe, if we’re lucky, it could give us an idea of the contract.”
“Have I told you how much I love you lately?” She really was amazing.
She laughed.
“Seriously, I don’t think I’d make it through all of this if you weren’t so smart.” In fact, I knew I wouldn’t. I wasn’t smart enough. I needed her brain.
“You don’t give yourself enough credit, you know?”
I shrugged. I didn’t care what she said. She was the one who had her head on straight most of the time. I just seemed to do okay when all hell broke loose. Luckily, that happened more often than I liked to think about.
“How are we going to handle this?” Tabby asked.
I shrugged. “Just ask him, I guess.”
I didn’t have any better ideas. If I did, I would have done them by now.
She rubbed her eyes. “Oh, yeah, like that’s gonna work. I can just see this. ‘Hey, Nick. Do you have any strange markings or birthmarks?’”
“Okay, smarty-pants. How would you take care of it?”
“Simple. We figure out what to do about dinner, and I’ll ask you how you like my new tattoo.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I knew firsthand Tabby didn’t have a new tattoo. She had the same one she’s always had—a phoenix on her left shoulder blade. Now, whether Vespa’s demon would tell him about the lie was another thing, but hell it sounded better than what I could have done.
“Works for me,” I said.
“Good.”
###
Vespa finally got up about four. Tabby and I had killed time trading the iPad back and forth, reading and playing games. I’d run upstairs and got it out of my backpack when it seemed like Nick was going to stay asleep for awhile. I never thought I’d need one, but it was coming in handy.
“Were you able to find everything okay?” Nick asked. He was rubbing his eyes with his hand.
“Yeah. No problems,” I said.
“What did you want to do for dinner? I could cook something,” Tabby said.
I liked the sound of that. I’d watched her grab the ingredients she needed to make her chili at the grocery store. It had been too long since I had it.
“No!” Vespa shook himself. “No, I... I think going out is better.”
“All right,” I said. Okay. I made a point to remember this. Mr. Demon does not like fire. Interesting. I looked over at Tabby. She seemed a little shell shocked. She looked at me. This was so fucked up.
“Oh, sorry,” Nick said. “I just… I don’t like to cook things in the house.”
Tabby nodded. “Okay, then. Guess we’ll go out again.”
I could hear an almost imperceptible snark in her voice. Honestly, I knew what she meant. I was tired of eating out too. Still though, we could talk about the mark easily in a restaurant. That part wasn’t a big deal. Vespa being a freaked-out idiot, well, it was becoming a bigger deal as the days wore on.
“Any Italian places around?” I asked. Yeah, we’d been to one earlier in the week, but at least it had a different taste to it. Even if it sucked, the extra garlic couldn’t hurt, especially when we didn’t know when we were going to start the exorcism.
Vespa nodded and walked back to his bedroom.
“That was fucking weird,” Tabby said.
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
“So, I mean, even to do his rituals for conjuring the demon, he had to use fire.”
I blinked. Okay, she would know. His kitchen phobia really made no sense now. “Really?”
She nodded. “Yeah. You have to call on the keepers, the guardians of the watchtowers. Earth, air, fire, and water. Just for what he does, it’s backwards.”
I took a deep breath. “So, the stove or the cooking thing has to be something else.”
“Maybe he’s afraid of being poisoned?”
“Maybe.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PREDICTABLE
Vespa came out of his room dressed in a suit. I almost fell off the sofa. What the hell was a kid like him doing running around in suits all the time?
“I’m guessing this is a fancy place?” I asked.
Nick smiled. “No, not really. I just think it’s proper to dress for dinner.” He looked at Tabby.
The guy had almost gone cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Damn.
“Give us a minute, and we’ll get cleaned up,” Tabby said.
I grabbed the iPad off the sofa cushion and followed Tabby upstairs. This was getting ridiculous. Once we were in the room, I closed the door.
“We’re going to have to do something about that,” I said.
“About what?”
“The way he looks at you. The way he’s acting.”
“You think I like it?” she asked.
“No. I know I wouldn’t. He just needs to lay off.”
She sighed. “Well, right now, it’s harmless. Why don’t we pick our battles?”
“Good point.” Yeah, better not get in yet another argument. Lucy’s demon had fed off that stuff. It would stand to reason that Vespa’s would too.
###
After we finished getting dressed, Tabby and I went back downstairs. I had on a dress shirt and some khaki pants, about as dressed up as I got, and Tabby had on a flowery summer-type dress. It was black with blue flowers on it. I liked it on her. It made the red in her hair stand out.
Nick was leaning calmly against the sofa, waiting for us.
I’ll admit, I felt weird getting dressed up when all we were doing was going out to dinner, and it wasn’t even the type of place you get dressed up for. But it would have looked weird to dress normally and have Vespa all dressed up. I needed to teach him the merits of being a slob.
Besides, it was better to play the game. It was hard to tell what could or couldn’t set the demon off. And the calmer we made things, the better off we’d be.
Still, the stupid part of me wanted to belt out “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!” just to see what Vespa would do.
“You look nice,” Vespa told Tabby.
“What about me?” I asked. Might as well get under his skin a little.
Nick blinked. “Uh, you look nice too.”
I laughed. “Just goofing around. Tabby does look great.”
She blushed and gave me a look. I could tell I was going to hear about it later.
“So, shall we?” Vespa asked.
We followed him out the door. I was still glad I was taking our rental car. I didn’t trust riding with a demon. They were known to cause car accidents if they wanted to kill you. I’d read that in an old book by Malachi Martin.
Some of the stuff in the book sounded fake, but some of it had a ring of truth to it too. The car stuff felt true to me. I didn’t care that he’d been eventually kicked out of the Church for indiscretions. He had married the girl he’d been… having relations with. Ironically, the same thing I had been accused of that had gotten me defrocked. Conspiracy maybe?
As soon as Tabby and I got the doors closed on the car, Lucy started. “I don’t like being in this car.”
Uh oh. Lucy being that blatant meant that things had gotten worse. “I know. It has to be boring,” I said. I hoped that was all it was. Please, God. I pulled out of the driveway and followed Vespa down the road.
“I’m not bored. I don’t like seeing the faces,” she said.
I almost slammed on the breaks. What the fuck? This was the first time I heard anything about this.
“What faces?” I asked.
“When you guys go inside, after a
while, these faces look in the windows.”
I didn’t like hearing that at all. The kid had had enough of spooky shit in her life. She didn’t need any more. And here I was, forcing her to stay in a car by herself without any way to get a hold of us so we could take her away from the monsters. I was a great guy all right.
“What do the faces look like?” Tabby asked.
“Asmodeus,” Lucy said.
I almost lost control of my senses. No fucking way was I going to fight him again for Lucy’s soul. I didn’t give a shit. He could have Vespa for all I cared, but I knew that wasn’t the case. He wasn’t the one in charge of Vespa. He would have done a hell of a lot worse in the house if he had. No, he’d come because he wanted Lucy.
I did the only thing I knew to do. I started to pray.
Tabby did not join in. I didn’t expect her to. Her religion did prayer in terms of rituals, and it wasn’t like this was the time or place for that, though I’m sure she could do something small in a car. She just didn’t have the stuff with her.
“Could you ward the driveway?” I asked.
“No. Probably not. It isn’t a dwelling.”
“Damn.” It was a thought. It was a shame there were limitations, but I already knew that.
While we were talking about it, I figured now was the time to ask Lucy about the contract.
“Remember earlier when we were talking about the demon contract?” I asked her.
“Uh huh.”
“What did you mean when you said the contract didn’t matter?” This was the most important thing I needed to know.
“It doesn’t.”
“How?” Tabby asked.
“The outcome will be the same.” She was talking in that weird way that made her sound older than she really was.
“What do you mean, Lucy?” I asked.
She started humming. I gave up. That was all I was getting out of her today. She’d answered my question, just not as much as I’d wanted her to. At least we still had options. The mark idea Tabby came up with. If he had one, and if he let us take a picture of it, maybe we could research the symbols.
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