My mom sighs and sniffles and says, “Baker’s in a different wing of the hospital, honey. And we don’t know who Isaac is.”
“He’s one of the two guys who brought me in,” I say. “From the Liberty.”
My parents exchange a glance, and I read sympathy and concern and fear, among other things. My mind is a little slow, though, and I can’t help feeling like I’m missing something.
“They found you with Baker,” my mom says. “He managed to call 911 before he passed out.”
“Is he okay?”
They look at each other again. My dad shakes his head and blinks away tears.
“They think he’ll recover,” my mom says, her voice breaking.
“When can I see him?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she says gently. “How do you feel? Are you in pain? Should we call a nurse?”
I try to sit up, but it’s hard to do with one hand wrapped in gauze and the other . . . burning? It’s clenched in a fist, and when I manage to open it, the palm is red and burned, with shadows of ink-black demon blood sunken into the lines.
Most important, that hand is empty.
“Where is it?” I ask, frantic. “Did they save it? Or send it to the incinerator? I felt her leave! They can’t take her back!”
“Sweetie, you need to relax,” my dad says in his soothing voice, standing and walking around the bed to hold my mom’s hand.
I glance around the room, at the sterile table beside the bed. Nothing of mine is here. Not my clothes. Not my half of the Best Friends necklace. And definitely not Carly’s distal.
“I can’t relax,” I say, voice shaking. “This is serious. This is important. What did they do with it?”
My mom sits down in the chair beside my bed and hangs her head. She looks up at me with deep circles around her eyes and new crow’s-feet. In her no-nonsense lawyer voice she says, “If you’re talking about the . . . finger . . . they saved it as evidence.”
“Evidence? No, they can’t save it. It needs to be burned. It has to be destroyed.”
I know I’m babbling, but how can they see me this upset and just sit there watching me? So calm, so sad. So resigned.
“Please. Mom. Dad. I’ll never ask you for anything ever again. But you’ve got to get it back. I can’t tell you why, but I need Carly’s finger.”
My mom looks up at my dad, and he looks down at her. He moves closer to her side, and she wraps her arm around his waist and leans against him. My dad subtly picks something up off the bed, and I see him pushing a button. Cold creeps into my arm, and things start to get hazy. A tear squeezes out of my mom’s eye, and she dashes it away.
“Billie Dove,” she says softly. “That wasn’t Carly’s finger. It was yours.”
My jaw drops, but then I chuckle. I can see her mistake.
“No. No, it wasn’t. I didn’t get mine, and I actually need to find it. But I think the person who had it is dead. Doesn’t matter now. I just need to destroy Carly’s distal so the demons can’t use her body as a servant.”
My mom bursts into tears, something I’ve never seen before. Not at my grandmother’s funeral. Not at Carly’s funeral. My rock-hard mother has been reduced to hysterical sobs.
“I know it sounds crazy, but it all fits together,” I say as my head wobbles and falls back against the pillow. “It’s like The Tempest. Just let me explain.”
“Dovey,” my dad says in his soft, reasonable voice as my mom cries into his sweater. “Baker called 911 from our house. When the ambulance arrived, they found Mr. Hathaway in the dining room, shot with my pistol. You were unconscious with a snake bite and missing the tip of your pinkie finger. Baker was stabbed in the back, lying in a pool of blood. You had a knife in your hand. They took you both straight into emergency surgery. They gave you antivenin and managed to save your left arm and sew up the pinkie on your right hand. You’ve been unconscious ever since.”
“But what about the Liberty?”
“There was a fire last night. It was destroyed. They want to talk to you about that, too.”
He looks deep into my eyes, and I can see his heart breaking.
“You quit taking your medicine, Dovey. You lied to us.”
Tears pool in my eyes, and I realize that after all that has happened, after all I’ve seen, I haven’t even had the time to cry.
“I had to quit,” I say between sobs. “I had to get it out of my system. It was like living in a fog. I wasn’t seeing what was really there.”
“No,” he says quietly, “you weren’t. That’s why you were on antipsychotics, honey.”
“They weren’t antipsychotics,” I say, grabbing his arm with my free hand and ignoring the pain bursting from the black stitches on my pinkie and the burns on my palm. “Those pills, they were something the demons made to keep me quiet, to keep me from seeing who I really am. They were drugging me with their magic. They’ve been drugging all of us. The whole city. Ever since Josephine.”
“The doctor warned us this might happen,” my dad says, but he’s not really talking to me anymore. He’s talking to himself, and to my mom. She can’t even look at me. I can barely keep my eyes open. But I have to make them understand.
“It’s the demons, Dad. They’re taking over the whole city. They’re feeding on us, using us. We’re just cattle.”
“Dovey, do you even hear yourself?” he says sadly.
He disentangles his arm from my hand and strokes my hair like he did when I was a little girl having a nightmare.
“Demons, drugs, fire, playing with rattlesnakes. You killed a helpless old man, sweetheart. You almost killed your only friend. You need help. More help than we can give you.”
He helps my mother stand, and she leans against him, racked with sobs. She seems shorter somehow, clinging to him like that. He stands tall and straight, and she hangs off him, weak and broken. It’s the opposite of the way they’ve always been, and it makes the world seem even more off-kilter.
“I don’t want to get back on the pills,” I plead. “I can’t go back to living that way.”
Just outside my door someone clears their throat.
“It’s out of our hands, honey.” My dad nods at the doorway. “I’m sorry. They need to question you. We’ll come back as soon as they’ll let us.”
“You can’t leave me here.”
“You haven’t given us a choice,” my mom wails, and my father half-drags her to the door.
“But what am I supposed to do?” I shout.
My dad turns back to look at me with dead black eyes. He smiles over my mom’s head, his teeth jagged and sharp, and my blood runs cold. He pulls something out of his pocket and shows it to me, just a quick flash. Something tan and pill-shaped in a little bottle.
My distal.
He slips it back into his pocket and leads my hysterical mom out the door.
Over his shoulder he says, “Just keep taking your pills.”
© 2013 Dolorianne Morris
delilah s. dawson is a native of Roswell, Georgia, and a big fan of cupcakes, horses, coffee, and high adventure. She’s the author of Servants of the Storm and Hit for YA readers, a novelization of the Shadowman comic, a short story in the Carniepunk anthology, and the dark and whimsical Blud series, including three books and three e-novellas. Although she’s never used it, Delilah has a BA in Studio Art from the University of Georgia and used to paint murals and pet portraits and teach art classes. She currently lives in the North Georgia mountains with her husband, two children, two cats, a spotted Tennessee walker named Polly, and a smooshy-faced mutt named Merle. One day she hopes to see a bear in her backyard.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
First Simon Pulse hardcover edition August 2014
Text copyright © 2014 by D. S. Dawson
Jacket photograph copyright © 2014 by Violet Damyan/Arcangel Images
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Jacket designed by Regina Flath
Interior designed by Mike Rosamilia
The text of this book was set in Minion Pro.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dawson, Delilah S.
Servants of the storm / Delilah S. Dawson. — First Simon Pulse hardcover edition.
p. cm.
Summary: After her best friend dies in a hurricane,
high schooler Dovey discovers something even more devastating—demons in her hometown of Savannah.
[1. Demonology—Fiction. 2. Supernatural—Fiction.
3. Savannah (Ga.)—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.D323Se 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2013031587
ISBN 978-1-4424-8378-1
ISBN 978-1-4424-8380-4 (eBook)
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
About Delilah S. Dawson
Servants of the Storm Page 29
