Chapter 35 #3
It was the first time I’d said the demon’s name aloud, and I shivered with another roll of forbidden power.
My voice was strong, epically strong, and somewhere deep inside her own mind, lost behind a keening wall of darkness, Emily heard it too.
Heard it and cried out for help from me. And I would give her that help.
Because there was power in props.
I walked over to the table between the two wingback chairs.
The chairs where Mr. and Mrs. Graham had sat like sentinels, not feeling what was between them—or perhaps they had.
Maybe that was the reason behind their docility.
They wouldn’t remember this terrifying night.
They probably wouldn’t remember a lot of things from these last seven years.
I opened the ornate box on the table and lifted out a crucifix.
Then a rosary. Gifts from Father Neismeth.
My fingers smoked a little, but they’d already been blistered black—I’d long since stopped feeling them.
That was worrisome, but I wasn’t about to stop.
If I still had demon goo clinging to my soul somehow, causing me to react to holy icons, so be it.
It might take a while to shake off fifteen years of possession.
Behind me, the things within Emily croaked a collective laugh. “You think that is going to bind me? You think I care about trinkets and beads?”
“You don’t.” I smiled, realizing that Rabbi Mordechai never had me hold these tools during an exorcism.
Only he held them, he and the people he was helping.
The people who looked at him with fear and terror and doubt and desperation.
Only it wasn’t the desperation of man that was emanating out of them.
It was the desperation of the creatures who sought refuge in man. “But I don’t care about you.”
My fingers slick with my own blood now, cracked and smoking, I placed the crucifix on Emily’s forehead, and she flinched back, hard, but I followed her even as she stumbled over the table and collapsed onto the couch.
She screamed with abject terror, her mouth hanging open, elongating into a rictus of pain.
I could feel the arrival of other people at the door.
Some of them coming in? I couldn’t tell.
I draped the heavy rosary over Emily’s shoulders, and she growled, feral, scrabbling back on the couch.
I was reminded of the lesser demon that had plagued Iris. That had not required so much effort.
This did.
“Naamah and your servants, leave this woman, never to return.” The words sounded gnarled and ancient, and my mouth felt like dust. Suddenly, there was a second person at my side, and another cross was pressed into Emily’s arm.
Her eyes were wild as she tried to jerk away, but Claire didn’t budge.
And it wasn’t just any cross she was using.
It was her own delicate cross from her necklace.
“Leave her alone!” Claire shouted. Max was beside me on the other side, his face resolute as he lifted a thermos of holy water. As Emily screamed, he poured the whole thing’s contents on her head.
“No!” Emily clapped her hands to her forehead, and I got down to whisper in her ear.
I don’t know what I said, then. I was in pain, terrible pain, a touch once more on my soul—one I both welcomed and reviled.
And I whispered things to her that my mind didn’t want to fully comprehend.
I told her of what was waiting for her, when she and her fellow creatures came out of Emily.
The long life ahead of her, the pain and the tears and the waiting, always the waiting.
I told her of the emptiness too. Because when I was done with them, if they didn’t leave her right then, and in the manner of my choosing, they would not be able to enter another soul for a millennium.
And what lay in wait for them before that millennium struck was anyone’s guess.
The world was an uncertain place. God was an uncertain master.
And I had learned so much in my long life—
“No!” The creatures came then, finally, bursting up Emily’s throat.
She coughed them up with blood and bile, the spew flowing over her like dirt down a trough.
I knew this wasn’t an illusion, however, like Mrs. Klein’s sister.
I knew this was real, and the remains of Emily’s esophagus would not be right for months after losing spirits this way.
If ever. The mouth was a terrible choice.
Then again, Emily fell back, away from the creatures she emitted, and it was as if her face had been set free from shackles.
Her body was loose, light. The body of a late-thirties actress and model, beautiful and carefree, her blonde hair spilling around her.
She was out cold, and God only knew when she would wake up again, but she was free.
She was free.
They were still vowing violence and retribution when they rushed up the chimney, even though I was the only one who heard their sickening threats.
But when they reached the top of the chimney and encountered the holy water-soaked shroud I’d had Max hang over it, I wasn’t the only one who heard them scream.
Laughter rolled just on the edge of my consciousness, rich, full…and achingly familiar.