Chapter Forty-Four
Cookson’s body lay facedown, one arm caught underneath it, the other flung to the side, the legs at odd angles that no actor ever manages on TV.
A dead body just falls differently even from an unconscious one, and yet I didn’t believe it.
The demon had taken a lot more bullets than this at the hospital and it had barely fazed it.
There was blood around the head and shoulder, but not enough.
At close range the nine-millimeter bullet should have blown out the other side of the head.
There just wasn’t enough damage, but . .
. the body lay like it was dead, and then I realized I had a way to be certain without getting close enough to check for a pulse.
I tried to see the angel at his back, and it was still there, trapped and screaming for help like someone half trapped in quicksand.
Cookson was still alive, or his angel would have been free to escape back to Heaven.
One uniform wanted to check the body, but I said, “He’s alive.” I might have yelled it accidentally as my ears stopped ringing.
“Ambulance is on its way, but shouldn’t we stop the bleeding or something?” Officer Stevens asked.
“Demonic possession, stay clear until we have a priest or a witch to check it for us.”
He went a little paler than his natural skin color, which was damn near pasty.
You didn’t meet that many people out here on the West Coast who looked like they’d spent the nonexistent winter indoors.
He was probably from back east somewhere.
Once I was sure that Mark Cookson wouldn’t get up and kill everyone, including us, I’d ask Stevens about his background and see if my guess was right.
He moved up beside me and aimed his gun at the body, which meant this probably wasn’t his first demonic rodeo. His partner, whose name I didn’t catch, took Shelby and Jeff out the front of the shop and to the sunny day that was still outside waiting.
I’d switched to a two-handed grip at last; I could hold that for a lot longer than the one-handed grip I’d had earlier.
I kept my gun aimed at Cookson and waited.
His angel screamed and writhed, trying to get away.
I let myself lean against the glass cases as the sound of its pain stabbed through me.
“I will save you,” I whispered. The angel quieted as it lay trapped on Cookson. Killing him would free the angel once and for all, but if bullets wouldn’t do it, what would?
The “body” twitched, then groaned, and the ringing in my ears had died down enough that I heard it. The uniformed officer jumped and said, “Jesus, I hate supernatural cases, you never know what’s going on.”
“You get used to it,” I said.
The body groaned again, and moved more like it was waking up than injured. The voice was thick and sounded wrong, but the words were clear enough. “That hurt more than expected, but as I said bullets cannot kill Mark now.”
Stevens hit his shoulder microphone and was calling for more backup. “. . . and we need a priest, we’ve got a full-on possession.”
Cookson laughed, but it sounded like he was having trouble clearing some of the blood out of somewhere. “I am beyond priests.” He started to get to his knees.
“Stay on your knees,” I said.
“Hands behind your head,” the uniform said.
“Or what, you’ll shoot me again?”
“You said it hurt, we could just keep shooting you until the priest arrives.”
“I also said that a priest can’t get rid of me, and that was the truth, too, Detective.”
“You’re just a demon using a human body; exorcism is designed to fix that,” I said. I was fishing, trying to figure out what was different about this demon and Mark Cookson.
“You think you’ve saved Shelby, but you haven’t. She can’t hide from me, Detective.”
“You could have had a new life in this body if you had just left Shelby alone,” I said.
“Mark wanted sex with those five women. We did try for willing and seduction, but like dear Shelby they chose force. Willing sex would have saved their lives, but if not that, then he wanted their deaths. Until we finish that part of the bargain, we are not free to have another life,” he said from his knees.
He didn’t seem in a hurry to stand up; maybe he was still feeling weak from being shot twice?
“A woman doesn’t force a man to rape her,” I said. “A man refuses to take no for an answer, then forces himself on a woman, that’s the definition of rape.”
“Look at this body, we could have made passionate love to them, but they would not have us. That’s not our fault, that’s their fault.”
My finger caressed the trigger, not pulling it, but God help me, I wanted to. “A woman is allowed to say no to anyone that she doesn’t want to have sex with.”
“It doesn’t work that way in Hell,” he said.
“Enjoy it when you get back there,” I said.
“I won’t be going back.”
“Tell that to your exorcist.”
“I’d rather tell it to you, Havoc. What a lovely name, Havoc. It suits you somehow.”
“You know my name, what’s yours?”
He looked over his shoulder, smiling. “Now, Havoc, that wouldn’t be any fun. If you want to know my name, you’ll have to guess.”
“I won’t play twenty questions with you,” I said.
Cookson sniffed the air like he had earlier. “Shelby is nearby, still within my reach.”
“No, she’s not,” I said.
A shudder ran through Cookson.
“What was that?” Stevens asked.
Another shudder ran through Cookson. “There are a few downsides to this new form,” he said in a voice that almost sounded like he was in pain.
“You feel pain,” I said.
“Demons feel pain, Detective, or what would be the point of torturing us in Hell?”
“But you don’t feel the pain of the human body you possess,” I said.
“Not normally,” the demon said, and shuddered so hard that he fell forward onto all fours.
“Don’t move!” Stevens shouted.
“Sorry,” said Cookson, “a side effect.”
“Are you sick or something?” Stevens asked.
“Or something,” Cookson said, and fell to the floor writhing.
“He’s having a seizure,” Stevens said.
“You said the ambulance was on the way, right?” I said.
“Yeah, but we have to do what we can to keep him from busting his head open.” Stevens holstered his gun and started toward Cookson.
“Stevens, don’t.”
Cookson’s body shuddered and writhed on the carpet.
It looked enough like someone having a grand mal seizure that even an emergency room might have been fooled, but it wasn’t right.
Seizures of any kind were flagged in possible possession cases, because they’d been mistaken for demonic interference for centuries along with so many things.
“We can’t let him hurt himself like this,” Stevens said.
“He’s a demon wearing a human suit, that’s not a seizure,” I said.
“You can’t know that,” he said, and was careful to kneel without spoiling my aim.
There was fresh blood. I had a second of wondering if Stevens was right. Had Cookson melding with the demon caused seizures? Then I realized the blood was coming from Cookson’s hand—there was no reason for that to bleed.
“Stevens, get away from him!”
Stevens froze in midmotion as he reached out to try to help.
I thought he was going to do what I’d told him to do and back away, and then his shoulders hunched forward, and claw tips sprouted out of the back of his body armor.
I pulled the trigger, aiming at the center of Cookson’s back, but he rolled in a blur of speed so that I shot into the back of Stevens’s body armor.
“God!” I yelled it and pulled my gun to the side, aiming at the floor so I didn’t shoot Stevens again.
I tried to move around so I could shoot Cookson, but he rolled and took Stevens with him, turning the other cop into a shield.
The claws through his chest and out his back held him in place.
A second set of claws curled around Stevens’s shoulder, pinning him in place so I had no shot.
I moved to the side, trying to circle around them and shoot Cookson.
There was blood on Stevens’s face, spilling out of his mouth. God help him!
It was a bad idea, but I walked up on them, trying to find a way to hurt Cookson enough for him to let Stevens go. If he was going to be saved, I had to get him away from the demon now, not later. I prayed that I’d live through crowding the demon, but I had to try to save the other cop.
I had to almost stand on top of them to catch a glimpse of a yellow eye peering over the cop’s shoulder, but the demon jerked back so that the head and all the rest of the main part of the body was lost between Stevens and his body armor, and then I realized the policeman was shorter than the demon.
I had a clear shot at the legs, so I took it.
“Damn you!” Cookson yelled, and then he was pushing Stevens into me like a battering ram.
I stumbled, fighting to keep my feet, and that was enough time for Cookson to get to his feet, still holding the other cop’s body like a shield.
I tried to shoot the demon again, but he rushed forward, stronger and faster than humanly possible.
Cookson shoved me into the glass case, and it exploded under us in a thousand biting shards.
I ended up on the bottom with Stevens between us, the demon pinning us to the broken glass.
I still had my gun but it was trapped underneath the body and the demon’s weight.
I fought to work it free to aim—and realized that the officer’s Guardian Angel wasn’t glowing anymore; he was dead, and his angel was free to return to God.
Only my glow and the twisted thing at the demon’s back remained.
Cookson’s face was humanoid, but the mouth was full of black fangs to match the curved black claws.
His skin had turned red like the scales he’d worn at the hospital.
The fangs snapped at my face, and I thought, You don’t have fangs, toothless , but nothing changed.
The demon snarled, “I’m half human, and we have our own imagination, Havoc.
You can’t fuck with our form now, too late for that! ”
I got my gun free and aimed at its face. The demon grinned and opened its mouth wide to engulf the gun and half my hand, and bit down as I pulled the trigger. I screamed and the bullet went out the back of the demon’s head while it laughed. It bit down and I screamed again.
The angel trapped at its back shrieked with me. I balled my hand into a fist and kept firing the bullets into the demon. I couldn’t kill it, but maybe I could keep it from biting my hand off. It finally reared back and spat a bullet at my face.
“That still hurts, damn, but pain is worth free will.”
His Guardian Angel screamed again as the demon’s claws scrambled for my face. If I died, the angel was trapped in torment. I prayed that if I died, I’d be able to set the angel free first.
There was the sound of wings like birds, and a voice breathed through me, “Zaniel, come to me.”
I didn’t think I could be any more scared, but I was wrong. I didn’t want to see Her again, ever, because I was afraid of what would happen. If it had been just my death on the line I might have hesitated, but I couldn’t leave the Guardian Angel to be tortured.
“I will destroy that handsome face and body, Havoc, and then I will hunt down the last women and be free to roam the Earth. No priest will exorcise me to Hell, because I will be half human.”
“That’s not possible,” I said through gritted teeth as I fought to keep his claws from my face.
“No, but it’s still true,” the demon said.
My gun clicked empty, and I couldn’t reach the extra magazine in my pocket.
He raised black claws upward like five daggers.
I was still trapped under the weight of two bodies, ground into the glass and diamonds.
I was out of time to decide, so I did the only thing I could be certain would free the angel.
I opened the space between here and where the angels dance on golden threads and sing the universe into continuous creation.
Our blood spilled out like rubies shining and bouncing in round globes because there was no gravity here.
Golden lines of power sang and gleamed around us, and the angels sang the universe into being, creating and re-creating over and over.
Matter is neither created nor destroyed, it simply is.
The perfection of it filled me and I wasn’t even afraid as I watched the rubies sparkle against the gold and silver and .
. . colors that had no words to describe them surrounded us.
Stevens didn’t care, because the dead feel nothing, but Mark Cookson cared. He began to scream. The human part of him wasn’t ready to go among the angels. The demon part of him got control and growled at me, “You cannot destroy us that easily.”
The angel on his back screamed for help and now there were many others that could hear its cry. The angels came glowing and burning and I heard a familiar voice. “Zaniel, what have they done to you?”
I said, “Save the angel, set it free.”
“And what of you, Zaniel?”
“I want to go home.”
“You are home,” she said, and I could almost see her golden hair, almost see her eyes, and then she was too far inside my head and she saw what I thought home meant, and it wasn’t Her.
We floated in the middle of holy fire; the seraphim had come, and neither Mark Cookson nor the demon sharing his body was pure enough of heart to survive their six-winged embrace.