Chapter Two
Two
One second, there is a door between us.
The next, there isn’t.
A blast of hot air scorches my face as the window I’m peering through shatters, the wood around it encased in flames that turn it instantly to ash.
Debra’s body rams into mine with the force of a linebacker gunning for a Super Bowl ring.
We go flying into my desk and the breath beats out of me as we skid over the laminate surface.
The monitor I spend 80 percent of my day cursing at to load faster crashes to the ground only a second before we do. My squeaky rolly chair breaks my fall, but glides away quickly, leaving my head to smack onto the plastic carpet protector.
Everything might be broken, or nothing, or something. I can’t tell, but fuck, it hurts. My lungs are stunned, like they’ve forgotten how to work. Debra fell next to me, but now she scrambles to straddle my waist in a move that I will be sure to file an HR complaint about.
Except I might not survive to see the paperwork.
She lifts her head, her neck cracking as the endless black of her eyes devours me.
It’s like her pupils ate her green irises and surrounding whites.
Her tongue flicks out, licking her lips in a barbaric manner as hot breath shoots across my face.
I gag, the stench rancid and metallic. Like blood.
“Pretty,” she rasps, her voice hers but not. A finger comes up to trail the side of my face, catching on one of the curls that made its way into my mouth. She tugs it out. “Tasty.”
“I’m really not,” I rush out, but my voice is so pinched with fear and adrenaline, I’m not sure she can hear me. “Compared to your gingersnaps, you’ll be so disappointed.”
Her leg pins my left hand to my body, but my right is free. My fingers brush something plastic: the stapler that got knocked off my desk.
“Hungry,” she rasps harder, her mouth opening to an impossible angle, like she’s about to eat me. What in the Silence of the Lambs—
She roars in pain as I smash the stapler into her temple. “Bad!” she screeches, a gust of sweltering heat surely singeing my eyebrows. “Dead!”
Her mouth opens again as her hand slams down on my right wrist to thwart another attack. “I’m sorry for the email!” I shoot out, though this is clearly not the Debra I prodded an hour ago. Still, it’s all I can think of, me and my nagging and exclamation points.
Suddenly, her weight is gone. I scramble on my elbows and ass, backing up until my head knocks into the filing cabinet behind my desk. My jaw drops.
Luke holds Debra by a fistful of her silver-streaked hair, wrenching her head back so the arch of her wrinkled throat faces the ceiling.
“Get the fuck back where you belong,” he growls, throwing her down the cubicle-lined aisle. She crashes through the glass wall of his office, landing like a sack of potatoes on the pentagram tarp.
I’ve never heard Luke swear. He’s always cool and collected. But like Debra, this is not a Luke I know. The man before me with muscles rippling under his torn white dress shirt, his sharp jaw set in a fierce scowl, his eyes burning with fury—this Luke is hot and stressed.
“The salt! Brie!”
And, apparently, he does know my name.
“On my desk! Get the damn salt!”
The world snaps back into focus with bitter, horrifying clarity.
Luke steps through the shattered glass wall of his office before Debra can lunge out.
On the ground where the door used to be, there’s a broken line of white.
I must have done that when I peeked. Beyond it on the corner of Luke’s desk is a sizable box of salt.
I rush into Luke’s office, trying to dodge flailing limbs from both Luke and Debra as they wrestle on the pentagram. I grab the salt.
“All along there!” Luke instructs, jerking his head toward the only side of the office not walled off. With shaking hands, the salt pours from the box as I make a crooked line past the original by the door. My flats crunch on bits of shattered glass and ruined vinyl blinds.
Whatever effect the salt has makes Debra—or whatever is in Debra—fall to her knees. It allows Luke to stumble backward out of the pentagram and resume his Latin. Debra tries to get up, but Luke’s words get faster and louder. It knocks her down so she’s sitting on her heels.
“This is only the beginning!” she screams, the sound scraping my eardrums. I slam my hands over my ears as another roar tears out of her open mouth.
The shadowy black mass tugs out of her toward the ceiling, where a swirling cloud of darkness appears from nowhere.
It reminds me of cartoon storm clouds, the kinds I’d see in elementary school during tornado drills.
As soon as the black mass touches the edges of the darkness, it gets sucked up and disappears like a smoke-and-mirrors illusion. Luke’s chanting stops and the cloud dissipates, leaving Debra to topple over in a limp heap.
Silence wraps around us save for our heavy breaths. Luke props himself on the edge of his desk, drained. The box of salt is still in my hand, my stapler still in the other. I glance between the two, and when I look back up at Luke, he’s staring at me with an unreadable expression.
“Did you just—” My voice catches as what I witnessed hits me. “Did you just perform an exorcism on Debra from Accounting?”