Chapter 6
Xander
A LONG STRETCH OF VARIOUS rooms lined the hallway I walked down with the nurse and Kendyll in front of me.
The doors had different doctors listed on them.
We stopped at one, which read, “Paul Roberts MD.” As if accustomed to this routine, the nurse opened the door, Kendyll sat in the plush brown chair in front of a large desk, and the older gentleman behind it folded his hands atop a notebook with a pen resting in his fingers.
The nurse shut the door, descending the doctor and his patient into privacy.
“Good afternoon, Kendyll,” Dr. Paul Roberts greeted.
Kendyll stared at her lap.
“How are you feeling today?”
Kendyll swallowed hard and finally looked up. “I’m not making it up.”
“I know,” Dr. Roberts replied patiently. “I believe you.”
“No, you don’t,” she gritted out.
“I do. I believe that you believe you see something.” The doctor splayed his hands wide and gestured at her. “So, please. Tell me what you saw that brought you here today.”
The ticking of the clock on Paul’s desk was deafening in the tense silence.
Slowly, Kendyll’s gaze moved behind her glasses to settle on me, where I stood behind the doctor’s shoulder.
Helplessness framed her tight eyes and deepening frown, begging me to do something.
I pursed my lips in response, pondering what my first move would be.
Meanwhile, the middle-aged doctor looked over his shoulder, trying but failing to see me. He jotted down a note on his yellow pad.
Delusions persist after six months of increased medication and therapy
His pad shifted as he wrote, exposing medical documents and notes beneath it. I spotted Kendyll’s name, as well as glimpses of different words and phrases.
Frequent nightmares
Touch aversion
Severe psychosis—auditory and visual hallucinations
Factitious disorder—consistently fabricates and feeds into non-existent childhood trauma
“Damn,” I mused, glancing at her. “They think you’re bonkers.”
Her cheeks grew red, and she glanced nervously at Dr. Roberts.
Understanding her nerves, I quelled, “Don’t worry. The fucker can’t hear me. Yet.”
I was still tucked in the shadows, only visible to her due to her ability to peer into the world I dwelled within. But it wouldn’t be much longer until I fully emerged.
“Is what you see in the room with us right now?” the physician asked.
I nodded at Kendyll, encouraging her to answer honestly.
She pressed her lips together at first but eventually responded quietly, “Yes.”
“I see. Where is it?”
“Standing behind you.”
With a mischievous snicker, I leaned down and blew a cold breath on the back of his neck.
He tensed, and I sensed his heartbeat skip in alarm.
A fine sheen of unsettled sweat dotted the back of his neck near his shirtline, but he managed to keep himself from turning to look this way.
Not that it would’ve mattered. Already, I felt the unease growing in his body, which slowly prickled power within mine.
The doctor coughed and shifted slightly in his chair, rolling his shoulders in what was probably an effort to dispel the remaining tingles on the back of his neck. “Can you describe what you see?” He poised his pen over his paper, ready to write the details.
“Go ahead,” I told her.
Kendyll studied me while I studied the professional’s desk and his office. “He … He’s tall. Short black hair, sharp eyes that are gold with a vertical black pupil. A black hoop through the bottom of his nose and tattoos on his arms. Dark and ribbed horns.”
Dr. Roberts paused his jotting down of my features. “Horns?”
“Yes,” she answered.
I grinned, flashing my sharp canines as I bent closer to the physician’s desk. “Go on. Tell him what I am, Ghost.”
Her fists clenched tightly, and she begrudgingly whispered, “He’s a demon.”
I blew on a stack of papers near Dr. Roberts’s hand. The pages fluttered, scattering slightly from where they’d been. Paul stared at the papers and glanced ever so slightly over his shoulder.
“Ha. Silly drafts.” He feigned nonchalance as he straightened the sheets, but he couldn’t hide his growing apprehension from me. The tips of my fingers warmed with a slight buzz of energy. The more frightened he became, the more that feeling swept through me.
Dr. Roberts clasped his hands over his notepad once more and faced Kendyll. “So you say the figure you see is a demon. Why do you think that?”
“Because,” she responded carefully, “he told me that’s what he is.”
“I see,” he replied calmly, jotting down notes about auditory hallucinations. “What else does this demon say to you?”
Kendyll didn’t respond, instead watching me with lips slightly parted while I moved around to the man’s other side.
With each small step, the overhead light flickered.
The man took in a sharp, almost imperceptible inhale, which he then held as he followed Kendyll’s moving gaze.
He glanced out of the corner of his eye in my direction, where her attention landed.
Another small spike in his fear had my own power rising, and I smirked, placing a hand on the back of his chair while resting the other on his desk. I crowded into his space and studied the hair rising on the back of his neck.
“Someone’s getting scared,” I chuckled.
“He says you’re scared,” Kendyll repeated to the doctor.
Dr. Roberts’s shoulders stiffened, and he frowned. “Why would I be scared?”
Kendyll’s eyes narrowed on the doctor, and she suddenly straightened with a swell of confidence. I didn’t have a chance to coach her on a response before she took over with a biting hiss.
“Because you can feel him standing beside you. Because you know I’m telling the truth and have always been telling the truth.”
Dr. Roberts’s erratic heartbeat echoed like the sweetest banging of drums in my ears. His alarm mounted, and he tried to mask it with a disapproving stern frown. “Kendyll, you—”
I snapped my fingers, finally descending the room into total darkness.
While the human eye lost the ability to see, I could still peer through the black void, and I watched as Paul gasped and looked around in vain with a panicked furrowed brow.
Meanwhile, Kendyll didn’t flinch, her unwavering stare unbothered by the lack of light.
The rush of energy that followed the doctor’s burst of fear had me inhaling deeply, savoring the high of this moment.
As I exhaled, I let out a sinister chuckle, and this time, I let the sound out.
The malicious laugh bounced around the room in a chilling echo.
The color drained from Paul’s face, and he stumbled out of his chair and into the wall, his wide stare looking all around the dark room.
“What’s going on?” the doctor demanded. “Who’s there?”
I leaned in until my lips nearly grazed his ear and whispered, “The demon, Paul.”
“Gah!” he screamed, falling away from me.
He barrelled toward the door of his office, stumbling from the lack of light as he went.
My ominous chuckle followed as he grabbed the doorknob, but with a single thought from me, the door remained shut.
He bellowed through clenched teeth as his trembling fingers frantically tried the light switch, but no matter how many times he tried it, the room remained dark.
He yelled and beat on the door, but with the shadowy shield I cast around the room, all remained calm and quiet for anyone on the other side.
Moving to him, I pressed into his back and taunted, “Are you scared, Paul?”
“No!” he shouted, falling in an effort to get away. He crawled in a trembling, whimpering mess along the floor, knocking into his shelves and desk as he went.
Meanwhile, Kendyll listened to all of this unfold, a small yet satisfied smile on her lips.
Dr. Roberts backed himself into a corner across the room. I took the chance to materialize slightly. My looming dark figure stood within the darkness of the room, and Paul stopped breathing as my golden eyes glowed and narrowed on him.
“This isn’t real,” Dr. Roberts rambled in a shaking mess. He squeezed his eyes shut and covered his face with his hands. “This isn’t real. This isn’t real. This isn’t real!”
I moved in a burst of shadows to crouch right in front of the doctor.
“He doesn’t like it when you say that,” Kendyll admonished with a glance at me.
At the sound of Kendyll’s voice, he dared another look, only to find my glowing eyes and sharpened white canines silhouetted in black right in front of him. He sucked in a petrified breath and begged, “Please! Please! Wh—What do you want?”
I made myself appear bigger among the shadows and stretched my grin as wide as it would go. “Your soul.”
“No!” he sobbed, collapsing into himself like an armadillo.
I wanted to throw my head back on a laugh, but that would ruin the malevolent vibe I was going for.
The old threat to a human’s soul worked every time.
As if I gave a damn about collecting souls from living people.
That wasn’t my job as a Mischief demon. I could collect the souls of ghosts, but I couldn’t claim souls from someone still alive. Not that he needed to know that.
“Please!” Paul gasped. “Have mercy! I’ll do anything!”
Kendyll, no doubt having seen an opening, stood beside me and stared down through the darkness at the doctor. “Sign for my immediate release.”
The quivering man slowly peeked up at her. “It’s not that easy.”
“Oh no?” I snapped my fingers, and the office light flicked back on.
I blended back into the shadows, hidden from him, though Kendyll could still see me.
With a wave of my hand, I summoned the discharge papers, and they rained down out of thin air to fall on and around the doctor.
His signature and fabricated successful “treatments” littered the pages, all placed by me.
“Done,” I said from within my hidden world. “She’ll be leaving now, and if any trouble follows her—” I reappeared right in front of his face, my golden eyes the only shape within my horned black mass figure “—I’ll come back for you.”
Dr. Roberts went as white as the sheets littered around his trembling form.
With my warning clear, I wrapped my wispy, clawed hand around Kendyll’s shoulder and swallowed us in shadows.
When they cleared, we stood on the outside of a gate with a large sign that read Mountview Psychiatric Hospital.
I stepped away from her and shed my extra demonic guise so that I once again looked like myself with the addition of the horns, claws, fangs, and golden eyes.
Kendyll’s gaze bounced between me and the metal gate with the stone building beyond it. “If you could get me out that easy, why go through all that fuss?”
I grinned. “It was way more fun that way.”
She shook her head, but the hint of a smile tugged at her mouth. She took a deep breath like she was basking in the air devoid of sterilizers and medicine. She spun around happily and began walking down the concrete road. “So, where are we off to now?”
I stared at the back of her head. “We?”
She stopped midstep and faced me once more. “Yeah. Me and you. You and me. We.”
I let out a disbelieving laugh and shook my head hard. “There is no we. I got you out of the shit hole. Now you’re free to do what you want. Go home and—”
“Home?” she cut me off. “I don’t have a home. Who do you think put me in that place? I’ll never go back there. I-I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Not my problem,” I shrugged.
Just as I prepared to step through shadows and leave, she reached out to grab my arm. This clingy scenario had déjà vu written all over it. She held on tightly and pleaded, “Why not?”
“Because I’m a demon who has no use for a human leech. We aren’t buddies. You needed help, and I wanted to have some fun fucking with people. End of story.”
“I won’t get in your way,” she tried to bargain. “I can help with chores or scaring people or whatever it is you do. Think of me as your lackey! Please? Just until I find somewhere to go. I won’t bother you for long.”
“You’re bothering me right now,” I hissed with narrowed eyes.
“Please,” she begged, the word coming out on a choked whisper this time. Her grip on my arm tightened, and her wide eyes became red and glassy behind her glasses. “Please take me with you. I can’t go back there.”
Fear, panic, horror—those were the easiest emotions for Mischief demons to manipulate and feed into. Because of that, we were masters in sensing them, even if we weren’t the ones causing the feeling.
Each one of those emotions swept through Kendyll now, the next more potent than the last. She trembled as an icy terror seemed to take her captive.
I stared at her and searched her petrified gaze for the source of what had her this afraid.
I would’ve expected anger or hatred to be on the forefront of her mind as she thought about the possibility of returning home to the people who had turned her over to the mental hospital, but instead, it was horror.
Something in her desperate plea and haunted gaze made me hesitate.
She probably had no friends or connections, and the family she did have clearly wanted to be rid of her.
Would it be awful to let her stay at my place until she found somewhere to go?
Normally, I wouldn’t even bat an eye at someone’s plea, but this human had the Devil’s Eye.
She wasn’t normal; she was gifted. It was rare to have a chance to talk to someone with her ability.
Besides, I was hardly at my apartment since I was always going out with the boys and fucking around with people. She could keep my place neat and tidy while I was gone, and maybe she could even help me get some power boosts by getting into some haunted shit.
Sighing, I relented, “Fine. You can come with me.” Before she could get excited, I shoved my clawed finger right into her face. “But only until you’ve found somewhere else to go, which better be sooner rather than later.”
“Okay! Deal!” she chirped, her terror sliding back into its recesses.
I really hope I don’t regret this, I thought as I swept us both away.