3. Chapter 3
I felt like the bottom had fallen out of my gut and sent it splattering to the floor.
“Serich’s minding the church while Father Hull is gone,” Livvy said. “He’s wearing the robes for now. A different acolyte has been named. The priest in Darensdale took ill, the whole place went up with fever. They need Father Hull to deliver last rites to the people who may not make it.”
Father Hull, Serich, it doesn’t matter, It droned, bored of the proceedings yet again. Neither can help you. We’re stuck together, for better or worse. You are my skin coffin. I am your special friend. Happily ever after we shall be.
I reject you, I told It. Officially. I…adjure you.
You wound me.
I don’t want you anymore. I never did. I only made my peace with you when I felt I had no other choice.
You have no other choice. This is pointless.
Well, maybe you lied.
I’ve never lied to you.
No, you just use omissions and half-truths.
I clenched Livvy’s hand in both of mine.
Focused on her warm dark skin, the rich scent of her hair.
My best friend who cared about me, not the demon in my head.
“Serich, then. I need him.” Serich had served as Father Hull’s acolyte for years.
If I hadn’t seen him tending to the outside of the church through churning fogs, I’d seen him on its front steps, his nose in a book.
We had not had much to do with each other since I was fourteen.
I could not enter the church and he rarely left it.
“Des,” Livvy said, her face eloquent with helplessness. “You can’t tell anybody! The things Serich will have to do to you. If you even survive whatever you’re put through, you’ll be an outcast.”
“It’s not the victim’s fault they’ve been possessed,” I said, more for her sake than for mine, because (not-so) privately, I agreed with her assessment. “All the texts say so.”
“You think they’ll accept that?” She hooked her thumb over her shoulder to our curtained window. “We live next door to fucking Hell! Nobody who lives here will trust that it won’t happen again. They’ll kill you just to simplify things. It’s the only way to be sure the demon flees.”
“What would you have me do?” I forced a calm I didn’t feel. “Keep silent? Accept It? Pray that it won’t happen again? Haggle with a demon? Kill myself? That’s the only way I’m free, if I don’t ask Serich for help.” Serich may have been a slim chance, but he was all I had.
“Well, we can’t go now.” Livvy collapsed on her bed, looking up at me in defeat. “It’s dark. We’ll have to wait for morning.”
And then it dawned on me that I could not go at all, day or night. I could not set foot into the church without suffering an agony so complete it made me wish for death. Where but a church could he stage an exorcism? The Warren parlor wasn’t an option.
Livvy tore her hand through her curls when I told her as much, her eyes swiveling around the room as if the answer hid in the corners.
“Serich’s father died a few weeks ago.” Her gaze snapped back to mine as she got to her feet. “His house is right behind the church. It’ll be empty since Serich left home. We can go there.”
It’s very tiring, never being listened to, It said. Now I know how my mother must have felt. Serich can offer up his own precious priestly soul in return and it wouldn’t be enough.
I’m done listening to you, I said, as Livvy stripped off my soiled cloak and worried over the knots at the back of my blood-painted dress.
If I have ever sat through a longer night, I do not remember it.
I spent it huddled with Livvy, curled beside her on her bed beneath piled quilts. Linen clotted her ears. I didn’t bother; linen would not muffle my demon and the ones who called from the wood could apparently convince me of nothing.
I got up not long after I felt the gray light of dawn drift over the bed. Livvy stirred fretfully but didn’t wake, and I pulled on fresh clothes and a cloak before making my way toward the front door.
My hand was on the knob when I heard human screams echoing up the lane, which only ever happened when a body had been discovered.
I pressed my forehead into the wood, willing steel into my blood, knowing I had to run out into the lane just like the rest of the village and convincingly feign terror, but I never had a chance.
A fist pounded on the door, the cross nailed above it juddering. A man screamed my name, a macabre echo ringing along the street as the villagers took up the cry.
I drew back from the door as suddenly as if it had burst into flames, prickling all over with an icy sweat.
Someone had seen me with the corpse. I’d thought the fogs would suffice, but the cover hadn’t been thick enough to obscure me from the back windows of the cottages.
Someone had witnessed me, all five feet two inches, dragging the rotund and tall, very, very dead body of John Dale with a speed and strength that was not quite human.
I felt It jerk to the forefront of my mind, which never happened so early. I imagined it was my fear that summoned It.
Run, It said. And when shock rooted me to the floor, It took the reins and forced me.
I sailed past a startled Margaret, a confused Robert, and burst out the back door with their exclamations pounding in my ears.
My muscles willingly joined Its momentum soon enough, and we were plunging down the empty back alley behind the cottages, skidding to a stop outside the church.
And even a few feet from it, my skin burned as though I were standing too close to a fire. I grabbed up a rock from the dirt and lobbed it as hard as I could against the church’s back door, leaving the wood cratered where it struck.
You should have just left the fucking back door open, It said. You had to move the body.
None of it would have happened if not for you.
Don’t dump the blame on my doorstep. Blame the bitch who put me here.
Five panicked seconds later, Serich flung the back door open, a dark beacon shining through the colorless fog.
His lips parted when he spotted me, warm amber eyes growing wide.
He didn’t wear a look of condemnation, fear.
Cloistered in the bowels of the thick-stoned church, closest to the wood, he must not have heard the commotion at the Warren home.
“I need you,” I called. “Please.”
He gestured me forward. “Come inside.”
“I can’t.” I had to force myself not to shout and give away my position. From the street, bodiless voices bolted through the mists like javelins. “I need you to come with me.”
Serich hesitated on the back steps. I felt my pulse fluttering in my throat. But then he pulled the back door shut and closed the distance between us.
“We haven’t spoken in years.” His brow creased as he straightened his collar. “And now you urgently need to talk with me?”
I didn’t answer, just grabbed his hand and towed him through the brush behind the church.
Serich gaped at me in the naked parlor of the cottage he’d grown up in, rolling a prayer bead between his fingers.
Most of the furniture seemed to have been carried off and redistributed to the needy since his father’s death, the only decorations a load of satchels piled up in a corner and a simple silver cross above the mantelpiece.
“You’re quite—quite sure that this is a possession?” Serich drew back against the empty hearth, subtly widening the gap between us. Giving himself space to run from me. Though I couldn’t help noticing his tone was inflected with the softest shade of doubt.
“Of course I am. Its murdered someone—”
“I only ask,” he said, a hand aloft to interrupt, “because most cases, I believe—as do a few others—are actually a disorder with the mind. Father Hull doesn’t think so, but I wonder if it might be a disturbance, a kind of emotional imbalance.
If John Dale tried to harm you, it would make sense that you might lash out and forget what you’d done to protect your mind from the truth. ”
“That’s not what it is. It speaks to me. Six years Its been with me.”
His new white collar soaked up the gray light seeping through the drapes as he adjusted it at his throat. “There are disorders where the sufferer can hear voices that aren’t their own—”
“Serich, this isn’t an issue with my brain,” I yelled, my voice echoing through the half-empty cottage. I sounded crazed, demonic.
“Have you ever lost time?”
“Pardon?” I asked, feeling my forehead crinkle.
“Do you ever wind up someplace and not know how you’ve got there? Do you ever experience extended periods of time where you’re not sure what you’ve been doing?”
“No, just…the fog in my head before I found John Dale dead and myself covered in his blood.”
His head ticked to the side as he gazed at me in silence. “Possessions almost always come with many episodes of lost time. I suppose, generally, you fit the victim type, but—”
“What, weak of mind and frail of body? A general lack of character?”
He cast me an apologetic look. “It’s just that most of the truly afflicted seem to be children or young women. In fact I’ve never heard a case in which a man was a victim.”
Odd, that, It said. It does make one wonder.
Wonder what? I asked irritably. I hadn’t the time to listen to It mindlessly opine.
Why are so few men afflicted and what racket are they trying to pull?
Serich drew closer, a furrow in his brow. “Are you all right?”
“It was speaking to me.” I belted my arms across my middle as he stopped a foot away, reaching out for me. His full lips pinched into a doubtful pucker, he lifted my chin with a fingertip and peered into my eyes.
And then jumped back with a gasp.
Serich called upon God, fumbling through his pocket as he tripped backward.
God is gone, It said, with a sort of disgusted boredom as Serich brandished an iron cross in my direction. He fucked off years ago. I doubt he’ll come back. He’s had his fun with humanity. You’re nothing but broken toys to Him now.
What did you do to him? I demanded as Serich’s back smacked into the hearth. He ripped the cross off the mantelpiece and brandished that one, too.
He thought you were mad or a liar or both, It said, sounding as though it were shrugging. Who is he to sit in judgement?
What did you do?
And as though It thought I ought to consider myself lucky that it condescended to answer, It said, I got a little closer to my window than usual.
Window?
I pressed up against the glass. It barked out a laugh. He noticed.
“Serich, It just wanted you to know I wasn’t lying.” My voice turned soothing, the way it had when the horses were spooked, back when they let me anywhere near them. “It won’t hurt you.”
I’d thank you not to speak for me. I don’t like this one.
I wasn’t aware It liked anyone at all.
Serich held up a hand as if to fend me off. “We’ll need holy water for this, I’ll have to run back to the church to grab my texts—”
“Its always said that won’t work, holy water, Livvy and I tried that once, in the beginning—”
“Livvy meant well, I’m sure, but she’s unqualified in such matters, you should have gone to Father Hull immediately.” He shook his head as if trying to jostle loose a thought. “What is Its name? There have been cases where knowing an entity’s true name can cast it out—”
“It won’t tell me that.”
Serich paused, stymied, but rallied quickly. “What is the sex? We can narrow down the possibilities with one of my texts, cross reference names and abilities.”
“It won’t tell me that, either.”
I fail to see how that’s even relevant.
“It speaks inside your head, Desideria!” he said, his amber eyes feverish against his dark skin, bright with a kind of horrified awe. “It has a voice; how can you not make an educated guess?”
“It’s not an earthly voice,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like us, it’s inhuman, it goes from high to low in a heartbeat and every time I think I know what It is, it says something that makes me think the opposite.”
Can you please try and be a little more helpful? I begged It, watching Serich gnaw on a thumbnail as he eyed me with professional interest. As if I were a specimen. I didn’t like the sensation. You’ve hated being here all these years, I know you have. You’ve never made a secret of it. Please.
Its answer was swift, clipped. No.
Do you like being stuck with me, is that it? Have you grown attached?
I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.
“What is It saying?”
“It doesn’t want to help,” I said bitterly. “It hates being with me but says we’ve no choice in the matter, that nothing and nobody can separate us so why bother attempting.”
Serich’s eyes fluttered closed for a few beats, his twitchy lids slick and shiny. “Tell me what Its said about the possession. Everything you can remember.”
I flipped through my memories since It was in an uncooperative mood.
What had It said, exactly? Holy water and crosses would not work, that It would leave if it could, some bluster about a flaccid sack.
Forces stronger than me or It. This is a cursed possession, It had snarled.
And when It and I had bickered over where the blame truly lay while waiting outside the church, It had said blame the bitch who put me here.
“Cursed?” Serich asked, after I’d related what I knew. “If it’s truly a curse, then it needs to be broken. We just need to figure out how.”
It shifted uncomfortably. Good. That meant Serich was onto something. It had gotten much too cozy in my head.
You have no chance, It said. None. You will die in the attempt and another damned human will find themselves with a sudden infestation.
How do you know I’ll die?
I have a lot more knowledge on the matter than you do.
Maybe I’ll surprise you.
I heard talons tapping, reverberating through the confines of my skull. I thought perhaps It would ignore me, as it did on occasion when it felt I’d been impertinent. But then It exhaled a gusty sigh and said, as though slapping down a trump card, You’d have to go to Hell.