Demon Inside

“M’lady! Mr. Dante!”

Someone lifted her from the ground. She was too tired to help, too cold to care. Her arm felt like it was on fire.

One of the brothers held her, she wasn’t sure which one. She managed to look over his arm and saw Maleficarum holding Spud, moving quickly toward the gate just ahead of the sea of snakes.

When she opened her eyes again they were on the sidewalk opposite the park, standing just outside a high chain-link fence. Behind the fence lurked the hospital, gray and silent like a moldering ghost.

Semiopaque plastic bulged and receded in the empty holes where windows had been, moved by the wind. To Megan it looked horrible, the erratic beats of a dying heart.

Automatically she looked for Greyson, but saw the snakes first. They were still advancing, but more slowly now, as if they just wanted to urge her into the hospital. Like they were waiting for her to go in.

Maleficarum set Spud on the pavement against the fence and grabbed the links in his bare hands. They popped like cheap buttons, opening a jagged hole. Metal scratched her cheek as Malleus carried her through, but she couldn’t be bothered to even lift her hand to the wound. Where were Greyson and Nick? Where the hell was Roc?

The first question, at least, was answered a moment later. The two demons stumbled through the hole, their arms around each other. She couldn’t see them well; even with the white sky above it seemed dark here, on the land she now owned part of. Like all the light was absorbed somehow, all the warmth and joy sucked away by the building looming over them.

She saw them well enough to know something was wrong, though, and when they stepped closer to her she realized what it was. For the second time in a week Greyson had been shot, at least once—in the leg, she thought, from the limp—but as she looked more closely, squinting in an attempt to focus better, she noticed part of his ear seemed to be missing. The bullet must have passed only centimeters from his head. The thought made her knees weak. If she’d been standing she probably would have fallen.

As it was she caught only a glimpse of him before Malleus carried her farther away, stopping on the crumbing steps of the hospital building. Wind swirled and eddied around them, lifting Megan’s hair and snapping the heavy corrugated paper of a torn cement bag to their right. She’d been wrong in thinking the hospital was like a ghost. She was the ghost, intruding on a world that had nothing to do with her, a world she should have left behind ages ago.

Her legs were steady enough beneath her when Malleus set her down just in front of the empty door frames. Once the doors had been etched glass, with TRUBANK MENTAL HEALTH CENTER printed in block script on each panel. Once the atrium had been painted an institutional pale green and filled with modular furniture and plants to take away the ache of that soulless color, and the light had poured in across terrazzo floors.

Now their feet crunched on litter and broken glass as they picked their way through. It smelled in there, like dead things and mold and rotten food, mixed with the fainter, more lingering fragrance of despair. The misery this building had absorbed! The walls still fairly throbbed with it. She could feel them close around her, like dogs sniffing out which hand held the treat.

But there was no hand to choose. She was the treat, and it wasn’t just the building that waited for her to feed it but something inside. Maybe more than one thing. Ktana Leyak could very well be here already. The entire room seemed to sigh when she walked farther into it.

Off to her right were the remains of the reception desk, broken and jagged. It had been bolted down, which was probably the only reason it hadn’t disappeared completely, along with the other furniture. A few disintegrating boxes littered the floor, along with some animal bones and piles of lint and cardboard that could only be rodent nests. That was another smell in the air, one she hadn’t identified until then. Droppings. She sneezed. Just that small movement sent fresh pain shooting down her arm.

A loud sniffle made her turn around. Maleficarum, shaking his head, wiping his eyes.

“Spud,” she said, ashamed of herself for not having asked already. “Is he—”

“He’ll be all right, m’lady,” Maleficarum said. His voice sounded strangled and lost in the empty space around them. “He’s tough, he is. But you—you been shot, and Mr. Dante, and Mr. Showtin…” He covered his face with his beefy right palm, and after a moment of surprise—Spud was usually the emotional one—Megan went to him and took his left hand. Even now they were separated by rank, but the touch meant more to him for that and she knew it.

Greyson cleared his throat. “Meg, we need to get that bullet out of your arm.”

To their left rose the wide, sweeping staircase leading to the second floor. Above that were only fire stairs, horrible dark shafts at the corners of the building. But this stairway was for show, this stairway was meant to reassure those leaving family members in the care of medical staff that Trubank was a nice place, a healing place, instead of the bowels of the Accuser.

Greyson slipped her coat off her shoulders and sat down, pulling her carefully to sit on his left thigh with his left arm tight around her waist. His damaged ear wasn’t far from her face; she refused to look at it, focusing instead on his eyes, his lips moving, telling her what she didn’t want to hear, about holding out her arm and it would only hurt for a minute.

Nick squatted in front of Greyson and took her hand. “Squeeze as tight as you want, Megan, you won’t hurt me.”

“Hold on a minute, guys, I don’t think this is really necessary,” she started, but it was too late. Greyson squeezed her so hard she almost couldn’t breathe, and Nick pulled her arm taut while Malleus produced a long silver pair of tweezers from somewhere on his person and plunged them into the wound in her arm.

She didn’t want to scream but screamed anyway. Her fingers ached from squeezing Nick’s hand with her left, Greyson’s with her right, while she buried her face in Greyson’s chest and cried, and begged him to stop. Deep below the pain was shame, the knowledge that she should be braver than this, should be stronger than this, but somehow the fear of what was to come made it all so much worse. It felt like Malleus was trying to remove her actual bone, like somehow the tweezers could grow and bend and tug out her demon heart as well.

As abruptly as the pain had started, it ended. Fresh blood spilled down her forearm to her hand, still held in Nick’s, and covered both of them as though they were being hand-fasted.

Malleus showed her his palm, where three bloodied bits of metal lay among the calluses. No wonder it felt like he was trying to dig out her intestines through her arm. Apparently the bullet had shattered when it hit her bone.

She wanted to laugh. It was the adrenaline, she guessed, buzzing through her body, shooting like champagne straight to her head. Now it was over she felt like she could fly, and while it lasted she wanted to savor it.

Instead she ended up wandering around the ghost town of the lobby while Malleus took care of Greyson and Nick. Both men cursed and gritted their teeth manfully; she felt their eyes on her and tried to pretend she didn’t find it amusing, although she suspected they were hamming it up for her. She’d seen Greyson take much worse pain without being quite so noisy, and she had the distinct feeling that Nick was just as tough if not even tougher. But she appreciated it just the same. For a minute—right around the time Greyson moaned, “By the fiery gates of Hell!”—she was even able to forget where they really were and why, and imagine they were on some sort of crazy Halloween dare.

Too bad the jokes, like the adrenaline rush, couldn’t last. By the time they were finished her hands were shaking and her fear was flooding back. She needed something hidden in this place, and it wasn’t just Ktana Leyak threatening her. It was this building, this place, the memories of the unhappy teenager she’d been, the nightmarish, vague recollections of her time spent here while the Accuser shared her body.