Poe (41 page)

“You said
pee
,” says Amelia, covering a giggle with her hand.

Elizabeth quietly mouths
thank you
, and then gently opens the door to go sit next to her daughter. Or at least her daughter’s body possessed by the spirit of a dead Russian woman with a penchant for knives and conjuring demons.

Something I plan on rectifying as soon as the night shift starts.

A couple of hours after I call Nachiel, he shows up. Somehow he’s managed to snag some surgical scrubs himself, along with a white lab coat and a fake ID with his picture clipped to his front pocket. Of course he didn’t bother to knock before entering the closet-sized break room, which somehow accommodates a twin-sized bed that the real doctors use to sleep between shifts. I finally managed to get a couple hours myself—deep, beautifully unconscious sleep.

“Did you find Bunky?”

“Just so we’re clear,” he says, unzipping a duffel bag and tossing a Coke and a Snickers in my general direction, “I’m only here to make sure you don’t make things worse. But I take no responsibility for what happens to Lisa tonight.”

That means he did.

“Nice to see you, too,” I say, cracking open the Coke and taking a deep sip. “Thanks for bringing dinner. Very thoughtful.”

Nachiel glares at me, locks the door, and props a folding chair under the knob—I guess he
really
doesn’t want someone walking in inadvertently. He sits down sullenly while I peel off the wrapper of the candy bar and take a bite. It’s the first thing I’ve eaten in I don’t know how many days, and for a moment I just bask in my caffeinated sugar high.

“So what’s next?” I mumble through the caramel.

“I don’t know. You’re the man with the plan. Why don’t
you
tell
me
?”

“Oh come on. Don’t pretend you haven’t done this whole exorcism thing before.”

“You’re right.
I
have done this before.”

Oh dear Lord, I feel a lecture coming on.

“To start with, I can’t remember
anyone
in the
entire
history of your family who has ever done anything as idiotic as
invite
an evil spirit to possess the body of someone they love…”

I was so right about the lecture. I wonder if the ring has given me some psychic mind-reading side benefits.

“… with the
asinine
idea that they would then be able to successfully exorcise that spirit—”

“Okay!” I interrupt. “Okay, I
get
it. My bad. So given this terrible situation I’ve created, what would you recommend we do next?
Tell
me.”

Nachiel fumes, but unfortunately for him I’m the one who can command spirits. He pulls an assortment of items from the duffel bag, some of which I recognize and others I don’t. There’s a vial with leaves, a small stone mortar and pestle, Bunky,
The Book of Seraphs
, a long white candle, a cigarette lighter, and a large container of salt. Finally he slowly pulls out a very ominous-looking needle containing clear liquid of some sort.

“Is all this really necessary?” I ask.

“Make yourself useful and grind the leaves,” he says in a tone that doesn’t leave much room for discussion. I reach out for the mortar and uncork the vial, then make the mistake of taking a whiff—the leaves are beyond rancid; they smell like a skunk that just crawled out of a sewage tank.

“Are you serious?”

“Do I
look
like I’m serious?” He pulls off poor Bunky’s head without even a hint of remorse and removes the rolled pages.

“Yes,” I say, reluctantly pulling out a leaf with the tips of my fingertips, “you look like you’re serious.” So whether this is really necessary, or I’m just being punished, I crush the leaves with the pestle, creating a fine granular ash and a pungent vapor that would probably stop the heart of a fully grown elephant.

“The fact is we don’t know what we’re dealing with here—which side Poe’s operating from. The exorcism to release a good spirit is
completely
different from the one used to exorcise a negative one.”

“Well, she seemed—”

“Seemed isn’t good enough.
Seemed
will take your ten percent chance of getting Lisa back alive down to zero. You think someone who spent the last hundred years in hell is going to tell you the truth?”

“Well when you put it that way—”

“We have to
know
,” says Nachiel. He picks up the lethal-looking needle and points it at me. “Which means
you
can’t get squeamish at the last minute.”

“You’re not sticking me with that.”

“You’re right.
You’re
sticking
Lisa
with it.”

I smile until I realize he isn’t kidding. “What is that? Some kind of truth serum? I thought those were bunk.”

“Nope. Epinephrine. You need to inject it right into her heart.”

A thought that makes mine skip a beat. “Wouldn’t that be… dangerous?” What if I miss and hit her kidney? I’m starting to think that maybe it wouldn’t be
too
awful letting Poe stay. Maybe she and Lisa could work out some kind equitable body time-share.

“Define dangerous,” says Nachiel, leaning back in the chair. “Dangerous to
me
is inviting an evil spirit to possess someone I
care
about—”

“I
know
,” I say, holding up my hand. “Okay? I heard you the first time. I’m just wondering why.”

“Her body is heavily sedated, and we need to jolt it suddenly into consciousness without giving Poe time to think. Once she’s awake I’ll be able to tell whether she’s for real, or if she’s still reporting to Sorath.”

“All I’m saying is that this seems a little extreme.”

“
Extreme
,” says Nachiel, leaning forward and taking the mortar and pestle from me. He taps the crushed leaves into one of the vials. “You haven’t even
seen
extreme yet. But you will. You will.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: A HARD TRADE

I
t’s late. the hospital is deathly quiet, and we pass unnoticed through the hallways with relative ease until we get to the sixth floor, Lisa’s floor. As we step out of the elevator, a thin and very intimidating nurse sitting behind a desk watches us closely. Her gray hair is pulled back so tight it actually stretches the skin on her cheeks, and I can feel her scanning Nachiel’s fake ID. Her eyebrows furrow slightly at the surgical mask I swiped from the break room. But just as she’s about to push a button on the phone, something starts beeping down the hall in the opposite direction, and she has to jump up to investigate.

“Did you do that?” I whisper from behind my mask.

Nachiel pointedly ignores me. We are apparently past the lecture phase and have moved on to the passive-aggressive silent-treatment phase.

I sneeze, causing another nurse to glance up as we pass her in the hallway. The mask makes my nose itch, but without it I’m way too easy to recognize—morgue guy with the mysteriously anemic girlfriend. I give her what I hope passes for a professional surgeon’s nod.

“You know, I was thinking,” I say quietly to Nachiel’s impenetrable wall of silence. “I’d feel a whole lot better about stabbing Lisa in the heart with a needle if we got a second opinion. Are there any other spirits I can call? Maybe a recently deceased pulmonary surgeon?”

Nachiel glares at me.

“Just to make sure we’re, you know, headed in the right direction with this. Not that I’m questioning your obvious exorcism experience.”

“You don’t just call spirits whenever you want.”

“I think—”

“And you’d
know
that if you’d been
paying attention. You
see more, but more sees
you
, too. But if you want to shoot a flare gun into the spirit world announcing your location at the present moment, be my guest.”

Oh yeah, I’d forgotten that part.

“I know what I’m doing,” says Nachiel tersely. “So just
shut up
and do exactly what I tell you.”

I’m wondering what Nachiel’s definition of “good spirit” is; he’s starting to get a little totalitarian. But as we slip into Lisa’s hospital room, I don’t care, because there she is—or there she is
almost
. In body if not soul. Her heart’s hooked up to a monitor, and there’s an IV with clear fluid connected to her right arm, but otherwise she looks remarkably healthy, like she might wake up at any moment and start deriding my taste in music.

Nachiel quickly starts to pull out his exorcism gear, dropping it onto a beige metal rolling table. “Pull the curtain.”

I do, cutting us off from view of any nurse who might pop open the door. Probably a good precaution, since the candle Nachiel lights is definitely against hospital rules; he places it right in front of a sign that says
OXYGEN IN USE. NO SMOKING. NO MATCHES. NO OPEN FLAME WITHIN 50 FEET.

“Is that a good idea?”

Nachiel pointedly ignores me and briskly takes out the container of salt and pours it in a circular line around Lisa’s gurney, until he’s encircled it completely.

“Do I want to know why?”

Finally he glances in my direction. “Prevents any interference. If we have to perform the exorcism, then we don’t want some other demon jumping in.”

I neatly step on the inside of the line myself. No sense taking chances.

Next Nachiel pulls out the ground ash. He takes a pinch and then smudges a line across Lisa’s forehead with his thumb. Her nose twitches, but otherwise there’s no sign of consciousness. He flips through
The Book of Seraphs
, chooses a page, and leaves the book open to it. Then, somewhat more gingerly, he picks up the
Fiend
pages and places them neatly on the table next to the flickering candle.

“God, I hate even touching these,” he says quietly.

Carefully he turns the delicate pages over until he finds the one he’s looking for. He gently places it on the table as well, moving a small electric clock over it to act as a paperweight.

“Okay,” says Nachiel, wiping a hand across his forehead, which is lightly beaded with sweat. “You’re going to have to pull the electrodes off carefully and put them on your chest; otherwise, we’ll have a bunch of nurses running in with a crash cart. Her heart rate is going to spike when you inject her.”

“Right,” I say.

Nachiel looks at me expectantly.

“
Right
,” I say with a sigh. I glance over my shoulder; the old woman is mumbling something unintelligible in her sleep, and the teenage girl is safely in her vegetative coma. I suddenly recognize her—I saw her at the crosswalk on Ocean and Main, looking cold and alone. But that has to be random. A coincidence.

“Dimitri?”

“Right,” I say again. More pressing business to take care of.

I pull off the top of my scrub and take a deep breath. I slip my hand down the front of Lisa’s hospital gown—
God
, her skin is soft (
Don’t think about it; not the time or place to get distracted
)—and just as her heart pauses between beats, I quickly rip an electrode off her chest and place it on mine without setting off a single alarm. One down, three more to go.

I take another deep breath and quickly remove the rest of the electrodes from Lisa’s chest. There’s one small blip on the last one,
but not enough to create an alarm. For a moment I watch the electric signature of my own even heartbeat.

“Not bad,” says Nachiel. He reaches into his duffel bag and pulls out the needle. It’s gotten longer since the last time I saw it. I swallow hard.

“Just jab hard with one hand, like this,” he says, making a stabbing motion, “and then press the epinephrine in.”

I ridiculously practice a few times, like I’m a baseball player out on the field swinging the bat at warm-up. Although maybe that’s not the best analogy, because I never was good at baseball. Whenever I actually hit the damn thing, it would shoot straight up over my head and then land somewhere behind me with a sad plop.

“There is no way in
hell
this can possibly work,” I say desperately.

“Keep your hand firm; don’t use the wrist. You just want to jab, but if you twist, you’ll rip—”

“No talking about ripping, please.” A droplet of sweat trickles down my back. “I’m nervous enough as it is. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“
Okay
,” I whisper. Feeling as prepared as someone without any medical training, not even a basic CPR course, can, I gently tug at the top of Lisa’s hospital gown, lowering it enough to get a direct hit into her upper chest without revealing anything rated
R
. I try to recall my basic anatomy course, looking for which side the heart is on. Little to the right? Left?

“Here,” says Nachiel, gently touching Lisa’s skin just to the left of her breastbone where a mole I’m fond of marks her.

“Hey! Hands off my girl.”

“I’m just trying to show you—”

“Well consider me shown,” I say irritably.

“
Okay
. Now you want one smooth motion.”