Embers (14 page)

“Let me guess.” Brian lifted his finger. “Bored teenage girl buys a Ouija board, summons up an uninvited guest. Parents are pissed at having a boarder that’s moving their shit around, drinking their beer, and bumping around in the night. That about sum it up?”

Jules nodded. “Well, that’s how it started. It would have been easy enough to nip in the bud at that stage, but now it’s gotten entirely out of hand. The kid’s pretty close to being involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. Apparently she’s lost all grasp on reality and she’s medicated out of her mind. Mom thinks that she’s being harassed by a demon. Dad thinks she dropped too much ecstasy and isn’t buying any spiritual explanations. Little sister is starting to hear voices. Mom wants this stopped before the little one goes around the bend like big sis.”

Anya flipped through the file. Jules always took meticulous notes and photographs. The house looked like any other suburban house: privacy fence hemming in the small property, two cars in the driveway, toys in the yard. Jules included a picture of Mom, Dad, and Little Sis sitting on the couch. Mom looked like a soccer mom: dark, curly hair pulled back in a ponytail. Dad worked in some environment where he had contact with the public—sales, perhaps. He wore a loosened tie over a dress shirt rolled up at the sleeves. A look of irritation creased his ebony brow. Above the couch, Anya saw framed military photographs, guessed that he’d been a serviceman. Marines, from the look of it.

The littlest girl sat on the floor at her parents’ feet, playing with a sticky Barbie doll. She looked like a shy six-year-old, not looking up at the camera, absorbed in play. Her thick black hair was held back in pigtails and she wore pink pajamas with cartoon cats covering them. She reminded Anya of the little girl from the pop machine. She swallowed hard.

Anya turned the page, finding a picture of the missing member of the family: the oldest daughter. She was captured on film with a sullen expression, sitting in the corner of her room on a beanbag chair. Her room was curiously stripped of the usual objects of the teenage years. . . no posters, books, CDs, or computer. No hard surfaces. Her thin arms were crossed over her T-shirt advertising a popular emo band. Her ears had been pierced several times and Anya guessed that, out of rebellion, she had many more piercings than met the eye. Her hair was caught up in a black head scarf covered with a pattern of winking skulls. The label
Chloe—Age 15
was penciled in at the bottom of the photograph. Not old enough to have the freedom of driving, but old enough to want it badly.

But the look in her eyes was what arrested Anya. She didn’t have the look of a child struggling against parental authority. The look in those sloe eyes was much darker, much older. . . Anya had only seen an expression like that in statues. It looked ancient, unyielding as stone.

“Has she been evaluated by a psychiatrist?” Anya asked.

“Yeah,” Jules said. “The school psychologist gave her a referral. She was initially diagnosed with bipolar disorder—the psychiatrist thought she was doing it for attention. Parents couldn’t get her to take her lithium. She wound up in the hospital after she broke the glass in her window when her parents grounded her. The hospital amended the diagnosis to acute schizophrenia. . . she was hearing enough voices that they had to sedate her. Chloe’s on a nice Haldol/Risperdal cocktail now. The parents are afraid to put her in a mental facility, afraid that something worse would happen.”

Anya’s fingers traced the border of the picture. Chloe was a pretty girl. If she were thrown into a state mental hospital with a bunch of unstable adults, something much worse
would
happen to her.

“She’s cute,” observed Max, holding her photo at arm’s length. “In a faux-goth, mall chick kind of way.”

“Down, boy,” Jules growled. “No hitting on the subjects. Ever.”

“Has she been violent to herself or other people?” Katie asked.

“So far she’s just been busting up inanimate objects. Her parents boarded up the window in her room and lock her in at night. They say she paces all night long, like a caged animal. She’s more subdued in the mornings. She won’t eat, won’t sleep.”

“Does she say anything? Anything coherent?” With cases like this, it could be a toss-up. The victim could be raving nonsense or she could be incredibly lucid, speaking treatises in another language. Sometimes clues about the entity haunting the victim could be gleaned from what the victim said, or didn’t.

“She’s threatening to burn the house down.”

Anya pressed her hand to her forehead. “Can I just have
one
night without someone obsessing about burning shit? Please?”

“This is Detroit, baby.” Max lounged back in his chair, put his feet on the table. “We’ve got a rep to uphold.” Jules whacked him on the back of the head and the boy’s feet landed quickly on the floor.

Anya made a face at him. “So what’s the game plan, Jules?”

“Chloe doesn’t know we’re coming. We get Mom and the little girl out of the house; Dad’s out of town at a sales meeting. If the demon gets loose, we don’t want it glomming on to the little girl. We try to drive the demon out of the older girl.”

Katie frowned, fidgeting with her bracelets. “Ciro usually does that part.”

“Ciro’s out of commission, so the containment ritual’s up to you. Max and I will restrain the kid, if necessary. Brian’s on tech. Anya. . .” He looked directly at her. “It’ll be up to Anya to eat the demon.”

Anya stared down at her hands. Spirits were relatively easy to consume; they went down like a cold beer on a summer afternoon, with a sting that faded quickly. Demons could be trickier; they tended to be more powerful, had sharper volition, and could put up a bigger fight. But Anya never felt guilty about swallowing a demon. Demons had never been human, and she didn’t feel the ethical conflict she did when she devoured a ghost. A demon was pure evil and the response was simple. Black-and-white. Destroy it before it destroys someone else.

But the simplicity of the task didn’t make it any easier. Eating a demon was like drinking straight bleach. Anya had only done it three times before. Each time had left her ill enough to clean the local pharmacy out of heartburn medications.

Katie’s hand brushed her back soothingly. “I’ll clear your aura afterward. Promise.”

Anya looked down at Chloe’s photo, resigned. Whatever bad taste the demon might leave in her mouth, what the girl was experiencing was far, far worse. She couldn’t imagine the terrible feeling of having another creature under her skin, controlling her movements like a puppeteer. She knew that other mediums did it, but she could never bring herself to.

She smothered a shudder. Yes, that would be far, far worse. But she still felt a tiny seed of resentment at being the only person who could help. She felt guilted into it, with Ciro laid up in bed upstairs, and she’d promised Brian to go out with DAGR tonight, but. . .

Her fist clenched under the table. They needed her far more than she needed them. But she couldn’t walk away from her role in this. Jules was the leader. Katie was the witch. Max was the gofer. Brian was the tech wizard. Her role was inescapable: to bat cleanup, to be the garbage disposal for lost souls.

It would take Herculean effort for a mother to leave her child in the hands of strangers. Anya could see the struggle on Chloe’s mother’s face as she loaded her smallest daughter into the back of her SUV, then stared back at the house.

Chloe’s mother crossed the yard to speak with Jules. “She’s in her bedroom. The key to her door’s on the kitchen table.”

Jules nodded reassuringly. “We’ll call you right after we finish.”

“Call me on my cell. My husband doesn’t know that you’re here. . . but something needs to be done.”

“We will.”

The mother stepped back to the SUV, wiping her nose with the back of her hand as she pulled out of the driveway. Two bumper stickers on the back of the car proclaimed that her girls were honor-roll students.

Anya stood in the yard with Max, Brian, Jules, and Katie. Night had fallen thickly over the neighborhood. Chloe’s mother had left every light in the house on, as if the light would frighten away the interloper in their midst. Anya knew better. Demons could always find a scrap of darkness to cling to: whether in the back corner of a closet, under the eaves, or in the stain on a heart. They always knew how to find it, nurture it, and make it grow. Despite the mother’s best efforts to bring light to the house, it still seemed the most shadowed home on the block, the entrance obscured by thick hedges.

Jules opened the front door. The living room was lit by floor lamps, showcasing a precisely neat house, always prepared for company. No photographs or pictures hung on the vanilla walls. Even the magazines on the coffee table were arranged with the corners flush to the edge of the table. The carpet bore vacuum tracks. Beyond, in the kitchen, no dirty dishes were left in the sink. The kitchen table, tile, and floors were spotless, the stainless-steel refrigerator and stove wiped clean of fingerprints.

Anya wondered how a mother this tidy dealt with the disorder of her daughter’s condition. Probably not very well.

Anya felt the familiar warmth around her neck as Sparky shook himself awake. He glided to the floor, taking on his fearsome hellbender shape. He sniffed the air. Anya could smell nothing other than disinfectant and some insipid cherry plug-in air freshener, but she suspected that Sparky could sense far more.

“Is
it
here?” Jules demanded.

Anya blinked. “I don’t feel the demon just yet—”

“Not the demon. Your. . . pet.” Anya could see the sweat prickling over his tattoo. Jules must have sensed the change in temperature indicating Sparky’s appearance.

Anya bristled. “Sparky’s here, yeah.”

“Is it really necessary to have
it
here?” Jules’s eyes moved back and forth, not registering the invisible presence he knew was there.

Anya hated when Jules called Sparky
it
. Sparky waddled over to Jules and growled.

“You want me to work this case?” Anya parked her hands on her hips, glaring up at Jules.

“Where I go, he goes. Period.” She dared him to kick her off the team. Part of her had been spoiling for this fight, so she egged him on. “I’m here because you can’t drive these ghosts and demons out yourself.” She lifted her chin, challenging him. “You want me gone? Fine. But you’d better be prepared to take out your own trash, all by yourself.”

The truth was as effective as a slap. Anya waited, staring Jules full in the face as he weighed Chloe’s life against his principles, against pragmatism. When he spoke again, his voice was cold and quiet.

“Let’s get set up,” Jules ordered.

Katie opened a patchwork bag and set her tools out on the kitchen table: a jar of coarse sea salt, a crystal bell, an atomizer of salt water, and a bundle of sage. She lit the sage bundle on the family’s spotless stove, breathed on it to nurture the ember. Meanwhile, Max opened the windows and closet doors. Brian plugged in voice recorders and tested his video camera. Jules set an ominous black duffel bag down on the couch. It clinked when he opened it and Anya saw him surreptitiously tuck a pair of handcuffs into his belt.

Jesus. She hoped this wouldn’t be that bad.

Katie began in the living room. Walking counterclockwise through the rooms of the house, she cast handfuls of salt in the corners and blew sage smoke in every closet and cabinet. She uttered a house blessing in her small, clear voice: “Let darkness leave and brightness remain. Bless this house and all who live within. So shall it be.”

Max dutifully followed behind her with the atomizer of salt water, spritzing the drapes. He held the bell solemnly in his other fist, ringing it as he walked. Anya could tell, now that he was given something to do, he was trying very hard to get it right. The crystalline voice of the bell seemed muffled in this close space. These things were meant to purify, to drive negativity out the open doors and windows. But even Anya could feel the energy sticking here, thick as molasses. Sparky’s gills curled, and he wound closely around Anya’s feet, on high alert.

Something thumped down the hall, loud as a gunshot against the hollow interior doors. Katie ignored the sound, continuing to cast salt on the spotless floor of the kitchen. The lights flickered, dimmed.

A voice rasped from down the hall:
“Mother won’t like you making a mess of the floors.”

Katie didn’t miss a beat. She cast salt down the hallway, blessed the bathroom and the parents’ room. She crossed into the littlest girl’s room, crowded with stuffed animals. Anya noticed that she used extra fistfuls of salt here, under the child’s bed and behind her pink flannel pillow with a pattern of dancing cats on it.

At last, they faced the closed door. Chloe’s room. Jules inserted the key into the brass doorknob, turned it. . .

. . . and all hell broke loose.

The door burst outward with the force of an explosion. Chloe, eyes wild, plowed into the hallway. The girl rocketed into Jules’s arms, knocking him to the floor. Max lunged to grab her legs, but she kicked him in the head, sending him reeling. Brian grabbed one of her flailing arms, and Anya snatched the other. Sparky bit down hard on her hand, and the demon in her howled at the ethereal wound.

By God, the girl was strong. She flailed in Anya’s grip. Anya tried to sit on her chest to keep her still. Jules’s handcuffs glittered in the air above her head; he wasn’t able to make contact with her wrists.

Chloe arched her back and howled:
“You can’t hold me!”

“Wanna bet?” Nose dripping blood on the perfect beige carpet, Max grabbed for her ankles.

Overhead, the hall light went out, plunging the fracas into shadows.

“Get her in here,” Katie shouted, holding the door of the bathroom open. The room was small and windowless; they stood a better chance of controlling her in a small space, where she’d have no room to run.

Arms around her waist, Jules dragged her to the doorway. The girl’s arms and legs spread out to catch the doorframe, like a cat resisting being stuffed in a cage. The girl giggled, spittle dripping from the corner of her mouth. Her pupils had dilated, rendering her eyes black as obsidian. This was bad.