Embers (26 page)

“And when I’m through with you, when I’ve used up every last bit of blood and bone,
every shred of sensation. . . I’m going to feed you to Sirrush. I’m sure he’ll look kindly on
such a gift—and give me a fine place in his new order.”

The darkness washed over her like the cloak of night, a night with no stars.

Anya awoke, gasping. She bolted upright in bed, knocking Sparky over and flinging his Gloworm to the floor.

She pressed her hands to her burnt chest and tried to steady her heart pounding behind her ribs. Sparky crawled into her lap and licked her face with his warm tongue. Anya put her arms around him and sobbed. The sobs racked her chest so hard she felt her skin split and blisters break. Sparky wound around her tightly, resting his head in the crook of her neck.

She reached down to grab his Gloworm, which had rolled underneath the bed. Wearing Sparky like a stole, she leaned down at an awkward angle, reaching farther under the bed for Sparky’s toy. Something hot scraped across her fingers.

She snatched her hand back, skin crawling. Slowly, deliberately, she climbed out of bed, put one foot on the floor and then the other. She bent to peer underneath the bed. She could see the Gloworm, its smiling face looking toward her. Steeling herself, she reached into the darkness. . .

And the darkness reached back. The darkness wrapped around her wrist as surely as it had in her dream, dragging her under the bed. Anya wrested her arm back.

Sparky, teeth gnashing, dove underneath the bed.

Anya kicked the futon. The frame bounced against the wall, scraping against the hardwood floor. She kicked it again, and it bounced against the opposite wall, exposing the darkness beneath the bed.

But there was only Sparky, hunched over his toy, growling at the air.

“Mimi.” Anya stood, turning on her heel. “Mimi, get the fuck out of here.”

“I’m quite comfortable here, thank you.”

It took Anya a moment to realize that Mimi had answered in her own voice. Anya clapped her hand over her mouth. The bitch had seized control of her voice, and was manipulating her waking reality. Anya dreaded imagining what else Mimi was capable of.

She glanced at her bedside clock, which read three thirty-five. Oddly, the date on the digital clock was wrong. It should be Saturday morning. . . but the clock read SUN. Anya squinted at it, rubbed her eyes. She flipped open her cell phone, confirmed that it was indeed Sunday.

The tiny scrap of dream controlled by Mimi had ballooned, had taken over. She’d been asleep for twenty-four hours.

Only then did she glance down at herself. Her forearms were scratched and bleeding. Underneath her fingernails, she could see bits of her own skin from where she’d clawed at herself in her sleep. . . perhaps struggling with Mimi, or with herself.

This had to stop. She’d been lucky Mimi hadn’t mustered up enough volition to force Anya to scrape her own eyes out.

She picked up the phone and punched the buttons with a finger that shook.

“Hey, Katie. It’s Anya. Can. . . can I come over?”

Katie opened the door, took a step back. It was as if a draft struck her, and she blinked. She looked like a character from a Regency romance, loose Pre-Raphaelite hair flowing over her ruffled, organic cotton nightgown. She was just missing a candlestick in one hand and a crush on a guy with a name like Heathcliff.

Anya stood on Katie’s doorstep, her hands jammed in her pockets. She was certain that she looked a mess: hair wild over her shoulders, dressed in jeans, an old T-shirt, and a salamander draped around her shoulders, sucking his tail.

“I’m really sorry to bother you.”

“Come in and sit down.” She pulled back the screen door, ushering Anya in without touching her. Her bare feet curled against the concrete step.

Though the living room lamps were lit, Katie turned on the overhead light, and the kitchen light. She lit all the candles on the coffee table before she turned her full attention to Anya. Anya sat on the couch, her arms around her elbows, tangled in her jacket and Sparky. The cats were nowhere to be seen.

“You said on the phone that you were seeing things, hearing voices.”

“Yeah. I think that I screwed up the exorcism of the girl, Chloe. . . I think the demon’s attached itself to me.”

“What makes you think that?” Katie perched at the opposite end of the couch. She was treating Anya as she would any other client, like any good investigator.

“I’ve had an incident of automatic writing. I hear the demon’s voice—its name is Mimiveh, by the way—in my head. It’s taken control of my voice on a number of occasions. It was in my dreams again last night, and I felt like it was manifesting under the bed. And. . . I slept through a full twenty-four hours, though it felt like just two. And Mimi’s starting to leave marks.” Anya rolled up her sleeve to show Katie the scratches.

“What have you done about it so far?”

Anya’s mouth quirked upward. “I took communion.”

Katie lifted her eyebrows. “Wow. This
is
serious.”

Anya shrugged. “Yeah, well. Any port in a storm, and all that.”

“Let me take a look.” Katie closed her eyes, brushed her hand in an outline around Anya’s aura. Her hands stilled above Anya’s chest, and she withdrew them.

“Well?” Anya asked, dreading the answer.

Katie rubbed her hands, as if trying to brush some invisible dirt away. “You’ve got problems.”

“How big?”

“Elephantine.” Katie frowned. “The demon’s anchored itself in your aura, feeding off of it. I recognize some of the elements of it from when it was in Chloe. . . the way it moves, the way it vibrates. But your aura is much stronger than hers, and it’s become much, much more powerful.”

“I thought most possession cases required the victim to open some sort of door to the demon.”

“My best guess is there was something about your emotional state that made you vulnerable. You might just have been having a shitty day. That and the effort to try and devour the demon might have given it a foothold.”

“How do I get rid of it?”

Katie shook her head. “I’ve never seen a demon of this magnitude before. I’m going to have to figure something out with Ciro. This is his area.”

“Ciro’s sick. He’s got enough to worry about.” Bothering Katie was bad enough. Bugging Ciro after she’d given DAGR the metaphorical finger wasn’t good form.

“And so are you.” Katie’s voluptuous mouth pressed into a thin slash. “This isn’t something you can play around with. This demon is stronger than your power. I know you’ve never run across this before, but you can’t take this lightly.”

“I’m running into a lot of things more powerful than me lately. It’s a great lesson in humility.” She told Katie the Cliffs Notes version of her adventures with Drake Ferrer, omitting the kiss and the irresistible pull she felt toward him. “Can’t you tranquilize this thing for a while?”

“Anya, you know this is serious. Why else would you be here in the middle of the night?”

The guilt barb hit home. Anya hung her head. “Look, nailing Drake Ferrer is my top priority. This thing with the demon is secondary.”

“‘Nailing Drake Ferrer’?” Katie gave her an arch glance.

Anya shook her head. “Mimi—that’s what I’ve been calling the demon—is attracted to him.”

“And you’re not?”

“Not enough to act on it.” She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “I think. I don’t know.” She peeked over the tops of her fingers. “Okay, you’re right. I’m fucked up.”

“You are.” Katie nodded sagely. “Acknowledging that you’re fucked up is the first step toward sanity.”

Anya felt like a drug addict begging for pills. “But don’t you have something that can get me through today. . .?”

Katie rolled her eyes. “Hang on. I’ll see what I have.” She climbed off the couch and headed down the hallway. Anya noticed that she turned all the lights on as she went. The demon Anya was incubating must truly be a badass, she mused.

Sparky lifted his head. His tail was gooey with salamander spit, and his eyes brimmed with anxiety. Anya stroked the divot in his skull between his eyes. He jammed his head into her armpit, sighing. She held him like he was a child, rocking him, wishing that she could do more to reassure him. “It’s gonna be okay. I’m not going to leave you.”

Katie returned, holding something behind her back. “This is your spiritual Band-Aid.”

Anya reached toward her.

Katie danced away. “Ah-ah. You can’t have it until you agree to my conditions.”

“Mercenary witch. What are your conditions?”

Katie lifted a finger. “You can’t sleep alone.”

Anya blinked. “Excuse me?”

“If Mimi has enough control over you to exercise volition while you sleep. . . you could wake up next time someplace you might not want to be, with no recollection of how you got there.”

Anya frowned. Mimi seemed just sadistic enough to make her perform a striptease at the sex offender registration desk at the sheriff’s office. Reluctantly, she caved. “Okay.”

Katie continued to wag her finger before Anya’s nose. “You have to follow my instructions and Ciro’s instructions. Witch’s orders. Or else you’re grounded.”

“Yes, mama witch. Now, what’s in the box?”

Katie showed her a jar with a flourish. It was about the size of a chip-dip jar, labeled GINO’S GARLIC BUTTER.

“You’re going to feed me?” Anya brightened.

“No. It’s bespelled garlic butter. Use it as an ointment. Apply liberally to the affected area, twice a day. In your case, I’d slather it all over.”

Anya’s nose wrinkled. “I thought you were a modern witch. That sounds medieval.”

“Tough noogies. Sometimes the old ways are the best.” She handed the jar to Anya.

“That’s a very commercial-looking label.” Anya was suspicious. “I thought you said it was bespelled?”

“Excuuuuuuse me for not dragging out my velvet robe and silver athame for this procedure. I assure you, it’s quite blessed.”

“Blessed by who?”

“It doesn’t really matter under what system of belief it was blessed. Despite what Jules thinks, a spell is a ritual of directed intent. It’s a wish, united with imagination, to manifest a change in physical reality. A spell is a spell, whether it’s conducted by a priest at mass or a witch in her kitchen.”

“I don’t think Jules believes he’s a magician when he’s quoting 1 John 4:4 and chasing a demon with a water pistol full of holy water.”

“Maybe that’s part of the problem why his techniques aren’t working as well as they used to.” Katie pursed her lips. “I mean, evil seems to be gaining more and more of a toehold here every day, and we’re being challenged to increase our commitment and our imagination to fight it.”

Anya was silent for a moment, digesting. “So. . . who bespelled the garlic butter?”

“I did, just now. And it’s been blessed by the rabbi at the end of the kosher assembly line that made it.”

Anya read the jar label. It was, indeed, kosher. She opened it and flinched. “Ugh. It smells like roadkill.”

“You’re overly sensitive to the odor because you have a demonic hitchhiker.”

“Riiiiiight.”

“C’mon and get buttered up with garlic love.” Katie pursed her lips. “And look at the bright side. . . it’ll keep Mimi from successfully hitting on Drake Ferrer.”

The only things in danger of hitting on Anya were the bomb-sniffing dogs at fire headquarters Monday morning.

Anya slunk across the lobby, attempting to make it to the back stair without running into anyone she knew. She hated to admit it, but the blessed garlic butter had seemed to calm Mimi down. The demon hadn’t uttered a peep since she’d slathered it on. She could feel the demon curled tightly in a ball in the pit of her stomach, but Mimi wasn’t moving. Perhaps it was simply disgust. Or Mimi had been up too late and decided to take a nap.

Anya had the ill fortune to cross the path of two massive Labrador retrievers in the HQ

lobby. Their handler lost control of them the instant they caught the smell of garlic butter. The dogs ripped their harnesses away from their handler, their claws scraping across the black-and-white tile floors.

Anya looked over her shoulder in terror as the dogs plowed into her. Snouts slobbered in her hair and her collar, paws climbing all over her. Instinctively, she curled into a ball and covered her face. But the dogs were determined: they drooled on her face, licked every last speck of makeup and garlic butter from her face and neck before the handler dragged them off. Sparky squirmed around her neck in disgust.

“Are you all right?” the handler shouted at her, wrestling with more than two hundred pounds of determined dog.

Anya picked herself up off the floor. “I’m good.”

The handler looked sidelong at her, then reached for his firearm around the leashes.

“Ma’am, keep your hands in view, please.”

Great. He thought she was carrying explosives. He shouted for the security guard at the station, who approached with his hand on his gun belt.

She lifted her hands. “Can I get my badge?”

He nodded. “Slowly.”

She pulled her badge out of her jacket pocket and flipped it open. The handler nodded.

“Sorry about that. I know that you wouldn’t believe that these guys passed their training, but. . .” Only then did he get downwind of the garlic. “Ah. You smell like my wife’s lasagna. The dogs go berserk over lasagna night.”

The guard wrinkled his nose. “I think she smells more like bruschetta.”

Anya smiled weakly. “Can I go now?”

“Have a nice day, ma’am.”

Anya slunk to the stairwell door and clattered down the steps to her office. She ignored the phone messages from the press and punched in the dispatch number to patch her into the radios at the apartment fire site. DFD hadn’t released the scene yet. As long as at least one firefighter remained at the location, DFD could claim total dominion over the damage area. They could control who came, who left. . . and detain anyone who trespassed.

“Hey, this is Lieutenant Kalinczyk. Can you post at least two DFD uniforms there for the next forty-eight hours?”

The scene commander’s voice crackled back. “We’re ready to clear out as soon as the gas company finishes up capping the pipes. What gives?”