CHAPTER SEVEN

I didn’t have to move far to see Mark Cookson’s body standing just inside the doorway. I say body because the look on his face was all demon. The evil rolled off him in a wave that made my chest tight, but the body was still tall and thin with too much leg showing around the white hospital gown. If I didn’t look at the face, then his body seemed younger than I’d been told, like early teens when boys get their big growth spurt but before the rest of them catches up and fills out. I’d have thought he was in high school, not college, and then I looked at his face again. Whatever was looking out of his face was ancient and evil and happy about it.

“You still in there, Mark?”

“Mark’s not home right now, but leave a message and I’ll be sure and tell him before I take him to Hell with me.” The voice sounded like it needed a chest three times as wide as Mark’s narrow one; it was weird that the voice coming out of the body was more jarring to me than the rest of the possession. You never know what will bother you most until it does.

“The human host doesn’t go back to Hell when we cast you out of him. You know it doesn’t work like that, but Mark doesn’t. You’re talking so he won’t fight to be free of you. You’ve told him that if you go, he goes,” I said, and my voice was calm.

“Stupid cop, you don’t know shit about Hell.”

“I’m a detective with the Metaphysical Coordination Unit, I know a lot about Hell and Heaven. I know you can hear me, Mark; fight free, we can save you.”

“Liar!” the demon roared, and then he stumbled. For a second the expression on the face matched the rest of the body. Mark Cookson was in there and he’d been able to get to the surface for a split second. Paulson was right, Mark was an unwilling weapon. I’d worry how a nineteen-year-old college student got messed up with a demon later, after we’d saved his life. I holstered my gun, because if I wasn’t willing to shoot the body it wasn’t the right tool for this fight.

Charleston and security would be up here as soon as they walked up twenty flights of stairs. All I had to do was stall until backup got there. It was no coincidence that the elevators had stopped. The demons had started getting better at messing with modern technology lately. Proving that you could teach old demons new tricks.

“You put up your gun, does that mean you don’t want to shoot me?” the demon asked in that voice that seemed too deep for Mark Cookson’s body.

“I’d love to shoot you, just give up the boy’s body and let me see the real you.”

“The sight of me unfettered to flesh would drive you mad. I would enjoy watching you gibber and moan while your reality cracked and bled out your ears.”

I glanced around to make a hundred percent certain that no one else had a sight line to the room, just in case the demon changed form. I didn’t want another accident like Gimble because a demon in true form is madness, death, or in rare cases possession.

“I think you’re just some poor errand boy from the nether regions that saw a chance to get inside a little boy. Is that it, you like children?”

“He’s nineteen, old enough to make his own choices and to choose the way he will fall from grace.”

It was funny how even demons didn’t like being accused of being pedophiles, as if that were the lowest rung even in Hell. “But you didn’t deny the errand boy part; you’re hiding behind the boy because your true form isn’t impressive enough to scare anyone.”

The demon reached out to touch the wards. In the movies they sparkle, or fizz, or something even more dramatic, but the only thing I saw was the hand pressing against the air. He pressed against it as if there was something much harder and more solid than the clear air of the doorway. It wasn’t dramatic, it was just solid workmanship. I made a mental note to ask them who did their insta-wards, because you didn’t find magical craftsmanship that solid often.

“You can’t get out,” I said.

“I had to try,” the demon said, shrugging, and the gesture matched the body. I knew that angels could become more humanlike the more they dealt with us, but I’d never thought the same might be true of demons. Angels could begin to adapt to fleshly ways just by being near us; how much more impact would it be if the spiritual entity were actually inside us? Was that why it was rare for a demon to stay in the same host body by its lonesome? If it was a possession of long standing you had hosts of Infernal spirits inside them. One demon at a time was usually quick in and out like an Airbnb; regular possessions were like renting to own except it was almost never just one demon. Long-term leases were group events for demons, because they wanted to trash the “house,” not actually live in it. That one gesture meant either that the demon had been in the body longer than Mark’s family or college noticed, or that this demon had been on possession duty before with other hosts. It wasn’t that he was picking up Mark Cookson’s gestures, but just human gestures in general.

“How long have you been inside Mark?”

“A direct question, really, Detective? As if.” The look on his face was eloquent and a strange mix of the demon’s “personality” and Mark’s, just as the sentence seemed a mix of them both. Was it the boy fighting back or another sign that the demon was contaminated with humanity? Though saying the college student was contaminating the demon sounded backward and made me wonder what habits Mark had already picked up from his Infernal infestation. But I’d worry about that later, after I figured out a way to stop the demon from hurting anyone else without having to kill Mark.

Paulson’s voice answered from a little farther down the hallway. “His parents found him passed out on his old bedroom floor at home. He’d showered but left bloodstained clothes. That’s when they called the ambulance. Does that help you get a timeline?”

“He’s been on academic probation for a semester, so the demon has been in him for about three months, maybe a little longer.”

“Guesses are free,” the demon called out in a singsong voice.

I thought things were going well; all I had to do was keep the demon interested in talking to me until Charleston and the rest of my backup finished climbing up the twenty flights of stairs. The lieutenant was in good shape, he’d be here soon. The demon was contained. I got my phone out and hit the button for Charleston to let him know what he was about to walk into, but I heard a groan, and it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Paulson.

The demon turned its head and looked to the side of the room I couldn’t see. “Oh, you’re not dead yet, my bad,” the demon said, and walked out of my line of sight toward what had to be Gonzales.

I called out, “Alive he’s a hostage, and you have something to negotiate with; dead he’s just collateral damage.”

The demon’s deep voice sounded pleasant, happy, as it said, “The wound closed around the needle, let’s fix that.”

I yelled, “Don’t touch him!” As if the demon would give a damn. Charleston was on my phone yelling, “Havoc, Havoc, what’s happening?”

“Demon possession with violence, one hostage. Mark Cookson is the possessed.” Then I had to hang up, because I might need my hands free for my gun, or wrestling demons, whichever came first.