Stacia Kane - Demon Inside

Even that made her uncomfortable. But she couldn’t let the Yezer starve either.

“I called you here because I know some of you are leaving,” she said finally. “And going to a different house.”

The crowd shifted uneasily. She glanced at Roc, but his expression was unreadable. She hated not being able to use her gifts with demons. Having spent her early life getting hunches about people and then her entire life beyond her teen years being able to simply open up and know all sorts of things about what a person was feeling or thinking or doing, she felt disarmed these days. Naked, and not in a good hot-demon-in-bed kind of way, but in a showing-up-to-work-undressed-and-being-laughed-at way.

“I want to reassure all of you that I’m doing everything I can to stop the…ah…the attacks on you. I will find out who’s doing it, and I will make sure they’re punished.”

A ripple of interest moved through the crowd, and her spirits rose a little. “It’s happening in other Meegras too. Not just to you.”

“So if the others can’t protect their rubendas, how are you going to protect us? You’re not even a demon.”

“Yes, when are you going to do the ritual?”

The words echoed in the cavernous space for a moment, bouncing off the wooden cabinetlike doors of their bedrooms and the incredibly high ceiling. Normally this house felt oddly peaceful, a happy place despite the human despair its inhabitants fed on. But now…the demons were angry. With her. With the Accuser for having bound them to her. At the unseen, unknown killer stalking them.

“We’re not here to discuss that,” she said, then, remembering what Roc had said, “I didn’t come here to be questioned. I give my orders and you follow them.”

A few of them seemed to settle down, either at her strong tone or the words themselves. But unrest still hovered in the air.

“Do you doubt I have the power to protect you? Is that why you’re going somewhere else?”

Murmurs. Mutterings. But none spoke up.

“I’m connected to you. You’re connected to me.” Her face reddened. She felt like a bad actor in a melodrama. But Rocturnus nodded slightly beside her and the numerous eyes glinting in the white light from the ceiling were trained on her. Bad melodrama was just the sort of thing they liked, along with sugary snacks and twee home decor. They were like vicious little old ladies in that way. “Any more of you leave and you’ll all be—punished. Punished severely.”

The crowd sighed and shifted a little. Shit, Roc was right. This was what they wanted. Did they know it was bullshit? That she didn’t think she could bring herself to punish any one of them demon style? The only example of such treatment she’d seen had turned her stomach; she still woke up some nights alone in her bed with the image of Greyson’s bloody back in her mind, with the sound of the whip echoing in her ears.

What she could do, though, was hit them with her power. The telekinetic ability Tera had taught her didn’t always work; in fact, it hadn’t been working very well at all of late. Tera said it was because despite Megan’s abilities being so closely aligned to those of witches, she wasn’t a witch. She simply didn’t have the genetic power.

Megan suspected it was more than that, but she didn’t want to think about it. She’d been doing very well with it before the Yezer Ha-Ra had connected to her.

Demons weren’t telekinetic.

But she didn’t need to move any solid objects here. She just needed to let them know how strong she was, how capable. And since they were bound to her, it would be easy.

Deep inside her was a door and behind it lurked her power. Lurked the piece of demon lodged in her chest. Lurked the anger and the fear and—her heart pounded in her chest, red heat spreading from it through her body. In her mind the door bulged and shook, wanting, waiting, ready to—

She opened it.

For the first time since the night she’d been bound to them she opened it and power, shiny bright and cold-hot, burst from it, into her, through her, filling the room.

The little demons screamed in unison. Megan screamed too, but whether it was from triumph or fear she didn’t know. All she knew was her throat ached, her head fell back, and before she could stop it she was pulling the energy back in, pulling it in mixed with theirs, her body acting of its own accord just like the last seconds before an orgasm—

Their power thrust itself into her. Every bit of misery they caused, every shameful thought and deed that fed them, ran through her mind like a triple-speed film played on the backs of her eyelids.

And it was wrong, it was so wrong because it felt good, it felt better than anything, it was power and danger and food and sex and everything she’d ever wanted, and it filled her until she thought she might explode.

“No!” She fell, crouching herself into a ball, trying to fight. The door had to close, the flames inside her had to recede, had to, because if she stayed like this much longer she might decide never to stop it, she might go ahead and—“No!”

With a final, almighty mental shove, she slammed the door shut, locking it tight, and just before she realized she’d fled the Yezer and gone back to her house something came to her, words that turned her shivers into quakes of terror though she didn’t know what they meant.

Ktana Leyak.

“Megan, are you sitting down?”

It was so much like Roc’s question the night before that she shivered and gripped the phone more tightly. “Yes.”

“Gerald Caroll died.”

Megan bit her lip. She almost said “I know” before she remembered she wasn’t supposed to know. “Gerald?”

“Yes, your client Gerald.” Althea Sprite’s voice, full of compassion, made Megan want to cry. Althea was, at this point, the only one of her practice partners—except Neil Fawkes, and that was simply because Neil didn’t have an opinion about anything—who didn’t turn away from her in disgust when she spoke up at their weekly meetings. Her radio show had not made her popular with them.

Megan knew she was holding on to her membership in the group by a thread and that one of these days it would likely break.

So why not just leave? a voice said in her head. It sounded suspiciously like a certain demon she knew.

Because I don’t want to leave, because I worked hard to build that practice, because it’s something I’m good at …

“Megan, are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m just—how? Who told you?”

“The police called the service; they found an appointment in his diary but it didn’t have your name on it. The service called me and I said I’d call you.”

“Did they say how…it happened?”

“Heart attack, looked like,” Althea said. “They can’t be sure, of course, until the autopsy. The police want to meet you at the office tomorrow morning, to get a look at his file.”

“But they know I can’t just show anybody those records, it’s—”

“They’re bringing his next of kin. So technically you’re not.”

“That’s fine.” Her voice shook a little. Next of kin. Gerald had a sister, she remembered.

“Are you going to be okay? Do you want some company?”

Althea, despite being the closest thing Megan had had to a friend until Tera entered her life, had never offered to come to Megan’s house before.

Then again, Megan had never had a patient die on her before, had she?

“I think I’ll be all right. I just…” She took a deep breath. “I feel like it was my fault.”

“It wasn’t your fault, honey. It was just his time to go. Sometimes it’s fast and sometimes it takes a long time, but when it’s your time to go there’s nothing anyone can do.”