Stacia Kane - Demon Inside

If she’d thought about it, she would have known he’d be here. Dave was the fair-haired boy in more ways than one.

They entered the kitchen, her mother and brother—her family—and Dave helped their mother into a chair. He glanced up.

“Megan. Oh. Hi.”

“Hi, Dave.”

“I didn’t think—well, wow. It’s nice to see you.”

Her smile felt painted on. “Yeah, you too.”

They all sat in silence for a minute before Megan stood up. “Well, I should go. Um, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Don’t be late. Eleven o’clock, at our church.” The look Diane gave her clearly indicated she thought Megan was planning on showing up drunk halfway through the service.

“Um…our church?”

“United Methodist,” Dave said. Like Megan was supposed to know. “On Oak.”

“Okay, well, I’ll be there. See you tomorrow.”

“I’ll walk you out.” Dave stood up. She had no idea what he was doing these days, if he was married or had kids or…anything. The last time she’d seen him he was still doing some low-level dealing out of his bedroom.

He took her arm and led her to the door. “Listen…,” he said, while she shoved her feet back into her boots. “There’s going to be a lot of people there tomorrow, you know? A lot of friends of Mom and Dad’s.”

“Yeah?” For the first time since she’d walked in the door, she had the urge to lower her shields. Idle curiosity, really. But the memory of Gerald’s sister’s pain and the reaction it had caused put her off the idea before it even finished crossing her mind. Dave would be upset about their father’s death, and she would feel that, and…no.

“So…” Dave’s blue eyes, so like her own, widened. “So it would be nice if you wouldn’t make a scene, you know? Maybe just keep to the back, out of the way…?”

She stared at him. Once, when they were children, they’d been close. Only three years separated them. Now it felt more like fifty. “Sure, Dave. I’ll try to remember not to pee in front of the altar.”

She was out the door and gone before the puzzled expression left his face.

One day she would learn to stop paying attention to the little voice in her head that told her to lighten up.

She’d listened to it this time, and that’s why she was stuck in a booth at Kelly’s Tap with Cassie, Amy, and Jen, three women who’d had nothing but nasty things to say to her for years and now seemed to think their mutual attendance at the same high school meant they were bonded like Vietnam vets.

Which for Megan wasn’t an entirely inappropriate analogy.

She couldn’t blame just the voice in her head, though. Her craving for a drink and anything to look at other than the bland hotel furnishings had something to do with it as well. So had Rocturnus, who was actually spending the evening at Megan’s mother’s house. There was plenty of misery to go around over there.

And here. Or maybe this wasn’t misery. Maybe it was filth. She’d never been in such a sticky place. A thin film of whitish grime seemed to cling to everything and everyone. Even the music coming from the aged jukebox—a mixture of soft rock and modern country—sounded distorted and fuzzy, like the speakers were clogged with phlegm.

She shifted in her seat and drank her beer, while the ladies discussed memories they shared, which had nothing to do with Megan. Once they’d ascertained she didn’t know any celebrities, wasn’t married, and didn’t have children, they’d completely lost interest in her.

Not surprising.

She shifted in her seat, lifted her bottle again. This was a huge mistake. As she tuned out the chatter of the women at her table she became aware of other conversations, less friendly ones, taking place around her. It hadn’t taken the locals long to figure out who she was. Their suspicion and resentment beat against her skin.

Nine o’clock. The liquor stores would be closed, but there was a gas station not far. She could buy her own beer and sit in her hotel room and drink it. Even being alone with her thoughts—of Gerald, of Greyson, of her family—would be better than feeling the eyes and anger of Grant Falls’s drunks focused on her like a lightning rod.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. Cassie, Amy, and Jen ignored her. So much for catching up.

The sticky floor sucked at her feet as she made her way to the back of the room and the dull illumination of the cracked bathroom sign. There might be a storeroom, another way out, so she didn’t have to walk through the small crowd again.

There wasn’t. She ducked through the ladies’ room door anyway, to gird herself.

In the bathroom mirror she looked sallow, half dead. The flickering bug light above the rust-stained sink did not flatter. Megan thought of the women who came in here to check their lipstick or brush their hair. What did they see when they turned their drunk gazes on themselves? Did the ugliness of their lives reflect back at them?

Silly thought. They saw what they wanted to see.

She turned back and opened the door, keeping her head down. She could probably slip past the girls without them seeing her; hell, they probably wouldn’t even notice she was gone. If she couldn’t gossip with authority about various useless heiresses and the general misery of raising children, they weren’t interested.

Megan clutched the strap of her purse and entered the bar, only to be assaulted by hostile glares. Coming to the bar had been the wrong thing to do. Leaving it, even worse.

Keeping her head down, she tried to push her way through the crowd, but the bodies would not budge.

“Excuse me,” she said, then again, louder. “Excuse me, please.”

A few people blinked and moved. Most didn’t. Megan glanced up and saw demons, Yezer Ha-Ra, on every shoulder, in every corner.

Not hers. Roc was at her mother’s house. These belonged to someone else, perhaps Ktana Leyak, perhaps a different demon entirely. A different family. The Meegras didn’t tend to divide land territorially, at least not in the city, but who know what subset ruled here, or in whose power the local Yezer were?

Whoever it was, she was willing to bet they weren’t particularly friendly.

“We don’t like murderers here,” said a man’s voice, low and threatening, from the back of the crowd.

Megan glanced at Cassie and her friends. They looked away, as if they didn’t see what was happening.

Anger boiled in her chest. Why wouldn’t they leave her alone? She hadn’t killed anyone. She hadn’t killed Harlan Trooper, all those years ago. She knew it and the judge knew it. She hadn’t even been charged.

If I wanted to, I could have you all killed, she thought, and was stunned when the thought didn’t shock her, didn’t scare her the way it should. She looked at their faces, stony and stubbled, shiny with alcoholic sweat. The power in her chest hadn’t worked against Ktana Leyak, but it could against them, this miserable bunch of humans with their heavy boots and beer guts.

She pictured those guts exploding. She pictured the terror in their eyes when they realized they were messing with the wrong fucking demon, they were—

Demon?

She wasn’t a demon. She was human. She was not a demon, no matter what lump of flesh crowded next to her heart and tried to grow.

She was human.

“Mr. Maldon doesn’t like you here,” one of the Yezer hissed. Her gaze flew to him as he hunched in one of the booths, bigger than the others. The Rocturnus of his family, she assumed.

“Then I’ll leave,” she said, her voice loud and clear as a bell in a forest, answering both the man in the back and the Yezer. She summoned as much of her anger as she could, let it fill her and give her strength, and shoved her way through the crowd and out the door.