Stacia Kane - Demon Inside

“You’re not talking her into it?”

“It’s her decision.”

“But I thought—”

“It’s her decision. I can’t interfere with that. Think about it.”

Silence. “I guess I see that. But…I mean…” Nick sounded uncomfortable, as if he’d just offered Greyson oral sex and been turned down.

“Hell, Nick. You know I’d—What the fuck!”

The car crashed into something, skidded, and spun sideways, flinging Megan off the seat onto the floor. For one long, terrifying moment she was certain she was about to die in a crush of metal on a deserted road. Malleus was yelling from the driver’s seat.

Then silence. The SUV gave a final rock to the left and stopped. Bright light flooded the interior of the car as the doors opened, and Greyson grabbed her and pulled her out, setting her down on her unsteady feet.

“I’m okay, I’m okay.” She wrapped her arms around herself. The night air was freezing and her coat was still in the car. Someone laid the blanket over her shoulders; she didn’t turn around to see who. “What happened?”

Greyson pointed behind them.

An oak tree grew by the side of the road, its gnarled arms reaching out as though it could trap the moon between them. From one of those branches dangled a rope, and at the end of that rope hung the body of a man, his eyes black holes in his swollen face. A chair, its legs reduced to splinters by the wheels of the SUV, lay about four feet from the tree.

He’d killed himself. The piece of paper pinned to the front of his shirt testified to that. Suicide, right by the road. It wasn’t the highway, as Megan had thought. They’d gone farther than that. The back of the sign welcoming them to Grant Falls gleamed in the darkness beyond the man’s swinging feet as the first flakes of snow drifted down.

Sleeping further would have been out of the question, even if she’d wanted to. The specter of that grisly welcome home haunted her.

Aside from a few dents on the right-side doors, the SUV was fine. They piled back in and headed toward the center of town, tooling slowly down the road, all of them on the alert. Greyson gave her his gun, grabbing another one from Maleficarum. It rested in his hand like a cobra about to strike. Nick had a gun too, in addition to, of all things, a sword. She might have laughed at the sight—it wasn’t often you saw a man swinging a blade in modern small-town America—if he hadn’t handled it with such deadly confidence.

Malleus, Maleficarum, and Spud, of course, looked like they were about to storm Fort Knox. Megan would have prayed they wouldn’t be pulled over, but even if Greyson couldn’t have handled any police officer who came near the car, she doubted it would be an issue tonight. Something told her the police in Grant Falls would be otherwise occupied.

They rolled past the hotel, silent and dark, and continued on. Through the haze of falling snow Megan saw Christmas lights twinkling still on some of the buildings and in the windows of the shops farther down the road, in town. The clock read 11:00. Surely the stores would be closed, the lights off?

Movement off to the right caught her eye. Emerging from the little forest was a woman, her filthy shirt in tatters. Through the strips of grayish fabric they could see her bra soaked with blood and her bare, ghostly pale skin streaked with it, making her look like a bizarre zebra. Even in the darkness her eyes seemed terribly white, wide with terror or the blank screen of dementia. Something else was wrong too, but Megan couldn’t seem to place it and it didn’t matter.

“Pull over,” she started to say, but Greyson interrupted her.

“No.”

“What? Look at her, she must be freezing, she’s—”

“Where’s the cemetery?”

“What? Malleus, I said pull over!”

“Mr. Dante?” Malleus glanced back. His features, cast in pale green light from the dash, looked somehow leaner, as if his frown was pulling them tight.

“Meg, where’s the cemetery?”

Megan glared at him and reached for the handle of the door. They were going slowly enough, and once she opened it Malleus would stop. She knew he would. “I can’t believe you’re going to let that woman just die like that, I—”

“She’s already dead.”

“Sure, if you let her…oh.” Megan subsided. That’s what was wrong. Snow was piling on the woman’s shoulders and forming an old-fashioned nurse’s cap on her head. “Oh.”

Somewhere in the back of her mind she’d had this idea—this fantasy—that they’d roll into Grant Falls, pop into the abandoned hospital, take whatever relic of the Accuser still lived there—which in the fantasy was a lock of hair or something similarly inoffensive—thus defeating Ktana Leyak and getting back her demons. Then they’d stop for a piece of pie or something before driving back toward the city singing “Adeste Fidelis.”

Nowhere in her fantasy did demon-powered zombies appear. Not once.

So much for fantasies.

Then again, the idea of riding around in an SUV with a bunch of demons singing Christmas carols was rather silly itself, wasn’t it? So why should she be surprised that this obviously wasn’t going to be the uncomplicated little jaunt she’d hoped for?

“Do you think there will be more of them?” she asked in a small voice. The energy to speak loudly eluded her.

“I think it’s a pretty safe bet, yes.”

“There are two cemeteries in town,” she said. “At least there were when I lived here. There’s, um, Holy Innocents, which is that way”—she waved her hand to her left—“and Harbor Lawn, where they buried my—oh God.”

The men exchanged glances. “We may not have to see many,” Greyson said. “We might manage to get in and out of here before they have a chance to reach us.”

Megan just nodded. If she opened her mouth she would start screaming, and if she started screaming she didn’t think she would be able to stop.

“Zombies aren’t going to be a problem,” Nick said finally. “They won’t even be able to get close to us, thanks to Grey. It’s the people who worry me.”

Megan glanced out the window, desperate to look anywhere but at the faces of the men watching her, then wished she hadn’t. Behind the picture window of Kelly’s Tap bodies lurched and leaped in a brawl of epic proportions. A man flew through the glass, landing on the white-dusted asphalt outside in an ungraceful heap. Blood steamed in the freezing air as the chaos inside the bar became audible, shouts and screams ending finally in gunfire.

The men tensed. Greyson and Nick lifted their weapons, waiting, but they were already passing the bar, leaving the wreckage of it behind them.

More evidence that something was very wrong in Grant Falls awaited them as they rolled past, the low hum of the SUV’s engine bouncing off the blank storefronts. A bloody handprint embellished the holiday display in the window of Tommy’s Toys. More blood smeared across the wall, ending on the pavement as if the bleeder had fallen, but no body lay there.

Megan pulled the blanket more tightly around her. “The hospital is to the right, closer to the center of town.”

They floated down the street, the only warm and moving things in an alien landscape. The blanket didn’t help. Even Greyson’s warm hand on her leg didn’t help. The wrongness, the plain and simple sense that all was not well, soaked into her bones. Even with her shields up she could feel the despair, the misery, the rage.

Especially the rage. She realized that tired as she was her body was still humming, adrenaline making her heart pound and her feet jiggle. Her lips felt raw from where she’d bitten them and stung when a tear rolled down her cheek and touched the shredded skin.