Stacia Kane - Demon Inside

They all stopped, turning, but it took a moment for Megan’s snow-blind eyes to catch on to what she was seeing.

They slithered up the great elm tree by the fence and swarmed over the white earth, their bodies like oozing black stains. Snakes. Serpents, sliding toward them, moving with a speed Megan couldn’t fathom. It was so cold, it was too cold for them, too cold…

Greyson grabbed her right hand, Nick her left. She saw flames erupt over the spreading mass of snakes but knew it was futile even as they started to run, heading for the far end of the park as fast as they could manage on the icy ground.

Malleus and Spud veered off to one side. Megan started to follow them but Greyson and Nick yanked her back, keeping her moving forward even as something yowled and screeched to her left. She dared a glance and saw the brothers fighting with something, a beast that reminded her vaguely of the Nepalese mountain demon who’d attacked her in a different park months before. That had been a sunny fall afternoon. This night was as if winter had a personal vendetta against them.

It wasn’t a yaksas, though. She realized it when they reached the far fence and looked back. The snakes were still spreading, moving as inexorably as the tide, getting closer to Malleus and Spud as they struggled with the thing. It was black or green or dark blue, she couldn’t tell, but it was huge, and she screamed when it swung a great fist and sent Spud flying. He landed on the grass and stayed there, motionless.

Megan’s heart stopped. Beside her Greyson jerked, ready to run to Spud, but another scream rent the air. They turned toward it to see a woman leap from one of the windows on the square. For one sick, dizzy moment Megan thought she was flying, the way her body seemed to hang there, before she plunged to the ground and bounced once, twice, before settling in the middle of the road.

Megan’s hands flew to her face, covering her eyes, her mouth. Greyson’s coat muffled her cries, his arms like a vice around her shoulders.

She didn’t understand when he shifted and gripped her neck hard enough to bruise, when he shoved her violently down to the ground at his feet and stepped sideways. The edge of his overcoat brushed against her face as she scraped her palms on the snow. In the same movement Greyson pulled his gun, aimed, fired, fired again. Off to the side Spud still lay silent. Malleus and Maleficarum were winning their battle with whatever beast had injured Spud.

How she was able to smell the alcohol on the men she didn’t know, but she could, just as easily as she could see them heading across the park. She even recognized one or two of them, from Kelly’s Tap the night of the fire at Maldon’s place.

That they recognized Greyson and her was obvious. That they carried a grudge was even more so, if the shotguns in their hands were any indication. With them came something she hadn’t felt in months, the slow malevolence of a person completely overwhelmed by Yezer. If they’d been making themselves visible Megan would have seen dozens of them, she knew.

What the fuck was Roc doing? Everything should have been taken care of by now, he was supposed to be here, trying to sneak some of her rubendas back to her, trying to get her as much power as he could. Instead she was looking at three guns, aimed straight at her, her bodyguards were injured or otherwise occupied, and all that stood between her and death were Greyson and Nick. The odds weren’t bad, but she would have liked better.

One of the men fell. Blood blossomed like a rose high on the right side of his chest, making his plaid shirt bizarrely effeminate, and poured from his mouth in a dark stream to stain the snow beneath him. Greyson’s second shot blew off the top of his head.

Nick twisted his body as she started to rise from the ground, so both of them stood in front of her. That was worse somehow, not being able to see, not knowing if the other men were running or taking aim.

Taking aim, apparently. Nick pivoted again, ducking, and came up with his gun ready. All she could hear were shots, louder than she remembered them from before, and it wasn’t until she thought of being in the car with Greyson while the witches attacked that she remembered she had a gun too.

Her cold, stiff fingers slipped on it, fumbled with it, but she managed to edge herself out enough to take aim. Nick stumbled against her so her first shot went wild, but he righted himself immediately before she squeezed the trigger the second time.

Pain exploded in her left arm, so bright and hard she didn’t know what it was for a moment. She screamed and dropped the gun as she fell, hitting her right shoulder hard against the wrought-iron fence behind her.

One last shot blared through the park, then screams, then silence. Megan tried to say something but her throat didn’t want to work. Nothing wanted to work, not her arms or her legs, or her head. She just wanted to curl up in a ball. It was so cold, if she huddled up she might be warmer.

“M’lady! Mr. Dante!”

Someone lifted her from the ground. She was too tired to help, too cold to care. Her arm felt like it was on fire.

One of the brothers held her, she wasn’t sure which one. She managed to look over his arm and saw Maleficarum holding Spud, moving quickly toward the gate just ahead of the sea of snakes.

When she opened her eyes again they were on the sidewalk opposite the park, standing just outside a high chain-link fence. Behind the fence lurked the hospital, gray and silent like a moldering ghost.

Semiopaque plastic bulged and receded in the empty holes where windows had been, moved by the wind. To Megan it looked horrible, the erratic beats of a dying heart.

Automatically she looked for Greyson, but saw the snakes first. They were still advancing, but more slowly now, as if they just wanted to urge her into the hospital. Like they were waiting for her to go in.

Maleficarum set Spud on the pavement against the fence and grabbed the links in his bare hands. They popped like cheap buttons, opening a jagged hole. Metal scratched her cheek as Malleus carried her through, but she couldn’t be bothered to even lift her hand to the wound. Where were Greyson and Nick? Where the hell was Roc?

The first question, at least, was answered a moment later. The two demons stumbled through the hole, their arms around each other. She couldn’t see them well; even with the white sky above it seemed dark here, on the land she now owned part of. Like all the light was absorbed somehow, all the warmth and joy sucked away by the building looming over them.

She saw them well enough to know something was wrong, though, and when they stepped closer to her she realized what it was. For the second time in a week Greyson had been shot, at least once—in the leg, she thought, from the limp—but as she looked more closely, squinting in an attempt to focus better, she noticed part of his ear seemed to be missing. The bullet must have passed only centimeters from his head. The thought made her knees weak. If she’d been standing she probably would have fallen.

As it was she caught only a glimpse of him before Malleus carried her farther away, stopping on the crumbing steps of the hospital building. Wind swirled and eddied around them, lifting Megan’s hair and snapping the heavy corrugated paper of a torn cement bag to their right. She’d been wrong in thinking the hospital was like a ghost. She was the ghost, intruding on a world that had nothing to do with her, a world she should have left behind ages ago.

Her legs were steady enough beneath her when Malleus set her down just in front of the empty door frames. Once the doors had been etched glass, with TRUBANK MENTAL HEALTH CENTER printed in block script on each panel. Once the atrium had been painted an institutional pale green and filled with modular furniture and plants to take away the ache of that soulless color, and the light had poured in across terrazzo floors.