Stacia Kane - Demon Inside

Now their feet crunched on litter and broken glass as they picked their way through. It smelled in there, like dead things and mold and rotten food, mixed with the fainter, more lingering fragrance of despair. The misery this building had absorbed! The walls still fairly throbbed with it. She could feel them close around her, like dogs sniffing out which hand held the treat.

But there was no hand to choose. She was the treat, and it wasn’t just the building that waited for her to feed it but something inside. Maybe more than one thing. Ktana Leyak could very well be here already. The entire room seemed to sigh when she walked farther into it.

Off to her right were the remains of the reception desk, broken and jagged. It had been bolted down, which was probably the only reason it hadn’t disappeared completely, along with the other furniture. A few disintegrating boxes littered the floor, along with some animal bones and piles of lint and cardboard that could only be rodent nests. That was another smell in the air, one she hadn’t identified until then. Droppings. She sneezed. Just that small movement sent fresh pain shooting down her arm.

A loud sniffle made her turn around. Maleficarum, shaking his head, wiping his eyes.

“Spud,” she said, ashamed of herself for not having asked already. “Is he—”

“He’ll be all right, m’lady,” Maleficarum said. His voice sounded strangled and lost in the empty space around them. “He’s tough, he is. But you—you been shot, and Mr. Dante, and Mr. Showtin…” He covered his face with his beefy right palm, and after a moment of surprise—Spud was usually the emotional one—Megan went to him and took his left hand. Even now they were separated by rank, but the touch meant more to him for that and she knew it.

Greyson cleared his throat. “Meg, we need to get that bullet out of your arm.”

To their left rose the wide, sweeping staircase leading to the second floor. Above that were only fire stairs, horrible dark shafts at the corners of the building. But this stairway was for show, this stairway was meant to reassure those leaving family members in the care of medical staff that Trubank was a nice place, a healing place, instead of the bowels of the Accuser.

Greyson slipped her coat off her shoulders and sat down, pulling her carefully to sit on his left thigh with his left arm tight around her waist. His damaged ear wasn’t far from her face; she refused to look at it, focusing instead on his eyes, his lips moving, telling her what she didn’t want to hear, about holding out her arm and it would only hurt for a minute.

Nick squatted in front of Greyson and took her hand. “Squeeze as tight as you want, Megan, you won’t hurt me.”

“Hold on a minute, guys, I don’t think this is really necessary,” she started, but it was too late. Greyson squeezed her so hard she almost couldn’t breathe, and Nick pulled her arm taut while Malleus produced a long silver pair of tweezers from somewhere on his person and plunged them into the wound in her arm.

She didn’t want to scream but screamed anyway. Her fingers ached from squeezing Nick’s hand with her left, Greyson’s with her right, while she buried her face in Greyson’s chest and cried, and begged him to stop. Deep below the pain was shame, the knowledge that she should be braver than this, should be stronger than this, but somehow the fear of what was to come made it all so much worse. It felt like Malleus was trying to remove her actual bone, like somehow the tweezers could grow and bend and tug out her demon heart as well.

As abruptly as the pain had started, it ended. Fresh blood spilled down her forearm to her hand, still held in Nick’s, and covered both of them as though they were being hand-fasted.

Malleus showed her his palm, where three bloodied bits of metal lay among the calluses. No wonder it felt like he was trying to dig out her intestines through her arm. Apparently the bullet had shattered when it hit her bone.

She wanted to laugh. It was the adrenaline, she guessed, buzzing through her body, shooting like champagne straight to her head. Now it was over she felt like she could fly, and while it lasted she wanted to savor it.

Instead she ended up wandering around the ghost town of the lobby while Malleus took care of Greyson and Nick. Both men cursed and gritted their teeth manfully; she felt their eyes on her and tried to pretend she didn’t find it amusing, although she suspected they were hamming it up for her. She’d seen Greyson take much worse pain without being quite so noisy, and she had the distinct feeling that Nick was just as tough if not even tougher. But she appreciated it just the same. For a minute—right around the time Greyson moaned, “By the fiery gates of Hell!”—she was even able to forget where they really were and why, and imagine they were on some sort of crazy Halloween dare.

Too bad the jokes, like the adrenaline rush, couldn’t last. By the time they were finished her hands were shaking and her fear was flooding back. She needed something hidden in this place, and it wasn’t just Ktana Leyak threatening her. It was this building, this place, the memories of the unhappy teenager she’d been, the nightmarish, vague recollections of her time spent here while the Accuser shared her body.

And knowing her father had done that to her. The one man who was supposed to love her more than any other man ever could, who was supposed to teach her how to relate to men and how to expect to be treated by them for the rest of her life, had discarded her without a second thought.

Did that color her relationships? Was she now in love with an emotionally distant demon because her father had never been there for her? It was ridiculous, she knew. It wasn’t as though she was an open book emotionally either, or didn’t keep secrets, and Greyson was nothing like her father.

And yet…he’d gotten where he was today in part by stepping directly on the heads of people who’d helped him. He’d worked his entire life to become Gretneg, and she knew he’d kill to stay there.

Would he discard her, as her father had done, if she became too much of a threat to his position? If dumping her would cement another deal, strengthen an alliance, bring him more power and money?

It wasn’t simply the cold that made her shiver. For a moment she just stood there, feeling more lonely than she ever had in her life.

Then he stood in front of her and heat radiated from his skin, and she didn’t care anymore what was wrong or right. If the last months had taught her anything, it was that no matter how hard you tried to guard against the unexpected, you couldn’t do it. And if her work had taught her anything, it was that feelings and emotions could be coped with but not stopped. She’d deal with whatever fallout happened when it happened. If it happened.

He held her for a minute, then pulled away, stroking her cheek with his fingers. “Ready?”

“My arm still hurts.” It did too. He took her hand, and she felt the smooth rush of his power over her skin. The pain lessened a little.

“I don’t want to use too much energy,” he said. “We’ll probably need all we can get. But that should be better.”

“It is, thanks.” She looked up and caught his eyes with her own.

The others were pretending not to watch them, but Megan knew they were. She cleared her throat and glanced at the floor. “What do we do? I mean, can you feel anything, do you know where it—whatever we’re looking for—is?”

“No. This whole place feels like demon.”

“Start at the top, work our way down?”

“Probably better the other way around. I’d rather not climb more stairs than I have to.”

She’d almost forgotten about his leg. With a concerned little sound she leaned down, but he touched her shoulder to keep her where she was. “It’s fine. Listen, Meg…”