Jenna Black - The Devil's Due

“What?” I asked.

“If someone in Dougal’s camp wanted Tommy Brewster bad enough, they could have arranged for Sammy to be possessed. Then he’d be both willing and able to lie.”

I chewed that one over. It would certainly work, but it was awfully risky. There are rarely enough demon-host-wannabes to require more than one exorcist at a time to do aura screenings, but it did happen sometimes, and if another exorcist got a look at Sammy’s aura—or if Sammy started avoiding multiple screenings to a suspicious extent—the demon could be in serious trouble.

“I’ll try to drop by Sammy’s office,” Adam said. “Given a few minutes with him, I should be able to figure out if he’s possessed.”

I nodded my agreement. When I had first contacted Adam about my own unwanted hitchhiker, he’d examined my aura, trying to find out if he could “see” Lugh. Unlike a human exorcist, he didn’t need a fancy ritual or a trance to see auras—he could do it with the touch of a hand and a few seconds of concentration.

With a very unhappy internal groan, I realized I knew who else we needed to talk to in search of explanations. I met Adam’s eyes, and saw that he’d come to the same conclusion.

“If you’d like,” he said with uncommon kindness, “I’ll talk to Raphael myself.”

I really wished I could take him up on the offer. The last thing I wanted to do was to talk to the scum-sucking demon who held my brother hostage. Aside from my fury for what he’d done to Andy, I also didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. He claimed to be on Lugh’s side, to want to put Lugh back on the throne where he belonged, but I still wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t betrayed us to Der Jäger.

“Thanks,” I said, and for once I actually meant it. “I appreciate the offer, but he’s slightly more likely to tell me the truth than you.” Only if he was telling the truth about being on our side in the first place, and only if he really respected Lugh as much as he claimed, but we might as well make that assumption if we were planning to question him.

“Let me know what you find out.” Adam gulped the last of his coffee. “And I’m really sorry about the crime scene photos. I should have known better than to show them to you.”

I gave him a suspicious look. It wasn’t like him to be this nice, or this conciliatory. He might not hate me, but he really didn’t like me. Perhaps he’d known better than to show them to me, but had shown them anyway, out of spite. “Didn’t your host warn you not to show graphic crime scene photos to a civilian?” I asked, and I’m sure he heard the undertone of suspicion in my voice.

The sudden hard glint in Adam’s eyes told me he’d heard it, all right. “No. He’s as inured to them as I am.” He grimaced. “And he asks me to extend his apologies as well.”

I had met Adam’s host during a brief time when Adam had transferred—most illegally—into Dominic to heal what would have been a fatal gunshot wound. I barely knew the human Adam, but I suspected he and the demon Adam were more alike than not.

“Tell him I accept his apology.”

Adam gave me one of those creepy stares of his. I’m sure he hadn’t missed the fact that I’d never actually accepted his own apology. But he didn’t call me on it. Instead, he shoved the manila folder with its ugly photos into the backpack, then left without saying good-bye.

The fact that my brother was possessed was not common knowledge. As far as the world at large knew, Raphael had fled my brother’s body and gone back to the Demon Realm, never to return. How I wished that were the case!

What this meant as a practical matter was that Andy was unemployed. Like Dominic, he’d been a firefighter when he was a legal host. He’d also begun hosting as soon as he’d turned twenty-one, which meant he hadn’t completed his college education and had no particularly useful job skills. The Spirit Society would give him a small pension for a couple of years, but he was young enough that they’d expect him to host again—or get his life together on his own if he chose not to.

The pension wasn’t enough to live on, so when I arrived at Andy’s apartment, it was to find him poring over the Sunday want ads. It seemed like such a quintessentially human thing to do that I almost forgot this wasn’t really Andy. I shook my head to clear the confusion.

“Are you actually going to apply for a job?” I asked.

He gave me a sardonic look. “I do have to support myself, you know. Or did you expect me to ensconce myself in this apartment and spend the rest of my life cackling evilly?”

I wished I could think of a brilliant plan to remove this bloodsucking leech from my brother’s body. Unfortunately, since he was a member of the royal family, he was an unusually strong demon. Too strong for me to exorcize. Lugh might be able to overpower him, but I’d have to let him be in control to try it, and we’d already established that I couldn’t.

“I really hate you, you know,” I said petulantly.

Raphael sighed like I’d hurt his feelings. “I gave you my word I’d take better care of Andrew this time around.”

“And you expect me to believe you?”

He shook his head. “I suppose not. But I’ll tell you anyway that Andrew is fine. We will never like one another, but we have reached something approximating a truce.” He laughed suddenly, though I couldn’t imagine why.

“What’s so funny?”

“He’s testing the limits of our truce. He wants me to tell you that he’s all right. He also wants me to tell you, and I quote, ‘Get this fucking asshole out of my body.’”

I had no idea whether the message was really from Andy, or whether Raphael somehow thought this would disarm me. “I’m working on it, bro,” I said, just in case it really was my brother. Of course, I wasn’t working on it all that hard. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I had no idea how I was going to manage it.

To my surprise, Raphael reached out and patted my shoulder. “If you and I can ever reach our own truce, and if you can find someone else to host me, I will leave him. You have my word on that, for whatever you think my word is worth.”

I stifled my immediate desire to tell him exactly what I thought his word was worth, but no doubt my opinion showed on my face. Raphael looked disappointed in me.

“Why are you here?” he asked. “It’s obviously not for the pleasure of my company.”

Probably I should be nicer to him when I was here looking for information—particularly information he wasn’t overly eager to give me. But I just didn’t have it in me to be nice to Raphael, who was the author of so many of my troubles.

Instead of answering, I invited myself to take a seat on his living room couch. Since he was pretending to be my brother, the slob, I had to move aside a pile of junk mail and discarded newspapers to clear a seat for myself. I was glad I was wearing one of my more conservative outfits so that my skin didn’t come in contact with the stained upholstery.

“Make yourself at home,” Raphael muttered, then took his own seat in the similarly disreputable-looking recliner.

I decided we’d had more than enough preliminaries, so I got right to the point. “Was The Healing Circle the only site where you and Dougal played God?”

Raphael blinked, the question obviously not one he expected. He thought about it a long time before he finally got around to answering. “No.”

He didn’t say anything else, and I had to quell a surge of impatience. “Care to elaborate?”

“Is there something specific you want to know, or are you just on a fishing expedition?”

“You said you wanted a truce with me, right? So why don’t you just talk to me without looking for what’s in it for you?”