Jenna Black: The Devil's Due

Naturally, I checked through the peephole when Adam knocked on my door, just to make sure there’d been no mistaken identity. When I confirmed it was just him, I opened the door and let him in. He was carrying a tattered nylon backpack over one shoulder, and after the most perfunctory greeting, he slung the backpack onto one of my dining room chairs and unzipped it, pulling out a manila folder bursting at the seams with papers.

“I thought I’d fill you in on what I found out about the Brewster kid,” he said, dropping the folder onto the table.

I was never at my best in the morning, and I was also never at my best when Adam was around. “You couldn’t have just called?”

He gave me a dirty look. “I thought you might actually want to see what I’d found rather than hear it over the phone,” he said with a nod at the folder. “If you’d rather I pack up my toys and go home. .”

I huffed out a sigh. “No, please, sit down. Would you like some coffee?” Far be it from me to actually apologize, but I could at least make a peace offering.

“I’m never one to turn down coffee.”

I topped off my own mug, then poured one for Adam and brought it to him at the table. “Where’s Dom?” I asked, because Adam rarely came to my apartment without Dominic in tow. Which was generally a good thing, since Dominic made such a good referee.

Adam flashed me a wicked grin over the rim of his mug. “I left him at home to sleep it off. He’s all tuckered out, poor thing.” He winked at me, I guess just in case I didn’t get the layers of innuendo.

I willed myself not to blush, but my depraved mind conjured a picture of Dominic bent over a table, gloriously naked while Adam rode him. I then remembered what I’d done with Brian last night and had no hope in hell of quelling the blush.

Adam laughed. “Damn, Morgan. It’s so easy to make you blush, it’s child’s play. At least make me work for it.”

My eloquent response was an Italian salute, which of course only amused him more. If I didn’t change the subject pronto, this was going to get worse before it got better.

“I presume you found little Tommy Brewster’s MySpace profile?” I asked.

Adam visibly took a moment to debate the relative merits of talking business and making me squirm. Thank the Lord, he made the right decision.

“I guess you’ve been doing some research on your own?”

I shrugged. “Just really basic stuff. So, is it true?” He took a long slurp of coffee, then nodded. “Every word of it, though it was damn hard to confirm. The court system did its best to keep his identity hidden. If he hadn’t gone blabbing on the Internet, I’d never have found out who he was, even with my resources. I guess it’s a good thing for us he’s such a wack job.”

Somehow I doubted Claudia Brewster would see it that way. I cradled my coffee mug between my hands, needing the warmth to fight off the chill as I asked the question that had been bugging me since the moment I saw Tommy’s story. “Does it seem to you that demons have been involved in his life far more than they should have been, considering he’s not Spirit Society?”

Adam nodded. “Yeah. And the whole story about his origins is a hell of a lot weirder than what got reported in the newspapers.” He flipped open the manila folder and pulled out some eight by ten photos, which he laid out on the table in front of me.

It took me a second to figure out what I was looking at, and when I did, I felt like I was hurtling down the steepest roller coaster ever built. I must have turned several interesting, not-very-healthy colors, but Adam didn’t notice at first.

“Do you see anything unusual here?” he asked, with the nonchalance of a man who looked at pictures like these every day.

When I didn’t answer immediately, he looked up from the photos and saw my face. And he probably also saw how badly my hands were shaking as I gripped my coffee mug. He reached out and plucked the mug out of my hands before I dropped it, then hastily gathered up the pictures and shoved them back into the folder.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I forget sometimes that other people aren’t used to seeing things like that.”

I debated the alternatives of sprinting to the bathroom to puke my guts out versus staying at the table hoping I’d be able to keep my coffee down. The bathroom sprint was probably the wisest option, but stubbornness and a fierce desire not to look weak in front of Adam kept me in my chair. I swallowed convulsively a few times.

“So what was unusual?” I asked, my voice raspy and shaky. “Other than the fact that their internal organs weren’t internal anymore?” My gorge rose at the memory, but a couple more convulsive swallows forced it back down.

“Several things,” Adam answered. “For one, none of the four victims was wearing shoes. The bottoms of their feet were bruised and torn, and it wasn’t anything the demon had done to them. For another, they were all dressed identically, in nondescript scrubs.”

I was sure this was all fascinating information, and that there was a deep, profound meaning behind it all. But I was too busy fighting nausea to figure it out. “What’s your point?”

“This is just a hypothesis, and I could be wildly off base.”

“Okay.”

“But what if The Healing Circle isn’t the only demon-run hospital that’s more than meets the eye?”

In the process of investigating my own origins, we’d discovered that Dougal and Raphael had for centuries been involved in a kind of eugenics program, trying to breed the perfect demon host. Their definition of perfection being a superhuman body with the intelligence of a sea cucumber. My biological father had been an escapee from one of those programs, but now that Adam mentioned it, it seemed awfully naive to assume only one such secret laboratory existed. And Houston was the home of Haven Hospital, one of the more well-known demon-run hospitals.

“We have four unidentified victims, with no missing persons reports. Dressed in scrubs, no shoes, and with battered feet.”

“As if they’d been running away,” I mused.

“Exactly. So this ‘rogue’ demon was sent to chase them down.”

“And how close to Haven Hospital did the attack take place?”

“If you could have looked past the gore of the pictures, you’d have seen the hospital in the background of some of them. They didn’t get more than a couple of blocks before they were caught. The demon took out the adults first, probably assuming a three-year-old kid wouldn’t get far on its own. According to the papers and to Tommy’s MySpace page, the demon was trying to kill him. But I suspect the truth is the demon would have hauled him back to the hospital.”

I shuddered. “Unless this was another of those reject strains that the demons decided to destroy.” Raphael himself had given the order to kill off my father’s strain—and it was my father’s escape from that purge that led to my birth.

“I suppose that’s possible. Either way, the kid was rescued and got lost in the foster care system, until he decided to post his story on the Internet.”

I nodded thoughtfully. “And the fact that he remembers enough to post that story makes the demons behind the project nervous, so they. . What? How do they get him to agree to host? Did you watch his registration video?”

“Yeah. There’s nothing to indicate any coercion. No signs of nervousness or reluctance. No furtive looks, body language completely relaxed.”

“So Claudia must be right. He has to have been possessed when he signed the papers.” I shook my head. “You know Sammy Cho. Can you imagine him lying about something like this? Even if he tried to lie, he’s bound to suck at it.”

Adam nodded. “You’re right,” he said, but he was frowning.