J. Ward: Possession

“Look, I don’t mean to be a bitch, but it had to have been a mistake. I can’t picture Thom with his nitpick all covered in spit-up, while he changes diapers and fills bottles with formula. That man used to vacuum his dorm room. Who does that?”

“In his defense, we did.”

“We’re girls .”

“Traditional sex roles much?”

“Whatever. You know what I mean.”

Cait nursed her water, feeling a cold tingle in that molar with the iffy filling she needed to take care of.

The truth was, Thom had told her the news six months ago. As soon as they told their families. And to his credit, it had been in a kind way—because he didn’t want her to hear it from anyone else, and his GF was shouting it from the rooftop, evidently. Cait had been shocked to the core, but she’d said all the right congratulatory things … then hung up the phone and burst into tears.

The woman who was about to give birth to his baby was the one he’d cheated on her with.

Margot. Her name was Margot. Like she was a French movie actress or something.

Hell, maybe it was even spelled Margeaux.

At least they’d been together for a while now. How many years had it been? Almost as long as Cait had been with him. No, wait … longer. So why the pregnancy had been such a shock to the system, she hadn’t a clue. But it had thrown her into a tailspin that had landed her here, in this hard little chair, with new hair, and an improved body … and a sense that she was through hiding from life, and ready to…

Okay, she didn’t know the answer to the “what” on that one.

“Hey, did you know you’re missing an earring,” Teresa said.

“Oh, yeah. I think it happened at the hair salon—”

“Here he is,” Teresa hissed as she sat up straighter.

Cait glanced over her shoulder. And did a little spine stretching of her own.

Yup, it was the one she’d just seen by the bike … and if the guy had been an eye-catcher from the back, the front view was even better: His face was a stunning composite of strong lines, enhanced not only by that holy-crap hair of his, but a goatee and a pair of hooded eyes that had bedroom all over them. Long and lean, he was wearing just a muscle shirt now, his arms covered in flowing black and gray tattoos marked with lettering in a foreign language.

As he sat down on a pine stool, he drew a hand through that hair, pushing it over his shoulder—and it refused to stay put, copper highlights flashing in the stage illumination as it rebelled back into place.

His smile was easy as a summer breeze, and as he tapped the mic to make sure it was working, Cait found herself wondering what his voice sounded like—

“Hey,” he said, deeply, softly. “How you doin’ tonight?”

The line was anything but cheesy coming from him, especially as the tenor of the words floated down from the ceiling like a caress.

“So I wanted to share a new song with you, something I just wrote.” He looked around as he spoke, and even though Cait was sure he didn’t focus on her, it felt like he was speaking to her and only her.

“It’s about living forever,” he intoned. “And I wish I could use my guitar, but there’s been a technical difficulty there—so you’re just going to have to put up with my voice all by itself.”

The clapping was quick and fervent, suggesting that there were a whole lot of Teresas in the crowd. In fact … this was why there were just women here tonight, wasn’t it.

He was even waving at a couple of them, like they were friends.

As he cleared his throat and took a deep breath, Cait found herself turning her chair around to face the stage.

“Told you,” she heard Teresa say with satisfaction.

The demon Devina took form in front of the nondescript, almost-modern headquarters of Integrated Human Resources, Inc. Located in one of Caldwell’s countless professional services complexes, the “firm” had no clients, no employees and was neither a resource for humans, integrated, or incorporated. It was, however, the perfect, protective shell for her collections, and the name was a nice play on what she did.

She was good at integrating herself into humans.

Had just come out of a rather accommodating vessel, as a matter of fact.

Loved those black jeans.

Striding to the door, she passed through the locked steel panels and emerged into the empty, shadowy interior. Inside, there were no desks, no phones, no computers, no coffee machines or watercoolers—and even M-F, eight a.m. to five p.m., there were no meetings being held, interviews set up, or business being conducted. If she had to, however, she could conjure that illusion out of the air at the drop of a hat.

After her last hideout had been infiltrated by Jim and his angel buddies, she’d had to relocate, and so far, so good.

“Hi, honey, I’m home,” she said to the newest sacrificial virgin who was hanging upside down over a tin tub by the elevator.

He didn’t answer her, natch.

In his previous life, before he’d become something important, he’d been a computer geek—God, with the chronic shortage of virgins in contemporary America, she’d never been so grateful for technology; all she had to do was search the yellow pages under IT.

And yet, even with him serving as a metaphysical ADT system, creeping tension made her walk faster and faster toward the elevator doors. There were two choices for other floors: “2” and “LL,” and when she got inside, she hit the latter. Silence accompanied the drop in height as she proceeded down to the windowless, open space of the basement. Her breath trapped in her lungs as the doors parted…

“Oh, thank fuck,” she said with a laugh.

Everything was there. All her clocks, which responded to her presence by resuming their count of minutes and hours; her many bureaus full of things that had just re-lined themselves up, their pulls still clapping from the return to proper position; her countless knives that were now once again facing point-first to the south; and her most important possession—the most priceless thing of all, in spite of its ugly state of decay—her mirror, was right where she had left it in the far corner.

Well, and then there was also the fun stuff in her “bedroom” area, the king-size bed, the vanity with all her makeup, her racks and racks of clothes, her shelves of shoes, her cupboards of bags.

Whenever she left, her possessions discorded, the orientation of the vast space becoming jumbled and confused. When she returned? Order was reestablished.

The same way a magnet would pull metal shavings together.

And just as her objects orbited around her, she too was drawn to them. Her greatest fear, at least on Earth, was that someday she would come back here and something would be gone. Or all of it would be. Or just a part.

As her heart rate regulated and she took off her fur coat, she walked down the aisles created by the bureaus. Stopping randomly, she pulled open the top drawer of a Hepplewhite she’d purchased from its maker back in 1801. Inside, there were eyeglasses from the period, thin wires curling around, circles of aged glass glinting. As she touched them, the energy of their past owners surged into her fingertips and connected her with the souls she had claimed and now held in her prison.

She knew each and every one of the sinners, her children, the beloved chosen who she nurtured through eternal pain and humiliation in her wall down below.

Fucking Jim Heron.

That goddamn “savior” might well be the death of her—literally. And that was not supposed to be the way shit went. In the beginning of this seven-round war, she’d had such hope for him, had been convinced that his bad side, cultivated in his professional pursuits for so long, would serve her well. Instead? That cocksucker was playing for the other team.