Meg Cabot - Darkest Hour

Still, I had never seen anybody go after someone with such single-minded purpose. Jesse, I was convinced, wasn't going to be satisfied merely with breaking Felix Diego's neck. No, I think he wanted to rip off the guy's head.

And he was doing a pretty job of it, too. Diego was bigger than Jesse, but he was also older, and not as quick on his feet. Plus, I think Jesse just plain wanted it more. To see his opponent decapitated, I mean. At least, if the energy with which he was swinging a jagged-edged piece of pew at Felix Diego's head was any indication.

"Here," Jack said breathlessly as he brought the wine, in its crystal decanter, to me.

"Good," I said. It wasn't whisky - isn't that what you're supposed to give unconscious people to rouse them? - but it had alcohol in it. "Father D," I said, raising his head and putting the un-stoppered decanter to his lips. "Drink some of this."

Only it didn't work. Wine just dribbled down his chin and dripped onto his chest.

Meanwhile, Maria had begun to moan. Her broken neck was snapping back into place already. That's the thing about ghosts. They bounce back, and way too fast.

Jack glared at her as she tried to raise herself to her knees.

"Too bad we can't exorcise her ," he said, darkly.

I looked at him. "Why can't we?" I asked.

Jack raised his eyebrows. "I don't know. We don't have the chicken blood anymore."

"We don't need the chicken blood," I said. "We have that." I nodded toward the circle of candles. Miraculously, in spite of all the fighting going on, they had remained standing.

"But we don't have a picture of her," Jack said. "Don't we need a picture of her?"

"Not," I said, gently putting Father D's head back on the floor, "if we don't have to summon her. And we don't. She's right here. Come on and help me move her."

Jack took her feet. I took her torso. She moaned and fought us the whole way, but when we laid her on the choir robes, she must have felt as I did - that it was pretty darn comfortable - since she stopped struggling and just lay there. Above her head, the circle Father Dom had opened remained open, smoke - or fog, as I knew it was now - curling down from its outer edges in misty tendrils.

"How do we make it suck her in?" Jack wanted to know.

"I don't know." I glanced at Jesse and Diego. They were still engaged in what appeared to be mortal combat. If I had thought Jesse had lost the upper hand, I'd have gone over and helped, but it appeared he was doing fine.

Besides, the guy had killed him. I figured it was payback time, and for that, Jesse did not need my help.

"The book!" I said, brightening. "Father Dom read from a book. Look around. Do you see it?"

Jack found the small, black, leather-bound volume beneath the first pew. When he flipped through the pages, however, his face fell.

"Suze," he said. "It's not even in English."

"That's okay," I said, and I took it from him and turned to the page Father Dominic had marked. "Here it is."

And I began to read.

I'm not going to pretend I know Latin. I don't. I hadn't the slightest idea what I was saying.

But I guess pronunciation doesn't count when you are summoning the forces of darkness, since, as I spoke, those misty tendrils began to grow longer and longer, until finally they spilled out onto the floor and began to curl around Maria's limbs.

She didn't even seem to mind, either. It was like she was enjoying the way they felt around her wrists and ankles.

Well, the chick was kind of dominatrixy, if you asked me.

She didn't even struggle when, as I read further, the slack on the smoky tendrils tightened, and slowly, the fog began elevating her off the floor.

"Hey," Jack said in an indignant voice. "How come it didn't do that for you? How come you had to climb into the hole?"

I was afraid to reply, however. Who knew what would happen if I stopped reading?

So I kept on. And Maria soared higher and higher, until ...

With a strangled cry, Diego broke away from Jesse and came racing toward us.

"You bitch!" he bellowed at me as he stared in horror at his wife's body, dangling in the air above us. "Bring her down!"

Jesse, panting, his shirt torn down the middle and a thin ribbon of blood running down the side of his face from a cut in his forehead, came up behind Diego and said, "You want your wife so badly, then why don't you go to her?"

And he shoved Felix Diego into the center of the ring of candles.

A second later, tendrils of smoke shot down to curl around him, too.

Diego didn't take his exorcism as quietly as his wife. He did not appear to be enjoying himself one bit. He kicked and screamed and said quite a lot of stuff in Spanish that I didn't understand, but which Jesse surely did.

Still, Jesse's expression did not change, not even once. Every so often I looked up from what I was reading and checked. He watched the two lovers - the one who had killed him and the one who had ordered his death - disappear into the same hole we'd just climbed from.

Until finally, after I'd uttered a last "Amen," they disappeared.

When the last echo of Diego's vengeful cries died away, silence filled the church. It was so pervasive a silence, it was actually a little overwhelming. I myself was reluctant to break it. But I felt like I had to.

"Jesse," I said, softly.

But not softly enough. My whisper, in the stillness of the church, after all that violence, sounded like a scream.

Jesse tore his gaze from the hole through which Maria and Diego had disappeared and looked at me questioningly.

I nodded toward the hole. "If you want to go back," I said, though each word tasted, I was sure, like those beetles Dopey had accidentally poured into his mouth, "now is the time, before it closes up again."

Jesse looked up at the hole, and then at me, and then back at the hole.

And then back at me.

"No, thank you, querida ," he said, casually. "I think I want to stay and see how it all ends."

CHAPTER 17

How it all ended that day was with Jack and Jesse and me helping Father Dominic, when he finally came around, to a phone, so that he could call the police and report that he'd stumbled across a pair of thieves looting the place.

A lie, yes. But how else was he going to explain all the damage Maria and Diego had done? Not to mention the bump on his noggin.

Then, once we were sure the police and an ambulance were on their way, Jesse and I left Father Dominic and waited with Jack for the cab we'd called, carefully not talking about the one thing I'm pretty sure we were all thinking: Paul.

Not that I didn't try to get Jack to tell me what was up with his brother and all. Basically, the conversation went like this:

Me: "So, Jack. What is up with your brother?"

Jack: (scowling) "I don't want to talk about it."

Me: "I can fully appreciate that. However, he appears to be able to move freely between the realms of the living and the dead, and I find this alarming. Do you think it is possible that he is the son of Satan?"

Jesse: "Susannah."

Me: "I mean that in the nicest possible way."

Jack: "I said I don't want to talk about it."

Me: "Which is perfectly understandable. But did you know before now that Paul is a mediator, too? Or were you as surprised as we were? Because you didn't seem very surprised when you ran into him, you know, up there."

Jack: "I really don't want to talk about this right now."

Jesse: "He doesn't want to talk about it, Susannah. Leave the boy alone."

Which was easy for Jesse to say. Jesse didn't know what I did. Which was that Paul and Maria and Diego . . . they had all been in cahoots. It had taken me a while to realize it, but now that I had, I could have kicked myself for not seeing it before: Paul's keeping me occupied at Friday's while Maria had Jack perform the exorcism on Jesse. Paul's remark - "It's easier to catch flies with honey than with vinegar." Hadn't Maria said the exact same thing to me, not a few hours later?