A Terrible Fall of Angels (Zaniel Havelock #1)(14)

“Very pragmatic of you, Dr. Paulson.”

Had we said Paulson’s name out loud? Up to that moment the demon had only repeated what he’d heard us say in the hallway, but we hadn’t said the doctor’s last name, so how had he known it? An Infernal that repeated things was small fry; one that knew things it had no way of knowing was a bigger fish and, Heaven knew, more dangerous.

“You can’t get out of the wards, which means you didn’t use a human as a costume. If you had that kind of power, no insta-ward would contain you.”

“I don’t have to come to you, Detective; you’ll come to me to save the lives of the civilians in here with me.”

“All I have to do is wait for backup; you killed your only hostage.”

“Did I?” There was a scream, and I knew it was a man’s scream.

“They are both dead,” Prescott said. “I saw them dead.”

“Demons can mess with your mind and make you see things that aren’t there,” I said.

What little blood had come back to her face drained away. “Oh God, did I leave Ray and that boy in there with a . . . demon?”

“You thought they were dead,” I said.

The scream sounded again, higher pitched this time.

“God help me, I thought they were dead.” She was hugging herself tight enough that her skin was mottling with the pressure.

“It could be the demon imitating the voice,” I said.

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”

“No, it’s the truth. He fooled you into thinking he was Mark Cookson; using the voice is nothing compared to taking over the whole body.”

She gave a small nod, but her arms loosened their desperate hug, so that she could let go of herself and stand straight instead of hunched over her guilt.

I started to move toward the room with my gun up. Paulson said, “Don’t shoot my patient.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, but I didn’t change my shooting stance as I eased toward the room.

“The demon turned Mark Cookson into a weapon. He had no more control over what he did than the gun in your hand.”

That made me pause for a second, because there was a chance that it had been the demon that turned Mark Cookson into a rapist and murderer. Had he been a terrified passenger in his own body watching the demon do horrible things? Except I knew that demons couldn’t force us to do things that weren’t already inside us. They could manipulate us into acting on them, but it had to be a thought, maybe a dark fantasy we never intended to act on, but it had to be inside us somewhere for the demon to find. They didn’t create horrors without our help. I kept moving to get a better look inside the room. My gun stayed in both hands, tucked up tight to the front of my body with me able to sight down it to shoot if I needed it. It would have been great to save the teenager, but just because he was young didn’t mean he was innocent. I’d had more teenagers shoot at me than adults, and I still had the scars from the eleven-year-old who stabbed me with a kitchen knife, because I thought he was too young to be dangerous. I’d lived through that mistake and I never made it again.





CHAPTER SEVEN




I didn’t have to move far to see Mark Cookson’s body standing just inside the doorway. I say body because the look on his face was all demon. The evil rolled off him in a wave that made my chest tight, but the body was still tall and thin with too much leg showing around the white hospital gown. If I didn’t look at the face, then his body seemed younger than I’d been told, like early teens when boys get their big growth spurt but before the rest of them catches up and fills out. I’d have thought he was in high school, not college, and then I looked at his face again. Whatever was looking out of his face was ancient and evil and happy about it.

“You still in there, Mark?”

“Mark’s not home right now, but leave a message and I’ll be sure and tell him before I take him to Hell with me.” The voice sounded like it needed a chest three times as wide as Mark’s narrow one; it was weird that the voice coming out of the body was more jarring to me than the rest of the possession. You never know what will bother you most until it does.

“The human host doesn’t go back to Hell when we cast you out of him. You know it doesn’t work like that, but Mark doesn’t. You’re talking so he won’t fight to be free of you. You’ve told him that if you go, he goes,” I said, and my voice was calm.

“Stupid cop, you don’t know shit about Hell.”

“I’m a detective with the Metaphysical Coordination Unit, I know a lot about Hell and Heaven. I know you can hear me, Mark; fight free, we can save you.”

“Liar!” the demon roared, and then he stumbled. For a second the expression on the face matched the rest of the body. Mark Cookson was in there and he’d been able to get to the surface for a split second. Paulson was right, Mark was an unwilling weapon. I’d worry how a nineteen-year-old college student got messed up with a demon later, after we’d saved his life. I holstered my gun, because if I wasn’t willing to shoot the body it wasn’t the right tool for this fight.

Charleston and security would be up here as soon as they walked up twenty flights of stairs. All I had to do was stall until backup got there. It was no coincidence that the elevators had stopped. The demons had started getting better at messing with modern technology lately. Proving that you could teach old demons new tricks.