0.5 Deadly Hearts (3 page)

“It wasn’t exactly a challenge. He really had no clue what’s been wrong with him,” Elise said, cinching the rope tight around his right ankle. God, it was wet there, too. Utterly foul. “You should have seen him when he opened the door.”

He ripped a page out of the notebook and stepped over the line. “I can’t imagine an exorcist as reputable as the great Rich Harris would be surprised to see the accoutrements of the occult. I’m shocked, just shocked.”

James flicked the paper into the air. His lips moved with a silent syllable. The candles flamed higher, stretching in long fingers toward the ceiling, and the radiant heat warmed Elise’s skin.

Closing the circle of power must have caused some jolt of energy that Elise couldn’t feel, because Rich’s eyes shot open. The whites were bloodshot. Veins corded his face and neck. The sweat beading on his skin swirled with black fog.

“Hey there, sleeping beauty,” Elise said. She nudged him in the chest with the point of her falchion. Not hard enough to pierce skin. Just enough to make him pay attention.

His eyes dropped to the blade. It was carved with religious symbols. Most of them wouldn’t mean anything to the average demon, but there was enough variety that at least one was guaranteed to bother any creature ending up at the point of her blade. His eyes widened and face paled, so obviously something worked.

“You got six couples and failed on the seventh,” Elise said, swinging her sword like a cane as she rounded his chair. “Sloppy work. You should have done them all at once if you wanted to avoid getting caught. What are you building energy for? You’re not big enough to manage an ascension, but it’s got to be pretty good, if you need seven pairs of hearts.”

“
I will copulate with you and tear through your organs with my phallus,
” he said.

James took a step forward, but Elise stopped him with a hard look. She leaned on the chair and got close to Rich’s ear.

“I think you’re trying to work up the energy to breed,” she said in a low voice.

He jerked and tried to bite her. His teeth snapped harmlessly at the air.

“Piggyback?” James asked, moving to Elise’s side.

“No,” she said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

James frowned. “What? Why?”
Because this demon feeds on broken hearts
. She bit the inside of her cheek and just shook her head. “Well, do you have some idea what this thing is?”

Oh, Elise had ideas, all right. She’d had ideas about which demon it had to be when she first heard that he was targeting divorcing couples.

She cast a sideways glance at Rich and sighed.

Of all the things she didn’t want to have to talk about with her aspis…

“I know exactly what it is,” she finally said. She reached under the chair to press the button on her tape recorder. The gears started moving with a gentle hiss. “This is Elise Kavanagh. It’s February fourteenth, two thousand and three, and I’m exorcising Rich Harris.”

The demon hissed, spitting saliva that looked and smelled like magma.

“Elise?” James asked in a low voice, quiet enough that the recorder wouldn’t pick it up.

She started looping the chains around Rich’s neck, and he thrashed, throwing his head from side to side. “Courevore,” she said, addressing the demon directly. “You’re breaking about a thousand laws by walking this Earth.”

Rich Harris’s lips widened in a painful grin. A black tongue snaked between his teeth. “
I go where I please
.”

James mouthed the name silently.
Courevore
. Recognition illuminated his features.

“Sure, you can go wherever you want,” Elise said. “As long as you don’t mind volunteering yourself for a death sentence. I saw a bounty for your life not even a month ago. You’ve moved fast.”

“
Release me, or this man dies
.”

Did he mean Rich Harris, or James? Elise couldn’t take that risk.

She took James aside. “Why don’t you give me some space?” she whispered.

“But you need the help.”

“Having you around can only make me vulnerable to this thing,” Elise said.

“He can’t have any effect on us,” James said, but he didn’t sound very convincing. He raked a hand through his hair and blew a breath out. He wouldn’t look at Elise. “It’s not like we’re…”

“Yeah, right,” she said. “You better wait outside.”

“I don’t think…”

Elise put a hand on his arm. “Please,” she said.

James’s shoulders slumped. “All right.” Another sigh, and then he added, “I’m sorry.”

He made a hand gesture like parting a curtain and stepped out of the circle of power.

As soon as he was gone, Elise faced Rich again. Now the tips of his hair were smoking. She wasn’t exactly hung up on saving this guy—nobody would be heartbroken over a lost grifter scamming money from broken hearts. But James was watching. She couldn’t just kill Rich and save herself the effort, either.

“I’ll give you one chance to be honest with me and return safely to Hell. Where are your offspring?” Elise asked, drawing her other sword.

“
You will never find them. Not if you lived a thousand lifetimes.
”

Elise had been wearing a pink shirt and oven mitts all day. She had no patience for this bullshit.

“Courevore, devourer of broken hearts, lover of the shattered spirit, lord of the seventh dominion,” she said, “I hereby sentence you to death.”

“
Under whose authority
?”

“Mine.” She aimed her sword at his breast again. “I exorcise you, impious demon. In vain do you boast of this deed. I command you to restore this man as proof you no longer have any rule over his soul.”

Rich threw his head back and cackled. His arm muscles bulged as he fought against the bindings.

Elise hooked the tip of her falchion in the charms. “I abjure you, stripping you of the arms with which you fight. I revoke the powers by which this man became bound to your service.”

His laughter turned to a shriek. His ribs rippled underneath his shirt like limbs twisting underneath a bed sheet.

Even as he screamed, a guttural voice rolled through the room. “
He doesn’t love you,
” Courevore said. “
He will never love you
.”

Elise’s sword wavered. She tightened her grip on the hilt.

“This creature is restored, rejecting your influence, and granted divine mercy for defense against your assaults. Now
get the fuck out
.”

His ribs rippled again, and Elise heard a
crack
. Blood spread over his chest.

She dropped one of the swords and ripped his shirt open. His sternum had snapped. Jagged shards of bone ripped through the skin.

A red eye stared from the place his heart should have been.

“Huh,” she said.

It rolled around to focus the gaping maw of its pupil on her face, and it looked
through
her. “
He rejected you because you’re broken
,” the demon said, and this time, it spoke directly into her skull. Her eardrums throbbed. “
The women I killed have all failed as wives, but you’ll never even be good enough to marry, much less fuck. Malformed hermaphrodite with a wasted soul
.”

The other sword slipped from her fingers, and Elise tried to cover her ears, but it wasn’t good enough. The voice came from within.

James shouted, and it sounded like he was a thousand miles away. “Elise!”

“
Useless, ugly, broken
,” Courevore said.

She wanted to slap the smugness off Rich’s twisted face.

“
Crux sacra sit mihi lux
,” Elise said. The words were unsteady. There was no power behind them. “
Non draco sit—
”

A rope snapped. Rich’s hand shot out and clenched on her throat.

A gurgle escaped her lips.

“
He only pretends to like you
,” Courevore hissed into her mind.

It was hard to speak without any air. Her head swam.

“You are so full of shit,” she grunted, and then she punched her hand through his chest and grabbed the eyeball.

It pulsed in her hand, hot and slippery and flailing wildly against her fingers, like a bird trapped in a net. His fingers tightened on her throat, and she responded by tightening her grip, too. “
Let me go or I’ll kill you
,” Courevore said.

She couldn’t speak anymore, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t give him a last, well-deserved “fuck you.”

Flexing her biceps, she ripped at the muscle, trying to wrench it free of his chest cavity. Bone scraped against her wrist. Fingernails dug into her throat.

And then James was between them, and he forced the hand off of Elise, pushed her away. She fell onto her ass. Her lungs ached with the sudden rush of oxygen.

“
She’ll hate you once she finds out
,” Courevore said, focusing the eyeball on James.
“
Your heart is blacker than hers
.”

James whispered something into Rich’s ear—something too quiet for Elise to hear. But the eye within his chest rolled with shock, his lungs wheezed in a gasp, and James stepped away apparently unperturbed by the demon.

He helped Elise stand and gave her one of the falchions.

“Let’s finish this,” he said, voice hard.

Elise couldn’t agree more.

“
Crux sacra sit mihi dux
,” she said, stronger this time. “
Non draco sit mihi lux. Vade retro, Satana. Nunquam suade mihi vana.
”

Rich screamed again, tearing at his own face with the free hand.

Elise gathered her strength for a final push. She placed the flat of the blade against the exposed eyeball.

“
Sunt mala quae libas. Ipse venena bibas!
”

His cries reached a pitch. His ribs rippled, danced, shivered.

And then his chest exploded.

Blood showered over the room, and Elise couldn’t duck fast enough to avoid the geyser. It was hot and sulfurous and it sprayed down her side.

James’s reaction time had been much better. He peered at her from behind the chair as a steady stream of blood drip-dripped from the seat to the floor. “Well,” he said. “That was a first.”

Elise wiped a chunk of slippery flesh out of her hair. “And hopefully a last.”

Rich Harris, priest of the Church of Light and soldier of God, had been split in half by the exploding demon. His pelvis was an open mess of intestine. Organs dangled from underneath the remnants of his breastbone. The rest was gone—including a couple segments of his spine.

Elise muttered a thousand curses under her breath as she tried to wipe the blood off of her face and hands, but there was just too much of it. Her skin was slick.

“Okay,” she said, squeegeeing blood out of her tank top. “McIntyre
really
owes me new clothes now.”

James laughed as he stood. Of course
he
could laugh. He only had blood on his right shoe. He plucked something off of her shoulder and flung it aside. “Are you all right? Any problems breathing?”

“I’m fine,” she said, and it was mostly true. Even though Courevore was dead, she could still hear his voice echoing through her skull.

He will never love you
.

She didn’t look at James as she peeled off her shoes and socks.

“I think I saw clothes in Leticia’s size in the other bedroom,” James said. “Maybe a shower’s in order.”

Elise was grateful not to have to discuss the destroyed body, or anything the demon had said. She ducked out of the room, leaving her shoes behind, and tried not to drip blood on her way to the shower.

Five minutes and a lot of hot water later, she was dressed again in shorts and a tube top that belonged to McIntyre’s girlfriend. James was waiting for her on the top of the stairs. She sat beside him to comb out her hair.

He was flipping through his notebook again, but he closed it to give her his full attention.

“Breeding,” he said.

Elise’s comb stilled. “What?”

“You said that you thought Courevore was trying to breed.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Courevore is one-of-a-kind. He could only breed by impregnating a human woman—which obviously doesn’t work in cases of incorporeal possession—or by some other asexual method. Like eggs, maybe.”

“Eggs,” James echoed.

“Well, I hope not, but I think that’s how his type usually make minions. If that’s the case, they could be anywhere.”

Elise continued to drag the comb through her hair, thinking back on everything that McIntyre had told her about the case.

Rich Harris lived in a pay-by-the-week motel—hardly somewhere safe and secure to keep one’s offspring. The former victims’ houses had all been swept by the cops and completely cleaned out. Where could that kind of guy keep a demon’s eggs? A storage unit, maybe?

James interrupted her thoughts by leaning forward and sniffing the air. “What is that?”

She lifted her arms and smelled herself. “Is there still blood on me?”

“No, it’s more like…burning chocolate?”

Elise almost dropped the comb. “Shit!”

She leaped to her feet and shot downstairs.

One could never
tell what might go wrong in the aftermath of an exorcism. Powerful demons had a way of leaving nasty tricks behind—booby traps, extra minions, things that could explode. When James smelled the smoke, he was certain that Courevore must have set the house on fire on his way out. What he found was a lot more shocking.

A black haze filled the kitchen. James rushed to open the back door and turn on the ceiling fan. Elise ripped a towel off the rack and pulled the oven open, and smoke spewed into the room. It was acrid and bitter, almost as bad as the sulfur pouring from a demon’s mouth, and tears sprung to James’s eyes.

“The hell is that?” he asked, flapping his hands in front of his face to clear a precious few inches of air.

Elise’s lack of response was even more worrying than the smoke itself.

She reached inside the oven and tossed a cookie sheet on the counter. Pieces of charcoal slid over the aluminum—pieces of charcoal that smelled suspiciously like Nutella. “Shit,” she said. “I ruined them.”