Embers (29 page)

Anya scrubbed futilely at the Hebrew characters on her arms. Ciro had used permanent marker, and they weren’t coming off anytime soon. If she had enough of her wits about her by the time Halloween rolled around, she could go as a dreidel. If. . . Devil’s Night was only two days away. She was running out of time to stop Ferrer from waking Sirrush. Hell, two days from now, it might not matter a bit to her. . . she might be locked up in the psych ward, completely unaware of the world spinning outside her own skull.

She reached forward to shut off the water. As soon as she did so, tiny glass cuts on her arms, face, and hands began to bleed again. She reached out of the shower for tissue to stanch the bleeding, feeling like she had when her mother caught her attempting to shave her legs for the first time. She was eleven and hadn’t realized that soap was part of the procedure. The red marks had taken days to fade from her legs.

She reached for a blue towel that wouldn’t show blood and dried off. She wiped steam from the mirror to inspect the burns on her chest. The red had faded to a sickly pink color, and the texture of her skin felt too soft, like skin that had wrinkled under a BandAid for too many days. Dutifully, she slathered more antibiotic cream on the wound, though it honestly seemed the least of her worries. She dimly wondered if it would ever heal, as long as Mimi was infecting her.

Katie had left a jar of something more potent than garlic butter for her as demon tranquilizer. It was a blatant reminder that the exorcism hadn’t worked. Anya screwed open the lid of the mason jar and sniffed. Beeswax suspended leaves of unidentifiable herbs and flowers, but the most overwhelming top notes smelled of mint and basil. She rubbed it into her skin, which seemed to absorb it much more readily than the garlic butter that had lain atop it all day in a sweaty mess.

Katie had brought her a change of clothes, for which she was grateful; Anya didn’t want to imagine trying to shimmy back into wet pants studded with glass splinters. Katie’s clothes smelled like lavender: the linen poet shirt was cut loose and blessedly cool on her burns. Katie was shorter than Anya, and the crinkled black skirt hit Anya at mid-calf, when it would have brushed Katie’s ankles. Katie had laid out a black brocade vest for her: perhaps out of a sense of whimsy, perhaps out of modesty. As Katie had collected Anya’s original clothes to run laundry, she might have noted the missing bra.

Hair dripping over her shoulder, Anya shrugged into the vest. She slipped on some black ballerina-type slippers Katie had provided and padded out of the steamy bathroom. Sparky followed close on her heels, curling around her ankles like a cat as she navigated the back steps to the bar.

Conversation collapsed when she reached the last creaking step. Jules and Max were chucking large pieces of glass into a plastic trash can, while Katie swept. Ciro was scrubbing down the bar with something that smelled like ammonia. Renee stood over the remains of the bathtub like a child gazing upon a broken piggy bank. Windows were cracked open to let the air come through, to disperse some of Mimi’s influence. Salt gritted in the glass under their steps, grinding into the spaces between the floorboards.

Anya hugged her elbows, guilty in the wake of all her destruction. “Hey, guys.”

A chorus of wary greetings met her.

She gestured at the trashed bar, the ruined bathtub. “I’m sorry about all of this. . . I’ll pay for it, really.” Anya had no idea how she was going to accomplish this without any income, but she supposed that selling the Dart might be a start.

Ciro wheeled up to her. “I won’t hear of it, child. That’s what insurance is for.”

“You’ve got insurance for Mimi’s tantrums?”

“I’ve got insurance for acts of God. It’ll cover acts of the Devil, too. . . just as long as I tell the adjuster that the damage was done by persons unknown.” Ciro shrugged. “It’s just stuff.”

Anya’s gaze flickered to a particularly bad cut on Max’s face and the way that Renee shied back a few steps when she came into the room. The physical damage was the least of her worries. Strange that she’d been so eager to drive DAGR away and how bad she felt now that she really had.

“Let me help you guys pick up.” Anya reached for a bucket to scoop the pennies and ruined porcelain.

“No.” Jules firmly set his hand on her shoulder. “We’ve gotta talk.”

The ghost-hunters righted bar stools and climbed up into them. Renee moved to melt into the floor.

“Renee, I’m really sorry,” Anya began.

Renee paused, looking over her shoulder. “Sweetie, it’s not your fault. I don’t take it personally. But. . . neither should you when I say that you’re scaring me right now. I know that you would never hurt me. But that thing inside you would.” Her kohl-rimmed eyes were wide with nervousness and she played with her beads. “So. . . I’m gonna keep a low profile for now, okay?”

Anya nodded, mouth dry. “I understand. It’s for the best.”

Renee gave her a sad smile and faded into the floor.

Sparky put his feet up on the bar stool, gazing up at Anya with limpid eyes. She leaned over, picked him up, and parked him in her lap. He wrapped himself around her shoulders like Miss America’s sash, his head buried inside her vest and his butt spilling off her lap. His tail curled around the legs of the bar stool. It was an awkwardly uncomfortable position from her perspective, but she knew that no one else could see it.

“Sparky’s spooked,” she explained. “He gets cuddly when he’s scared.”

“We’re all spooked,” Max confirmed.

Ciro folded his hands in his lap. “Though the exorcism failed, we did glean some useful information about your parasite.”

“Parasite? That’s an apt term.”

“The names it says it’s used are troubling me.” Ciro’s brow was knotted in concentration.

“One of them was ‘Lilitu.’ That’s a Sumerian cognate for ‘Lilith.’”

“Wasn’t she Adam’s first wife?” Anya’s knowledge of Bible Apocrypha was limited. The Catholic church hadn’t been too fond of extra books beyond the Old and New Testaments.

“Depends on whose mythology you follow. According to the Sumerians, the Lilitu—

there were more than one—were beautiful, succubilike creatures who fed on men’s erotic dreams.”

“That’s hot,” Max said.

Jules slapped him on the back of the head. “That is
not
hot.”

Ciro continued, ignoring the squabble. “The Babylonians mythologized her as the prostitute of the goddess Ishtar. Other traditions tie her to the serpent in the garden of Eden, to storm-goddesses, and to the bearer of Adam’s demon children. In the Kabbalah, Lilith is represented as a Qliphoth, a shell of impurity dealing with the temptations of seduction.”

Anya sat very still, thinking back to her dream of the priest. “It tracks with one of her memories that came up in a dream. . . she drove a priest to suicide through obsession with a woman.”

Ciro frowned and rubbed his beard. “She’s very powerful. And ancient. And she may be well beyond all our powers to drive her out.”

“Then what are we going to do?” Jules said. “We can’t just leave it in her.”

Ciro nodded. “We won’t. I need to do more research, see if there’s a specific weakness we can exploit. I have some friends to call for advice—a rabbi here in Detroit, and a voodoo priestess in New Orleans. Among the three of us, we should be able to come up with a solution. In the meantime, practical preparations need to be made.”

Anya leaned forward, cradling the salamander. “What preparations?”

“Rest assured, we will find a way to drive her out. But it may take some time. In the meantime, you should not be left alone. And. . . you should consider drawing up some legal documents to protect you, in the event that you manage to slip out of our capable supervision.”

“Like a durable power of attorney in case I wind up in the nut ward?” Anya was half kidding, but her voice stuck in her throat when Ciro nodded.

“I’ve seen what happens to people in psychiatric care without anyone to make decisions for them. I would not have that happen to you. Much as I like to think of you, of all of you, as family, there’s no legal standing for any of us to see that you get the spiritual treatment you need.”

Anya’s grip on Sparky whitened. As bad as it was, being under the spell of a demon, she still had some measure of control over her life. If she were to wind up in a mental institution, no part of her life would be hers. None of it. She’d be at the mercy of a psychiatric nurse feeding her Haldol three times a day. The prospect of not only being unable to protect others, but unable to look out for herself, frightened her more than the prospect of Mimi chewing away at her soul, whatever remained of it.

“I have no way of peering into the future,” Ciro told her. “And I hope I’m wrong. But please see to it, while you still can.”

When she found her voice again, it tasted hollow. “I’ll contact someone in the morning to get the papers drawn up.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THERE WAS ONE PERSON WHO she knew could get rid of Mimi.

And she knew that he would be glad to see her.

Anya waited until the house was asleep. Jules and Max had left hours ago. She listened to Ciro snoring like a freight train in his bedroom. The old man worried her; he would snore vigorously for about ten minutes, then snort and stop. When she was on the verge of leaping out of the guest bed to resuscitate him, he would begin again. This pattern had continued for hours. Anya didn’t know how Max had been able to stand it.

Katie slept beside Anya in the guest bed. At least, Anya assumed that she slept by the steady rise and fall of her chest. The witch had wrapped a pillow around her head with both fists, and had wadded most of the comforter edge around her ears to block out the sound.

Stealthily, Anya slipped out of bed and gathered her clothes from the floor. In bare feet, she crept down the staircase. She tried to keep at the edges of the stairs, where squeaks

would be less likely, but it sounded like she was murdering mice under high-heeled shoes. She heard no interruption in Ciro’s snoring, no creak in the bed upstairs to suggest that Katie had been disturbed enough by her absence or the creaking to even turn over.

She dressed in the ruins of the bar in Katie’s clothes, then pulled her coat and purse from the cloakroom. Holding her shoes in her hand and feeling like a teenager creeping out of her parents’ house, she padded to the front door of the bar.

“Where are you going?”

The whisper caught her off guard. Anya looked back to see Renee sitting on the edge of the bar, swinging her bare feet into darkness.

“I’m going to try to find someone who can help me. Another Lantern,” she said. That much was the truth. She hoped she wouldn’t have to elaborate, that Renee wouldn’t wake Katie and Ciro.

Renee fixed her with a knowing look. She’d seen decades of this same old story playing out within these walls.
“Be careful, sweetie. Any man that can devour that demon can
ruin you, too. . . as easily as crushing out a cigarette.”

“I will, Renee. Thanks.” Anya let herself out of the bar, car keys in hand.

As much as the thought boiled her conflicting emotions, as much as it stung her pride and mangled her ethics, she’d have to do it.

She would have to ask Drake Ferrer to take Mimi off her hands.

Drake had built himself a nice little fortress of solitude in Oakland County, northwest of the city. According to real estate records, it sat on Lake Angelus, a rich area where the few hundred residents jealously guarded their privacy. Unlike the McMansions in most of Detroit’s suburbs, the people in Lake Angelus didn’t park huge houses on tiny lots. Most of the Angelus houses were built on substantial acreage, hidden from prying eyes. The wealthy here had nothing to prove to their neighbors. Drake Ferrer’s house was no exception to local habit.

Anya cruised down the winding lane to the lake, headlights shut off. Under the waxing moon, Lake Angelus shone like a flat obsidian mirror. This far out, away from the glowing light of Detroit on the horizon, Anya could see stars. Every so often, she would crane her head under the windshield to see them. She’d met little other traffic on the way here and most of the distant house lights she passed were doused. Everything was still and asleep.