Poe (37 page)

My father drops the extinguished candle and races down the stairs. The fire now creeps across most of the ceiling, and above I can hear the panicked cries of servants and partygoers. Captain Aspinwall appears at the doorway dressed as a pirate. He shouts down through the haze of smoke.

“Have you seen my daughter, my wife?”

“Here!” my father shouts as he takes off his shirt to damp the flames on my mother’s inert form; his body is surprisingly wiry and muscular, like a gymnast’s. He gently lifts the hair from her raw, burned neck, and she whispers something unintelligible before closing her eyes.

Covering his nose with his handkerchief, the captain rushes down and spots Delia on the floor, covered with blood. “My baby, my baby girl,” he cries. Her eyes flutter and then open.

“Daddy?”

My father covers my mother’s now apparently lifeless face with his shirt; it’s hard to tell if she’s breathing. The captain clutches Delia to his chest, looks over to where my father is kneeling beside my mother’s body, and catches his eye. There is a wordless exchange. My father shakes his head solemnly. Delia coughs. Fighting back tears, Captain Aspinwall lifts his daughter and carries her past the bodies, dodging the growing flames, up the stairs and out into the night air.

For a moment I think stupidly that my father is just going to sit there, let them both burn, because he doesn’t move, doesn’t stir. All the rage is gone; in its place is an exhausted, haunted look, like he knows too much, has seen too much. It’s my mother who reaches out with a trembling hand, touches his leg. Quietly, gently, he lifts the rag from my mother’s face. She nods imperceptibly, and then he takes her
hand and gathers her in his arms. She looks so small as he carries her up the stairs, like a child herself.

“
Say my name
.” Through the fire, Poe walks toward me, strangely triumphant, her pale face illuminated by the flames. “
Say my name and we will have our revenge
.”

But I don’t say her name. Instead another word escapes my lips: strange but familiar.

“Nachiel.”

Suddenly there’s a blazing pain like my ribs are being crushed, like someone has implanted a firecracker in my chest and lit it.

Poe’s eyes grow wide. “
No
,” she hisses. She reaches out an arm, but there’s nothing to reach for.

I’m gone again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: NACHIEL

F
or someone who’s not sure if they’re immortal, you sure take some chances.”

I’m lying on the cement floor of the basement, wet and cold—no, make that freezing; I can’t feel my feet or my fingers. The road flare is still burning, providing a small modicum of heat and giving off enough flickering light for me to see the man crouched next to me.

The guy from Sacred Heart Collectibles?

I take in his ordinary dark jeans, brown T-shirt, and gray baseball jacket with an electric blue embroidered logo, “Supreme Being,” but there’s something else about him that’s harder to place. Like his eyes. They’re a deep, wintry gray, and I can actually feel them probing me, like a delicate finger is brushing through my thoughts.

“Fuck,” I mutter, but even that small word causes pain to shoot through my chest. I spit out some brackish water and then vomit the content of my stomach—what little there is.

“Not easy pulling you up out of that well,” says the man cheerfully. “Good thing I got to you first or you could’ve been on the way to the morgue again. Assuming they ever found you. Knew this spirit once, been possessing a body for years, right? Decided he wanted to do some cave exploring, live a little. But then part of the cave, it collapses on him, and he’s stuck there, like, for a century. Skin was crazy white when he came out, like one of those weird albino fish that live at the bottom of the ocean.”

I try to sit up—more pain.

“Might have broken a rib there. Sorry.”

“Feels like you broke all of them. Who
are
you?”

“Me? Who do you think?”

When I don’t immediately come up with the answer he looks offended. “
Nachiel
,” he says as if I’m very, very stupid.

I start to laugh bitterly but have to stop because the pain’s too intense.
This
is Nachiel, my protective spirit? A retail sales clerk? No wonder everything’s so fucked up. “Great job. How many people have been murdered now?”

“I watch over
you
. Who do you think scared Daniel off when he was in Lisa’s house or when he climbed the tree outside your window?”

The bootprints around the tree. It never occurred to me that there might be more than one set.

“The rest I’m not allowed to interfere with,” Nachiel adds. “Rules of engagement.”

“Rules of engagement. Next you’ll be talking about collateral damage.”

He shrugs. “Free will always results in collateral damage. Not my call.”

I consider this for a moment. What if he’s not really a good spirit but is working with Poe, or worse? How would I know the difference?

“So what happened on Halloween when I almost drowned? Had a night shift at Sacred Heart you couldn’t get out of?”

“You were off the radar. I had no idea where you were,” replies Nachiel defensively. “None of us did until you called.”

Now this is
truly
unbelievable. “
I
called. When the
fuck
did I call any of you? I didn’t even call Poe or Khi—”

“Stop!” shouts Nachiel with an intensity that instantly silences me.

He takes a breath. “You have to be
very
careful what you say. You have more power than you realize, wearing that ring. Never say a spirit or demon’s
true
name unless you’re ready to meet them. And when
you give a command, watch how you phrase your sentences. Do you remember what you said at Aspinwall before all hell broke loose?”

Not exactly at the top of my mind; something about spirits… doing something? “I said—”

“For
fuck’s
sake, don’t say it again. Seriously, got enough to deal with. But you
do
remember?”

“I think I get general the drift. So
that
made all
this
… happen?”

He sighs, like I’m an idiot finally catching up. Which I am. “Exactly. You opened the door to
anything
supernatural that had touched that place. Poe came through, possessed Maddy—”

“Then the floor gave way, but she wasn’t possessed afterward.”

“Because you told her to leave Maddy alone. Nice bit of intuition there. But the whole thing rang a pretty loud bell in the spirit world. Sorath sensed your connection with Lisa. He needed to find a host, someone he could use to emotionally manipulate you, and he’d already possessed Daniel once. Makes it easier.”

“Once?”

“Daniel found
The Book of Fiends
, or what there was of it, at Aspinwall. He conjured Sorath… thought he’d be smart enough to control him. Of course he wasn’t. After he tried to kill Lisa, your father was able to perform the exorcism. But it was his last. It… drained him. He never fully recovered.”

I lean the back of my head against the cement wall, fighting a wave of dizziness. It all fits, but then that’s what bothers me. It’s too perfect.

“And you didn’t just
tell
me all this in Sacred Heart because…?”

“You hadn’t called me by name yet. Rules of engagement. If seraphs could just walk around telling people what they should know, it’d be a different world. You have to admit though I dropped you a pretty serious hint.”

In a very odd way, probably because my life is very odd at the moment, it makes sense.

“And my father. Why the fuck didn’t
he
bother to tell me? Didn’t think I could handle it?”

Nachiel pauses for a moment.

“Honestly, your father didn’t want a son.”

I burst out into laughter, the bright, bitter kind. “Oh well, that makes me feel
so
much better. You’re an amazing help, Nachiel. Wish I’d conjured you before. Could have used some help slitting my wrists.”

Nachiel sighs, then joins me on the cold cement floor. “Look,” he says quietly, “this is dark, dark stuff. Not the kind of stuff you’d ever wish on anyone, not your worst enemy, certainly not the people you love. You can exorcise demons, but once they’ve connected with someone, they’re more accessible. Easier to find.”

I think about Daniel’s victims. How each of them in some way had been touched by Sorath. None fared well.

“A lifetime exorcising demons isn’t much of a life,” he adds grimly.

“Who wouldn’t want to be a part of all this?” A bout of serious coughing starts then, making me double over again with pain. Nachiel reaches into his pocket and pulls out a flask. He hands it to me, and I choke back a swig of liquid fire. It takes out the cough but does nothing for the dull ache in my heart.

“He was
hoping
it would end with him. But then there was the fire. He rescued your mother, nursed her back to health. They both became different people. Better people. But because they grew close, and Delia had been possessed once… Well, Delia would have been too tempting of a target for Sorath if your mother ever returned. She was devastated of course.”

“I was her consolation prize.”

“One I know he never regretted.”

I know then, by the sickening drop in my stomach, that it’s true. All those years I was angry at him. Wasted. And while I now have one living relative, she suffers from dementia and I’ll never be able to meet her for the same reason our mother could never see her.

“My inheritance,” I mutter. Suddenly I remember how pale my father was after his unexplained trips, how he’d be in bed for days, as though he were suffering from cancer. Even dealing with Poe gives me a splitting migraine. I’ve finally found out what my father’s “thing” was. Exorcising demons. It’s an empty victory.

Nachiel looks at me intently. “He was ready to move on, knew he wasn’t much use anymore in the demon-exorcism department. They planned to come out and visit you. He was going to give you the ring, pass it on as his own father, Rasputin, did before him.”

“Funny, I found it under the dresser.”

“Well, your mother,
she
had other ideas. Slipped the shoebox out of the car when he wasn’t looking.”

Click, click, click go all the pieces of my fragmented life.

“But she didn’t get old.”

“Not as quickly as she would have,” says Nachiel. He slips the flask back in his pocket. “Time is just another force of nature. One that with a little education you’ll be able to… adjust is probably the best way to describe it.”

“And the grimoires?”

“Your father left
The Book of Seraphs
with Lucy for safekeeping during his trip. She happens to own your favorite store. If you define favorite as bad, kitschy religious memorabilia.”

“Sacred Heart Collectibles.”

“You disappeared after the funeral and she didn’t know how to get it to you. Funny, because she reads the
Devonshire Eagle
every day, but your byline is D. Peters. By the way she doesn’t know about all this. Would be dangerous for her if she did. But
The Book of Fiends
is a little more tricky.”

I give him a hard look. “Define tricky.”

“Well, your father separated the
Book of Fiends
—never kept the pages for conjuring demons and exorcising them in the same place. Young Archibald Bennet, not knowing how to read at the time, stole the half for conjuring demons, and we all know how
that
went.”

“So the other half for exorcising demons…?”

“Unknown,” Nachiel says. “Which makes me very, very uneasy. Your father always stashed those pages in the strangest places. You didn’t run across them when you cleaned out the house?”

“I would have mentioned it.”

“Well it doesn’t mean you don’t have them. Probably in something you’d take with you if something happened. Think about it for a sec. What would you never leave behind?”

“Wish I’d known when I packed my boxes, because what I took was random.”

“I said think about it, not complain about it.”

I groan. “Poetry magnets. High school yearbook. Bunky.” Wait—Bunky
was
heavier than he should have been. But what kind of sick bastard would stuff their son’s favorite stuffed animal with a grimoire?

Oh, right. Probably the same kind of sick bastard who’d steal a grimoire from his girlfriend, along with her mother’s gun. Like father, like son.

Nachiel says nothing then, watching me carefully, and I’m overwhelmed with the impossible weight of it all. All I want to do is quit, find a corner somewhere to curl up and sleep, let it all fall away.
Enough
.

But then where would that leave Lisa?

Wincing with pain, I grab my jacket, slip the gun in my pocket, and shakily get to my feet, using the cement wall to hold myself steady.

“So how do we save Lisa?”

Nachiel though doesn’t move, doesn’t stand to join me. “That’s just it, Dimitri. We don’t.”

I hobble up the Aspinwall stairs as quick as I can, ignoring the pain that’s like a fire burning in my rib cage. Ignoring the useless sales clerk behind me. Protective spirit, my
ass
.