up, but my legs collapsed under me. Suddenly I felt incredibly cold despite the heat; I began to shiver. My eyes entirely lost focus.
“Get this—get this out of me. The blood. Get it out,” I managed.
“She’s going into shock,” I heard the Warlock say. “What the hell happened to her hand?”
Someone brought a big towel, and Cooper wrapped me in it and carried me into the store.
“Do you have a shower?” he asked Rudy. “And any syrup of ipecac?”
“Yes sir, I got a shower back here in my apartment,” Rudy said. “And I think I got some in my medicine cabinet.”
The death-memories were overwhelming me. So much remembered lust for and fear of the beautiful woman, the tearing dark of souls sundered from still-living bodies, the raw agony of claws and teeth shearing skin and nerve and muscle, my own panic and horror at knowing my body had been used to commit mass murder. That the men I’d slain were soulless didn’t matter, because it hadn’t mattered to the entity that had possessed me. The expression of monstrous blood lust I’d seen on my own face through the dead men’s eyes made me want to slit my own throat for fear of that happening again. Better to be dead than to be used for such evil. Better to be dead.
I was barely aware and mostly blind with tears as Cooper set me down into a bathtub of warm water.
“Drink this,” he said, pushing a small plastic medicine cup to my lips. I opened my mouth and took the shot of sickly sweet syrup.
“Now this.” A bottle of Evian was at my lips. “Drink it all if you can.”
I tilted my head back and swallowed down the cool, sweet water. Mere seconds later, my stomach began to cramp and roil.
“Over the side! Bucket’s right here!”
I turned my head and spent the next half hour or so being miserably sick into a galvanized steel bucket that smelled of bleach and harsh soap while Cooper sat close by on the lidded commode.
“Jessie, can you hear me? Are you all right?” Pal’s voice was faint in my head.
I’m pretty fucking far from all right, I thought back.
“Oh, thank Goddess. I thought we’d lost our connection for good. I’ve been trying to get through to you for quite some time.”
What the hell happened?
“Do you remember anything?”
Bits and pieces. Death-memories. I … I can see myself killing those poor guys.
“Don’t spend a second longer feeling guilty about those men.” Pal’s sternness was a thin veneer over an underlying tone of worry. “They were nothing more than meat puppets, and their master does not appear to have good intentions toward us.”
How did you know they didn’t have souls?
“That was fairly obvious: dead eyes, jerky gait, like the lad at dinner but without the pretty flowers and good complexion.”
So what happened?
“Shortly after you went off to try to open the mirror, two vehicles arrived with the puppets. They demanded our surrender. Cooper and the Warlock began fighting with them, and then you came out of the store attacking whoever happened to be closest to you. Cooper is most fortunate he quickly realized you were not yourself.”
I thought of the old shopkeeper. There wasn’t a death-memory from him in my head, but then there wouldn’t have been one if I’d simply gutted him in passing as I hurried to get to the fight outside. Rudy … I didn’t … did I?
“No, you didn’t harm him. He was tending to his solar array when the cars arrived. The Warlock has been questioning him out here since Cooper brought you back inside.”
He isn’t beating him up, is he?
“Oh, no. Seeing the corpses of the ‘Welcome Wagon,’ as Rudy calls them, has made him quite talkative. Apparently the town has been taken over by a demon or devil who simply calls herself Miko—what a Japanese entity is doing here of all places, nobody seems to know—and she has captured an unknown number of local Talents along with Rudy’s daughter.”
That fits with what my father told me.
“So you were able to open a mirror after all? Excellent. Any suggestions from him as to how to leave this lovely little hamlet?”
Not so much. There’s an isolation barrier around the whole area.
“How dreadfully inconvenient.”
Dreadful, yeah. Do you have any idea what just happened to me?
“Based on the fragments of diabolic babble you uttered while you turned the meat puppets to slaw, I’d hazard to guess that you were temporarily possessed by some sort of devil.