he was one, wouldn’t have done something without the direction of the Almighty. Except . . . doing things on their own is how angels supposedly fell from the light and entered the dark in the first place. Over and over. I’d been over this ground so often my mind knew the patterns and I was getting nothing new, except that maybe Hayyel didn’t have a job for me. Maybe he hadn’t been part of causing the cancer. Maybe it was all just timewalking, which actually made more sense than an angel needing me to do something for God. Yeah. Okay. That was a relief.
I picked up the Glob. It contained a splinter of the Blood Cross and the Blood Diamond, powered by the magic of sacrificed witch children, and some iron discs made from the melted-down spikes of Golgotha. I turned it over in my hands.
My finger, still smeared with my blood, touched it. I jerked it away almost instantly, but a faint quiver of electricity shocked through me. It reminded me to call Ed. Edmund Killian Sebastian Hartley, I called. The blood on the Glob sizzled with heat, spitting black motes of power.
My vision went sideways, and I was in a different place. In a room, dark and muggy and . . . moving. Vibrating engine noise. The bed of a truck or an RV. Metal beneath my cheek. The stench of diesel and rotting blood and death. The sound of sex, bodies hitting rhythmically. Pain rippled through my body as if every muscle were in spasm. Hunger. Hungerhungerhunger hammered me. I pushed it away, feeling the direction of the truck. He was headed north. Toward Asheville.
My mistress?
I was in Ed’s mind. “Ed,” I whispered. “Hang on. You’ll be here soon. We can help you then.”
My mistress, he thought back at me. Stay away. The Darkness is within me.
I turned from the sound of his voice to a small corner in Ed’s mind. A semblance of his body was hunched there, protected at his back but vulnerable from the front. Something shadowy crouched beside him, amorphous, moving but contained, like smoke in a bottle. But the shadow had eyes. They were watching me with intelligence and intent. The Darkness Ed was talking about. An invader in Ed’s brain, in his mind, with him. Possessing him.
The Flayer of Mithrans. In Ed’s mind.
The thing in Ed’s mind spoke. Greetings to She Who Walks in the Skin of Animals. I will drink you down, the smoke said, with Ed’s mental voice. Inside the shadow I caught a glimpse of bloody human teeth and a blade and a sensation of terror. A fast vision opened in the air between us. Ropes and utter agony and the feel of bloody wood beneath my body. It was more memory than dream or threat. In it, the bloody teeth bit down and crunched through small fingers, ripping them off. A scream echoed, high-pitched and shrill. Pain clawed through me as if it were my own. Then in an instant, it was gone. The smoke shape broke and swirled in two different directions, like a tornado inside a tornado, closing over the images.
The Darkness shot toward me. Its mouth opened. Fangs. Dozens of fangs.
With a thrust of power, like blue electricity and the smell of burning anise, Ed threw me out. The vision ended.
I was back in the circle, lying on the rug, shaking. My tongue was twisted up and around in my mouth as if it was trying to swallow backward, as if it was trying to crawl down my throat. I forced it into place and started coughing. Which jarred the thing in my middle. Pain went through me like a mudslide, darkening and covering everything. I rolled to my side and held myself, shuddering. My throat and tongue ached and when I could let go of my belly, I massaged my throat with one hand. I was cold. Too cold. Throat and hands and feet ached. But the circle was still active. I hadn’t broken it.
It took me two tries to speak, and when I did, every syllable hurt. “They’re starving him. Hurting him. Twenty-four/seven. The Flayer of Mithrans is inside Ed’s brain, trying to take him over.” I rubbed my throat and swallowed, my tongue feeling weird. My throat muscles ached. “I had access to a memory or a vision, as if Ed was fighting back, pilfering things from the Flayer’s memory.”
“How sure are you that Ed’s fighting back?” Evan asked.