“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I forget sometimes that other people aren’t used to seeing things like that.”
I debated the alternatives of sprinting to the bathroom to puke my guts out versus staying at the table hoping I’d be able to keep my coffee down. The bathroom sprint was probably the wisest option, but stubbornness and a fierce desire not to look weak in front of Adam kept me in my chair. I swallowed convulsively a few times.
“So what was unusual?” I asked, my voice raspy and shaky. “Other than the fact that their internal organs weren’t internal anymore?” My gorge rose at the memory, but a couple more convulsive swallows forced it back down.
“Several things,” Adam answered. “For one, none of the four victims was wearing shoes. The bottoms of their feet were bruised and torn, and it wasn’t anything the demon had done to them. For another, they were all dressed identically, in nondescript scrubs.”
I was sure this was all fascinating information, and that there was a deep, profound meaning behind it all. But I was too busy fighting nausea to figure it out. “What’s your point?”
“This is just a hypothesis, and I could be wildly off base.”
“Okay.”
“But what if The Healing Circle isn’t the only demon-run hospital that’s more than meets the eye?”
In the process of investigating my own origins, we’d discovered that Dougal and Raphael had for centuries been involved in a kind of eugenics program, trying to breed the perfect demon host. Their definition of perfection being a superhuman body with the intelligence of a sea cucumber. My biological father had been an escapee from one of those programs, but now that Adam mentioned it, it seemed awfully naive to assume only one such secret laboratory existed. And Houston was the home of Haven Hospital, one of the more well-known demon-run hospitals.
“We have four unidentified victims, with no missing persons reports. Dressed in scrubs, no shoes, and with battered feet.”
“As if they’d been running away,” I mused.
“Exactly. So this ‘rogue’ demon was sent to chase them down.”
“And how close to Haven Hospital did the attack take place?”
“If you could have looked past the gore of the pictures, you’d have seen the hospital in the background of some of them. They didn’t get more than a couple of blocks before they were caught. The demon took out the adults first, probably assuming a three-year-old kid wouldn’t get far on its own. According to the papers and to Tommy’s MySpace page, the demon was trying to kill him. But I suspect the truth is the demon would have hauled him back to the hospital.”
I shuddered. “Unless this was another of those reject strains that the demons decided to destroy.” Raphael himself had given the order to kill off my father’s strain—and it was my father’s escape from that purge that led to my birth.
“I suppose that’s possible. Either way, the kid was rescued and got lost in the foster care system, until he decided to post his story on the Internet.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “And the fact that he remembers enough to post that story makes the demons behind the project nervous, so they… What? How do they get him to agree to host? Did you watch his registration video?”
“Yeah. There’s nothing to indicate any coercion. No signs of nervousness or reluctance. No furtive looks, body language completely relaxed.”
“So Claudia must be right. He has to have been possessed when he signed the papers.” I shook my head. “You know Sammy Cho. Can you imagine him lying about something like this? Even if he tried to lie, he’s bound to suck at it.”
Adam nodded. “You’re right,” he said, but he was frowning.
“What?” I asked.
“If someone in Dougal’s camp wanted Tommy Brewster bad enough, they could have arranged for Sammy to be possessed. Then he’d be both willing and able to lie.”
I chewed that one over. It would certainly work, but it was awfully risky. There are rarely enough demon-host-wannabes to require more than one exorcist at a time to do aura screenings, but it did happen sometimes, and if another exorcist got a look at Sammy’s aura—or if Sammy started avoiding multiple screenings to a suspicious extent—the demon could be in serious trouble.
“I’ll try to drop by Sammy’s office,” Adam said. “Given a few minutes with him, I should be able to figure out if he’s possessed.”
I nodded my agreement. When I had first contacted Adam about my own unwanted hitchhiker, he’d examined my aura, trying to find out if he could “see” Lugh. Unlike a human exorcist, he didn’t need a fancy ritual or a trance to see auras—he could do it with the touch of a hand and a few seconds of concentration.
With a very unhappy internal groan, I realized I knew who else we needed to talk to in search of explanations. I met Adam’s eyes, and saw that he’d come to the same conclusion.
“If you’d like,” he said with uncommon kindness, “I’ll talk to Raphael myself.”
I really wished I could take him up on the offer. The last thing I wanted to do was to talk to the scum-sucking demon who held my brother hostage. Aside from my fury for what he’d done to Andy, I also didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. He claimed to be on Lugh’s side, to want to put Lugh back on the throne where he belonged, but I still wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t betrayed us to Der Jäger.
“Thanks,” I said, and for once I actually meant it. “I appreciate the offer, but he’s slightly more likely to tell me the truth than you.” Only if he was telling the truth about being on our side in the first place, and only if he really respected Lugh as much as he claimed, but we might as well make that assumption if we were planning to question him.
“Let me know what you find out.” Adam gulped the last of his coffee. “And I’m really sorry about the crime scene photos. I should have known better than to show them to you.”
I gave him a suspicious look. It wasn’t like him to be this nice, or this conciliatory. He might not hate me, but he really didn’t like me. Perhaps he’d known better than to show them to me, but had shown them anyway, out of spite. “Didn’t your host warn you not to show graphic crime scene photos to a civilian?” I asked, and I’m sure he heard the undertone of suspicion in my voice.
The sudden hard glint in Adam’s eyes told me he’d heard it, all right. “No. He’s as inured to them as I am.” He grimaced. “And he asks me to extend his apologies as well.”
I had met Adam’s host during a brief time when Adam had transferred—most illegally—into Dominic to heal what would have been a fatal gunshot wound. I barely knew the human Adam, but I suspected he and the demon Adam were more alike than not.
“Tell him I accept his apology.”
Adam gave me one of those creepy stares of his. I’m sure he hadn’t missed the fact that I’d never actually accepted his own apology. But he didn’t call me on it. Instead, he shoved the manila folder with its ugly photos into the backpack, then left without saying good-bye.
Chapter 6
The fact that my brother was possessed was not common knowledge. As far as the world at large knew, Raphael had fled my brother’s body and gone back to the Demon Realm, never to return. How I wished that were the case!
What this meant as a practical matter was that Andy was unemployed. Like Dominic, he’d been a firefighter when he was a legal host. He’d also begun hosting as soon as he’d turned twenty-one, which meant he hadn’t completed his college education and had no particularly useful job skills. The Spirit Society would give him a small pension for a couple of years, but he was young enough that they’d expect him to host again—or get his life together on his own if he chose not to.
The pension wasn’t enough to live on, so when I arrived at Andy’s apartment, it was to find him poring over the Sunday want ads. It seemed like such a quintessentially human thing to do that I almost forgot this wasn’t really Andy. I shook my head to clear the confusion.
“Are you actually going to apply for a job?” I asked.
; He gave me a sardonic look. “I do have to support myself, you know. Or did you expect me to ensconce myself in this apartment and spend the rest of my life cackling evilly?”
I wished I could think of a brilliant plan to remove this bloodsucking leech from my brother’s body. Unfortunately, since he was a member of the royal family, he was an unusually strong demon. Too strong for me to exorcize. Lugh might be able to overpower him, but I’d have to let him be in control to try it, and we’d already established that I couldn’t.
“I really hate you, you know,” I said petulantly.
Raphael sighed like I’d hurt his feelings. “I gave you my word I’d take better care of Andrew this time around.”
“And you expect me to believe you?”
He shook his head. “I suppose not. But I’ll tell you anyway that Andrew is fine. We will never like one another, but we have reached something approximating a truce.” He laughed suddenly, though I couldn’t imagine why.
“What’s so funny?”
“He’s testing the limits of our truce. He wants me to tell you that he’s all right. He also wants me to tell you, and I quote, ‘Get this fucking asshole out of my body.’”
I had no idea whether the message was really from Andy, or whether Raphael somehow thought this would disarm me. “I’m working on it, bro,” I said, just in case it really was my brother. Of course, I wasn’t working on it all that hard. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I had no idea how I was going to manage it.
To my surprise, Raphael reached out and patted my shoulder. “If you and I can ever reach our own truce, and if you can find someone else to host me, I will leave him. You have my word on that, for whatever you think my word is worth.”
I stifled my immediate desire to tell him exactly what I thought his word was worth, but no doubt my opinion showed on my face. Raphael looked disappointed in me.
“Why are you here?” he asked. “It’s obviously not for the pleasure of my company.”
Probably I should be nicer to him when I was here looking for information—particularly information he wasn’t overly eager to give me. But I just didn’t have it in me to be nice to Raphael, who was the author of so many of my troubles.
Instead of answering, I invited myself to take a seat on his living room couch. Since he was pretending to be my brother, the slob, I had to move aside a pile of junk mail and discarded newspapers to clear a seat for myself. I was glad I was wearing one of my more conservative outfits so that my skin didn’t come in contact with the stained upholstery.
“Make yourself at home,” Raphael muttered, then took his own seat in the similarly disreputable-looking recliner.
I decided we’d had more than enough preliminaries, so I got right to the point. “Was The Healing Circle the only site where you and Dougal played God?”
Raphael blinked, the question obviously not one he expected. He thought about it a long time before he finally got around to answering. “No.”
He didn’t say anything else, and I had to quell a surge of impatience. “Care to elaborate?”
“Is there something specific you want to know, or are you just on a fishing expedition?”
“You said you wanted a truce with me, right? So why don’t you just talk to me without looking for what’s in it for you?”
He closed his eyes and scrubbed at his scalp, once again looking strangely human, even to me, who should know better. “I know it’s completely out of character for you, but if you can see your way clear to giving me a break, I’d really appreciate it. Some of this stuff is really hard for me to talk about.”
“My heart bleeds for you.”
His eyes opened, and there was a flash of something dark and inhuman in them before he managed to control himself. I had to suppress a shiver. I was pretty sure Raphael hated me almost as much as I hated him, and he was not a good enemy to have.
He released his tension on a deep breath, and his voice when he spoke showed none of the anger that still lurked just behind his eyes. “I don’t give a damn what you think of me. But no matter how much I wish it were otherwise, I do care what Lugh thinks. I don’t much relish the thought of talking about things that will make him think even less of me than he already does.”
I think it was genuine anguish I saw on his face just then. He and Lugh have one hell of a twisted relationship. I felt a reluctant sense of pity for Raphael, who clearly idolized his brother, but who was doomed to fall short of Lugh’s expectations. Of course, that was only because of the choices he made, so I reminded myself not to feel too sorry for him.
“I think he’ll feel better about you if you tell me the whole story than if you refuse to tell me to cover your ass.”
“I’m not—” He shook his head. “Oh, what’s the use?” he muttered under his breath. The expression on his face faded until all that was left was a bland impenetrable mask. “We had numerous facilities through out the country. Even with our considerable understanding of human biology and genetics, what we were trying to do wasn’t what you’d call easy. There was a lot of trial and error involved.”
I made a sound of disgust. “These are human beings you’re talking about, not lab rats.”
I expected that to piss him off, but his mask stayed firmly in place. “Some of them were sufficiently altered that I rather doubt they still qualified as strictly human. Certainly your father’s strain didn’t. The fact that, except in your mother’s case, we were unable to crossbreed them with human beings…” He must have realized what thin ice he was treading, for he let his voice trail off. “What is it, exactly, that you want to know?”
“Did you have a facility at Haven Hospital in Houston?”
“Yes, though I personally had little to do with that one.” I gave him a skeptical look, and he smiled a bit grimly. “Would you believe I’m scared of flying?”
I thought about that a minute and realized I did. Planes don’t crash often, but when they do, there’s bound to be a major explosion—and fire. There were plenty of legal demons who worked as firefighters, but their superhuman strength and healing ability could keep them safe in all but the most volatile of situations. Explosions with airplane fuel were about as volatile as you get. It’s thought that around twenty-five demons died on September 11, not from the collapse of the towers—which killed any number of demon hosts, sending their demons back to the Demon Realm—but from their heroic attempts to penetrate the fire.
“But even if you weren’t there in person, you know what was going on,” I said, shaking off my morbid thoughts.
He shrugged. “Their goal was similar to the goals of The Healing Circle’s labs, though they were coming at it from a different angle. The Healing Circle worked on increasing the strength and durability of their subjects. The Houston labs were working on increasing the malleability of human flesh.”
“Huh?”
“We wanted stronger, faster-healing hosts.”
I started to protest, but he held up his hand for silence, and I complied.
“Yes, we can heal our hosts very quickly by human standards. But our hosts can still die of injuries and send us back to the Demon Realm before we’re ready to go. We wanted to create hosts whose flesh could be manipulated well enough to heal even catastrophic injuries quickly. I know I can never expect you to approve of our goals, but this one was actually beneficial to our subjects.”
I snorted. “Your subjects who were held prisoner for their entire lives and then killed when they were no longer useful.”
He had no answer for that accusation. “Why are you suddenly interested in the Haven project?”
I debated how much to tell him, then decided that if I expected him to talk, I needed to bite the bullet and do some talking of my own. So I told him the details of the Tommy Brewster case, watching his face for any trace of expression along the way.
He was silent for a long time after I’d finished, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
“Well?” I finally prompted
when I got tired of waiting.
He blinked, as if coming back from a great mental distance. “From the evidence, it sounds like there’s a definite possibility he’s a product of the Haven project, but I don’t think there’s any way to be sure.”
“And how do you explain his mysterious change of heart? Why did he leave God’s Wrath and register to become a demon host?”
Raphael shrugged, his expression telling me how little this mattered to him. “I’ll buy Adam’s theory that Sammy was possessed, at least until it’s proven wrong. But you know, as fascinating as you might find this puzzle, in the grand scheme of things, it’s unimportant.”
Yeah, that was Raphael all right—compassion personified. “It’s important to the Brewsters.”
“I’m sure it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s important to you.”
“You don’t get to tell me what’s important to me,” I said through gritted teeth.
He rolled his eyes and looked exasperated. “Fine. Sorry I presumed to tell the demon king’s host that she has more important things to do than play girl detective.”
I’m usually a master of sarcasm myself, but I don’t much appreciate it when it’s aimed at me. “How’d you like fifty thousand volts of electricity running through your body?” I asked, though I refrained from actually pulling the Taser. I was sitting too close, and Raphael would be on me before I even got my hand on the damn thing.
Raphael’s nostrils flared. “The next time you Taser me, remember you’re Tasering Andrew at the same time. I can promise I won’t shield him from the sensation.”
I growled in frustration. Raphael laughed, but he sounded more bitter than amused.
“What’s the good of having a hostage if you’re not going to use him, eh?”
My fingers curled into fists, but the emotion that swelled in my chest was more grief than anger. So many people had suffered already because of me.