Destroyer of Worlds (9 page)

Therapy or brainwashing? Did it even matter
any more? John felt hollowed out, as if his emotions were too huge
to experience, leaving behind only numbness. Gray was still in
danger, and John would be the bait in the trap for him.

Please let Sean be wrong. Please let
the “we” and the “ours” have meant something else. Let Gray not
give a damn one way or another about John, let the drakul
hate
him if it would just keep Gray
safe.

Sean leaned forward again, resting his
fingers lightly on John’s shoulder. “It…it’ll be okay. I know it
doesn’t seem like that now, but it will. The docs will help you get
your shit together, get over this death wish of yours.”

John swallowed against the roughness of his
throat, and forced his gaze up, to meet Sean’s eyes. “You’d better
hope they don’t,” he said quietly, as something congealed into
hardness deep inside. “You’d better hope you’re right, and I get
myself killed somehow. Because otherwise, I’m coming for you, and
there is nowhere on this earth you’ll be able to hide.”

* * *

Caleb floated.

He became aware of his own existence
gradually, like a dreamer waking from sleep. Or perhaps a sleeper
moving into dream, from nothingness into something not quite
reality.

He hung suspended in warmth, a chick curled
in a shell. Safe. Held.

Loved.

Whatever wrapped protectively around him knew
him completely. Every virtue and flaw, every moment of triumph and
second of shame, every impulse of generosity and every selfish
act.

It knew him. And it loved him, without
reservation or condition. He didn’t have to do anything to earn its
affection, or even to keep it. It loved him, always had, always
would, and such was simply the way of things.

He’d never felt such peace.

“
Of course I love you. You
are my other self.”

A name came back to him.
Gray.

“
Yes.”
Regret.
“It has been too long since
we fed. Our healing has been slow. I am afraid this will
hurt.”

It’s okay.
He
didn’t know what would hurt, but he knew the other—Gray—wouldn’t
let him come to any real harm, if he could prevent it.

“
Are you ready?”

For what?

“
To breathe.”

Aren’t we breathing?

“
No.”

We probably ought to, don’t you think?

“
Yes. Hold tight. As I said,
this will hurt.”

The protective cocoon of love and warmth
began to peel back, and the light grew brighter. Agony spiked
through his head, pieces of his skull grating against each other as
they shifted back into place, and Caleb—

—
drew breath.

He jerked off the floor with a gasp, his
lungs desperate for air. His entire body ached, as if he’d
overexerted every muscle and left it screaming for oxygen. When he
blinked, his lids scraped over corneas gone dry from exposure to
the air.

“
Fuck!” Caleb blinked rapidly, tears
washing over his eyes for lubrication. Vision blurred, a smear of
colors, then came slowly into focus.

A pair of women’s shoes stood on the filthy
floor in front of him. He lifted his gaze slowly, past dark-skinned
calves and an expensive skirt, to find Tiffany Ward staring back at
him with shocked eyes.

“
Never mind,” she said into the cell
phone against her ear. “The situation has changed. I’ll call you
back.”

“
Agent Ward?” What the hell was she
doing here? For that matter, what was he doing here?

She watched warily as Caleb shoved himself
first to his elbows, then to his knees. He was in a house, warped
boards beneath him, the stink of mold mingling with the savory
scent of ghouls to make his stomach cramp.

God, he was
hungry.

The house. Right. John planned to exorcise
him. But John had disappeared. There was only Tiffany. And blood—a
big pool of it on the floor. His mouth tasted of rust, like he’d
been sucking on one of the iron gates surrounding the houses in the
historic district. Raising his hand, he touched his face, found
something congealed and tacky against his skin. “What
happened?”

“
A bullet entered our skull
at the base. We sustained a great deal of damage, and it took time
to heal, especially as we have not fed for a while.”
Shame.
“I do not know what happened
otherwise. Keeping you with me took all of my concentration. I am
sorry.”

“
Somebody shot us in the back of the
head,” he said numbly. Fuck, his pronouns were slipping, and in
front of an agent, even.

An agent. A SPECTR agent. Oh hell.

“
You did this!” he accused, scooting
back from her. “Where’s John? If you’ve—”

“
Having your brains scrambled must have
taken off a few IQ points,” she said, lip curling slightly. “Sean
shot you.”

“
Sean?” No way. “He and John are best
friends. He wouldn’t.”

Tiffany shrugged, her long braids whispering
against the expensive fabric of her suit. “Forsyth must have gotten
to him. Once we heard you broke out, we tried to put a tail on
John, but he was already gone. I knew if he’d told anyone else
about his plans, it would be Sean, so we watched him instead. Sure
enough, he led us straight here. A few minutes after you three went
in, SPECTR vans surrounded the place. They dragged John out at
gunpoint. Sean wasn’t under guard, and climbed in one of the vans
without any signs of coercion. Make of it what you will.”

Caleb rubbed at his eyes. A part of his mind
babbled over and over again he’d been shot in the fucking head. He
shoved it aside; turning into a gibbering heap wouldn’t help anyone
right now. “John. Where did they take him? Is he okay?”

“
He just saw his best friend shoot his
boyfriend in the back of the head. If he’s okay with that, you
seriously need to trade up.”

Oh, God. Caleb sagged against the floor.
“John,” he whispered.

“
Focus.” Tiffany snapped her fingers in
front of his face. “There’s no time to sit around moping, hear
me?”

Caleb glared up at her with narrowed eyes.
She wanted him to focus? Fine. “You said ‘our people.’ You’re one
of them, aren’t you? The moths. Just like Brimm. So why the hell
should I listen to anything you say?”

“
We’re called the Vigilant. And Brimm
wasn’t one of us. Well, not anymore.” Her lips tightened. “He left
SPECTR when he found out the bottles imprisoning exorcised NHEs
aren’t being destroyed, the way they’re supposed to be. We
recruited him, but he went crazy, stole a bunch of our books, and
disappeared. Fucker.”

She paced away from Caleb, warped boards
protesting under her weight, before turning to face him again. “He
almost caused as much damned trouble as you.”

“
Me?”

“
Yes, asshole, you. I’m going to tell
you a couple of things, and you’d better listen because I’m not
repeating myself. SPECTR toes the same line as the damned
Inquisition—all NHEs are dangerous and have to be destroyed, end of
sentence, no exceptions. The Vigilant don’t agree. One of my jobs
at SPECTR was to keep an eye out for drakul, to make any reports of
them disappear, before an investigation could be
launched.”

“
I thought they were rare,” Caleb
interrupted. “Or, I don’t know, that maybe Gray was the only
one?”

She rolled her eyes. “Rare and non-existent
aren’t the same thing. We’re pretty sure there’s at least one other
in North America right now. We tracked yours all over the southeast
for the last twenty years, losing it for a while, then finding it
again.” She shrugged. “So I wasn’t completely shocked when I saw
the footage of it taking off with your brother’s corpse. I deleted
the video, which should have been the end of it. Would have been,
except you had to play amateur demon hunter with the Fist.”

Caleb scowled. “It’s not fair—”

“
What does fair have to do with
anything?” She folded her arms over her chest and returned his
glare. “All the sudden, the situation went from a wandering
drakul—a good thing, from humanity’s point of view, since it means
fewer malevolent NHEs to prey on people—to a drakul in a living
body. Which, according to everything we know or guess, is a
disaster.”

“
Wait, what?” Caleb rose to his feet.
“This has happened before?”

“
Not exactly. Drakul have been summoned
directly into living bodies, but haven’t jumped into a corpse which
unexpectedly came back to life the way you did.” She waved a
dismissive hand. “We don’t have time for a history lesson. The
point is, living drakul have immense power and are damned hard to
kill. As you’ve seen for yourself.”

“
Yeah.” Blood pasted the hair on the
back of his neck to his skin. “You thought I was dead when you came
in.”

“
Nothing ought to be able to survive a
bullet to the brain. If the creature in your head decides to go on
a rampage, I don’t know how anyone would stop it.”

“
I do not
rampage.”

“
Gray doesn’t rampage.”

“
Well, that makes me feel much better,
thanks.” She shook her head in disgust. “Shit, what a mess. We
suspected Forsyth was up to something out there in RD, but the best
we could do was get an operative on the cleaning staff.”

“
He’s building an army of
demons.”

She froze, eyes going wide. “Fucking
hell. No wonder he wanted the drakul. Does he really know what a
drakul
is
, or does he just
think of them as rare and powerful NHEs? The files from the Soviet
experiments in the 1950s were supposedly destroyed, but—never mind.
It doesn’t matter right now. Damn it, why didn’t you call us like
you were supposed to?”

Caleb swallowed. If he had called the
moths—Vigilant, whatever—John wouldn’t have gotten caught up in all
this. “John said he could exorcise me. It’s why he asked Sean to
meet us here, for help. Gray and I…we wanted John to be the one to
do it.”

“
He couldn’t,” she said. “Not with
fewer than seven or eight other exorcists, anyway. But it’s just
like Starkweather to play the hotshot.” She shook her head. “But
why did RD take John? If they wanted to eliminate a witness, why
not just kill him?”

Caleb bit his lip, not wanting to say it
aloud. But he didn’t have a choice. “I’ve got a theory. When we
broke out, maybe it convinced Forsyth we were too dangerous. He
sent out the kill order to Sean. But he still wants to add Gray to
his collection of demons.”

“
I am not a
demon.”

“
If Forsyth knows anything about
drakul,” Caleb went on, ignoring Gray, “he would realize Gray in a
corpse would be easier to recapture. But it would be really hard to
track Gray down, since they couldn’t know where he jumped. Forsyth
needs some kind of bait, to make sure Gray returns to
RD.”

Tiffany’s eyes narrowed. “Starkweather, I
take it. Why does the drakul care if Forsyth has him or not?”

He thought back to his conversation with
Sean, when the other man tried to convince him to break up with
John. “Sean must have realized Gray’s in love with John. And he
told Forsyth.”

“
In love with…you are seriously messed
up, you know that?” She took a deep breath. “Then we sure as hell
can’t leave Starkweather there.”

Hope stirred tentatively in Caleb’s chest,
fragile as the first shoot of a flower. “You’re going to save him?
I thought you didn’t even like each other.”

“
What does that have to do with
anything?” Tiffany took two steps closer to him then stopped, her
brown eyes intent. “Okay. I’m going to offer you a choice. You say
the word, and I’ll have ten exorcists ready to pry the drakul out
of you.”

“
Or?”

She hesitated, as if asking herself whether
she did the right thing or not. “Or I don’t, and you and the drakul
stay together and help us rescue Starkweather.”

* * *

Caleb stood very still, feeling as if any
movement would result in some irrevocable decision. “You mean…let
the possession become permanent?”

“
Time’s up,” Tiffany said. “You’ve only
got a few hours left, which isn’t nearly long enough for us to
gather our forces and get Starkweather out.”

He watched her warily. “Why not just exorcise
Gray then leave him in the bottle for a while, so he can’t go after
John?” He didn’t want to put the idea in her head, but surely she’d
already thought of it.

She snorted. “You think a bottle can hold
something like what’s living in your head? If we exorcise the
drakul, it goes for the nearest habitable corpse, whether we want
it to or not. From what you say, it will then make a beeline for
Starkweather. I’m not leaving Forsyth with a hostage to lure in the
drakul. Hell, what if he catches the drakul and forces it into the
body of one of his pet soldiers?”

Revulsion curled through them.
“I would not like that.”

“
By all rights, I shouldn’t be giving
you a choice,” Tiffany went on. “I should just have you
exorcised.”

“
Why don’t you?”

She met his gaze. “Because the drakul
saved my life. The wendigo would have taken my face off. All the
stories say living drakul are dangerous and scary and bad news of
the kind no one has seen in a thousand years. Unless the rumors
about the Soviets are true, and they had to encase it tons of
concrete and drop it to the bottom of Lake Baikal.” She shook her
head. “Thing is, half of what we
think
we know about them is pieced together from
ancient legends and rumors written down by holy madmen. What
I
do
know for sure is the
drakul…Gray…has listened. Refused to kill even the possessed when
they could be saved. So I’m going to take a chance, and hope like
hell I’m doing the right thing.”