“Is your shoulder hurting?” Rule asked.
He sat in a chair beside the bed, holding her left hand. Lily quickly dropped her other hand. She’d been rubbing her shoulder again, the way you’ll pick at a scab or run your tongue over the place a tooth used to be. Not because it helps, but because something isn’t right. “Not really.”
“You aren’t possessed.”
He said it so calmly, as if he were completely certain. She grimaced. “I don’t think I am, either. Magic can’t get inside me, so how could a demon?” And yet she’d felt something around the wound. Something that shouldn’t have been there.
“Probably it couldn’t,” Karonski said comfortably from where he sprawled in a chair by the window, digging into a bag of Fritos. The blinds were pulled up, letting the tattered darkness of a city night peer in. “We’ll find out for sure soon.”
Karonski was in shirtsleeves, having draped his jacket over the back of his chair. Maybe he’d been too warm. Or maybe he’d wanted to have quick access to the .357 in his shoulder holster in case Lily suddenly turned green and started ripping off people’s arms.
Cynna paced. They could have snagged another chair for her, but she didn’t want one. A restless sort, Lily supposed. Not comfortable with waiting.
She could relate. “I see why you can’t take my word for my condition. But I’d know, right? If I were possessed, I’d be able to tell.”
“Maybe.” Karonski dug into the bottom of the bag, frowned, and came up with crumbs.
“I’d know,” Rule said. His hand tightened on hers.
“Maybe,” Karonski said again, and popped another chip in his mouth.
“I got the demon’s scent from the door. If it was in Lily, I’d smell it on her.”
“Yeah?” Cynna paused. “What does it smell like?”
“Cloves and car exhaust. Sort of.”
Karonski shook his head. “If your sniff test was reliable, Dr. Two Horses would have said so.”
Lily didn’t think Rule had been talking just about scent, but they couldn’t discuss the mate bond in front of Cynna. Would it alert Rule to an alien presence inside Lily? She didn’t know. She didn’t think he did, either.
She looked at Cynna. “No opinion?”
“Plenty of them, but not about possession.” She reached the closed door, turned, and kept moving. “I don’t know much about that.”
“I thought Dizzies were into demonology.”
“Some are.” She paused by the window, frowning out at the darkness as if she disapproved of it. “But most of demonology is a matter of finding enough names for a demon to summon it and then control it if it shows up. Exorcism’s a whole ‘nother bag. That’s a job for religion.”
Religion. The subject kept popping up lately. Most noticeably with the Church of the Redeemed, aka the Azá, and their former leader, the Most Reverend Patrick Harlowe. He’d tried to sacrifice Lily and Rule to the Azá‘s goddess. But there was Rule’s mysterious Lady, too—the one he believed had Gifted the two of them with the mate bond. The one who, his legends said, had created the lupi a few millennia ago to defeat the Azá’s goddess.
It was enough to make Lily’s head pound. “I thought the Dizzies were a sort of religion. Ah—is it okay to call you that?” Belatedly she’d remembered that “Dizzies” was a mangling of the original Swahili.
Cynna shrugged. “That’s what everyone called us. I’ll admit I dabbled a bit in demonology in my young and stupid days. That’s how I could recognize the traces left by your demon.”
“Not my demon.”
“Whatever. The point is, it’s gone.” She scowled at Karonski in his chair by the window. “This whole rigmarole is so not necessary. I picked up two of the demon’s names.”
Karonski crumpled up his chip bag and tossed it in the general direction of the trash. He missed. “Not enough to Find it, you said.”
“No, but I could sure enough tell if it was in the room with me!”
“I believe you, already. But there are procedures for this sort of thing.”
That was news to Lily. But she hadn’t made her way halfway through the pile of reading she’d been given on FBI and MCD resources, regulations, and procedures. “And yet you delayed your flight.”
He looked at her, his eyes gentler than usual. “If I’d left, there wouldn’t be a senior agent to oversee the procedure. Can’t very well leave you in charge of a major investigation until you’ve been documented as clean.”
Okay, that made sense. Lily drew a steadying breath. She wished Nettie would hurry up so they could get this over with.
“At least,” Rule said, “we can make a guess about what they were up to.”
She nodded. Her head was feeling better. At first she’d thought that was Nettie’s doing, but that was foolish. Magic—even the good stuff, like healing magic—couldn’t affect her, so it must be getting better on its own. ‘They sent a demon to possess me. That required privacy, so someone supplied a bolt for the door and the demon zapped it into place.“ The S.O.C. officers had confirmed that the bolt had been freshly installed.
“Makes sense,” Cynna said. “The woman you followed was the demon, form-changed to look like Helen. It knocked you out and did… whatever.”
Lily looked out the window. From fifty yards away two windows stared back, one lit, one dark. Like two great eyes frozen in mid-blink. What had the demon done while she was unconscious?
She didn’t feel different. There was no sense of an alien presence in her body or her mind, none of the struggle she’d seen in Karonski when he’d fought against the mental tampering inflicted by Helen and her staff.
And yet she’d felt something when she touched her shoulder. Something that shouldn’t have been possible. Lily’s fingers twitched in Rule’s grip as she thought of the odd, slick feel of her wound. Orangey.
She looked at Karonski. “You know what’s required for a demon to take possession?”
He was brushing crumbs off his shirt. “There are plenty of theories, most of ‘em contradictory. But because of an incident seven years ago, MCD regs for dealing with demons limit involvement to persons of faith. Doesn’t seem to matter what faith, so long as the agent has one.”
Seven years ago… it took a moment for Lily to place the reference, but the story had been sensational enough to stick. “You mean the shoot-out down in New Orleans? That FBI agent shot by his own team—he really was possessed?” Someone had leaked that to the press, but very few had bought it. Too outlandish.
“Oh, yeah. The powers-that-be didn’t want to alarm the public with the facts.”
“And this guy who was possessed wasn’t… um, a believer?”
“Catholic, but lapsed.” Karonski stretched out his legs and laced his fingers over his middle. “Way lapsed. My personal take is that he was more vulnerable than most because he’d lost his faith, but that’s just a guess.” He shrugged. “MCD policy is just a guess, too.”
“What do you know?” she asked, exasperated.
The door swung open. “Proximity is a factor,” Nettie said crisply. “The demon must be in close physical proximity to its victim. Possession doesn’t happen at a distance.”
“How did you do that?” Lily demanded. “Rule can hear me from two rooms away. You can’t.”
Rule smiled. “You were a little loud.”
And a little more rattled than she wanted to admit, dammit. Lily took a slow breath, reaching for calm. There was something different about Nettie. She was wearing the same lab coat and jeans. Her hair was braided instead of hanging down in a fuzzy cloud, but Lily had seen it that way before. So what…
“Another thing,” Karonski said. “Demons can get into animals, especially birds. I’ve been on a couple cases involving possessed birds.” He shrugged. “Don’t know why. Maybe birds are easy for them.”