“But we’d rather get him here on our own terms than on his,” I continued.
Adam snorted. “No kidding? Really?” I guess he knew I wasn’t relaying Lugh’s words, because I couldn’t see him smarting off to Lugh.
I decided to ignore him, not even giving him the dirty look he deserved. Lugh wasn’t jumping in to interrupt me, so I kept going.
“Dougal’s shown an absolute fascination with the Mortal Plain. Aside from the experiments he did with you,” I said, nodding toward Raphael, “he also decided to move on the throne as soon as Lugh suggested he was going to make it illegal for demons to possess unwilling hosts.”
“Just get to the point,” Raphael said.
I smiled sweetly at him. “I’m telling you all the reasoning that leads up to the point, so you’ll understand what I’m thinking.” I wished I could remember the exact phrasing he’d used when he’d made the same sort of comment to Saul, but even with the paraphrase, he recognized what I was saying. It shut him up.
“So Dougal—and his supporters—really, really want access to the Mortal Plain. And Dougal’s gained his supporters by promising to give them unlimited access. If they’re already starting to get out of hand now, just imagine what they would be like—and how desperate Dougal would be—if we threatened to cut off access altogether.”
I looked carefully from face to face as I made this suggestion. Brian wore his lawyer face, hiding whatever he was thinking. Adam’s face had frozen in a look of shock, his expression so raw that Dom felt the need to reach over and give his hand a firm squeeze. Saul looked mulish, as usual. And Raphael
… Raphael looked grim, but not a bit surprised.
“This thought has occurred to you before,” I accused.
Raphael examined his manicure while he spoke. “I thought of it as a last-ditch way to stop Dougal from getting what he wanted. I thought maybe if we made it impossible for him to get what he wanted, he might eventually decide it wasn’t worth it to kill Lugh for the throne. But I never liked the idea enough to mention it. There are so many downsides …”
I laughed, but it wasn’t a nice laugh. “You mean you’d lose your access to your own personal playground.”
His eyes flashed, and he bared his teeth at me. “And so would every other demon, even the ones like Adam and Saul, who make your world a better place. Think what you want of me, but the reason the U.S. legalized demonic possession is because of how much we can contribute to your society.”
In my usual tactful manner, I’d been about to remind Raphael that he wasn’t the only demon who wouldn’t recognize the concept of “conscience” even if it bit him in the ass, but Brian spoke before I did.
“What exactly do you mean when you talk about cutting off contact between the Demon Realm and the Mortal Plain?” he asked.
I gave him a grim smile. “Think about all we’ve learned about demons since we’ve gotten sucked into this mess. There’s a reason demons keep all this shit secret, and it’s not just because they like being mysterious.”
Brian processed that thought for a moment. “You mean if we start telling the public about the secrets the demons have been keeping, the anti-demon lobby will get demonic possession outlawed once again?”
“Exactly. It’s not like it would completely stop demons from getting to the Mortal Plain—it never has before—but it would make it a hell of a lot harder for them to get here.”
“And a hell of a lot less fun,” Adam contributed. “If we came to the Mortal Plain and then had to stay in hiding …” He shook his head. “I’ve gone that route before, as I suspect most of us have, since possession was illegal much longer than it’s been legal. I enjoyed myself enough to want to come back, but now that I’ve seen what it’s like to be out in the open, I don’t know if I could go back to the way it was.”
“But we’re not actually going to do it, right?” Raphael asked, fixing me with a piercing look. Once again, I was pretty sure the look was directed at Lugh. “We’re just going to threaten to do it if Dougal doesn’t come to the Mortal Plain and fight like a man, as it were. Right?”
We’ll try a threat first, Lugh said. But I suspect Dougal will think we’re bluffing. If we make the threat and aren’t willing to back it up, we have gained ourselves nothing.
I relayed Lugh’s message. It might have been easier to just let him take control and do his own talking, but it hadn’t been all that long since he’d last been in control, and I wasn’t sure how my body would react to another control shift. I preferred not to find out.
Raphael looked very unhappy. He might not have wanted what Dougal wanted badly enough to kill Lugh, but he did still want it.
“We don’t have to give away everything,” Raphael said, and his voice sounded a lot calmer than his face looked. “We can reveal something humans won’t like but that won’t get us outlawed. That might convince Dougal we mean what we say.” He looked at me, and this time he was really looking at me, not Lugh. “You’ve been a demon-hater all your life. Which of our secrets would piss you off but not make you want us all to be outlawed?”
They were all looking at me now, and I didn’t much appreciate the scrutiny. Raphael made me sound like some kind of bigot when he called me a “demon-hater,” and that was certainly not the way I’d ever seen myself. And yet …
Before Lugh had come into my life, I had made no bones about my dislike of demons. If I knew someone was possessed, I disliked him or her on the spot, and no number of good deeds would make me let go of that dislike. It wasn’t like I’d marched on the streets of Washington shouting “down with demons,” but if you’d pressed me, I would have admitted I thought demonic possession should be outlawed again.
I didn’t feel that way anymore, which was in a way kind of strange considering everything I’d learned and everything I’d been through. Demons had been the authors of all my worst troubles, and I’d dealt with the darkest, the most dangerous, the most evil of them. But I’d also dealt with Lugh, who could annoy the shit out of me at times, but who was so good and honorable that I couldn’t really think ill of him even when I was pissed off at him. And I’d come to know Adam, who was far from one of the nicest people I’d ever met, but who was a hero in every sense of the word, and whose love for Dominic had shown me that demons really were capable of the same depth of emotion as humans.
Demons were people to me now, not inscrutable aliens. And I had no grounds to argue Raphael’s assessment, even if I didn’t hate them anymore. I knew what it was like to hate them and to want them gone.
“If we told people that demons don’t die when they’re exorcized,” I said softly, “that would make a lot of people very unhappy.”
There was a moment of shocked silence, but it didn’t last long. Saul, Adam, and Raphael all started to protest at once, but Raphael’s voice was loudest, and the other two reluctantly ceded the field to him.
“They wouldn’t be just ‘unhappy’!” he snarled. “That’s the one secret that could very well fuel the effort to outlaw us again!”
“No,” I said, very calmly, “the one secret that would be sure to get you outlawed is the eugenics program you and Dougal ran for the last several centuries.”
Raphael actually paled at my words, and all the starch went out of his spine as his fellow demons turned to glare at him. I almost felt sorry for him. But not quite.
“If the human population finds out that exorcism doesn’t kill you,” I continued, “then I can guarantee there will be some changes in the law. Maybe more states will go the execution route, but since it’s killing the human host that made them balk before, they may well still balk even if they know the truth. Exorcism may not be the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye-type punishment that people think it is, but it gets the offending demon off the Mortal Plain and leaves the host alive, at least usually. Knowing the truth will give the anti-demon hate groups and the anti-demon lobby more power and fuel, but I doubt it would be enough to make you all illegal. Demons have made themselves too useful for us to get rid of you that easily. It would take something really heinous to destroy you all in the court of public opinion.”