His amoral associate cracked a yawn. “Where are we going? I’m beat.”
“I want to take a look at this video. We need to find that anklet before things get out of hand.” More out of hand.
“Nobody has VCRs anymore,” she said. “We couldn’t even have stolen one from the pawnshop. They only had DVD players.”
“I know a place just enough behind the times to have what we need.”
A streak of orange showed in the eastern sky, like the heating element of a toaster oven promising another broiling day, when they pulled up at the cinder-block building on the edge of the city proper.
Nim stood with the open car door between her and their destination. “A church? You brought me to a church while I’m dressed like this?”
“I was a churchgoing man.” He clipped the words off; whether he was dulling them for himself or sharpening them for her, she wasn’t sure. “And you dressed like that for me.”
“Yeah, but I’m offending you on purpose.” She clutched the doorframe. “Is this your church?”
“No. I don’t belong now.” And never would again. Thankfully, the reminder no longer had the power to wound him through the scars of years. He slammed his door and stalked around the front of the car.
“Right. What with being possessed by a demon. That’d probably freak ’em out.”
“Most, undoubtedly. But Nanette knows what we are. She is the wife of the pastor here, and is host to an angelic force.”
Nim’s sneakers thudded on the concrete behind him as she scurried to catch up. “Angels? You didn’t tell me there are angels here on Earth.”
“Didn’t it seem inevitable, once you knew demons existed?”
“Just because brussels sprouts are healthy doesn’t mean they’re tasty.”
He stopped in his tracks. “What?”
“There are all sorts of bad things with no corresponding good.”
He shook his head and continued on. “Why do you insist on dwelling on the evil?”
“Being good is too hard. Doesn’t leave any room for failure. Speaking of failure, why’d you forget to tell me there’re good guys—real good guys, not good guys by comparison—in this fight?”
“I didn’t forget. It’s just not relevant. They aren’t like us. They move in the human realm and live fragile, mortal, human lives. Most of the angelic forces don’t see fit to acknowledge our efforts. To them, a demon once, a demon forever.”
“But the first devil was a fallen angel, right? Or do the angels think once you’ve fallen you can’t get up?”
“There’s some question whether they might not be right.” He unlocked the double front door with a key from his ring and held it open for Nim.
She regarded him suspiciously. “If demons are bad news, why did this Nanette chick give you a key to her place? And does her husband know?”
“Since when does a stripper care about a betrayed spouse?”
Nim stalked past him into the vestibule. “I don’t. I’ll just feel even less guilty now that I know you’re lying too.”
“Nanette is protecting her husband from knowledge that would destroy his world.”
“He’s a preacher, for God’s sake. He should already believe in good and evil.”
“She wants him to keep believing that good has a chance.”
“How nice for him that somebody cares enough to lie.”
The lobby beyond was dark. Jonah’s vision flickered like a failing old television between black snow and grainy image as the demon swelled and short-circuited, struggling with its tricks in his broken body.
“Nanette has seen that the battle doesn’t always go to the righteous,” he said. “Sometimes strategy, guile, and luck win the day. She wants the powers of light to have every possible advantage.”
“So they have us, the wayward powers of darkness?” Her voice wavered, and he knew she was having as much difficulty as he adjusting her sight. But at least one day she would find her way through the demon’s conflicting energies.
Cruelly, he didn’t turn on the light in the hallway, and only led her deeper into the church. “She hosts the weakest of angelic forces, and yet if more people were like her—kind, caring, loving—there’d be no room in this realm for demons.”
Nim followed close behind him and stumbled on the stairs leading downward, but he couldn’t escape her comment. “Between Nanette and your wife, you’d have quite the virtuous harem.”
He stopped abruptly at the bottom of the stairs, and she smacked into him.
She didn’t reach out to steady herself, but the scent of her warm skin wreathed him in the lingering hint of incense.
“You’re trying to offend me again,” he said. “Is it jealousy? My wife is dead. Nanette is married to a man she adores. They cannot come between what you and I will be to each other.”
She recoiled. “We’re nothing to each other. Except maybe thorns in each other’s sides.”
“Then the ache will help us remember why we are here.” When he faced her, her expanded pupils were shot with violet sparks.
“That’s just sick,” she hissed.
He leaned toward her and thumped the hook into the wall at her eye level. “This,” he said. “This is what we are to each other. Missing pieces that will never again be unbroken. But in the striving, we will atone.”
She slapped her palm against the wall just above the hook and canted forward to get in his face. “I am not your phantom hand.”
“A phantom would be quieter.” He stalked away from her, unlocked the storage room, and shoved open the door. This time, he turned on the light.
Behind him, Nim sucked in another breath.
“Come on,” he said. “I’m sure Nanette has a VCR here with all this other junk.”
“Junk?” Nim crept the last few steps to the doorway.
He stepped in amid the half dozen people standing motionless around the stacked plastic chairs and folding tables, a rolling car with a slide projector, and a teetering pile of cardboard boxes labeled CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS. None of the people moved to avoid him, spoke, or even blinked at the change of light. A misty haze hung in the air.
Nim lingered in the doorway, her fingers pressed bloodlessly against the jamb. “Who are they?”
“No one. Not anymore. Their souls have been stripped by a desolator numinis, a rare demonic weapon. Similar to the one you apparently sold for—what?—fifty bucks.”
“Ten,” she whispered. “I told you, it looked like . . . junk.”
“The desolator numinis was reengineered into a street drug called solvo and spread through the city.”
“But solvo disappeared months ago. One of the girls at the club, her boyfriend was a dealer. She was complaining because as the source dried up, he got twitchy and weird, and then he . . .”
“Disappeared too?” Jonah rifled through one of the shelves. “These soulless haints have a bad habit of forgetting. Everything. In their blank states, they can be overwritten by free-roaming demons. Many were destroyed last winter in a pitched battle. The league survived the conflict. Mostly. Nanette collects the haint remnants.”
“And stuffs them in basements?”
“For a few days. See that flickering haze? Thanks to the teshuva, you are seeing what remains of their souls. Some of the soulflies find their way to the body. We keep the haints nearby until the dust settles.”
“What happens to them?”
“Jilly knows an old Chinese witch who draws the solvo out of them, as much as she can. We hope that lets some of the soul wisps in and gives them some measure of redemption. Then we take them out to the country, where they’ll wait. Maybe for the end of days.”
“Oh, I’ve heard that line before. ‘Sorry, Johnny. We can’t keep the dog anymore, so we sent him to live in the country.’ Meanwhile, Spot ends up at the pound. Or in a bag in the river.”