Then he took the Taser and gave Abraham another jolt, just to make sure he was down for the count. I suggested the unknown woman could use another jolt herself, despite the fact that she was curled up in fetal position and crying.
She wouldn’t have enough control to curl up and cry if she were a demon, Lugh reminded me. As usual, he was right.
Adam arrived in less than fifteen minutes. Lugh quickly took him aside and told him the whole story. Raphael arrived only a couple minutes later, and while Adam shared the story with him, Lugh drove my body over to a corner and sat down.
Are you ready? he asked.
God, no. The idea of going through another three days or more of the hellish sickness was almost enough to make me leave Lugh in control for the rest of my life. Well, no, not really, but you know what I mean.
Then Lugh shifted control back to me, and I was so violently ill I had no idea who said what to who or what exactly happened afterward.
I have only the haziest of memories of the next few days. I know I was in the hospital—The Healing Circle. You’ve got to love the irony. And I know that an exorcist was brought in to the hospital to examine my aura. But I was mercifully unaware of whatever tests may have been performed on me in an effort to figure out why I was so damn sick. All things considered, I was probably a lot less miserable staying in the hospital than I had been when I’d stayed home. After all, they have way better drugs.
I had visitors every day, although I was rarely clearheaded enough to know the difference between dreams and reality. The first time that I woke up and was actually coherent, it was Adam who sat at my bedside. I might have been touched that he cared, only he was really there just to fill me in on the official story about the showdown at the warehouse so I wouldn’t say anything to contradict it.
Apparently, everything had gone down approximately as I remembered it, only it was Tommy Brewster who’d gotten into the nasty fight with the possessed Jessica. He’d come with me to meet Abraham because I was ill, and he’d defended me against the attack, the stress of which had somehow made my illness ten times worse. Jessica had, of course, disputed the story, but since all the other witnesses—even the mystery woman—corroborated it, and since the examination by the exorcist had proven I wasn’t possessed, her claims were dismissed.
I listened to Adam’s version of what happened and decided that even with my meager lying skills, I could pull it off. It was close enough to the truth not to make me squirm too badly. But what I really wanted to know was who the hell the woman with the gun had been. Luckily, Adam was in an expansive mood and was happy to tell me.
“Her name is Susan Harvey,” he said. “She’s an actress. A pretty good one, too, with aspirations of Broadway. She’s also a single mom, and Abraham kidnapped her son. She was ordered to put on the show of a lifetime, and if she failed to convince you, then she’d never see her son again. Ms. Harvey was contrite enough that she needed little persuasion to remember things the way we wanted her to.”
I remembered the nearly hysterical look in her eyes when Lugh had been about to stab Jessica. At the time, I’d interpreted it as Abraham’s excitement at seeing his revenge come to fruition, but the truth was it was unadulterated horror. Despite the fact that she’d held a gun to my head, I felt sorry for her.
“Is her son okay?” I asked, my voice weak and raspy from disuse.
Adam’s lips tightened with displeasure. “For the most part. Jessica had tied him up in her basement. She hadn’t exactly been gentle with him, and she hadn’t bothered to feed him or give him any water while she held him, but the doctors say he’ll make a full recovery.”
I shuddered, thinking that, with Abraham’s callous disregard for human life, the boy was lucky to be alive. Certainly he wouldn’t have survived once his mother had completed her mission. Nor would his mother, for that matter. I remembered how “Abraham” had held onto Jessica’s ankle, supposedly to keep her from getting away. I should have realized how strange that was at the time, seeing as Jessica was pretending to be so out of it she could barely move, much less make a run for it. If Lugh had gone through with it and stabbed Jessica, Abraham would have used that physical contact to transfer into Susan.
“Jessica had a child, too!” I gasped as I suddenly remembered.
Adam nodded. “But luckily she was visiting her grandparents for the week, so Jessica didn’t have to deal with her.” Because we both knew exactly how she would have dealt with such an inconvenience.
And now for the biggest question of all. “I assume Jessica was exorcized while I was out of it?” I shouldn’t have cared what happened to her. After all, she was a killer herself, or at least she thought she was. But no matter what the human host was like, I couldn’t help feeling sympathy for someone who’d had Abraham rampaging around in her head. “Is she one of the lucky ones?”
Adam’s face was hard, his expression stony. “Three different exorcists tried to cast Abraham out, but he was too strong for them.”
Horror stabbed through me. “Oh, no.”
His lips tipped into a smile, but his face retained that feeling of hardness. “It was poetic justice, Morgan. The only exorcist in the country—possibly even in the world—who could have cast him out is under suspension by the U.S. Exorcism Board because of the lawsuit Abraham himself put into motion.”
“Was poetic justice?”
He nodded. “Yeah. He was executed this morning at around eight, when the third exorcist failed to cast him out.”
“And so was Jessica,” I murmured, feeling cold.
Adam shrugged. “I can’t get too worked up about that,” he said. “She was no innocent bystander.”
Even though I saw his point, even though she’d kinda had it coming, in an Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye way, I still wished I’d been available to do the exorcism myself. I hated the idea of anyone being incinerated to destroy a demon.
My eyes slid closed, and I realized I had used up my meager strength. “I’m going to go back to sleep now.” Maybe when I woke up, things would look brighter.
I had the vague feeling that Adam stayed at my side until I fell asleep, but that was probably just my imagination.
I managed to fight my way out of the hospital the next day, against medical advice. Although I was feeling much better, my doctor still wanted me to stay for observation, because she had no idea what was wrong with me. She never would, either.
Dominic picked me up at the hospital to take me home, but since it was around lunchtime, and I was eating again, he took me to his and Adam’s place instead so he could set me up with some nourishing Italian food. Adam wasn’t home.
“It’s just leftovers,” Dominic said apologetically as he seated me at the kitchen table.
“After you were nice enough to come pick me up and to feed me, I can hardly complain about leftovers. Especially not if you made them.”
As usual, the praise made him blush. I lavished more on him when he served me the most delicious stuffed shells I’d ever eaten. I almost cried in gratitude when he put together a care package to take home with me.
When I say I almost cried, I mean it literally. Now that the crisis was over, the emotions I’d been holding at bay with a vengeance were eroding away my shields. I felt like there was an aching hole in my chest where Brian had once been. Even when I tried to summon some anger to bolster my defenses, I failed miserably. I couldn’t blame him for finally giving up on me. I just wished with all my being that he hadn’t. Or that I could go back in time and force myself to open up to him, to tell him the truth. To trust him, because he was right, and I’d often withheld my trust even when I knew in my heart he deserved it.