Magnusson sensed what I was doing — sensed, or guessed. He stretched his mind toward the Welshman’s shattered one as well. He was faster than I, and managed Gareth’s meager psychic locks with the ease of one maneuvering one’s own living room with the lights off. All while I fumbled and struggled to gain hold. But I felt first one arm twitch, and then another, and felt the bile rise in Gareth’s throat as his body tried to cast me out. It happens every time my kind possesses a new vessel — more or less the only thing The Exorcist managed to get right. The body’s way of trying to expel that which does not belong, not that it ever does a lick of good. I thought that meant that I stood a chance, that I might yet best Magnusson as we struggled for control.
I was wrong. I never stood a chance.
Because Magnusson didn’t need complete control. Couldn’t even use it if he did manage to get it. As he himself had told me, “We can scarcely stretch our consciousness enough to control those most dimwitted of humans who happen through our sphere of influence — and even then, only temporarily.”
But what he could do, I discovered, was plant a seed.
A kernel.
A single, irresistible suggestion.
I felt it bubble up from the depths of the Welshman’s psyche as if the thought were his own. But the malice behind the thought was unmistakable.
Through Gareth’s mind’s eye, I saw a gun — his gun. Not as a threat, or a defensive weapon, but as a choice, a cure, a salve to soothe his aching soul.
I saw it through his mind’s eye as salvation.
And from the sudden giddy hope that surged in Gareth’s breast, it was clear he saw it that way too.
I pulled back in time, but only barely. In time to hear the bullet-blast tear through the cavernous room, rather than feel it blow off the Welshman’s skull. I clenched back tears, at the senseless loss of life, at the lingering notion implanted by Magnusson (but no less achingly authentic-feeling for it) that it was the only answer, the truest answer. A righteous fuck-you ending to so piteous a life.
That’s when I decided I was going to make this motherfucker pay.
Magnusson’s dead weight sagged atop me, the needle still buried in my neck. Limbs on top of limbs on top of limbs. I heard him grunt with exertion, felt his fingers scrabble ineffectually at the syringe plunger like a drunk too far gone to operate his keys. Saw by the flicker of the firelight that his lids were heavy, his mismatched eyes all whites. Turns out his powers of persuasion didn’t come without a price.
I heaved him off of me. He caught himself before his face met tile, one hand a weak protest against gravity, propping him up. He shook his head, and forced himself onto his hands and knees — although in his case, it was hands and elbows. I heard a snarl build in his throat, saw him eye me with a blinding fury as he gathered to pounce at me once more, his eyes twin suns, radiating malevolence so palpable it stung my cheeks. They blistered and peeled beneath his gaze, and my eyes burn-itched like I’d just peeked at an eclipse, which is when I realized it wasn’t anger but juju his baleful glare was sending my way. He was channeling the power of the building flames around us.
Figured I ought to stop him. Thought a mirror would make for some quality playground comeuppance of the rubber-and-glue variety. But I didn’t see any goddamn mirror, and I was running out of time. My meat-suit’s clothes were smoking, and starting to singe at the edges.
Then I remembered I had a needle chock full of noxious who-the-fuck-knows-what still sticking out of my neck.
Which I rectified, forcibly, by removing it and driving it as hard as I could into Mr. Angry Eyes’ shoulder, depressing the plunger with my thumb as the needle breeched his leathery flesh.
Magnusson roared then, and smacked me so hard I sailed clear across the pool, shattering a display case containing a fetal cow with two front-ends on my way to cheek-firsting into the tiles. A tinkle of glass and a water-balloon splash accompanied the skin on ceramic slap of my landing, and the bonfire air grew heavy with the dizzy, gag-inducing scent of formaldehyde. The poor dead calf-times-two spun on its side like a top until it skittered to a stop above the floor drain, plugging it and preventing the formaldehyde from draining. Then an ember from the growing fire drifted into the noxious puddle, and, with a sudden, breath-sucking whoosh, fire and fumes were one.
Magnusson and I were separated by a wall of flame, he eyeing me, me eyeing him. My borrowed heart soared as I realized the fire had encircled him, cutting off any hope of egress as it transformed itself from minor emergency to full-blown conflagration. Then the spidery bastard, after crouching low a moment like a snake coiling in preparation to strike, hurled himself straight upward into the air, all six hands and no small amount of magic working in perfect synchronicity to launch him far higher than Newtonian physics could possibly have justified. There, he clung with his hand-feet to the rafters, hanging like a bat and glaring down at me in anger and in challenge.
His freakish hand-feet alternated one over the other down the rafter until he was directly overhead. I moved. He followed suit. I ducked through a growing wall of flame — my sleeve over my face in a vain attempt to avoid the bitter sting of the burning formaldehyde fumes in my throat, my nasal passages, my eyes, trying to escape the rigid line of the rafter to which he was confined. But I underestimated the agility of his monstrous, many-limbed form. He swung on two arm-legs first once, then twice, then thrice, and with the agility of a gymnast , leapt from one rafter to the next, catching it such that he once more hung upside-down above me. Grinning. Taunting.
“Do you really think you can escape me, child? I assure you, you cannot. I am in every way your better, and you’re trapped beneath me in your lake of fire, with no hope of escape, no options left to you except to surrender, or to succumb. I can wait you out all day if need be, but I suspect the flames will take you far sooner than all that. And when they do, I’ll pounce. Perhaps by then this place will be halfway to cinders, and I’ll be forced to find another sanctuary in which to house you during your great slumber. Perhaps this place can yet be saved. Either way, you’ve accomplished nothing but to forestall the inevitable. Well, that, and to force me to take the life of a loyal servant.”
“You sure about that?” I shouted, my voice hoarse and weak from the fumes. I fell to my knees amidst the flames. By choice, I told myself, since the air down low was cooler, clearer, and seared the tender tissues of my eyes, my throat, my lungs less. But, the fact is, the air was so thick I couldn’t keep my feet.
“Excuse me?” he asked, as if he hadn’t heard my words.
I stayed low, belly-crawling across the tile in an attempt to change my position relative to his under the cover of the thick, black roiling smoke. My elbow bumped something and bled warm and wet onto the tile. That something skittered off into the darkness. I pressed a palm to the wound, and cast about for whatever it was that just sliced through clothes and skin like so much nothing, spotted it glinting polished gold some feet away. Like hope; like the beginning of a plan.
I picked up the skim blade. The dull throb in my elbow, so subtle and deep a slice it scarcely even hurt, told me the ancient blade was still diamond-sharp, and as my fingers wrapped around it, searing it to my skin like chicken to a grill, I learned all too well it was still blister-hot from its time spent in the flames. But as it bonded to me, and weapon and flesh became one, I did not cry out, so unwilling was I to display weakness to the monster above.
I called to him again, the blade in my hand lending steel to my voice. “I asked you, are you sure?”
“Am I sure of what?”