Page 134 of Hell Bent

“Did he burst into flames?”

Turner barked a laugh. “No, but he looked at me with this soft little smile, like I’d said something about the weather. My grandfather loved scripture. He had a pocket Bible, carried it everywhere with him, kept it over his heart. If I quoted God’s word to him, his face should have lit up like a sunrise.”

Cunning, but not smart.

“Then things got ugly,” said Turner. “Even though I knew it wasn’t him, I didn’t want to use the oak on him, to push him away. He seemed…” Turner’s voice tightened, and Alex realized he was fighting back tears. She’d seen him angry, frustrated, but never grieving, never lost. “He was so old and frail. When I turned on him, he looked scared and confused. He…”

“It wasn’t him,” Alex said. “That thing was feeding on you.”

They pulled into a parking lot.

“I know, but—”

“It still feels like shit.”

“It really does.” He stared straight ahead, at the chain-link fence and the big brick building beyond. “You know they call the devil the Father of Lies? I don’t think I ever really understood what that could mean until now.”

Alex tried not to squirm in her seat. Every time Turner got biblical, she felt uneasy, as if he was telling her about some grand hallucination and it was her job to nod sagely and pretend she saw miracles too. Then again, she’d spent her whole life seeing things no one else did; maybe she could extend him the benefit of the doubt.

For a moment she felt that pull to tell him everything, what Eitan had asked of her, the jobs she’d done for him, the fact that he had been here, in New Haven. Turner knew what it was like to be backed into a corner, to do the wrong thing because all the right things just got you in deeper.

Instead she got out of the car. “I think something may have happened to Michael Anselm.”

“Because he didn’t show up at Il Bastone?”

“I figured he went back to New York, but I met with the new Praetor just now and he didn’t say a word about the Gauntlet or all of us getting kicked out of Lethe.”

“Could be Anselm wanted to talk to the board in person.”

“Could be,” Alex said. They hustled across the street to the entrance, and passed through a revolving door into a big, anonymous lobby. It didn’t really look like a hospital. They might have been anywhere. “Or maybe something got to him before he made it back to the city.”

Turner flashed his badge and ID at the desk, and they headed for a bank of elevators.

“I thought the demons were tied to us. Why would they seek out Anselm?” He sounded worried, and Alex understood why. None of them wanted these things going after their friends and family.

“Who says something else didn’t get loose? Anselm stopped the ritual. Maybe there was blowback.”

“You’re guessing,” Turner said. “Or, as we call it in the business, pontificating out of your ass. For all you know, Anselm had a fight with his wife and he just hasn’t gotten around to screwing us.”

“It’s all guessing, Turner. But it doesn’t have to be.”

Turner sighed. “Fine. I’ll see if I can look into it without raising any alarms. Now would you focus?”

Focus, Miss Stern. But Alex didn’t want to focus. All of it was too familiar. The white walls, the inoffensive art on them, the reception carpet giving way to cold tile. These were the places where she’d learned to lie, to pretend she was an ordinary kid who’d fallen in with a bad crowd, to tell kind social workers and curious shrinks that she liked to make up crazy stories, that she enjoyed the attention.

There had been truth mixed in too. She didn’t want to hurt her mom. She knew she was a source of headache, heartache, financial trouble, maternal woe. She wanted to make friends, but she didn’t know how. Tears had come easily. The hardest thing had been hiding how desperate she was to get better, how much she wanted to be free of the things she saw. The single upside to psych wards was that Grays hated them even more than the living.

Only once had she given in and told the truth. She’d been fourteen years old, already hanging with Len’s crowd. She’d already let him fuck her in his narrow bed with the dirty sheets. They’d smoked before, after. She’d been disappointed by the mess of it, but tried to go along, made the noises that seemed to excite him. She’d stroked his narrow back and felt something that might have been love or just a desire to feel love.

Her mother had dragged her in for evaluation, and she’d gone along because Len had told her if she played her cards right, they’d prescribe her something good, and also because it was better than getting sent somewhere to be scared straight again. Guys in fatigues could shout at her and make her do push-ups and clean bathrooms, but she’d been scared her whole fucking life and she just kept getting more crooked.

Alex had actually liked the doctor she’d met with that day at Wellways. Marcy Golder. She’d been younger than the others, funny. She had a pretty tattoo of a rose vine around her wrist. She’d offered Alex a cigarette, and they’d sat together, looking out at the distant ocean. Marcy had said, “I can’t pretend I understand everything in this world. It would be arrogant to say that. We think we understand and then boom! Galileo. Bam! Einstein. We have to stay open.”

So Alex had told her the things she saw, just a little about the Quiet Ones who were always with her, who only disappeared in a cloud of kush. Not everything, just a little, a test.

But it had still been too much. And she’d known it right away. She’d seen the understanding in Marcy’s eyes, the studied warmth, and, beneath it, the excitement that she couldn’t hide.

Alex had shut up quick, but the damage was done. Marcy Golder wanted to keep her at Wellways for a six-week program of electroshock treatment combined with talk therapy and hydrotherapy. Thankfully it had been out of Mira’s budget, and her mother had been too much of a hippie to say yes to clapping electrodes on her daughter’s skull.