Page 131 of The Devil and His Ghost

My fury raged into a fire that melted the man from the inside out. It was a slow process. The magma of Hell slowly melted away his veins, tendons, muscles, and bone. The trapped soul screamed so loud within the confines of his own body that some of the sound even rushed past his lips while I continued to press them together.

While he was cooked alive from the inside, I plowed a fist into a neighboring mirror. Glass shards pierced the man’s flesh, making him howl louder within. I wielded a chunk of ragged glass and looked down at the man’s crotch, letting him piece together what was coming. I laughed in the wave of his panic, and with manic wide eyes, I angrily stabbed, slashed, and mutilated the man’s genitals while his screams grew louder within this body.

I tossed away the bloody glass, some of which had splintered off and remained in the man’s limp, shredded, and now amputated penis. The soul belonging to this body was a mess of agony and torment. He pleaded silently for relief, but relief would never find him again, not with where he was headed to.

I forced the body to trek the same path Kendyll must’ve taken. I let him watch through his own foul eyes as I pushed the balcony doors open to step into the evening air. I let his pain and panic act as music to this macabre of a show. I pulled his own face into a delirious grin while he wailed on the inside, unable to stop me as I stepped up to the stone railing only to tip forward and over.

I laughed on the way down to the bloody pavement while he screamed. Leaving the body, I felt alive while he went quiet in death. I stood on top while he fell down, down, down, straight to the Master who’d given me life.

“Did you see that, Kendyll?” I whispered, placing a hand over my chest where her soul hummed. “The scary man is gone. And Mr. Monster finally took you away.”

Chapter 45

Xander

(Present Day)

IN KENDYLL’S MIND, IT HAD only been a few months since that day. She didn’t realize that an entire year had actually passed. I’d spent that whole year focusing on two things: numbing myself and storing up as much energy as I could by any means possible.

I’d spent the past year high on everything—human and demonic drugs, sex, goading my friends into fighting with me, and putting my best rockstar persona front and center. I took a page out of Kendyll’s book, running from the truth, because the minute the high wore off, the minute I stood still, I saw her again. I saw her bloody, lifeless body on that pavement. I saw her spirit waver with the threat of leaving forever. I broke over and over and over again.

But avoiding the memory wasn’t my biggest reason for doing everything I’d done in the past year. Unlike Incubi who fed off of sex, I merely stole that energy from my victims like a sponge, soaking in all the energy they had to give. There was no pleasure involved for me, despite my acting the contrary. There was only a goal to bring Kendyll back. I scared and terrorized people as usual, but for the first time ever, I didn’t keep that power for myself. Everything I absorbed, I funneled into Kendyll’s soul.

I showered her in every bit of power I stole so that when her soul stirred fully awake, she could function as though she were still alive. She would have enough of my energy to do whatever she wanted—interact with objects or ghosts as she’d done in life, envision the world around her to make sense with whatever picture her soul painted, and remain conscious for full days instead of for small increments.

When I’d felt her readiness to return to the world as a ghost, I’d released her soul and followed it to Mountview. I wasn’t surprised that was where her soul thought it needed to go; I’d even banked on that being the case.

It didn’t matter that Bethelma and the TV network weren’t waiting on Kendyll to finish a job there since the show had been cancelled after her passing. Her coworkers weren’t expecting her. Alex had moved on to a new position in the network, and he probably rarely thought about Kendyll these days.

It didn’t matter that I’d bought the haunted hospital from Bethelma when she went bankrupt after her credibility came crashing down without the real Ghost Speaker. Kendyll had been focused on her upcoming work at Mountview, and even in death, she was determined to follow through on the job.

Part of me hoped that she would remember and understand that she was a spirit so that we could be together without that secret between us, but the other half of me hadn’t wanted her to recall such a horrific moment.

A moment when I’d failed her.

A moment when I’d broken the most important promise—to be there, to not let anything happen to her.

When I’d mustered up the courage to show myself at Mountview, I wasn’t sure which way the pendulum would swing. My heart fractured all over again when it turned out that she didn’t remember dying.

At the start, I let her believe she was alive, because I didn’t want to risk her becoming a malicious spirit if her soul wasn’t ready for that knowledge, but eventually, I knew better. I knew she could handle the truth. It was me who couldn’t handle it, and I was just drawing out the inevitable. I was drawing out her suffering in an afterlife she hadn’t agreed to, an afterlife that I’d picked for her by taking the choice away from her soul. Doing so had put her in danger yet again.

When Riddle captured her and I saw her soul’s connection to me manifest while I panicked on the other side of his barrier, I knew what he was trying to do. That white wisp, which funneled between my chest and the floor beneath my feet, could only have been my binding to Kendyll’s soul. He was trying to break my connection with her to steal for himself, and he had all the power from his army of ghosts to do it. I’d nearly lost her again. But thankfully, Coldin showed up in time.

I got to hold onto her a little longer. I got to see her exist in this time and world for a little bit more. Yet watching her move about and go on with life, unaware of what happened, unaware of our last interaction and words, was akin to swallowing nails every single day.

But it wasn’t as painful as what was coming.

Kendyll’s watery eyes widened, and she slowly looked at me, clutching each side of her now visibly bloody head with trembling hands. “I-I forgot. How could I forget? I’m so sorry! I’m so—”

“Kendyll,” I soothed, reaching out to hold her upper arms. “You did nothing wrong, Kendyll. You know this happens with ghosts sometimes. You didn’t do anything wrong, baby.”

Catsper meowed and rubbed his phantom cheek soothingly under Kendyll’s chin. He drifted through the air to her fatal wound, which now appeared with Kendyll’s remembrance of it. The cat rubbed his body along the blood to try to make it go away.

Kendyll shook her head wildly. “I didn’t even ask what happened between that day and arriving at Mountview. My mind just filled in the blanks between that day and showing up at the hospital to work.” She let out a broken, pitiful laugh. “All this time, I-I thought you didn’t come. I thought you left me alone that day. How could I forget that you were coming? You were there. How—” Her teary eyes met mine. “I-I thought something else saved me from the fall.”

My grip on her arms tightened, and my jaw worked. “I am so, so fucking sorry, Kendyll. I am so sorry for not getting there in time. I promised that nothing would happen to you, and I … You have no idea how badly I wanted to save you. How badly I wanted to rewind time to arrive a few minutes earlier or stop you from going there at all.”

But I hadn’t arrived a few seconds earlier.