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“Okay, I get it. We made a mess.”
“A mess? Do you have any idea how many memories, how many video monitors, how many—”
“I said, I get it.”
“I don’t think you do! But right now, I’m not even worried about all of that. Do you know what has me freaking the hell out? Would you care to take a wild fucking guess?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Let me give you some help,” he said savagely, beginning to pace around the tiny space between the desk and the door. “I keep going over and over it, trying to find another explanation. Telling myself I must be crazy. Telling myself I must be wrong. But two plus two equals four. And incubus plus human equals—”
“Stop right there.”
“Like hell I’ll stop!” He whipped around to face me, surprisingly fast for such a big guy. “Do you have any idea what’s going to happen when everyone else does the fucking math—”
“They’re not going to do it.”
“Oh, really? Let’s go through it, shall we? John gets hit with a crap load of dragon blood, enough to take out a fucking platoon. The usual spells for stopping shit like that aren’t worth a damn, and every single person in that car knows what’s what. I do, too, but I’ve known him a long time, so I’m gonna see to it that he gets back here, even if it’s only to have the docs hang a damn toe tag on him!”
“Caleb—”
“I figured that’s what you were doing, too, and when you ordered those men out, I guessed you just wanted to give him some privacy in his last moments. Thought that ‘if you want him to live’ shit was just to get ’em moving or to give yourself some hope or something. But lo and behold. What happens?”
“Caleb—”
“You start putting the moves on what is basically a corpse, and then talking when there’s nobody there, and then some weird-ass shit starts going down with sparkly light and heat and John comes back to life and jumps your goddamn bones—”
“Technically, he didn’t—”
“And the next thing I know, he’s doing just fine. He’s fucking dandy. And you’re the one who looks like a corpse and almost are one—”
“I was not.”
“And he’s all energized with creepy, glowing eyes and enough power radiating off him to take on an army, and there’s only one way he got it, okay?”
“He could be possessed by an incubus,” I argued. “He doesn’t actually have to be—”
Caleb looked disgusted. “Sell it somewhere else. Everyone knows John is half demon—it’s not the kind of thing you can hide from the sort of work-up the Corps does on its recruits. But we didn’t know what kind. He told us Ahhazu—”
“Imagine that.”
“—but they’re minor-level functionaries. They can’t do that kind of shit. And a demon can’t possess another demon—or a half, for that matter. So two plus two, okay? His other half ain’t Ahhazu, it’s incubus. And there’s only one half human, half incubus ever been recorded—”
“Maybe Pritkin’s birth wasn’t recorded.”
“Bullshit. You know damn well who we got—”
“Don’t say it.”
“—next door, and John Pritkin ain’t his—”
“I’m warning you.”
“—name. It’s motherfucking Mer—”
“Say it and spend the rest of your life in the Jurassic,” I hissed.
We just stood there and breathed at each other.
