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“But you talked to it! Or it talked to you, through the board. Didn’t that tell you anything?”
“It told me that this is way too big for me to deal with.”
Deep breath. Keep it together. “Okay. You guys had your equipment monitoring the séance at New Moon, right? Have you looked over the recordings at all? Were you able to collect any data from the fire?”
“We gave copies of the video footage to the fire investigator,” Tina said.
“But they’re not looking for the things you’d be looking for. Didn’t it occur to you to look for anything weird in the footage, anything to explain what happened?”
“Mostly we were worried about Gary,” she said.
Fair enough. “There’s got to be something, and we can cross-reference anything having to do with demons—”
“The chances are really slim we’ll even find anything. They always are.”
“I don’t have a choice. It’s getting worse.”
“Did something else happen? What?”
I hesitated before saying, “It killed someone.”
“Oh, my God. And after that you’re asking us to help you?”
“I can’t make you stay, but could you please review the video? Let me know if you find anything? I’m running out of ideas here.”
“Kitty, it was just a fire. A normal kitchen fire—”
“You of all people can tell me that?” I said.
“I can convince myself of that. Kitty, I don’t want to touch this thing again. It felt wrong.”
“I need evidence, Tina. And I need a plan.”
“I’ll talk to the others,” she said. She sounded tired, but I couldn’t afford to feel any sympathy. I couldn’t let them off the hook. “I’ll let you know what we decide.”
Reminding myself that screaming demands wouldn’t get me what I wanted, I clamped my jaw shut and took a breath before I was ready to say, “Thank you. Just think about it. Please.”
The next day, Ben and I made our weekly pilgrimage to Cañon City, about a hundred and fifty miles south of Denver. The timing was bad. I was afraid to leave town, in case something happened; on the other hand, it would be nice to get away. To run away. Ben wouldn’t let any excuse short of lying in the hospital in a coma cancel this visit. I found I didn’t want him to go alone, or I’d spend the whole day worrying about him.
Behind the glass at a visitors’ booth of the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility, Cormac Bennett rubbed his forehead in a long-suffering manner. “I don’t know why you guys insist on telling me about a problem like this when there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Ben and I slumped in the chairs across from him, sharing an intercom phone, talking to a man serving time for manslaughter. Cormac—bounty hunter of th
e supernatural, Ben’s cousin, and my friend—had saved our lives with that manslaughter. We’d sort of gotten used to him arriving in the nick of time, guns blazing, to save our asses. He couldn’t do that much anymore.
Like we usually did on our visits, we asked how he was doing, and he said fine, as well as could be expected, and he asked how we were doing. I hadn’t meant to tell him. We were supposed to be cheerful and keep up a good front so he wouldn’t worry. He had enough to worry about. Then I’d said, “Oh, everything’s great except for the demon.”
Then I had to tell him the whole story, which left him rubbing his forehead like he suddenly had a headache.
“I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m just venting,” I said.
“And fishing for advice, right? Just in case I know anything about hunting demons.”
“Well, yeah, okay, if you know anything,” I said, squirming. “So—you ever hunt down a demon before?”
Even Ben was looking amused.
Cormac glared at me. “Can’t say that I have. I’d talk to a priest.”
