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Trine laughs again. “Julio,” she says, her voice overlapping. “Rosa. Anabel. Clemencia.”
The demon is trying to mock me. These are my relatives’ names, not their own names. But it’s weakened, otherwise, it wouldn’t have engaged me. I know that for a fact.
I keep praying, demanding the demon leave her. She laughs again, this time more deeply, her eyes jet black. The rope around her wrists break. She moves and writhes and sounds like she’s choking on her own spit .
“Tell me your name,” I say.
“There are so many of us,” she says, but it’s not her speaking anymore.
“Tell him,” Malon screams. He’s holding his head. He’s clearly in pain. When he stumbles toward me, he looks like he’s about to scream. Trine looks at him, her eyes narrow. Malon picks up his head to look at her. “Tell him!”
“My name is Legion,” she says, her voice deep, distorted. “For we are many.”
“Lies,” I say. I keep praying as everything around us shakes. In the background, I can hear the glass of the window crack open. Alana shrieks and jumps off her exercise ball as a tree falls in the backyard.
“In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to leave!” I say into her face. Her expression crumbles for a second, her bindings suddenly coming loose to the point where the rope hits me.
It fucking hurts.
I’m in a ton of pain. My skin screams with the sting of the rope.
But it doesn’t matter. This is working. The demon wouldn’t be reacting like this if it wasn’t working.
They wouldn’t be fighting back if they weren’t weakened.
“What do you care, priest?” she asks. “After everything you’ve done, you can’t think this will help you when it’s your time to die. And it’s going to be so much sooner than you expect.”
“This isn’t about me,” I say. “This is about Trine. And you need to leave.”
“You heard what the priest said,” Malon says. He sounds like he’s in so much pain. I think he could probably pass out at any second. He doesn’t–he stumbles around as if he’s going to fall, but he stands at the foot of the bed, holding himself up by putting his weight on the mattress. “He doesn’t care about dying. You can’t win.”
Trine screams again. She kneels up, her legs folded under her, and she screams. “Traitor,” she says. “I hope you burn in hell, crushed under the weight of your own betrayal.”
“Behold water that has been blessed,” I say as she screams, sprinkling her as I continue praying. She screams like she’s being branded, her eyes suddenly going completely white, then rolling to the back of her head. She keeps thrashing around and her knees start to move as she slowly rises from the bed toward the ceiling, a gap between the mattress and her body.
I’m worried about what’s going to happen when the demon is expelled and that’s going to happen soon, so I need to address the rest of the room.
“Misha,” I say. “I need everyone to participate.”
Misha nods. “You heard the priest,” he says. “Just reply I do.”
Trine screams again, as if we were hitting her over and over again. “Do you renounce Satan?” I start.
Trine laughs. “Go fuck yourself, Father–”
“I do,” the rest of the room answers in unison. That includes Malon, which surprises me.
Trine trails off and screams.
“And all his works?”
“I do,” they reply.
“And all his empty show?”
“I do,” they say again.
I’m looking at Trine, at the way she’s throwing her head back and the flicker of the muscle in her jaw, so I don’t notice, at first, when Malon faints at my feet. Rei runs up to check on him and Trine’s head moves forward in an angle that looks completely unnatural, until she throws up all over the front of her body.
