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“Um. I beg to differ. I have felt some weird shit moving inside of me.”
“Andyou’rejust now tellingmethis?”
“Touché.” I pushed up from the desk, taking deep breaths through my nose to calm the churning in my gut. “What do you mean when you say I gave it permission? I never gave permission to anything to possess my body.”
“It’s the only way they can inhabit. They aren’t like normal demons who can possess at will.”
“How?”
He leaned against the desk beside me, arms folded. “They’re crafty. Have you bitten into anything–fruit, for example, which may have looked rotted on the inside?”
The visual of that had me crinkling my nose. “Ugh. No. The sight of rotted fruit would sicken me. I’d have spit it out.”
“Anything you might’ve signed recently?”
“No, I don’t think–” I slapped a hand over my mouth, my mind reeling back to the day in the gynecologist’s office. “When I visited the doctor a couple months ago.” I fluttered my hands, the nervous energy pulsing through me as it occurred to me what I may have inadvertently done. “T-t-t-there was a weird document they asked me to sign.”
“What kind of document?”
“It was printed on a really thin paper. Almost translucent. It was supposed to be some kind of waiver for the ultrasound. But … it was worded so weird, I almost didn’t sign it.”
“What did it say?”
“Something about allowing my body to be entered with a transducer. Oh, God.” The sickness from before reared its ugly head, and I jerked forward as if to spew all over his desk. Slapping a hand to my mouth, I choked it back, as Jericho reached under his desk for a silver trash can and set it down beside me. After more deep breaths, until the acids subsided, I continued. “There was a weird … glitchy moment when he inserted that thing. The electricity went out, and they couldn’t get a good view of the baby. He said there was something there, but he couldn’t see what it was.”
Jericho fell back into the seat and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Fuck.”
“You’re not helping my urge to puke. What does this mean?”
“It means it found a way to stick with its host. And I suspect whatever is living inside of you has learned how to send you away.”
“What? Send me away, how?”
“When you say you went into a black subspace, that was the soul putting yours to sleep, so to speak.”
I didn’t want to admit that what he’d said made sense, as that was exactly what it’d felt like. “But … I was aware of things around me. I could hear you, but I didn’t have any awareness of picking up that opener.”
“It’s an unnerving feeling when something takes over your body.”
“How do I get rid of the damn thing?”
“I thought we already had, but perhaps we need to consider another method.” He ran his thumb over his bottom lip, his good eye staring off, contemplative.
“What method?”
“I don’t know in the case of a soulwantingto remain. I’ve taken over a body before, but the last thing I cared to do was stay in it. Unbound souls are different, though. They need a physical body in order to truly exist.” He let out a huff and rubbed a hand down his face. “Soreth is fairly well-educated on the topic of souls. I can inquire and see what he knows. Are you in pain, at all?”
“At the moment? No.” Still a little queasy, but I couldn’t sense any pain anywhere, aside from the ache of having had him fully erect inside of me.
“I’m going to see if he has anything to offer.”
“Will this entity hurt me? The baby?”
The way his brows came together certainly failed to put me at ease. “According to Kezhurah, it depends on the malevolence of it. She said this one has been with you a while, so I would imagine not, but after what happened to you outside of the bookstore, I won’t take any chances.”
Wringing my fingers together, I tried to ignore how many times it’d felt like something had punched me from inside. How many times I’d felt a stabbing ache of pain, or queasiness. The black vomit I couldn’t explain and the hallucinations. All of it made sense when possibly tied to this disturbing revelation. “I want it out of me. Whatever I have to do, I want this damn thing out of my body. God, can you even imagine, Jericho? I stabbed you with a freaking envelope opener?” I couldn’t even say aloud the visual that’d slipped behind my eyes, of this entity compelling me to harm the baby after it was born.
“Let me speak with Soreth. And don’t worry, I’m going to remove this soul if I have to rip it out of you with my bare hands.”
