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Well…okay. That was that. “Did she deserve killing?”
“Does anyone? That’s not the way they work, and you know it. He wanted her dead, so she died. I can’t go home, and I wouldn’t want to, anyway. I wanted to stay in prison, and you chose to out me to the district attorney, so now we’re both in this tent. So be it. We’ll be besties soon. Isn’t that the phrase?”
I sat down. My demon reveled in his presence, like she’d just met a movie star. I grabbed my phone. Ryker would be no help, and I didn’t have a number for Nathan. There wasn’t anything I could do anyway, but someone should know he was in my tent.
Danvers has moved into my tent. Don’t do anything. I just wanted someone to know.I managed to hit send before sherealized and stopped me. That would be all I’d get away with for the night.
He’d know who that was, had probably been the one to let him out earlier in the day.
There really was just one more thing to ask him before we became two possessed people alone in this tent together until something else happened. “Are you still in there or is it mostly just him?”
That got his attention. He sat up, leaning on the back of his arms to speak to me. “It’s mostly just him. I’m losing more and more time. I remember getting here. That’s about it. I liked the prison. We both did. Plenty of people for him to fuck with and I wasn’t at risk of killing innocents. How much of you is left in there?”
I thought about the fact that I’d cried and didn’t know why I had been, that maybe I was losing myself more and more each day and didn’t even seem to care about it that much. Other people did but not me. Near strangers gave a shit, and I was barely conscious of it. “I’m not sure.”
“The spiral down will be fast soon.” He lay back down. “Don’t worry about me. I never had much of a future. I was born cursed. Some people are.”
Maybe I was, too.
There wasnothing more disconcerting than essentially waking up from what felt like a haze, carrying a baseball bat having just, very obviously, smashed in a car window. Danvers laughed, a dark deep sound while he dropped his bat and got on his knees. Someone—maybe the owner of the car we just smashed up—stood holding a gun right at his head.
I dropped my bat. Bat versus gun. I knew how it would end.
“Do it,” he taunted the older gentleman. Where were we? I looked around. Some random nice neighborhood, with big houses done in Tudor style. Okay, probably the west side of town, with the good public schools and the neighborhood watches.Fuck me. Why had we done this?
“Don’t make me.” The man’s voice shook, and that wasn’t a good sign.
I had to think of something. Police sirens sounded in the distance.
“We’re possessed,” I told him and he jarred at my voice. Had he forgotten I was there? On the outside, Danvers was a lot scarier than me. “It hurts. All the time. And you do bad things you’d never do otherwise, but we love company.” I grabbed onto the gun holder’s arm. “We like to have more demons. We could make you one.” I gave him my best evil smile, which might look deranged because I’d never done it before. “Or you could let us go. Which one is it? Demon? Or you tell the police we escaped, your insurance pays for this mess, and we all get on with our night? Unless you want to feel what this is like?”
He outright shook under my hand, terrified. He dropped the gun. “Go. Don’t make me one of you. I want to go to heaven.”
I didn’t know anything about that, and maybe I never would. Danvers rose, and I grabbed the gun before he could. Neither of us were safe with that thing, but I had to believe I was still safer than he was with it.
“Move.” I nodded in the direction I wanted to go. The police would come up Broad Street to get us. We had to go down Chester to get away from them. “Run.”
He shot me a look. “You should have let him shoot me.”
So the real Danvers was there; his demon would never have said that. “Leave me out of your death wishes,” I suggested.
We ran together down the block. “I think you know I didn’t have anything to do with this anymore than you did, Addalee.”
He wasn’t wrong, but why had we come back to ourselves right when we did? Where was my demon? “Why did we beat up his car?”
“For fun. It’s always for fun with him.” He took my hand. “Also, for the record, I don’t have a death wish. I have a desire to cease this pain.”
I nodded. Actually, I could understand that. “I’m not there.”
“You are. You just don’t know it yet.”
By the timewe reached the tent, my demon was back and happily humming in my ear. I hated that sound. The only thing worse was whistling. History taught me she’d be doing that next. Nathan stood outside the tent, his arms crossed, staring at Danvers.
“You don’t belong here. Leave her alone.”
Danvers’ demon appeared in his eyes, and mine surged forward as well. I didn’t disappear. I couldn’t tell if it was because she was too tired to knock me out, or if she wanted me to see her current antics. Either way, she used my mouth and I knew it.
“Are you particular about who you decide to take on, freak?” Danvers approached Nathan. His demon demanded, “Or do you just like her because she’s blonde and helpless? Or at least she used to be. She’s not so helpless anymore, is she?”
