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My stomach panged, a hollow bottoming out sensation. Oh, my demon wanted to be awake. I recognized the sensation, and it hurt like hell. She did it to me once before, when she first took me—a sensation like a knife being shoved into my gut. Although she managed to terrify me as a child, right then, I was too focused on the sensation of Danvers’s demon to give her much thought.
No, instead, I reached into Danvers and Itugged. Hard. My hand might rest on the muscled plane of his stomach, but my energy grabbed onto him. Using that invisible grip, I tugged his mother fucking demon right out of him. Danvers screamed as Idid it. I did, too. And his demon? Well, hebellowed, a sound like scratchy rage that wanted to claw us to ribbons.
I smiled, satisfied to have pulled that thing out of him.
He burned my skin, the demon, as I held onto him. But I didn’t let go. I couldn’t. Danvers shook—violently, convulsing as if a force we couldn’t see tried to rip him apart from the inside. Probably because it was. His demon roared again, its red eyes glaring at me with pure hatred and an almost palpable malice. It loved my demon, but boy did it hate me.
That’s fine. I want it gone anyway. Right this second. Despite the second most horrible pain I ever experienced, I refused to let go, determined to save Danvers from the one who’d stolen so many years from him. He thought he was going to die? That it was too late? I had news for him. It wasn’t too late.
As I pulled harder, I could feel my own strength leaving me. My own demon roared in my head, a second layer of sound amid the chaos. She wanted back in control, and she didn’t like the situation at all. Not one second of it. My body shook as I fought herandDanvers’s demon. The three men watching cried out, but I couldn’t listen to them, nor could I spare the attention to try to hear them. It didn’t matter right then. Nothing did, not beyond holding on. Tears leaked from my eyes, mixing with the blood trickling down my arm, but I gritted my teeth and kept pulling. Finally, although it seemed impossible, I felt the snap and the release of tension. The demon fled his body.
It flew into the air in a rush to stare back at us. With a flap of wings that stirred my hair, it roared like a dragon, its red eyes glittering out of an inhuman face. I stared back at it with a smile that faded a heartbeat later. Danvers would be safe, but the demon could take anyone else in the room.
Nathan said a few words I couldn’t quite hear, and it roared again before it flew upward and away with a few powerful bursts of its wings, vanishing over the rooftop of a neighboring house.
“You did it,” Cruise said as he grinned at me. “How did you do that? Wait, you’re still possessed?”
Danvers clung to my body, drenched in sweat and shaking. He lifted his head to stare at me. “Addalee…”
I don’t know what he would have said because I convulsed.Oh, she is mad.So fucking mad she couldn’t even speak to me right then. Nothing existed beyond her all-consuming rage and her very clear intent to punish me.
Cruise must have somehow sensed what would happen because he tugged Danvers away from me. The other man didn’t even struggle, blinking helplessly.How could he? He must be weak as a newborn kitten.
My demon threw me on the ground. With my own hands, she yanked the IV out of my arm.
“Addalee!” Danvers called. “No. Let me go! She’s going to hurt her. It’s going to be bad.”
“Stay away from me,” she said with my voice, turning my head so she could show them her eyes through mine. “Or I’ll kill her. And I’ll make it hurt. There are others like you I can take. Stay back, or it’ll be so bad, it’ll haunt your nightmares for the rest of your pathetic lives.”
She threw me around then. I would float up in the air, weightless as a diver, then she’d crash me down so hard, I thought my bones would shatter like china. Not enough to kill or paralyze me, she just made sure to do enough damage so I would hurt everywhere. Into the bed, the chairs, the walls, she dragged me around the room with as much care as a child with a ragdoll. I clawed at my own face, my fingernails cutting me everywhere. She ripped at my clothes, stripping me.
“No!” Danvers wrenched out of Cruise’s hold. The room had fallen silent as they stared at me. “No.” He grabbed onto me. “No more. You wanted her punished. She’s punished. Fucking stop. Stop.”
She let me feel the pain then. Everything she’d just done, saved up and released right in that moment.
I screamed until I couldn’t anymore, tears streaming down my face. It felt like my body was being torn apart. I begged for death, for anything to end the torturous nightmare, but there was no escape. She didn’t stop; she increased the pressure, magnifying the pain past any human comprehension. Across my vision, I saw my own death, Ryker’s death, my mother’s. Cruise. Nathan. Danvers. All of them being split in two. Explosions. Gunfire. Disease. Decay. Rot.
She laughed, using my lips so they could hear her. “Go ahead, scream all you want. Beg me to stop. I won’t.”
Everyone surrounded me, all of them trying to help somehow. Nathan finally took me from Danvers, his touch cool, like rain on my burning skin. He spoke words I didn’t understand, and she stopped, her internal magnification at least halted for the moment. Oh, she wasn’t gone, or even put away, but she ceased beating on me. I gasped for air, finally able to try and move past the agony, but it was hard to breathe.
“I think she cracked a rib. Maybe more than one.” Nathan shook his head. “We need to get her checked out.”
I looked around the room, my vision blurred, but I could see what I expected to find. Ryker gazed at me in horror but not just because I was hurt. No, I expected to see the expression on his face, even if it had taken longer than I thought. “I knew someday you’d look at me and actually see the monster.”
Then the world went black.
The beeping woke me again.Another IV, the clear tube snaking up to another dangling bag, connected me to the blinking andbeeping medical devices. A nurse’s bent head read something on a chart near the foot of my bed. A hospital? I wondered. It didn’t seem like Cruise’s basement.
I lifted my head, and the nurse sprang into motion, pressing her hand on my shoulder to stop me. “You’re okay. We’re treating you. How do you feel? That demon beat you up pretty badly.”
I’ll do it again if you pull bullshit like that again. Again and again. You won’t get rid of me, and if you fuck with any others, I’ll beat you until you’re just a walking bag of pulp. I won’t let you die, though. I’ll make you rot while you breathe.
She meant it, too, every word. I stared at the nurse’s hand. “Please don’t touch me. I don’t like it.”
Her eyes widened. “Sorry, sometimes I forget. I do this all day, too, so you’d think I would know better. We treat you guys regularly. You’re about an hour from Cruise’s house, and he brought you here, if you’re curious. We run a special hospital for the possessed—totally secret, of course. We know a little better how to help you than a regular human hospital. We can’t do anything abouther—our experience is that putting them to sleep only makes them madder, although I know they used some of those drugs on you before. I also heard you did a successful exorcism while you are still possessed, and can I just say…wow. You’re going to be a celebrity!”
She was perky, and I hoped she was wrong. The last thing I wanted was to be well known.
