Jules and I stood about five feet away from her, afraid to move.
“Guys, are you getting this?” Jules whispered into his headset. I didn’t hear the response, but I assumed it was affirmative.
“Tina?” Jules said. “Can you hear me, Tina?”
“No, no,” she murmured. Her voice wasn’t hoarse, deep, or scratchy like Jules warned it might be. It was her normal voice.
Maybe a little sleepy, like she was hypnotized.
Then she tipped her head back and spoke a rapid stream of gibberish.
“Oh, my God,” Jules said.
The speech cut out.
“Now,” Jules hissed at me. “Kitty, talk to it.”
“It?”
“Yeah—the demon, whatever it is. You’re talking to it now.”
Her eyes were closed, her face was blank. There was just the smell, and the hair on my neck standing on end.
“Hello? What do you want? What are you doing here?” I asked it.
She twitched a smile that made me flinch. I didn’t want this demon to have a face, any face, much less Tina’s. I didn’t want
to see the expression of malevolence.
She spoke a few more words. Her voice was rich with laughter. I still didn’t understand her. Our demon didn’t speak English,
apparently. But I could tell it was teasing me. That it thought very little of me.
“How do I convince you to go away? I want you to go away.”
Now she frowned and spoke a couple of terse words. A denial.
“Did the Band of Tiamat call you, or did the vampire Roman? Whoever it was—how did they do it? Are they paying you? Or do
you just like mayhem?”
She laughed, rich, teasing laughter. It didn’t sound like the voice Jules had recorded from New Moon, but it had the same
tone, the same mocking emotion behind it.
I didn’t think I could really talk this thing into confessing all its sins and leaving us alone. We were trying to learn more
about it. Get some kind of clue to its identity that we could use to finally discover what it was and how to banish it. But
I couldn’t help venting some of my frustration at it.
“Mick didn’t do anything to you. There was no reason to touch him. If this is about me, you should be coming after me, and
I gotta tell you, you’re a really lame demon if you can’t get past a little blood on the ground and have to go after the guy
who’s undefended. You’re a
coward.
”
Maybe I shouldn’t have resorted to name-calling. Oh well.
Grimacing now, with some kind of pent-up anger or righteousness of its own, it kept talking at me in its own clipped, musical
language. It sounded superior, mocking. It had to know we couldn’t understand it, right?
“Come on,” I muttered at it. “Surely an all-powerful demon of the netherworld could set aside a few eons to learn English.”
Tina—her body, at least—was sweating. A drop ran from her damp hairline down the side of her face, which was pink and flushed.
“Oh, my God,” Jules said. “Kitty, she’s burning up.”
It was burning Tina up from the inside, just like it did to Mick.
W
e have to get her to wake up,” I said, moving toward her, getting ready to shake her out of it.
“No!” Jules intercepted me. “It’s supposed to be dangerous to touch someone in a trance like this.”
“Then what do we do?” I said shrilly.
“I don’t know. God, Tina, you didn’t tell us what to do. Tina!” Her eyes flickered behind her eyelids, but she didn’t wake
up. Her lips were still moving in the demon’s rant, but her voice was a whisper. She was breathing harder, and I could feel
the heat coming off her. She was going to burn up in front of us.
I ran to my bag in the corner and grabbed the jar of blood goo, the one Tina wouldn’t let me use on the house. I opened it,
then I splashed it on her. Just threw the whole bottle of gunk right at her.
The sticky, blackened potion spattered over her like mud, over her clothes, her face, her hair. The voice cut out, and she
fell, sprawling flat out like she’d lost her bones.
Jules and I crouched beside her. I touched her face; the skin was warm, damp, feverish, but not burning up. It seemed to be
cooling off, even. Jules went to one of his equipment bags and found a bottle of water, which he tipped to her lips. Most
of it spilled out the side of her mouth, but her throat showed swallowing movements.
“Tina? Come on, wake up,” I murmured, hoping that she would both wake up and still be herself. I didn’t want to have her on
my conscience, too.
“Tina,” Jules said, more sternly but just as desperate.
Her eyes squeezed shut, then blinked open. She groaned. “Did I black out? Ow, my head.”
She touched her forehead, and her hand came away sticky. Patting herself, her fingers landing in spots of blood goo, she grimaced
in disgust. “Oh, gross! What happened? Don’t tell me we’re going to log the first verified case of genuine ectoplasm on top
of everything else.” Then she looked closer at it. “Oh God, I think I’m going to be sick.”
We helped her sit up. She looked like she wanted to crawl out of her own skin.
“What do you remember?” Jules said. He touched his headset. “Are the recorders still running? Are we getting all this? Tina,
do you remember anything at all?”
“I don’t remember anything,” she said, sniffing, trying to wipe off her face with hands covered in slime. Exhausted, she looked
on the edge of tears.
“Maybe we could go over the video footage,” I suggested. “Hey, there aren’t any fires started anywhere, are there?”
We did a quick check of the house and didn’t find anything burning, which was a huge relief. This was still just another haunted
house. It felt like the only thing that had gone right in weeks. That, and the potion had worked and saved Tina from spontaneously
combusting.
At Tina’s insistence, we went back to the hotel suite so she could shower. She wasted no time and soon emerged with wet hair
and fresh clothes, squeaky clean. Within a half an hour, we were gathered around the video playback screen on Jules’s laptop.
“Here we go,” Jules said, tapping keys.
The camera angle showed Tina in profile, frozen in her unnatural, possessed pose.
She frowned. “I don’t remember any of this.”
“Probably for the best,” I said. “Can you imagine? That thing was
using
you. Like a puppet or something.”
She paled, looking nauseated, her lips pursed. “Thank you for that image. I may never sleep again.”
Oops. It only got worse when Jules started the audio portion. Tina’s voice came out of the speakers, we all recognized it,
but none of us understood a word she was saying. Not even Tina.
“What
is
that?” she said, her horror plain.
“Looks like a classic case of glossolalia,” Jules said, almost happily.
Glossolalia. Speaking in tongues.
“That’s it,” Tina said, leaning back in her chair, holding her head in her hands. “I’m never, ever doing that again. It’s
all Ouija boards from here on out.”
Nobody argued with her. We were all rather horrified. I had expected some kind of warning, but the possession of her had just
happened.
The demon had slipped into her presence without any sign. We’d had so little chance to react.
Tina was carrying a jar of blood goo with her at all times now.
“I don’t think it’s glossolalia,” Gary said, looking even more quizzical with the gauze over his eye. “In classic glossolalia
cases, the subject speaks an unknown or made-up language. I think this is a real language.”
“But which one? Do you recognize it?” Jules said. “There are demonic languages. The medieval Cabbalistic writers talk about
a language of demons, a language of hell—what if this is it?”
“No. There’s got to be a more logical explanation,” Gary said. “Don’t go over the deep end on us now.”
Jules said, “There are thousands of possible languages. We can’t rule out ancient ones, either. How are we going to figure
out which one this is?”
“Call it a hunch. Give me a sec.” Gary turned the laptop toward him, closed the video screen and called up a Web browser.
Within a minute, he’d found the site and played a video.
I couldn’t make out individual words, but it had a clipped rhythm to it. And Gary was right—it was familiar.
“What is it?” Tina said.
Gary showed us the screen, which was a mass of squiggling script. A video streaming in the corner showed military Jeeps rumbling
down a yellow, dusty landscape. If I had to guess, I’d say Gary had found an Arabic news site.
“Arabic?” Jules asked.
“That’s only a demonic language if you’re a warmongering Republican,” I said, flippant. It was either laugh or cry in a situation
like this.
“That’s it, then. I’m done. I’m a complete and utter believer. At least in Tina,” Jules said. “All those people who claim
they’re channeling medieval German milkmaids or Cleopatra—and then they speak English? Tina, you don’t know Arabic, do you?”
She shook her head.
Jules laughed. “This is . . . it’s
crazy
. Do demons even have nationality?”
“Maybe they do,” Gary said. “If it really is Arabic it’ll be easy enough to find a translator and find out what it said.”
“So it’s an Arabic demon,” Tina said. “Now what?”
“Oh, my God, I know what it is,” Jules said, dumbstruck by his own revelation, staring into space. “An Arabic demon—it’s a
genie.”
I had to admit, I wasn’t expecting that one. None of us were; we remained silent.
Jules kept on, pleading almost, like he needed us to tell him he was right. Or crazy.
“Like a genie in a bottle,” he said. “Arabic folklore, all those stories in
One Thousand and One Nights
. Genies aren’t supposed to have physical form. They’re magical beings, but they have sentience and will—they’re like people.
Well?”
“Sorry,” I said. “All I can think of are reruns of sixties TV shows.”
“What if you’re right?” Tina said. “We still have to figure how to stop it.”
Gary said, “This is way outside my area of expertise.”
“I could make another round of e-mails and phone calls,” Jules said. “There’s a guy at Oxford who’s written about this. But
he specializes in the folklore. I’m not sure what he’ll say when I tell him this is for real.”
“The worst he can do is say you’re nuts,” Tina said.
Jules smirked. “He’s already said that.”
I had an idea. Probably not a good idea, but I liked it anyway. “There’s something else we can do. We can turn this one over
to the group mind.”
“Group mind?” Gary said.
“Friday night, my show. We throw this out to my listeners. See what happens. I’ve got a pretty diverse audience. Who knows?
Maybe someone out there can help. We might be surprised.” I blinked hopefully.
Jules chuckled. “Where you’re concerned, I don’t think I’ll ever be surprised.”
“Please don’t say that,” I said. “That’s when the really weird shit starts happening.”
Like a knock on the door. Not again, I thought. We looked at the door, but nobody moved. Nobody wanted to see who would come
visiting at this hour. Like maybe the demon had found another body and wanted a rematch. The knock came again.
Jules went to the door and checked the peephole, then opened the door and let Ben in. My husband didn’t look happy. My first
thought was panic: What had happened? Who’d died now? But then, seeing him glare at me, the guilt landed in my stomach like
a rock. I’d promised to call him, hadn’t I?
“Ben. Hi,” I said. I bit my lip.
“Would you believe I was just about ready to call the police?” he said.
I scrambled from my chair. “Would you all excuse us for a sec?”
As I passed Ben, I grabbed his sleeve and urged him outside. He was smirking.
There, in the dark under the porch light, we looked at each other. He didn’t look angry, just tired. Like he’d expected me
to forget to call him. Like none of this surprised him. That made all this worse, and I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry,” I said bleakly. It sounded lame.
“Have you checked your phone?”
My phone in my pocket. I’d turned it off before the experiment at Flint House and hadn’t looked at it since. When I did, I
found six missed calls. All from Ben.
“I forgot to turn my phone back on after the séance.”
He blinked. “Wait a minute. You guys did another séance?”
“It never really got to the séance stage,” I said, realizing I was just digging the hole deeper. “It was more a demonic possession,
really, but we stopped it. And we think we know what’s doing this now.” Always end on a bright note.
Why did I feel like I was trying to explain to my parents why I’d broken curfew? Ben was my husband, not my father, and I
hated feeling like this about him.
“You were supposed to stay out of trouble,” he said, scowling, his voice tight, obviously trying not to yell. “You were supposed
to call me if you got in trouble or did something that was likely to get you in trouble.”
“I forgot. I’m sorry.” I had an urge to look away, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to give ground.
He shut his eyes for a moment. “If it were any other time, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But something out there is trying to
kill you. When I got back to the condo and you weren’t there, and you hadn’t left a message—” He shook his head. “I could
almost kill you myself.”
I didn’t believe it, but he spoke calmly, and there was something in his eyes, amber and wolfish, and his shoulders were bunched
up, tense, like hackles. His body language was edging toward ferocious.
“Tina and the others found something,” I said. “Another clue. Maybe another step toward stopping this thing.”
“That’s good,” he said flatly.
Then nothing, for five heartbeats. Six.
“We can’t do anything else tonight. Maybe we should go home and get some sleep.” Cue tail wagging. Imaginary tail wagging.
I hoped the thought came through.
“Yeah. Okay.”
Usually when Ben was angry at me, he yelled. We both yelled, and then it all went away. This tamped-down temper—it almost
sounded like he’d given up. The problem of the demon almost faded from my attention.