The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(34)
“Chilkat gamun!” the boy howled, his words distorted and leaping in pitch. “Chilkat gamun rabadai!”
Onlookers gasped as the chair lifted from the ground, slowly spinning, hovering an inch over the pea-green rug as the torrent of arcane words grew louder, more furious.
“Be at peace!” the man said, holding up his hands to calm them. “The angel greets us, but he bears a message of warning. Some of you have not been doing all you can for the family. Some of you have not been sharing freely of your hearts, your minds, and your labor. He says to look inside yourselves, to question if your devotion is true!”
Caitlin leaned against the wall and folded her arms, one eyebrow raised.
“That ‘angel’,” she said pointedly, “is a fledgling demon of the Choir of Wrath. It’s speaking in gutter flensetongue, and it’s promising that man a number of sexual mutilations involving battery acid.”
I felt tired. Old hurts and old angers helped to smother my panic, leaving me numb in the balance.
“We called him the Shepherd,” I said.
“The Up With People reject?” she asked.
“I was seventeen and on the run. Hungry and desperate. When he found me, I was using some crude misdirection charms to hustle a tourist. People like me, people with a spark of raw magical ability and no real training, were like catnip to him.”
“A cult.” Caitlin’s nose twitched with disdain. “So he’d get one of you possessed, claim he was translating angel-speak, and give your marching orders. What’d he do if he got a demon who spoke English?”
“Square it ahead of time. I don’t know what he offered them, but they’d say whatever he wanted them to. Usually that his spiritual powers would be a lot stronger if his bed wasn’t empty that night.”
She peered around the room. “Which one is you?”
I pointed.”I’m the one tied to the chair.”
The chair fell to the carpet with a thud and Dream-Me slumped against the ropes, unconscious under the hood. The onlookers applauded, hugging one another, some with tears of wonder in their eyes.
“I had the bare essentials for learning sorcery,” I said, “talent and insatiable curiosity. He only wanted the talent. He tried to starve the curiosity out of me, tried to torture it out of me with ‘ritual penance,’ tried…other things, but it just made me fight harder. I knew I needed to escape.
“That’s when he decided that being a host for the ‘angels’ wasn’t to be shared among all of us any longer, that instead I’d been specially chosen to be their one and only vessel. And instead of once a week, they had so much to tell us that they needed to come every single night.”
Caitlin stared at me, horrified.
“Humans can’t endure…” she started to say, then shook her head. “How many times were you possessed? By how many demons?”
“I lost count after thirty. Usually a different one every night. Night after night I was a puppet, a prisoner in my own body. The physical pain was excruciating, but that was nothing compared to what it felt like inside my head. The torrents of psychic filth, like someone pissing inside your brain and carving their initials on the back of your eyelids just to show they were there—”
We stood in a grassy meadow under a warm summer sun. Caitlin pressed her finger to my lips.
“Shh,” she said. “I know. You don’t have to talk about it.”
“Where are we?” I squinted at a French manor at the top of a hill. “This isn’t one of my memories.”
“No. It’s one of mine. A peaceful place. I thought you might like it. How did you get away?”
I shook my head. “I don’t remember. I remember running. I got out somehow, and they chased me, but…there’s a place in the city, an occultists’ hangout with an invisible door. It pulled me inside, and I passed out cold on the carpet. A couple of friendly magicians found me and took me in, taught me, made me strong.”
Caitlin tilted her head, taking me in with a curious stare.
“You were already strong. Your survival is proof. I’m curious—I would like you to explain something.”
“Ask.”
“After what you endured at the hands of my kind, and knowing full well what I am, you still saved me. You not only saved me, you risked your life to do it. Why?”
I shrugged. The answer seemed obvious.
“Because what they were doing to you was wrong,” I said, “and it needed to be stopped. Doesn’t matter who you are. Doesn’t matter what you are. Wrong is wrong.”
She blinked.
“Curious,” she said again, and I found myself staring at my bedroom ceiling. Alone in the darkness, I put my palm on my chest and felt the beating of my heart.
? ? ?
Nothing felt entirely real as I turned on the shower, scrubbing my hair under the spray and turning over the events of the dream. I’d heard of shared dreams before, but I’d never expected to experience one firsthand. Or did I? For all I knew, the entire thing was just my imagination on overdrive. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been thinking about Caitlin.
Finding Artie Kaufman’s brother was priority one, but for that I needed a name. I’d been thinking about Artie’s house, how it was so much nicer than he should have been able to afford on a low-end porn director’s budget. If his brother had helped him pay for it, his name might be on the deed. I got out of the shower and toweled off.