Nightmare (41 page)

It was horrific. The perfect plan, the ultimate act of spite
against God. For the first time I was thankful to be without
skin or blood, because they would both have been ice cold right
now.

The silence was broken by the sound of desperate whispers.
I turned and saw Derek on his knees, his eyes closed and his
mouth moving with barely any sound coming out. There were
beads of sweat all over his head and hands; he was trembling so
hard that he almost lost his balance at one point.

Derek was praying, and I recognized his words as Scripture.
" `In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have
overcome the world.'"

"Get on your feet, boy," the demon taunted. "Believe me ...
He's not listening. He has abandoned this place and all who come
inside it. It's mine now, and I will grow it to engulf this entire
wretched world."

Derek slowly, weakly stood back up. "If that's true," he said,
his voice low, "then why haven't you killed me already?"

The demon's red eyes narrowed into slits, but it had no
reply.

Derek had something in his hand-the thing he had been kicking across the floor-and he raised it before him, with his
arm outstretched fully in the direction of the monster.

It was two intersecting pieces of rebar, welded together in
the middle. Together, the two metal rods formed a crude but
unmistakable cross.

"You can't touch me," Derek said, hefting the cross high. His
voice gained strength with every word. "You can't harm me. You
have no power over me. I do not fear you!"

With a move so fast it seemed impossible, the demon spun,
grabbed its metal cage with its gigantic, gnarled hands, and tore
the thing apart with a howl of rage.

Then it spun again, and two things happened at once.

The demon hurled a large crisscrossing section of the metal
rods from the cage in Derek's direction.

And just before the flying metal made contact, Derek was
flung violently onto the ground.

jordin. I'd lost track of her in all this. Her spirit now stood in
the exact spot Derek had been occupying a second ago, her arms
thrown straight out. She'd somehow worked up the strength of
will to make physical contact with Derek and push him out of
harm's way. And it didn't escape my notice that the demon wasn't
able to see her apparition standing there glaring at it.

The demon was furious, and grabbed more pieces of the broken cage to hurl at Derek, though Derek was now on the ground.
I saw his fingers still clutching the rudimentary cross, and his
lips were moving again. I was about to call out to Jordin when
she started moving away, out into the middle of the chamber,
on a mission.

I couldn't see if Derek was hurt or not, but I didn't spend a
long time staring from my vantage point behind the demon. As it threw metal rods and other bits in a hot fury, I drew closer, as
fast as I dared, still afraid that some unsuspecting interaction
of mine with the mortal world might tip the demon off to my
presence.

I moved around behind its enormous legs, noting the horrendous stench and incredible heat it was giving off-though
neither had any effect on me-and with all of the concentration
I could muster, I reached out my indefinable hand and grabbed
the object of my desire.

The demon was still flinging things toward Derek when it
stopped short at the sight in front of it. Thanks to yours truly,
the metal cube bearing the glyph was floating right in front of
its charcoal body.

I lunged, and the cube was shoved forward toward the
demon's chest, but its reflexes were too fast. It stopped the cube
with a single hand and snatched it away from me.

"A ghostly rebellion, eh?" it muttered, straining to see me
but unable to.

But while it was speaking, I was already in motion. My
strength of will was fully maxed out as one of the metal rods
from the creature's cage flew into the air. Its sharp broken-off
end scratched a deep cut into the demon's chest, and in that
instant, the entire room shuddered.

The demon dropped the cube and the metal bar was torn free
from my hands, but it didn't matter. I stood slowly in triumph,
gazing at the gash I had made across the demon's chest-carving
straight through the glyph that was branded there.

The demon's eyes swelled in horror when it saw that the
symbol had been broken, and it scrambled about, searching the
floor beneath it for the cube.

But I already had the cube in my hands once more, and I
tossed it toward the center of the room, where the extractor lay,
my body still resting inside it.

The brightest glow I ever saw burst into being all across the
ceiling above us, and an entire legion of beings of light flew into
the Body Chamber at breakneck speed. I couldn't get a good look
at them because of how fast they moved, but they were more
dazzling than the sun. A thousand suns.

They grabbed the demon, kicking and screaming, and the vile
thing turned inside out until it vanished from sight. The angels,
likewise, faded in a single powerful instant that was punctuated
by a clap of thunder.

Amid the silence that followed, I made my way to the center
of the chamber and directly through the extractor's clear tube
to slide into my physical body. The mortal world came flooding
back, my dull but familiar human senses taking over as I opened
my eyes and took a long, deep breath.

Jordin was already back. She was supporting Derek's weight
as they stood side by side just outside the machine, watching and
waiting for me to emerge. Derek looked terrible, bleeding from
a gash on his head and ready to pass out. He had a broken wrist
from where Jordin had shoved him to the ground. And Jordin
was pale and looking rather weak herself.

She pushed a button on the extractor's controls and the clear
pod slid down away from me. I realized how weak I was myself
as I tried to stand on my own and my knees buckled. My trusty
heart began beating faster and harder, and for the first time, I
was oddly happy to feel the sensation.

As Jordin and Derek helped me to stand, the three of us
heard murmuring from throughout the vast room. Other souls
trapped here in the building had found their bodies and were
returning to the land of the living.

The three of us never spoke, never charted a course or laid
out a plan.

We stepped up to the extractor as one. In our respectively
weary states, we worked methodically and tirelessly, prying free
keypads and monitors from the extractor. I reached inside and
tore out the needle that had punctured the back of my neck
during the procedure.

As others awoke and exited their cubicles, our feeble efforts
grew into a movement as dozens of us worked in silence to dismantle the extractor down to its circuits and wires, never uttering
a single word between us. Pierre eventually returned and whispered to me that the authorities were on the way, and though
I knew he had to be thinking about how the extractor should
be preserved as evidence, he finally chose to join the group in
tearing it apart.

I left them to continue the work, and went off in search
of two things. I returned to the center of the room when I had
them both.

Derek and Jordin looked up to see me holding the demon's
cube in one hand and the rebar cross Derek had held aloft in
the other. They watched silently as I placed the cube on the
ground and then reared back and jammed the rebar cross straight
through it.

Again and again I did this, and when I was done, the cube was
crushed beyond recognition. And the glyph it bore, with it.

ONE WEEK LATER

The Boston Herald was proudly on display, covering a large portion
of our dining table. Pierre Ravenwood's expose of the astounding, horrifying work of Durham Holdings International took up
the entire front page, and continued onto a second. The Herald
exclusive had been picked up by all the major news networks and
outlets, making its way all around the globe.

Pierre was being called "a bold new voice in investigative
reporting" by some, and he had appeared on half a dozen news
broadcasts-with eight more already scheduled-to tell our
incredible story. Derek, Jordin, and I turned down all offers for
interviews, referring everyone to Pierre instead.

Tonight, the four of us enjoyed a nice dinner out at Pierre's
expense. He said it was the least he could do for the three of us helping to fast-track his career. I sat next to him-which was a
bit awkward but also kinda nice-while Jordin and Derek leaned
against each other and frequently looked at one another with
longing, maybe just to make sure they were both really there
and together again.

While we waited for our food to arrive, Jordin spoke up.
"There's one thing I still can't figure out," she said, looking to me.
"When you and I were investigating ... why was the paranormal
activity so unusually high? Am I really some kind of paranormal
focal point? Or do you think it could have been-"

"The demon's presence in the mortal realm? Or maybe DHI
tailing you while it tried to lure you in to take part in its experiments?" I sighed, but not in a tired way. "I don't know. Everything
we experienced was in keeping with what I've observed about the
paranormal in the past. My feeling is that it was all real, though
I'm sure at least one person at this table would disagree about
that."

Derek smiled a rueful smile but said nothing.

"It was just the frequency of it-the tremendous amount
of activity everywhere we turned-that was odd," I concluded.
"Ultimately, it's something you'll have to decide for yourself. I
know what I think."

"Fair enough," Jordin replied with a thoughtful, unworried
smile.

Now it was my turn. I had a question of my own I'd been waiting for the right moment to ask. "Will you tell me something?"
I said. "Why did you go to that church in New Jersey when you
knew a demon would probably be there?"

"Demons are more powerful than humans," she explained,
not trying to hide how foolish she felt now. She shrugged a useless shrug and shook her head sadly. "I hoped to barter something
with the demon if it would open the veil and let me in. I know
how ridiculous that sounds now. I was ... obsessed. Now it feels
like it's lifted. I had a lot of time to think after they abducted
me, and the question that kept echoing in my head was what the
angel said to the women at the tomb on Easter morning: `Why
do you look for the living among the dead?'"

Derek put his arm around her and held her tight. The two of
them had had a long week to reacclimate and talk out everything
that had happened. It looked like they were going to survive the
experience.

"So do you still feel the weight of the old family curse?" he
asked, without a hint of humor or judgment in his voice.

ButJordin grinned. "It wasn't there. There was no blemish or
mark on my soul. It was never there. It was clean. I should have
known it would be. That's the promise after all-but I didn't
have faith. I know now how short life is in this world regardless
of when we leave it, and I'm not going to spend what little time
we have here living in fear."

I liked that answer. I also wondered how much of it she had
heard from Derek and had adopted and repeated as her own.

It didn't matter. I could tell she believed it.

"You know," Pierre chimed in with a bit of a flourish, "as long
as we're tying up loose ends ... There's a question I still haven't
gotten an answer to. And this question is for you, Ms. Peters."

I smiled sheepishly at his cheeky use of my last name. "Yes?"
I said in faux sincerity.

"What happens when we die?" he asked.

I couldn't stop myself from glancing across the table at Jordin, recalling our first meeting and how I had demanded that she come up with that very question on her own, before I would
agree to help her. We exchanged a brief glance. Even Derek looked
my way for a moment before smiling warmly at his fiancee.