Reflexively I open my hand and the knife begins to fall.
“No!” I shout, reaching for it. But before I can catch it, it disappears in front of me with a deafening crack that releases a burst of light so bright, it’s almost blinding.
Fire. How could we have lost so quickly?
The crack fills the shack again. It isn’t fire after all.
It’s a bolt of lightning.
The weapon hasn’t disappeared—it’s becoming a storm.
Clouds cover the shack’s ceiling, thick and black like Ridgemont on its dreariest day. The roof dissolves in the fog above us. I jump at the sound of thunder and a flash of lightning, together in perfect unison. I hold my breath.
The rain starts.
This is no mere drizzle. This is a pounding, driving rain, accompanied by wind that whips what’s left of my hair into my face. The clouds overhead are so thick that the only light left comes from the piercing moments filled with lightning.
Crack, flash. I see the large man drop the smaller one at his feet. Over the wind I hear him shout when the spray touches his pink flesh.
Crack, flash. The large man falls to his knees.
Crack, flash. I fall to mine.
I can actually feel the demon moving around inside the tall man’s body, holding tighter to his insides, trying to bury itself deeper in his flesh. I sense it so intensely that it’s as though it’s happening to me. Crack, flash. I curl into the fetal position. The pain is like nothing I’ve ever felt before, like red hot fingers are twisting their way through my intestines. I open my mouth and let the rainwater fill me, hoping it will drip down into my body and cool my insides.
The pain is extraordinary. Crack, flash. The man and I are crawling on the ground, our bodies mirror images of agony. Lucio must see me falter, because soon I feel his hands over my own, lacing his fingers through mine, like Mom’s hands when I hurt myself as a child: squeeze my hand as hard as it hurts.
Crack, flash. The tall man and I fling out our arms, our mouths twisting in so much pain that we can’t even scream. The demon is being dragged through his flesh. It loses hold of his guts and wraps its hands around his kidneys, then moves up to his ribcage, and finally twists its fingers around his heart.
No, I think. Not his heart.
Grabbing hold of the heart is how a demon kills the humans it possesses. It squeezes until the blood stops flowing. Or maybe this demon will just set his heart on fire. This demon is determined to get at least one kill in today. His strength is extraordinary.
“We’re losing him,” I gasp, rainwater running into my eyes and mixing with my tears.
“What are you talking about?” Lucio shouts. “We’re soaking this demon! It’s not going to be able to withstand this much longer.”
No, not much longer. But it doesn’t need a lot of time to finish the job.
If the demon stops the heart from beating, this suffering man won’t just die; his spirit will be destroyed. Over time everyone who knew him, everyone who ever loved him will forget him, as though he never existed at all.
I muster all my strength and get to my feet, gasping for air. The rain is so thick, a person could drown in here, but I manage to take a deep breath and run headlong into the enormous man in front of us. When I crash into him, it feels like crashing into a soaking wet wall.
But it’s enough. The impact causes the demon to loosen its grip, though I feel it struggling to regain hold. The wall of a man collapses to the floor, taking me along with him. I scream, feeling the demon’s every movement in my own body. I fall away from the man’s body, and we are lying on the ground retching in pain. The rain beats down as Lucio runs to help.
Time slows just like it did when I defeated the water demon on New Year’s Eve. I stare at the rain: it looks frozen in time. No—it’s actually frozen, turning from rain into icicles that crash onto the ground around us. Suddenly I know exactly what I have to do. I grab an enormous icicle and plunge it deep into the chest of the possessed man.
At once I feel the demon disintegrate. The man exhales, and a cloud of dark ash floats into the air above us and disappears. The ice melts, splashing across the floor, leaving no evidence of what just happened. The man’s chest is smooth and unbroken. Only the demon was stabbed.
“Sunshine!” Lucio shouts. Above us the storm clouds part. The knife reappears and drops, landing with a tiny ping. The ceiling is right back where it used to be, the sun streaming in through the uncovered windows. I lie back in a patch of light.
“I’m okay,” I pant.
“What were you thinking?” Lucio asks, crouching beside me. He wraps his arms around me. The smaller man has already run out the door of the shack, and beneath me the larger man is unconscious, but I feel his pulse, steady and strong.
“The demon was about to kill him,” I explain. “I could feel it.”
“You actually knew the exact moment the demon went in for the kill?”