“What a dick,” Caleb said, snagging a fortune cookie. He cracked it open and read, “‘Some answers invite more questions.’ Yeah, no kidding.” He balled up the slip of paper and threw it disgustedly into the trash.
“I doubt this fifolet has been standing around since the early 1800s,” John went on. “Mr. LeBlanc did say the promise of treasure was the lure it used, so the entire story about pirate treasure might be a fabrication.”
“Or the exact opposite—it uses the treasure lure because it’s true. Either way, we need to find this thing before it eats someone else.” Caleb dropped onto the couch beside John and leaned into him. “Gray is sulking about having to leave earlier, and it’s getting tedious.”
“You should trust Caleb’s judgement, Gray,” Zahira said, putting down her chopsticks.
“Thank you,” Caleb said. He rested his head against John’s shoulder. “We’re going to need a canoe at the very least. Though how we’re going to find one demon in the middle of a hundred-thousand-acre swamp, I have no idea.”
John angled the laptop so Caleb could read, too. “It’s thought they prefer to take cover in areas of stable ground surrounded by water. If there are any old hunting cabins or the like, it might be a place to start.”
His phone rang. Tiffany.
Feeling suddenly nervous, John answered. “Did you find something?”
“Hello to you, too, Starkweather,” she replied. “We haven’t cracked the files yet, but the metadata isn’t encrypted. Does the name Osmond Walsh mean anything to you?”
The office where they’d found the naga had belonged to O. Walsh, Director.
Osmond Walsh.
Dr. Walsh.
The man loomed over him, white coat in sharp lines. John’s eyes fixed on his tie—the only spot of color in the concrete cell. Bright blue, like the sky he hadn’t seen in so long, with lavender dots.
He longed to lunge off the bed. Sink his teeth into Dr. Walsh’s flesh. Taste the hot blood in his throat.
No. No he didn’t, he wouldn’t, he’d refuse to want it. Every instinct screamed to cast out the thing rotting inside him, but he couldn’t, he couldn’t. He had to bear it. They’d just put another in, and then he’d lose some of the few freedoms he still had as punishment.
“The chlorpromazine isn’t showing the results we’d hoped for,” Walsh said to someone else. Another researcher. “Patients still report NHE-induced psychosis and growing anti-social behavior.” He paused, studying John.
John tugged against the restraints holding him to the bed. Walsh was nothing. No, wait—Walsh was something.
Walsh was food.
A growl escaped him. He pulled harder on the leather straps, the smell of human flesh working its way into his brain. He was so hungry. The dead meat on the plastic trays they served held no attraction; he choked it down only to keep up his strength. They’d make a mistake one day soon. He’d get out of the leather straps. Leap on the humans with claw and tooth and—
He squeezed his eyes shut. No. This wasn’t him. It was the decaying thing inside him, staining his very soul with its presence. He wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t give in.
He wanted it out so bad. But he had to endure.
There was no other choice.
Three
John blinked. He found himself on his hands and knees on the floor, his phone lying a few feet away. Caleb crouched by him, hands on his shoulders, steadying.
“We’ve got you,” Caleb said. “It’s okay. We’ve got you.”
Gray’s presence surrounded him, like a crackling blanket. “We are here,” he affirmed, his deep voice thrumming in John’s bones like thunder.
Zahira scooped up the phone. “Tiffany? No, John, um, had to put the phone down. It’s not my place to say. Yes. Thank you, that was very helpful. Thank you. Goodbye.”
John took a deep, steadying breath. “I’m all right,” he said aloud. “I’m all right.”
Gray stood, then easily pulled John to his feet. Though he held himself with a preternatural stillness, John knew him well enough to tell he was on edge. Gray wanted something to fight.
Which could be a problem.
John deliberately leaned against him, hoping the contact would calm Gray at least a bit. “Tiffany gave me a name,” he said. “Osmond Walsh. I remember…he was a doctor of some kind.” He closed his eyes, conjuring up the mental image of the man even though it was the last thing he wanted to do. “I’d say he was somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five at the Center.”
Zahira already had her laptop open. “So he’d be between sixty and seventy now. Any ideas what his doctorate was in?”
“Torturing kids,” John said before he could censor himself. “Sorry, that isn’t helpful. I don’t know. Psychiatry, medicine, parapsychology…any of those would make sense as a starting point.” His head had begun to throb. “I need an aspirin.”
Gray slipped away. “I’ll get it,” Caleb said. “Just sit down. Anything else you need? Cup of hot tea?”
“That sounds great.” John sat down, then dragged his laptop toward him. “I shouldn’t let you do all of the work.”
Zahira made a shushing motion toward him. “You have a headache. Rest for a moment and let the rest of us see what we can do.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I mean that.”
He stretched out on the couch and closed his eyes. He must have slipped into a doze, because the next thing he knew, Caleb was setting the tea down on the coffee table. “Here’s your tea and aspirin. And I think Zahira found something.”
John sat up. “Thanks, babe.” He dry-swallowed the aspirin, then chased it with the near-scalding tea. “What did you find, Zahira?”
“First, can you tell me if the man in the picture is him?” She put her laptop on the table and rotated it in his direction.
Despite the hot tea, John’s blood went to ice. Age had thinned Dr. Walsh’s hair from thick silver to balding white, but the narrow nose and square jaw still remained. But even more than those features, it was his eyes that John recognized: cold and dead, empty of the smile that stretched the thin mouth below.
“It’s him,” he said.
Zahira nodded and turned the screen back to her. “It looks like he currently lives in Boca Raton. Give me a little time and I can turn up his home address, but it also looks like he teaches psychiatry at a local university.”
“Way to go, Zahira,” Caleb said. “Let’s pay this fucker a visit.”
John remembered how badly he’d wanted them to be there at the Center. But… “I’m sorry, babe. You can’t come.”
“What?” Caleb demanded, and Gray’s bass tones slipped into his voice, both of them united in shock and anger. “Like hell we aren’t!”
But John was shaking his head. “It’s not that I don’t want you to come. I do. But it makes more sense to catch a plane this time, since I’m just going to interrogate an old man. And you can’t fly.”
Caleb ground his teeth. On the one hand, John was right. The spirit wards at the security checkpoints would betray Gray’s presence in an instant. They’d end up in a terminal full of panicking passengers long before they ever saw the runway.