“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.

Chapter 17

“We 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.