Shoot Me Down

Part 17

When I pass through into the house Nakia isn’t there. But Caleb is, and he has company. An older woman stands in the living room with him, one arm around his shoulders. She’s slightly shorter than him, a round woman with a fierce face who keeps her blonde hair pulled back into a tight bun. His mother. In front of them, talking to both of them is a man in a black suit. I recognize the high white collar he wears. They’ve called in a priest.

            I could go back to Sam at the river, but I don’t. I stay because I’m curious. What effect will a priest have on me? Does he have any kind of power at all? I drift around him, examining him closely. Watery blue eyes peer out from behind glasses, and a wide unattractive mouth makes any expression seem comical. That, combined with the overabundance of red hair that springs up from his head in violent curly clumps, makes it hard to take him seriously. He speaks through his nose, and looks down it at Caleb and his mother. “Now, where has the spirit been most predominant?”

            “Uh,” Caleb stammers. “I guess…I dunno. Once in the kitchen, once in my bedroom and twice in the living room now.”

            “And what sort of thing has the spirit been doing?”

            Caleb looks at his mother, as if asking if he’ll look crazy when he says it out loud. She nods slightly. “Um, banging in the walls, lights flickering, stuff being knocked over.” He shivers, his face twisting in disgust and horror. “And last night it showed up in my doorway. Just a…black outline of a person.”

            His mother rubs his arm in a comforting gesture, and I watch them in fascination. So, he just saw me silhouetted in the light from the hallway. No features. Only a vague, black shadow. Interesting to imagine how I’d looked to him.

            The priest asks, “Do you have any idea who the spirit might be? Any idea who the former tenants may have been or if they experienced anything similar?”

            Caleb shifts uncomfortably, he chews on his lip and shakes his head. “No idea.” The lie slides out easily enough, but his mother can probably tell when her son is lying, because she glances sideways at him, and for just a split second, her lip twitches. My breath catches, no – he can’t possibly have told her, can he? Would she cover for him?

This is confirmed when the priest turns away for a minute, examining the walls of the living room, and I catch a sharp nervous look between mother and son. Rage washes through me. I’m practically shaking with it. How can she possibly go along with it? How is she evil enough to cover for a murder?

            I grit my teeth. Really, why am I surprised? The woman raised a monster. Why wouldn’t she have monster DNA as well? I narrow my eyes, setting my sights on the woman.

            Now I know where he gets it from.

            The priest does a circle of the living room, then he stops in the middle of the floor and sets down a leather brief case that I hadn’t noticed until now. I hold my breath, wondering what sort of deadly things are going to come out of there. The priest cracks open the metal clasps on the front, throwing the case open he pulls out a metal flask.

            “Holy water,” he explains to Caleb, who raises a critical eyebrow at him and says, “Isn’t that for vampires?”

            “No such thing,” The priest says seriously, and sets the flask down on the floor. Next he takes out a leather bible and proceeds to sit down cross- legged in the middle of the floor. “And in fact, I don’t believe what you have here is a ghost. There’s no basis for it. The house is fairly new, and there’s no history that any of us are aware of. So I believe you may have a demon.”