Page 75 of Devil Inside

“Would you like to hear another?”

“There are more? Just how many names do you have, exactly?”

“Legion,”she says. “None of them suffice. No name can contain us.”

“Lilith it is, then.”

“Lilith it is.”

Now my mind is racing. So many questions to catch up with. Too many. They’re all backlogging my brain, ready to reach the open. I want to ask them all at once.

Where do I even begin?

“So... if there’s a hell... that must mean there’s a heaven as well, right?”

“If there is,” she says, “I’ve never been.”

Faith isn’t something I factored into my life. Heaven or hell, I was never a believer. Not truly. I could deny it, couldn’t I? Push it all away? Who believes in this sort of thing?

Now there’s no denying it, is there?

Demons?

Her?

There’s a part of me, the darkest part, the deepest recesses of myself, that fucking black chasm at the very center, that’s screaming even now, a voice rising up—Yes, it’s true.

Maybe this is what I need. She can bring me back. Back into my body.

Back home.

“Demon,”I repeat. The word takes shape in my mind. Definition. “You’re ademon.”

“What does it matter what I am?”

“Because I’m fucking you.”

“And here I thought I was the one fuckingyou.”

“This is just about the weirdest postcoital conversation I’ve ever had...”

“Sorry.” She kisses my bare shoulder, working her way down my arm. She takes the slightest bite of my bicep, the scars there. “What were you saying? We were distracted...”

“It’s been pretty hard for me to feel much of anything lately...”

“How so?”

“I don’t know... I’ve just been so numb to everything. Until...”

She looks back at me. “...Until?”

“I found you.”

“Ifoundyou.”

Look, just look at her. Those eyes. I find her hazel eyes—not her host’s, but something else, bands of gold and black lingering in the deepest recesses of this body.

Someone else is staring back at me. A passing shadow.