Then she heard something rustle at the end of the hall and knew Ktana Leyak waited for her in room 526, Ktana Leyak and the last piece of the Accuser that still lived outside Megan’s body.
“Let’s go,” she said, and headed for the door.
Bad as the graffiti was by the elevators, it got worse the farther down the hall she went, hate and pain vomited all over the walls. It was like walking into a museum of misogynistic racism, with some crazy thrown in for spice.
The demon inside her leaped and twitched, a sort of inner Geiger counter, but she didn’t need it. The sense of unease, of wrongness, coming through her shields would have alerted her without it, just as it had that day at the diner.
The door frame of room 526 had been ripped out, leaving a jagged, gaping hole. Megan stopped in front of it, took a deep breath, and walked in.
A streetlight glowed on the corner, not far from the empty window, making this room the brightest she’d been in since entering the hospital what felt like hours ago, months ago. Even with that light it took her a second to see Ktana Leyak, and that second cost her.
Ktana vaulted away from her hiding spot on the ceiling with her arms outstretched, her face curled into a vicious snarl. Too late, Megan ducked, avoiding having her jugular severed by Ktana’s sharp claws but not sparing her left cheek. Her tears ran rivulets down her face and stung in the sharply painful grooves.
Blindly she swung back, using her still-aching right hand. It hurt, oh how it hurt, but she managed to land a solid blow to Ktana’s chin as she swung upward.
Malleus and Maleficarum crowded into the room, shoving Ktana, trying to force her down, but Megan already knew it wouldn’t do any good. Stuffed with power from Megan’s demons and the chaos they’d caused in Grant Falls this night, she was too strong for them. As Nick had said, the boys weren’t psyche demons. They had all the physical strength they needed, but they couldn’t draw power the way she could.
Still they gave Megan a short respite and for that she was grateful. Somewhere in this room that last relic hid, and she needed to find it immediately if Ktana hadn’t already.
Ktana freed herself from the boys and rushed Megan again, this time stopped by Nick, who managed to get in a vicious slash with his sword. Ktana stumbled back, looking up at him with almost comical shock before attacking him, screaming, her arms windmilling while blood pumped slowly from the gaping wound across her chest.
That was Megan’s chance, shitty as it was. She dared to close her eyes for a second, trying to feel the exact location of the relic, but with so many demons and so much violence in the room, she couldn’t seem to identify it. She hadn’t a doubt it was there—and she had some vague sense of why it was there, some half-formed idea that it had stayed here with her, that it was left here the night Harlan Trooper died, waiting for the Accuser to come back and claim it—but where?
The metal bed bolted to the floor looked like a good place to start, even if it did mean making herself completely vulnerable while she looked under it. Why Ktana hadn’t checked there already she didn’t know, or again, maybe she had, but Megan had to try, didn’t she?
She heard Nick’s sword ring against something metal, chunk into plaster. Meaty sounds of fists on skin and cries of pain might have horrified her, but they at least told her that Ktana was still being kept busy.
The rodent droppings and filth under this bed were even worse than the basement, piled high. Something with little claws skittered across her arms, and her scream turned into a sneeze. Here were dead things, foul things, and just before her hand closed over it she knew here was the relic of the Accuser as well.
Hard hands grabbed her ankles and yanked, pulling her out from under the bed like a cruel child pulls the legs off a spider. Ktana’s foot slammed into the back of Megan’s head, driving her face into the hard floor with a terrible crunch and a bolt of white-hot pain. She didn’t need to feel it to know blood was pouring from her nose, that it was broken.
She tried to get up, but the foot forced her back down. This time she turned her head at the last second, managing to avoid having her face smashed into the floor again.
She stayed down. She had only seconds to decide what to do next, maybe not even that long before the fatal blow—if there was to be one—fell. Megan took a chance. She opened the door inside her, as wide as she could, praying she was right.
Power flared through her. Her demons, sated on the town’s misery, had fed Ktana all she needed; she didn’t seem to notice when Megan sent a shivery little feeler down the line connecting her to them and took some of it for herself. Not to mention what Rocturnus and his accomplices had for her. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to flip her over and send Ktana Leyak flying against the gaping window.
Megan struggled to get up. In her hand she clutched something soft and revoltingly warm, something that could have been the body of a mouse if it hadn’t been slick instead of furry. If she hadn’t been so far in the thrall of the demon it would have made her notoriously weak stomach lurch but, as it was, she felt only a terrible, weary resolve. It wasn’t what she wanted to do, but she would do it.
Ktana had barely hit the wall when she sprang back again, knocking Megan onto the floor. Megan didn’t bother trying to push or fight. Every fiber of her being was focused on getting her hand to her mouth. How did Ktana Leyak not know what Megan held?
No sooner had the thought entered her brain than Ktana’s focus changed. She let go of Megan’s neck and reached for her hand, making an attempt to grab the relic—go ahead and say it, it’s a heart or a lung or something equally revolting.
It was a miscalculation. Malleus’s boot swung out and clipped Ktana neatly across the face as she moved, snapping it back, and Megan used the opportunity to force herself to bite down on the thing in her hand.
Her first impression was that it tasted almost sweet, not like something foul and rotting for years under a grimy bed in a mental hospital, but that thought, and every other sensation, left her as power swept over her. It washed through her, taking her with it, filling her body with a raging torrent of emotion and fire and strength. She screamed, knowing as she did so that it wasn’t just the Accuser, knowing that when she’d taken the bite her demons had rejoined her and the energy they’d built up over this long winter’s night would have been enough to send her flying to the moon even without the relic.
For what felt like an eternity she hovered above the floor, riding an enormous rail of gleaming iridescent force, her fists clenched around the useless final bit of the relic and her head thrown back, before somehow falling into place, into her body, to find Ktana Leyak about to shoot her with her own gun.
Megan ducked, feeling as though it was somehow very easy to do all of this now, and swung her arm sideways, realizing her hand no longer hurt. Nor did her face, not really.
Ktana dropped the gun but managed to elbow Megan in the face. In her hyperecstatic state Megan hardly noticed it, but she knew it had happened, just like she knew without the Yezers’ power behind her Ktana would be disappearing soon, and this wouldn’t be over. It had to end now if Megan was going to have any peace, if she was going to have any real authority over her demons.
She swung again, catching Ktana across the face and knocking her down. The nose, go for the nose, like she did with you…She had no idea why that seemed right, but it did, so Megan lifted her foot and brought it down as hard as she could on the back of Ktana’s neck.
“Kill you! I’ll kill you, I’ll come back and kill you!” The normally light tones of Ktana Leyak’s voice harsh-ened, deepened, turned into something singularly unpleasant. Megan’s stomach lurched but she kept going, hitting Ktana on the back of the neck, understanding now that it wasn’t the nose, it was the neck, it was something in her neck that needed to be damaged if she was going to win, if she could ever hope to keep her demons safe.