Vicious Circle

Helping herself to some mee goreng that she hadn’t ordered, Juliet nodded curtly. “They’re possessed,” she said.

“What, all of them?”

“All of them. Do you read the Bible much, Castor?”

“Not when there’s anything good on the TV.”

“Commentaries and concordances? Textual exegesis?”

“To date, never.”

“So do you know what the Jewish position on Christ is?”

I shrugged impatiently, really not wanting to sit through what looked like it might be a very circuitous analogy. “I dunno,” I said. “They probably think he got in with the wrong crowd.”

“I mean, what exactly do they think he was? What kind of being?”

“I give up. Tell me.”

“They think he was a prophet. Like Elijah, or Moses. No more, no less. One in a long line. Someone who’d been touched by God, and could speak with God’s authority, but not God’s son.”

“So?”

“But Christians think that the indwelling of God in Christ was different in kind from his indwelling in the prophets.”

I took a long slug on the whisky, as an alternative to playing straight man. Presumably she’d get to the point without any prompting from me.

“As in heaven, so in hell,” she said. “When demons enter human souls, they can do it in a lot of different ways.” There was a pause while she ate, which she did with single-minded, almost feral enthusiasm. Then she fastidiously licked the corner of her mouth with a long, lithe, double-tipped tongue. That had made me shit a brick the first time I’d seen it. Nowadays I just wondered what else she could do with it besides personal grooming.

She held up an elegant hand, counted off on her fingers. Her fingernails shone with copper-colored varnish; or, possibly, just happened to be made of copper tonight. “First, and easiest, there’s full possession, in which the human host soul is overwhelmed and devoured, and the body becomes merely a vessel for the demon as long as it chooses to use it. That’s commoner than you’d think, but usually it can only be done with consent.”

“You mean people ask to have their souls swallowed?”

“Essentially, yes. They agree to a bargain of some kind. They accept the terms, and the terms include forfeiting their soul. Obviously they may have an imperfect understanding of what that means. An eternity of suffering in hell, or separation from God, or whatever the current orthodoxy is. But for us, it only ever means the one thing. It’s open season. We can eat them.”

Strong-stomached though I am, I was in danger of losing my appetite. She was enjoying this too damn much for my comfort.

“Who lays down the rules?” I demanded. “Open season implies someone dealing out the hunting licenses. Is that—?”

“There are some things I’m not prepared to tell you,” Juliet interrupted, making a pass through the air with her hand like someone waving away a paparazzo’s camera. “That’s one of them. But if you were going to say ‘Is that God?’ then the answer is no. It’s more . . . involved than that.”

“ ‘Involved’?”

“Complicated. Things fall out in a certain way, and accidents of the terrain give birth to rules of engagement. But in any case, that’s one form that possession can take—the most extreme form. The demon devours the human host and lives in its shell.”

“Okay,” I conceded. “Go on.”

“Number two is house arrest. It’s possible for a demon to overwhelm a soul without its consent and hold it captive. Again, that would allow it to use the host body as if it were its own, but the human soul would still be inside, witnessing its own actions and even experiencing them, but as a passenger rather than a driver.”

“Fuck.” I let my laden chopsticks fall back into my pad thai. That was what Asmodeus did to Rafi: hijacked the bus and made him watch while he went on a joyride that was still going on two years later.

“One and two have a lot in common,” Juliet said, ignoring my discomfort. “They both involve the demon literally invading the human host. But there are other ways in which human and demon can be grafted together. Other degrees and gradations, I suppose you could say. At the opposite extreme, a demon can gift a man or woman with a tiny part of its own essence.”

“Gift?”

“Infect, if you prefer. Impart. Impose. Don’t argue semantics with me, Castor. You can’t expect me to have the same moral perspective on this that you have.”

“I guess not,” I acknowledged. “And yet, here you are.”

Juliet shrugged with her eyebrows. “It’s a job.”

“Right. Like if bubonic plague was a woman, and she signed on as a charge nurse in a hospital.”

She actually laughed at that. “Yes. Exactly. Anyway, the point about gifting is that we can do it as many times as we like. It diminishes us a little, and that imposes a limit. A strong demon could gift a couple of hundred people at once, but it would be severely weakened afterwards. To get its full strength back, it would have to call all those pieces home eventually.”

“But in the meantime—?”