Color returns to the room.
Breath returns to my lungs.
The sharp edge of reality chases away the grainy distortion of a moment before. Crystalline lucidity slams back into place, sending me staggering backward.
The only evidence that anything happened at all is the raucous pounding of my pulse thudding wildly in my ears, and the cold, clammy sweat coating my palms and beading over my chest.
The pressure in my lungs fully eases only when the officers drag me from the room. Every step away from Ford granting me another small breath until we make it outside.
I jerk myself away from the officers, and helpless to stop it, I bend with my hands planted firmly on quaking knees and retch onto the street.
“She’s in the system,” I hear one of the officers whisper just outside the door to the small room where they deposited me. “Looks like she has some mental health issues. Bi-polar. Schizophrenia. Paranoid psychosis. You name it, it’s in the file.”
“Are you sure?” The female officer who I learned is called Silva asks, and I sense the hesitation in her tone.
“Yeah. Seems our cadaver took the responsibility of watching over her after her mom died in childbirth.”
“No family then?”
“None.”
A long sigh. “It just doesn’t make sense,” Officer Silva argues. “She was locked up in that creepy house with a damned tracker on her ankle. She seemed…scared.”
The other officer doesn’t remark on her comment. There’s a rustle of paper and Silva speaks again. “Get me a diviner. I just want to be sure before we hand her over to the state to deal with.”
I stop breathing.
Handing me over to the state takes a backseat in the horror-mobile to the mention of a diviner.
They are Nephilim. From what I know, they can see truths and sometimes—if their heritage is enriched with enough angel’s blood—events of the past. In the rarest of circumstances, glimpses of the future as well.
One of the news channels covered a story once where the police enlisted the help of a diviner to catch a killer. I wonder if that sort of thing is common practice now.
A ball forms in my throat, and I struggle to swallow it down, not daring to hope.
I strain to hear as the other officer speaks again. “She’s nineteen, Silva, a legal adult. If she refuses to—”
“Just get me the damned diviner, Peters.”
Peters’ heavy footsteps grow faint as he moves away, back toward the subdued swell of conversation and ringing telephones at the entrance to the large building.
I busy myself worrying the hem of my tank top when Silva reenters the small room a moment later, her expression drawn.
She no longer makes an effort to look me in the eyes. It’s always the same. At first, they jump to my defense. Pity me. Want to help me. And then when they are presented with Ford’s facts, their tone changes.
Their defense becomes indifference. Their desire to help dwindles.
But the pity always remains.
It seems even after his death I won’t be able escape the lies Ford spun to keep me safe. It would almost be funny if it weren’t so sad.
“You asked if we were sick,” Silva says, edging the words in a way that is neither a statement nor a question, but something in between. Giving me the freedom to decide if I want to respond.
“I have SCID.”
Her left brow raises as she folds herself into the brown leather chair on the opposite side of the narrow desk between us.
“My immune system is compromised,” I explain. “I get sick a lot easier than healthy people.”
I don’t bother adding in the fact that if I do get sick, I am far more likely to die than your average person. This is the longest I’ve been out of the house in two years. And the furthest I’ve ever been from the house ever.
I don’t want to ruin it.
On the way into the precinct an hour before, I could see the glint of sunlight bouncing off the rushing water of the Mississippi river in the distance. Could just make out the curved top of the Gateway Arch across the river in Elisium. Which means The Hinge isn’t very far.
From this side, in East St. Louis, it doesn’t look like a devil’s playground is sprawled over the land of what used to be St. Louis proper. It’s hard to imagine that across the metal bridge at The Hinge, Diablim roam freely.
The offspring of humans and demons have many forms, but they all go by that name.
And even though Ford didn’t permit me to learn much about them, I know enough from the blare of the television behind his locked bedroom door. I sat and listened there for hours as the news anchors told of the creatures living in the lawless city next door to us. Of the chaos and carnage.
Demonic beasts. Incubi and succubi. Salamanders, necromancers and fallen angels, and who knows what else. They all live there—just a stone’s throw away. Some of the Nephilim live there, too, though many have been granted permission to live on our side of the river.
It’s a truth universally accepted by everyone except Ford that the offspring of humans and angels can be trusted even though their dark counterparts across the river cannot.
They say the demons can’t cross it. That the rushing water acts as a natural sort of deterrent. But some Diablim can cross—if the amount of tainted blood flowing in their veins isn’t too great.
Being this close to Elisium makes me shudder with rivaling sensations of revulsion and morbid curiosity. If I’d been allowed, I would have inhaled all knowledge of their kind.
Now, I may not ever get the chance. If the police don’t send me to a new place to be locked up because of my ‘mental instabilities,’ I may still be a dead girl walking.
No doubt one of the hundred people in this building is ill with some sort of ailment my weak immune system will suck up. By tomorrow, I could be hospitalized.
By the end of the week, I could be on a slab next to Ford.
I shiver, trying to suppress the strange image of him hovering over his own corpse at the morgue. A hallucination—it had to be. Yet another side-effect of the pills Ford had me swallow day after day without fail.
They are supposed to boost my immune system, but all they do is leave me feeling heavy-headed and lead-limbed. And sometimes, they make me see things that aren’t there. But Ford had been vivid.
Not a strange shadow at the edges of my vision, or a foreign voice whispering as I reheat my tea in the microwave.
He was so real I felt as if I could’ve reached out and touched him.
Hallucination or not, the memory of his twisted face is burned there at the front of my mind, taunting me.
Run, he said. But to where?
Obviously, my subconscious mind is trying to tell me something, and I’m willing to bet it’s that I can’t trust these people.
The officer in front of me wouldn’t hesitate to throw me into an asylum at the first indication that the paperwork now lying face down on her desk holds the truth.
Telling her I saw the ghost of the dead man on the steel table at the morgue would earn me a one-way ticket.
“Paige?” Officer Silva prods, and I realize I missed something she said.
“Hmm?”
“I said that we have your medical records here. I submitted a request for them when we got back to the precinct, along with your adoption paperwork. There’s no indication of any sort of autoimmune disease that I can see here.”