The Worm in Every Heart

That’s right.

My friend Jen, laying there on the tatty green carpet of her basement apartment; my other friend Franz, leaning over her. Shaking her—a few times, gently at first, then harder. Slapping her face once. Doing it again.

Watching her continue to lie there, impassively limp. Then looking back at me, a growing disbelief writ plain across his too-pale, freckled face—me, standing still inside my circle, with no expression at all on mine. Watching him watch.

She’s not breathing, Jude.

Well, no.

Jude. I think . . . I think she’s dead.

Well—yes.

“Turns out,” I told Grandmother Yau, “she wasn’t actually possessed, after all.”

“No?”

“No.”

Ai-yaaah.

Because: I’d taken Franz’s word, and Franz had taken Jen’s—but she’d lied to us both, obviously, or been so screwed up that even she hadn’t really known where those voices in her skull were coming from. So I’d come running, prepared to kick some non-corporeal butt, and funnelled the whole charge of my Power into her at once, cranked up to demon-expelling level.

But if there’s no demon to be put to flight, that kind of full-bore metaphysical shock attack can’t help but turn out somewhat like sticking a fork in a light socket, or vice versa. If that’s even possible.

Franz again, in Jen’s apartment, turning on me with his eyes all aburn. Reminding me, shakily: YOU said you could HELP.

If she was possessed, yes.

Then why is she dead, Jude?

Because . . . she wasn’t.

You—said—

I shrugged. Whoopsie.

He lunged for me. I let off a force-burst that threw him backwards five feet, cracking his spine like a whip.

You don’t EVER lay hands on me, I said, quietly. Not ever. Unless I want you to.

He sat there, hugging his beloved corpse with charred-white palms, crying in at least two kinds of pain. And snarled back: Like I’d want to touch you with some other guy’s dick and some third fucker pushing, you son of a fucking bitch.

(Yeah, whatever.)

Fact was, though, if Franz hadn’t been so cowardly and credulous in the first place—if he hadn’t wanted an instant black magic miracle, instead of having the guts to just take her to a mental hospital, the way most normal people do when their girlfriends start telling them they hear voices—then Jen might still be alive.

Emphasis on the might.

I can call demons. I can bind angels. I can raise the dead, for a while. But just like Franz himself had observed, more than once, I can’t actually cure anybody—can’t heal them of cancer, leprosy, M.S., old age, me

ntal illness or color-blindness to save my fucking life. Not unless they want me to. Not unless they let me.

The other way? That’s called a miracle, and my last name ain’t Christ.

Franz, crying out, tears thick as blood in his strangled voice: You PROMISED me, you fuck! You fucking PROMISED me!

Followed, in my memory, by a quick mental hit of Carra, half the city away: Still floating, still wreathed. And think: If I could do something for people like that, you moron, don’t you think I WOULD?