“Oh no,” Thor says. He has his binoculars to his face again.
“What?"
“The girl. Nina. She's out there.”
I’d ask how she got out there so fast, but she moves with angelic speed, so there we have it. Her disinterest must have been feigned. As she approaches the line of demons, it’s no longer necessary to use binoculars, one, because I have run as fast and as hard as I can to get to her and two, because her brightness is all the more brilliant for flaring against a backdrop of true darkness and evil.
“Jonah!” She's calling out to him. “Jonah! I thought you were dead!”
Oh, the poor girl! She thinks she is about to have a touching familial reunion. She knows nothing of the evil that has long stood by her side.
Jonah laughs at her. She still doesn't get it. I can see an expression of pure confusion on her face. She’s not sure if she's mad, if this is another mist hallucination, or some kind of gloom drunk attack — but it is none of those things. She’s finally seeing the truth for what it is.
Nina
“Jonah?”
My voice cracks. The air reeks with sulfur, and there are a myriad of leering faces of evil peering out at us from the sea of demons.
My relief at seeing Jonah is greater than I can properly express. I thought, for a brief mad moment that somehow fate was giving me something back, that I was going to have a happy ending somehow. But now I am here, I realize that this is not going to go well. It is Jonah. I would know my brother anywhere. It is his face, his expression, his eyes. I've seen him mock enough people in the past to know that this is him. However, he didn't used to be on actual fire. His hair is flaming, like a torch. But it doesn't burn him, at least — oh gods, it is burning him. The flames are sort of creeping all over him as I stare at him.
He laughs at my retching horror.
“I spent so many years trapped in pathetic flesh. I can't tell you how liberated I am now to stand before you and show you what I really am, you pathetic cunt.”
I think I understand him, but I don't want to understand. My body and my mind reject the obvious explanations for this and search for something else. Has he been possessed? That's something that happens when you spend too much time around demons. Maybe he can be saved.
“Jonah, why? What is happening?”
“Jonah, why? What is happening?” He mocks me by repeating my words in a high-pitched frail tone.
“You dick.” The insult escapes me, because that is the way one talks to their brother when they realize he is an asshole demon and has been one all along.
"You're nothing. You have nothing. You’re an orphan who fucks old men,” the demon says. “I was going to sell you if we got through to Europe. Would have been interesting to see little miss perfect angel turned into a crack whore.”
He’s saying the most awful things, but what he’s saying is not the worst of it. The fire is spreading, and the flesh or whatever he is made of is not flame resistant. His visage rots and burns before me. This thing is making me watch Jonah’s destruction in real time, just like the mist imagining, but worse because there is no mist here. I am not altered in any way. I am seeing what I am seeing, and what I am seeing is awful.
"So you came, just to hurt me.”
"To hurt you," he shrugs. “To kill the priest you love. To take everything from you and leave you with nothing but the ashes of another life.”
“But why?”
“But why!?” He mocks me again. All the demons laugh with him, a ripple of demonic amusement rolling up and back over the hills.
“Because,” burning Jonah laughs. “You're a fallen angel. You're light trapped in flesh. You are a piece of divinity we can reach, we can hurt. We can torture and torment you in ways humans don’t have capacity for. Now. Stand aside. We have your life to ruin.”
I am not going to stand aside. I am going to stand my ground even though it feels as though every part of me is being ripped apart from the inside out. My life has been a lie. My family has been a lie. In the last twenty-four hours, I met my biological father whose alleged evil has been channeled into cat ownership and discovered that my brother was a usurper demon all along.
I also realize in a flash that I might owe Bryn an apology, or at least a retraction. Apparently, he didn't actually kill my brother, though fuck knows how that works.