Page 68 of What Happens at Nightfall

Babies. This was why it was always better to possess babies. They had no memories to bother you with. But, then, of course, the drawback was that you had to wait for them to grow up before you could do anything more vicious than pee on people. Possessing a baby was more of a long-term project, and he’d needed a body now.

After 150 years of confinement, he was woefully behind on his soul-collection quotas.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Possess this Ingrid, lie in wait, skewer the Jacinta before she could thwart him, then, bingo, all the souls he could eat.

But he hadn’t been able to make the host’s limbs work properly, and now here he was, shedding bits of salt, tripping on toads, with the blasted woman chanting at him.

Belfagor wasn’t sure what she was saying—the light of that rainbow made him wince, and the stupid host body was still presenting him with inane images of tricycles and pool parties and something called a research grant—but whatever it was made him feel like he was being forced through a funnel.

“All right, all right,” snarled Belfagor.

Possession was overrated.

The host body flopped limp on the floor, an embarrassing collection of useless limbs. Belfagor reared above the fallen form in all his smoky glory, stretching his hooves and cracking his claws. They wanted him out? He’d show them out.

“Do you think to challenge me?” he rumbled. “I was old when the mountains were young. Your kind have feared and worshipped me for more millennia than your puny human mind can compass. Death and destruction await those who cross me.”

The Jacinta gave him an exasperated look. “Death and destruction await if we don’t cross you.”

He was hoping they wouldn’t notice that bit. Sometimes people didn’t. “You are helpless against me. I can turn your very thoughts against you . . . I can turn your strength to weakness and your dreams to nightmares . . . I can slide beneath your skin and infest your soul.”

The man at least was looking properly appalled.

The Jacinta just looked annoyed. “I’d really prefer you didn’t.” She sent another wave of glowing light in his direction. “Go back. Go back to whatever foul hell you came from.”

It was a very nice hell, thank you very much. Belfagor might not have a sulfur pit like Baphomet—that was Baphomet for you, always had to have the latest in mod cons—but he was proud of his bed of burning coals.

Belfagor reared up in annoyance, making the man shy back, tripping over a toad. The woman stood her ground, but she was weakening, he could feel it. The light was wobbling, the smell of flowers less intense. She wasn’t, Belfagor realized with growing delight, nearly as strong as she had been the last time.

All he needed was another two weeks as the humans reckoned it. Another two weeks and he’d make them all dance, in a danse macabre that would have the corpses in their crypts shaking and calling his name. Two weeks and Belfagor would be free, free at last, to sow mayhem, death, and destruction. Gomorrah had been just a practice run. The Big Apple—now here was a place where his talents could truly find their scope.

The woman swayed and the man hurried to brace her. Belfagor had tried to keep the man away from her—he’d wanted her away from the Vanderwilt heir—but maybe he’d been wrong. He could smell lust, lust and guilt, hot and steamy and ripe for the manipulating.

Oh yes, he could work with this.

Already, that ridiculous bond was tugging him, pulling him away—the boy needed help with his Latin again—but Belfagor grinned broadly at the two humans as he departed, making the frogs explode in flames just for kicks.

Let them think they’d driven him away. Belfagor knew exactly what he needed to do—

He arrived, with a pop, in a room that smelled of gym socks. A textbook sprawled open on a crowded desk.

—as soon as he was done with the boy’s Latin homework.

Chapter Twenty

There were little fires everywhere.

“Quick—the flames,” said Jess hoarsely.

Adam was afraid she was going to fall if he let go, but given that the alternative was immolation, he was going to have to risk it. Releasing Jess, he lunged at one flame, then another, stomping them out and trying to ignore the smell of smoldering rubber coming from his favorite pair of sneakers.

Jess dropped to her knees, crawling to Ingrid, who had collapsed in a heap on the floor. In the midst of his mad fire dance, Adam could see Jess feeling for Ingrid’s pulse, bending her head to her mouth to check her breathing.

Adam pounced on one last flaming frog that had managed to set fire to a pile of papers. Adam stamped them out before it could spread to the tottering stack of library books next to it. Sweaty and winded, he flapped his shirt to disperse the lingering reek of smoke, sulfur, and frog flambé. Then he dropped to the floor across from Jess.

“Is she okay?” Madame Tussauds’s statues looked more lifelike.

“She’s breathing,” Jess replied. “I don’t know about okay.”