Page 130 of Deliver us from Evil

And three dead bodies.

Four if you count—

“No! Trinity!” I rush forward, but then Cass is in front of me, driving me back. “No!” I try and shove him, but he somehow manages to herd me away from the bed. My back slams into a wall.

The sound of police sirens and ambulances want my attention, but I don’t give it to them.

Cass clasps my head in his hands, wiping my face, forcing me to look at him. “Hey, bud. Hey. Over here.”

We lock eyes.

“I did everything I could, okay? I tried to save her, but she’s gone. She’sgone. You read me?”

My heart stops beating. “CPR,” I croak.

“Got no blood left,” Cass says. He’s grinning, but it’s the kind of smile you see on a corpse where the fleshy bits of the face have been picked clean by scavengers. “It just kept oozing out. Can’t put it back in, can I? So that’s that. But listen, buddy, listen to me, okay?”

There’s a heavy drone in my ears, which makes complying difficult, but I nod anyway. My eyes dart to the side as I try to look past him, but he tightens his grip on my face and sinks his fingertips into my scalp.

“Look, the police are going to be here in like…fuckingseconds. All right? Now we need to do something very important. And we gonna have to do it really fast.”

He steps back. Points.

A dark-haired man lays sprawled on the carpet. There’s a gun near his right hand.

“We got to take this motherfucker downstairs. There’s this big hole outside—”

“The grave.”

Talking is good. Not looking at the bed, that’s good too. Doing something that gets me out of this room? Even better.

“Yeah, the grave.” Cass pats my chest. “Good. So, you grab his legs, yeah?”

Cass backs up, still grinning like a fucking Jack-O-Lantern, and grabs the guy’s wrists.

“Come on, Zach. Stay with me.”

I keep my eyes down. When my vision blurs, I blink them clear.

“We can do this.”

I nod, not trusting myself to speak. But as soon as Cass breaks eye contact, my gaze flies to the bed.

She looks so serene.

So pale.

So fucking dead.

I blink again. My chest feels like it’s caving in. Tighter and tighter and tighter. I try and breathe, try to clamp my mouth shut, but then another set of hot tears races down my cheeks. The salt in my mouth triggers a sob.

“No, n-no,” Cass says, voice wobbling. “Fuck you,Zachary. You’re grabbing his fucking legs, and we’re putting him in that fucking grave!”

I choke, wipe my face on my shoulder, and lift the guy’s feet.

He groans.

Maybe a normal guy would have dropped him. I don’t. I hold on even fucking tighter. Because he undoubtedly had something to do with the dead girl on the bed, and that means I owe him a world of hurt.

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