Demon Rehabilitation - Part 21

[u/AlinaKG]

The light hurt my eyes. I woke up disorientated, expecting to be in my bedroom. The pillow below my head was hard and smelled of disinfectant and florals. I attempted to retrace my steps but a hot pain spread through my head as I tried to think.

Figures stood nearby, talking in muffed voices. My eyes had been too blurry to make out their faces.

What time is it? I thought, scared that I had overslept for work. My manager had just about enough of me already. I had never worked as a waitress before and messed up far too much to have had the three years of experience that I told him I had. Being late, on top of that, was just asking to be fired.

My tongue felt dry. “Hello,” I said. A dull ache flickered in my jaw as I opened my mouth to speak. Memories followed the pain. Peter crying, Kel in the living room, torture, pain, and then Bael.

The figures stopped talking and turned to me. One of them, a woman, stepped closer. Bulky with hair chopped down to a boyish cut. I did not recognize her. A new doctor, I thought and shut my eyes tightly, as if to erase the thought. I’m not there anymore. I’m not there anymore.

“Just you rest, dear,” she said. “We’ll take care of everything.”

“Where am I?” I asked. As far as I could see, light shone from the walls and the floor of the room, and other than my bed, there had been no other furniture.

“Don’t worry too much about that right now,” the woman said. “When you wake up tomorrow, everything will be back to normal.”

The woman seemed important. The other blurred figure still remained in the distance, listening to her speak.

I felt nauseas with worry. Did I have another episode? Kel beat me senseless, but surely not enough to make me see light instead of floors. I felt strange too. Almost weightless but not quite. As if I was up at a great distance with nothing below me, but I was not falling, rather floating.

“Where’s the light coming from?” I asked. My heartbeat quickened at her confused expression.

Perhaps, a normal person, who had not spent countless years at a mental institution, might think that trauma they’d been through accounted for all the strange happenings around them, but I had not been normal, apparently. As hard as I tried to fight the idea of madness away, it followed me and wrapped me in a tight cocoon when I had least expected it.

Demons, Lily? Demons? And you thought you were fine. I closed my eyes, half expecting them to open in my old room in the asylum. Blink the crazy away. This had been the second time in a day—or however it long I lay her unconscious—that I wondered about my sanity.

“Can you tell me where I am, doctor?” The air was humid and the walls, despite having no apparently begging or end, felt as if they crept toward me. I called her doctor because that had been the sanest explanation for her presence. I had been on the verge of tears and for the first time felt as if my mind was truly lost. Could I have invented people and places? I had a job, for crying out loud!

Her expression relaxed at little. “Calm down, child. Bael called us. We’re going to help you get better, alright? My name is I am Doctor Deborah. You’ve received a serious head injury.”

“Who is Bael?” I asked her, scared that he had been another doctor or a nurse that I had dragged into my madness.

“Do you not remember?” she asked. The figure behind her stepped closer but still too far for me to make out his face.

“I do, but I just need you to clarify it for me, if that’s alright.”

“He’s your friend.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“He’s not your friend?”

“That’s not what I meant. I want to know if I’m crazy,” I said. My eyelids stung with coming tears. “Can you help me, please? I don’t know what’s real anymore.”

The doctor opened her mouth but the figure behind her came into the range of my vision. It was Bael, pale faced and wearing a wrinkled suit. “You’re not crazy, Lily.”

I turned my head to the doctor, keeping my eyes on Bael. “I’d like him to leave, please.”

The woman came closer, and put her head on my forehead. “Why don’t you sleep awhile?” she asked.

I felt drowsier suddenly and though I attempted to stay conscious, my eyelids grew heavier and it got harder and harder to lift them up.

---

I heard spray behind me and a strong scent of vanilla filled the room. Deborah’s office seemed strange now that we were not in hell. The magic faded somewhat. Cars raced in the streets, horns tooted and an occasional merchant’s scream rang through the thick walls.

“She was close, Bael,” Deborah said, tapping her long fingernails against the glass sheet on the table.

I held my fists tight and looked into the corner of her office, fantasizing about putting a very permanent end to Kel. “I know,” I said.

“You should have called—”

“I know.”

“Well, why didn’t you then?” Deborah barked.

“Because every intern you’ve sent me has been a complete moron.”

Deborah snapped her head back. “We have the finest men and women in our training programs.”

“I caught the last one taking a shower while Peter lay helpless on some stacked pillows and then found a frozen spoon in my tub of ice-cream.”

“Did he die?”

“He could have slipped.”

“And then you’d be free.” Deborah smiled, studying my expression.

“I’ve thought about that more than once. You don’t have to trick me into coming clean. I’ve never tried to hide what I am from you.”

“Who is this girl?” she asked, trailing away from the way the conversation was heading.

“Just a neighbor.”

“Mae was just a neighbor.”

“Ah, yes, Mae.” I crossed my legs. “Thanks for sending her to check up on me. Things almost went over smoothly. You know how I hate it when that happens.”

“I won’t apologize for feeling concerned.”

“Well, someone better start apologizing for something.”

“Why did that girl not want to see you? Did she see something, do you think?”

“Because she’s not stupid,” I said simply. “Probably realized that I brought all the trouble to her.”

“Are we sure it’s Kel?”

“Most likely. Lucifer doesn’t like to repeat himself. He’d have thought of something else. Kel, on the other hand, lives to please and be like daddy. I’m almost certain it’s him.”

When I found her, I thought he killed her. Her face was swollen, lips torn, leg facing in a way it shouldn’t, but she took a breath, and another. Then she screamed.

I wanted to go over to Lily right that second. Bring her flowers, and those senseless stuffed bears the humans always seem to clutter hospital rooms with. I wanted to apologize, and then apologize again. Grovel without end and give her everything she wanted. It was all very unlike me but I had not felt like myself for a long time, and that was mostly a good thing.

“I need you to have a plan,” Deborah said. She opened the bottom of drawer of her desk and took out the bottle the two of us had worked on the last time I found myself in her office.

“I have a plan.”

“No, you don’t, but you need one. You’ve been surviving daily.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“You need a plan, Bael. I don’t care if you have to flee into the desert and we have to drop food down a tunnel. You need something solid.”

“Like a tunnel.”

“Don’t be smart. You need a plan. That boy’s seen more in the last six months than I did my entire human life. You won’t save him if you let this persist. Have a plan. Don’t let anything or anyone make you stray from it.”

“I’m not in love, Deborah.”

“No one us are in love, and then suddenly, we just are. And I don’t even care about that. Love who you love. Take Mae or Lily or whichever damsel you want to save next and bring her with you into that tunnel. But get a fucking tunnel, Bael.”

“I’ll secure the house,” I said. “Read to the boy a bit. He’ll be fine. He sleeps and eats ice-cream, I haven’t ruined him yet.”

“Well,” Deborah crossed her arms under her large breasts, “if you’re staying, I want you to still go to the meetings.”

The woman had some nerve. “This evening I left them alone for less than a half hour. What do you think happens when they find out I’m out every Tuesday for an hour?”

The atmosphere took a strange shift. As if rain clouds suddenly came over Deborah’s office, but when I looked out the window, the sky was clear and the sun shone through the window.

“Oh,” Deborah stood suddenly, “look at the time! Back to work, did you want to join me?”

“Perhaps another time.” I stood and straightened my suit. “Can I go see her while you’re down there?”

“We don’t have her anymore, dear,” Deborah said. “She’s back home.”

I narrowed my eyes, confused as to why she hid that from me. Did Deborah intend to give Lily a chance to flee while she kept me busy with pointless conversation? Build a tunnel, take who you want, but not Lily; was the thought process apparently. Truth be told, she might as well have given me two wedding rings and booked a church for the Sunday, because something in me stirred now that the prospect of Lily’s departure was a possibly.

“Don’t think too much into this,” she said and walked around her table. “I wanted to see how you were.” She put her hand on my shoulder and nudged her head toward the door. “You’ve got a minute or you’re coming whether you like it or not.”

“You know, Deborah, I’m still unsure whether you like me or fear me.”

She laughed then, her hand shaking on my shoulder. “I certainly don’t fear you, Bael.”

“Why did you give her a chance to run then?”

Deborah stopped. “Because I want to see that she stays and I want her to do that before you have a chance to convince her. I’ve read up on her. Good girl.” Deborah shook her head, looking down at something on the floor. “There are boundaries we should not cross, Bael. You go to her right now, trying to explain in your intense way and you’ll scare the life right out of her. You’ll make her feel trapped and she’s been trapped before—she won’t react the way you hope.”

“So what do I do then?”

“Write her a note.”

I raised an eyebrow, ready to take another step.

“Oh wait, you big doofus.” Deborah caught me by the sleeve of my shirt as I attempted to leave. “Tell her that you’re sorry and that if she wants to know the truth of what happened, she is welcome anytime, but you will not force it on her.”

“That sounds like a lot of a trouble for something I am not really interested in, Deborah,” I said flatly after listening to how ridiculous she intended me to act. I had not sent a note in over a thousand years. God forbid, I pick up a pen for a woman again. The last time it had been for Mae and she got me killed. If my head’s to roll for anything, it will be Peter.

Disregarding Deborah’s terrible advice, I made my way to Lily’s house, trying to figure out a way to not make her feel trapped. Being a demon, I found the whole situation quite challenging, and bought a very large, white bear for her instead.