Chapter 22: THE ASHFORD POSSESSION — PART 1
The Ashford house was beautiful from the street.
Colonial architecture, white siding, black shutters. Manicured lawn despite the February frost. The kind of home that appeared in magazines about the American Dream. The kind of home where nothing bad should ever happen.
But I could feel the wrongness before Ed even parked the station wagon.
It pressed against my senses like a physical weight—heavier than the Morrison house, heavier than the Henderson farm, heavier than anything I'd encountered since the artifact room. The air tasted of copper and decay. Static electricity made the hair on my arms stand up.
[ENTITY DETECTED: TIER 3 — DEMONIC]
[THREAT LEVEL: EXTREME]
[CAUTION: ENTITY AWARENESS DETECTED]
The front door opened before we reached it.
Thomas Ashford stood in the doorway, a man who'd aged decades in weeks. Mid-forties on paper, but his eyes were ancient. Hollow. The eyes of someone who'd watched his child become something else entirely.
"Thank God you're here." His voice cracked on the words. "He's upstairs. He... he knows you're coming."
My stomach tightened.
"How does he know?"
Thomas's face twisted with something between fear and confusion. "He said a name. Last night, around midnight. He said 'Paul is coming. The wrong one. The traveler.'" His eyes found mine. "Are you Paul?"
I felt Ed's gaze on my back. Felt Lorraine's sudden stillness.
"Yes," I said. "I'm Paul."
"He's been waiting for you. He says..." Thomas swallowed hard. "He says he has messages to deliver."
The stairs creaked under our feet.
The second floor hallway was darker than it should have been, despite the afternoon sunlight streaming through windows downstairs. Light didn't seem to reach up here. It stopped at the top of the stairs, as if afraid to go further.
Michael's door was at the end of the hall. Even from twenty feet away, I could see the scratch marks covering its surface—deep gouges in the wood, made by fingernails that had shredded themselves bloody in the process.
A padlock hung from the outside. Three crosses were nailed to the frame.
"We had to lock him in," Margaret Ashford whispered from behind us. She'd joined the procession, unable to stay away from her son despite the terror. "After he attacked his father. After he—" She couldn't finish.
"It's not your son doing these things," Lorraine said gently. "Remember that. Whatever we see in there, it's not Michael."
I approached the door slowly, Spirit Sight already active. What I saw through the wood made my breath catch.
The entity inside wasn't hiding. It blazed like a dark star, malevolent energy coiling and writhing in shapes that hurt to perceive. And at its center, buried so deep I could barely sense him, was a twelve-year-old boy named Michael.
Still alive. Still fighting.
Still running out of time.
"Open it," I said.
Thomas fumbled with the padlock. His hands shook so badly it took three tries to get the key in. The mechanism clicked. The door swung inward.
The smell hit first—sulfur and rot and something else, something organic that I didn't want to identify. The room was freezing, every breath producing clouds of vapor that hung in the air like fog.
And there, strapped to a bed that had been bolted to the floor, was Michael Ashford.
He'd been a handsome boy once. I could see it in the photos downstairs—dark hair, bright smile, the easy confidence of a child who'd never known real fear. Now he was something else. His skin had taken on a grayish pallor. Veins stood out black against white. His eyes were rolled back, showing only whites, while his mouth moved constantly in languages that had never been spoken by human tongues.
I stepped across the threshold.
Michael's head turned to face me—not by lifting and rotating, but by rotating on its axis while his body remained still. The neck twisted a full 180 degrees with a series of wet cracks that should have been fatal.
His eyes rolled forward. Black where white should be. Burning with intelligence that had nothing to do with a twelve-year-old child.
And when he spoke, it was with a voice that dropped three octaves below anything human.
"The wrong one arrives at last." The thing wearing Michael smiled—too wide, too many teeth, the lips splitting at the corners. "Welcome, traveler. I've been waiting so very long to meet you."
We retreated to the living room for strategy.
Thomas and Margaret were sent to stay with neighbors. They didn't argue—the relief of being able to leave, even temporarily, was written on their faces. I didn't blame them. No parent should have to witness what their child had become.
"It knows you." Ed's voice was flat. Controlled. But I could hear the questions underneath. "How does it know you, Paul?"
I'd been asking myself the same thing since we arrived.
"I don't know." The words tasted like a lie, even though they were technically true. I didn't know how it knew. I just had theories—terrible theories that I couldn't share with anyone.
"The Morrison demon said something similar," Lorraine said quietly. She was watching me with those eyes that saw too much. "When you fought it in the basement, before Ed and I arrived. It called you 'wrong.' 'Different.'"
I remembered. I tried not to, but I remembered. The thing in the Morrison basement, tearing into my arm, whispering about how delicious my difference tasted.
"And Malthus," Lorraine continued. "In the artifact room. It spoke to you directly. Told you things that shook you for days afterward."
Ed's eyes narrowed. "What things?"
"Lorraine—"
"He deserves to know, Paul." Her voice was gentle but firm. "If we're walking into something that's specifically hunting you, Ed needs to understand the stakes."
She was right. I hated that she was right.
"Malthus called me... wrong. Said my soul didn't fit where it was supposed to be." I kept my voice steady with effort. "It said I was an anomaly. Something it wanted to study."
Silence. Ed stared at me like he was seeing someone new.
"And you didn't think this was worth mentioning before we walked into a case where the demon explicitly asked for you by name?"
"I didn't think—"
"Clearly." Ed stood, paced to the window, stared out at the darkening sky. "Two years, Paul. Two years I've been training you. Trusting you. And you've been keeping secrets about demons targeting you specifically."
"Ed." Lorraine's voice was soft. "Now isn't the time."
"Now is exactly the time." He turned back to face me. "Whatever's in that boy—it's been waiting for you. Not me. Not Lorraine. You. And I need to know why if we're going to have any chance of saving Michael."
I wanted to tell him. God, I wanted to tell someone. The weight of carrying the truth alone had been crushing me for two years—the transmigration, the system, the meta-knowledge that made me an outsider in a world I'd been born into.
But I couldn't. Not without destroying everything I'd built.
"I don't know why," I said instead. "I just know that demons seem to sense something different about me. Something that interests them."
Ed studied me for a long moment. Whatever he saw in my face, it seemed to satisfy him—or at least convince him that I wasn't lying about my ignorance.
"Then we use that," he said finally. "If it wants you, we give it you. Under controlled circumstances. While I perform the rite."
"You want to use Paul as bait?" Lorraine's voice sharpened.
"I want to save that boy upstairs. And if Paul's the key to getting the demon's attention, then Paul's the key." Ed's jaw set. "Unless you have a better idea."
No one did.
Margaret Ashford caught me in the hallway as we prepared for the evening attempt.
Her hands found mine before I could react—desperate, trembling, the grip of a mother watching her child die by inches.
"Please save my son." Tears streamed down her face. "I don't care what it costs. I don't care what you have to do. Just bring him back to me."
I held her hands gently. Felt the wedding ring she still wore. The calluses from years of gardening and housework and building a life that was falling apart.
"I'll bring him back, ma'am." The words came out steady despite the fear coiling in my gut. "I promise."
She searched my face for doubt. Found none—because I'd buried it deep, where she couldn't see.
"God bless you," she whispered, and let me go.
I climbed the stairs toward Michael's room, hoping it was a promise I could keep.
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