His eyes widened and he glanced at my sister, then back at me. “You want me to make sure Mellie’s…still in there?”

“Will you have to let go of Jennings to do that?”

“No, I should be able to sort of…push her, mentally. If there’s give she’s fine. If not, she’s possessed,” he whispered.

“Do it.”

While Flores unlocked, then flipped back, the steel bands that had bound my sister into the posture of penitence until she’d lost consciousness, Finn closed his eyes. A second later, he opened them, and I saw his relief even before I heard it in his voice. “It’s her. She’s fine.”

Tension eased within me—my unconscious sister would have been an easy and convenient target for the newly disembodied deacon. “Thanks,” I said to Finn. Then I turned back to my sister. “Let’s get you up slowly. Can you stand?”

“I think so,” Mellie said. I helped her carefully to her feet and kept one arm around her while she stepped over the restraints bolted to the concrete floor. “Yeah. I’m tired, but I can walk.”

Anabelle slid her arm around Melanie’s other side and Mellie looked surprised to see her. “It was all a lie, Ana. Mom was the demon, not Nina, and—”

“I know.” Anabelle smiled. “I’m not sure I understand it all yet, but I know,” she said as we helped my sister out of the cell.

“You need to get going,” Flores said. “Take a left into the hall, then two rights and another left. That’ll put you in the parking lot. But you’re on your own from there.”

“Thank you, Officer Flores.” I glanced back at him over my shoulder on our way down the aisle. “Be careful.”

He nodded, and we left him in that room full of empty cells, clearly trying to decide how best to proceed, armed with knowledge that could get him killed.

We took a left turn and two rights and were halfway to that last hallway when a soft thwup from a room ahead and to my right drew me to a silent stop in the middle of the hall. Something growled—a thick, guttural sound—and then I heard the distinct, grisly tearing of flesh.

Chills shot up my spine.

“Shit,” Finn whispered with Officer Jennings’s voice as my heart began to pound deep within my chest.

I’d just recognized the room ahead as the police station lobby—where I’d exorcised a demon a quarter hour earlier—when a man in an unembroidered navy cassock stepped into the doorway, one hand pressed to a wound in his chest. Blood seeped between his fingers, and his face was already pale. His focus found me without even veering toward Finn, Melanie, or Anabelle.

“You killed them,” the man said, and before I could object or ask who I’d killed, he spoke again, a thin line of blood leaking from one corner of his mouth. “You killed them all with that little demonstration. You killed them the moment you opened your mouth.”