The Devil Inside читать онлайн

for demon-kind.But Lisa Walker’s pitiful little frame wasn’t what horrified me the most. No, what horrified me the most was that her parents sat huddled together on a bench at the other end of the room. Mrs. Walker’s eyes were swollen with tears, and Mr. Walker’s face was pale and tense.I whirled on Jenkins. “You’re letting the parents watch? Are you nuts?”Exorcisms are never a pretty sight. There’s usually a lot of screaming and cursing. From the demon, not from me. And about seventy-five to eighty percent of demon hosts end up dead or catatonic when the demon is cast out. So far, no one has come up with a reliable method of predicting which hosts would survive intact.“She’s their daughter,” Jenkins said, drawing himself up to his full, not very impressive height. “If you fail, they’ll have to sign the consent form.”I looked at Lisa Walker and a very unpleasant lump formed in my throat. I hate demons with a passion. And I don’t like the legal ones much better than the illegal ones. But even I wasn’t sure I could sign the order to burn an eleven-year-old girl alive to destroy the demon. Especially not if the girl was my daughter!“You could have had them sign the consent beforehand,” I muttered, disliking Jenkins now as much as he disliked me.“They’d want to say goodbye.”I glanced over at the parents, who hadn’t said word one to me. They couldn’t even bear to look at me. Can’t say I blamed them. I wished I’d worn a conservative business suit after all. I don’t think my jeans and sweater gave them great confidence in my competence.But the worst thing I could do now was make them wait and worry any longer, so I settled my shoulder bag on the floor and slipped out of my full-length leather coat. I glanced around for somewhe