Misha
None of us want to say it, but I can tell that we’re all really worried about Trine.
Her room is small, and I don’t think her roommate likes us here. Trine is talking quietly to her in her bedroom while the three of us look in the boxes under her bed. The luxury of privacy is one we can’t give her when we’re trying to get rid of her possession, and if my hunch is right—if her mother is who I think she might be—then we might even be in more trouble than I thought.
Luke is on his knees next to me, pulling cardboard boxes out from under her bed, and Rei is flipping through the books on her desk.
The box I pull out is full of stuff. It’s so heavy it’s hard for me to even grab it. There are a bunch of books in here, old books with black and white covers that don’t have titles on them. They could be old-school photo albums. I open one to look at it, just so I can flip through the pages, and my jaw hardens as I see what it is.
The pages are yellowed, and the tome is old, but this is definitely a copy of a ‘De Exorcismis Et Supplicationibus Quibusdam.’ I don’t speak Latin, but I’ve read the translation of this book enough times to know it like the back of my own hand. It makes absolutely no sense for a member of the public to have a copy of the exorcism book the Vatican put out in the 90s, but I’m starting to think that there are a lot of things about Trine’s life that don’t make sense.
“Salinas,” I say. “Look at this.”
He perks up his head, his brow furrowed. “Was this in her mom’s stuff?”
I nod. “It was.”
“Wonder what else was in her mom’s stuff,” he mumbles. “If she got a hold of that, who knows what else she got a hold of? Because you couldn’t just google this twenty years ago. And this is a book. An actual tome. She didn’t print this out.”
Woods sits on the chair in front of her computer. “Did she tell you guys her pin?” he asks, brushing past our conversation.
“She said it was 6666,” Salinas says. “She thought it was funny.”
“Easy to hack, too,” Woods mumbles. I hear his fingers working on the keyboard as I tilt the contents of the box on Trine’s bed.
Salinas flips through a few books, saying nothing, and we all work in silence until I hear Luke exhale heavily through his nose. “Listen,” he says. “I think I found her name.”
Woods and I both stop what we’re doing to look at him. “Aura Dawes,” he says. “She didn’t change her name after she got married, but Trine has her father’s last name.”
“Dawes might be a pen name,” I say.
“Yeah, but even then,” Salinas replies. “I don’t think demons care that much about anonymity.”
“This isn’t great,” Woods says.
That’s a fucking understatement. Rei’s the least plugged in of all of us—he doesn’t know much about this world, mostly because he doesn’t have to. His chief interest is the person’s well-being. He tries to stay away from the lore. I don’t think it’s because it doesn’t interest him; rather, he doesn’t want his own knowledge to tint the experience he has when examining clients, and people who have been potentially possessed.
But he’s heard of Aura Dawes.
She’s probably one of the most influential authors in the whole thing—mostly because she took this kind of personal approach to writing about the experiences of possession. We speculated that she had to have experienced it herself, but this feels too close to comfort.
When someone brings awareness to it, that’s like painting a target on their own back. On their family’s back. There’s a reason none of us—barring Father Salinas, of course—have a family. We don’t want to hurt anyone.
And Trine didn’t do anything to deserve this. She’s a victim of circumstance, and she shouldn’t be dealing with any of this.
Woods types something on the computer, then shakes his head. “She hasn’t published anything for about ten years,” he says. “Not under this pen name, anyway.”
“She could be anyone,” Salinas says. He sits on the edge of Trine’s tiny bed, next to all the shit I’ve sprawled over her blue comforter. “She could be using any number of pen names to talk about demons and possessions.”
“Or she could not be doing that anymore, since it seems to have destroyed her relationship with her daughter,” Woods says.
I shake my head. “Yeah, I have no faith in her wanting to do that,” I say. “How would that help her? She’s not speaking to her daughter now. This seems to be her passion, so why would she stop?”
“You’re so cynical,” Salinas says, more to himself than to me.
Woods laughs under his breath, then shakes his head. “We can’t tell what she’s thinking, now or then. All we do know is that, according to what you guys have told me, this would make Trine more vulnerable to possession.”
“She seems to have known it, too,” Salinas says. “If she was talking to Trine about it, then she might’ve been concerned.”