Exorcist Road by Jonathan Janz

church if I left the priesthood. Perhaps it would be a relief to Father Sutherland. At least he wouldn’t have to fire me.
    Thinking of Sutherland, I opened my eyes and beheld the figure glued to the ceiling above me, the red eyes glaring at me in triumph.
    The demon fell. As it swooped downward, its splayed limbs groped for me as if eager for my blood. Forgetting my injury, I brought up my hands to fend it off, but its snarling body slammed against me, setting off a conflagration in my mangled hand and pounding the wind from my lungs. Its head rose, the mottled fangs catching glints of pale light, and I jerked up a forearm a moment before it could chomp into my face. The scimitar teeth punctured the flesh of my forearm, pierced the surface of my ulna. The pain was excruciating, but I was barely conscious of it. The demon crunched down harder, its black tongue flicking at the blood that gushed from the wound.
    I shot a knee into its crotch, but if anything this only whipped its bloodlust into a more violent frenzy. Its talons harrowed my shoulders, shredding my robe, my T-shirt, and carved deep slashes in my deltoid muscles. I bellowed in terror and agony, implored someone to intervene, and as though one of my prayers had at last been answered, I heard footsteps in the hallway. There were shouting voices, the sounds of a struggle. What sounded like a man screaming.
    The beast gave off the attack to stare over its shoulder at the door. My angle afforded me a glimpse of the doorway just as it burst open. I muttered a mental prayer of thanksgiving, thinking Father Sutherland or perhaps Danny Hartman had arrived to save me.
    But it was neither Sutherland nor Danny who came through that door.
    It was Jack Bittner.
    The question of how he’d gotten out of the cruiser did not occur to me at that moment, though I would learn how later. The only thoughts I had at that moment were the desperate hope that the demon would release me and a sudden fear of being shot.
    For Jack Bittner had not only escaped the cruiser, he had managed to arm himself. He strode toward the bed with the gun trained on us, a look of deadly calm on his pitiless face.
    “This is for your victims,” Bittner said. “This is for those poor kids you destroyed.”
    The door behind Bittner slammed shut, but he hardly seemed to notice. He lumbered inexorably on, looking intent on finishing what he’d begun earlier.
    Bittner stopped just shy of the footboard, the barrel fixed on the back of the demon’s head. I realized then that the beast hadn’t even watched Jack Bittner approach, had instead watched me watch Bittner. And as I gazed into those lurid red eyes, I understood why. Its lips stretched into a sly grin. Bloody slaver drooled off its teeth and pooled onto my face.
    I don’t know now if it would have made any difference had I warned Bittner of the impending attack. My conscience says it would have. My reason, however, points out the appalling suddenness of the onslaught, the manner in which the creature sprang and spun at Bittner like some agile jungle cat.
    The gun fired once, and the plaster over the headboard exploded, showering me with grit and dust. I pushed onto my elbows to see Bittner windmilling his arms as he blundered backward, the demon affixed to his upper body like an inoperable tumor. I crawled forward on the bed just as Bittner landed on his back.
    He was slapping at the demon—at some point he had apparently dropped the gun—and I could hear the demon’s deep, throaty voice taunting him in some indecent-sounding language. I thought at first the demon would simply lean down and bite Bittner’s face off, but that, I soon understood, would have been too quick.
    The demon actually climbed off Bittner’s supine form. Bittner scrambled to his knees and had just retrieved the gun when a new voice said, “No, Daddy.”
    Despite how bloody Bittner’s face was, I could distinguish his eyes well enough. They were huge, starey. “Celia?” he