Possessed or not, I felt I could have the upper hand against Maura, as long as I played things right. I could not free the Whisperer and give her that extra power over me, she had to remain Maura right until the end, and as long as Jesse didn't suddenly wise up and realise that there was something seriously wrong with his mother we might just be able to get away. While still trapped inside of the human vessel that housed it, the Whisperer had all the advantages that a delicately built woman in her sixties might normally have over me. I'd take my chances.

Of course getting rid of the demon that was hunting me would also mean having to kill Jesse's mother, there was no way around it. Kill the vessel and send the demon back to Hell, the alternative didn't bear thinking about. I only hoped that Jesse might eventually be able to understand what had to happen for the sake of us both, but I had a feeling it was going to put some serious strain on our relationship.

“Heather?” As if on cue Jesse managed to drag himself out of the state of shock he'd been frozen in and finally tuned in to the strangeness of the situation around him. “What's going on? We need to....Eric's dead, I killed him....Heather?”

I let my eyes slip away from Maura for a moment, just long enough so that I could turn to Jesse and take in his still pale, sick looking complexion. The pleading in his eyes that echoed his tone of voice. I felt such a pang at the desperate expression he wore, I wanted to comfort him, tell him I would fix things somehow. Not to mention apologise. It was, when it really came down to it, my fault he was even in this situation. Though I had a funny feeling that things were going to get a whole lot worse before they got better.

I opened my mouth, though I had no idea what I was going to say to him, so it was almost a relief when Maura didn't give me the chance.

She rushed at me while I wasn't looking, grabbed me around the waist in a move not uncommonly seen in a game of rugby, and hauled me bodily to the ground. My back hit the concrete, the impact thrusting the air from my lungs, and I gasped, struggling to take in a breath. Somehow I managed to stop my head from cracking down on the ground. I wasn't seeing stars and I didn't black out, but that didn't change the fact that it hurt.

Maura had managed to save herself from the fall by using me to cushion herself – plus I wasn't sure the demon inhabiting her really cared much for the well being of the human skin it was wearing. She wasted no time in mounting the rest of her attack, not giving me any chance to recover or fight back. She clambered on top of me, her weight pinning me to the ground. She was deceptively heavy for a fairly small woman. The maniacal grin still distorted her face and the gleam in her tar pit eyes reflected the glint of the knife in her hand. When had she picked that up?

“Mum, what the hell are you doing?” Jesse yelled and I breathed a quiet word of thanks that I had someone on my side.

It was an unusual feeling to know that someone had my back. Traditionally I worked alone, but in this situation, without some kind of backup, I was pretty sure I'd be dead. It was a unique situation, that was a certainty, and I would be eternally grateful for having Jesse there to come to my aid.

Demon-Maura didn't much care to listen to her son. She shifted the knife in her grip so that the blade was aimed straight down, the point mere inches from my right eye. I wrapped my hands around her slender wrist and used all of the strength I had available to keep her from plunging that rust red, blood covered blade straight into my eye socket.

“Mum!” Jesse yelled again, “seriously, what the fuck are you doing? Get off of her.”

He grabbed his mothers body and forcibly heaved her off of me. I kept one hand still wrapped around her arm that held the knife, and as she rolled to the ground I smashed her hand down hard on the concrete. She cried out in surprise and pain at the attack. I grazed my own fingers raw in the process but put as much force behind my attack as I could. Disarming her was my first priority, and I was satisfied when the knife clattered from her grip, but it gave me an extra jolt of pleasure to feel the delicate bones of her wrist snap beneath my fingers.

Maura wrenched herself away from me, cradling her injured hand in the other and panting with the exertion.

“Now that's not playing nice.” She breathed, her eyes narrow with fury, the gleeful smile long gone. She turned her eyes to Jesse, her expression melting to one of pain, deep emotional hurt. “Did you see what she did to me Jesse? How can you let her hurt your mother like that?”

I worried for a moment how he might react to those words. Sure his mother had obviously flown off the rails, but I'd physically hurt her, and she was his blood kin. I hadn't really needed to break her wrist, he would tell me, he'd gotten her off of me and would have handled it from there. But the look of terror on his face gave me hope, she'd turned on the motherly charm but had forgotten about those eyes.

“Mum? What is wrong with you?” he asked, sounding uneasy. He backed away a few steps, his eyes wide and complexion still deathly pale.

“You saw what is wrong with me, she hurt me. She's evil Jesse, you can't trust her.” She stared him down, her gaze holding his almost hypnotically and her words came out slow and steady. Would her hypnosis power work on a person the demon was not possessing? She was certainly trying hard enough to make it work, to turn him against me. I had to end this soon.

While her gaze was fixated on Jesse, I crept backwards as quietly as possible and plucked the knife up off of the ground.

“But...your eyes...”

No, no Jesse don't say it, don't acknowledge the demon inside of her. Maybe Maura wasn't trying to hypnotise Jesse after all, she hadn't forgotten about the eyes she was trying to get him to free her so that the Whisperer could do away with the both of us without breaking a sweat. He was inches away from saying too much and releasing the demon, there wouldn't be another chance to do this.

Knife clasped firmly in my hand, I sidled up behind Maura. I threw my free arm around her chest and pulled her tightly against me. I could have been embracing her were it not for the serrated edge of the blade that I pressed to her throat. There was no time for words, no taunting retort nor witty remark as I pressed the blade down hard and dragged it across her skin. The ineffective piece of cutlery required so much force behind it to even cut through her flesh, it wasn't quick, it was far from painless, and it was certainly messy.

Blood drenched my hand as it flowed feely down Maura's front, making my grip on the blade slippery as I passed it over the wound for another slice; the first hadn't cut deeply enough. My hold on her moved from her chest to cover her mouth, muffling the sound as she screamed a hideous, gurgling cacophony of rage and pain.

Another cut and the screaming stopped, severing through the vocal chords, and Maura slumped in my arms. Any strength she had left to fight with rapidly faded as the blood flowed from her neck.

My own blood rushed in my ears as my heart beat too fast, pumping adrenaline around my wired body. It muffled any sound around me and I stole a quiet moment consumed with my own self and my kill. The demon in me relished in the spilling of blood, I shouldn't have killed a human it went against everything that we were taught – as much as we longed for the blood lust to be satiated, hybrids like me were not permitted to do the killing ourselves – but as far as I was concerned the rules had been drastically changed.

Jesse's mouth was moving, though I couldn't hear what he was yelling through the rushing in my ears. My body shook and I threw the knife to the ground, taking a deep breath to compose myself – this was no time to let things get even more out of control. We needed to get out of there before someone came and found us, both covered in blood with two corpses and the murder weapon. It was a wonder no one had come to investigate already. Only half an hour could have passed since I first came out into the car park, but it already felt like days. So much had changed in so little time, we had no option but to leave, but where in the hell could we go? Jesse would be wanted for murder and I? I still needed answers.

“What the fuck, Heather, you just killed my mother!”

“That wasn't your mother,” I snapped, not really. We didn't have time for an argument and I needed to think.

“What are you talking about? What the fuck have we done here? This is a serious mess.”

“Alright, just calm down Jesse please. I'm trying to think of something.” It didn't feel like we had very many options open to us any more, and exactly how much was he likely to trust me now, after what he'd just seen?

“But, Heather...”

“Dammit, stop calling me that!”

I flipped, I was already losing all sense of myself through the duration of this case, the set up, other demons hunting me down. I couldn't hold onto that fake identity any longer for fear of losing my grip on who I really was entirely.

“I'm not who you think I am, hell I'm not even what you think I am. And your mother, was a demon.”

The lie slipped easily off my tongue. It wasn't really that big of a lie, even though the difference between being a demon and being possessed by one was pretty extensive. We couldn't afford to spend time quibbling over the details. I could already tell he was lining up the questions for me.

“Okay, now I know I'm dreaming. This is all just some horrible nightmare and in a minute I'm going to wake up and have to get ready for my sister's funeral.”

I sighed, walked over to Jesse and pinched him hard on the arm.

“Ow! Hey, what did you do that for?”

“To prove this isn't a nightmare. At least not one you're just going to wake up from.”

“I can't believe this, it's insane. My mum was a demon?”

“You saw the eyes didn't you? And you're lucky you didn't say anything else about it. While she was still like that I could deal with her, but if you'd set her free, let her take her true form I mean, We'd be no more than a smudge on the concrete right now.”

Whatever questions, or expressions of disbelief he had left died on his tongue as he stared at me. My seriousness told him clearly I wasn't joking about this. I took a moment to survey the carnage in the car park. We were lucky it was hidden from view of the street, and everyone still at the wake was busy with lunch, it bought us a little time.

The knife, I picked it up off of the floor and slipped it into my bag then, as an after thought, added the fork that Jesse had also brought out with him, it would have his fingerprints on it too. There was little I could do about the bloodstains, but I could at the very least get rid of the bodies. Then we would have to run.

As soon as I opened the Void the demons would sense its use and send a welcoming party up to the Receiving Chamber, but it wouldn't be me going back, they could deal with the corpses in Hell. I wondered how long it would be before another demon would be sent after me, how long could we linger here and not be in danger? Not long at all I was betting. Maura's Whisperer would have given her report the moment she got sucked back to Hell, and surely they'd be sending someone straight back after me.

Working quickly, I took a grip upon both of the corpses at once.

“What are you doing?” Jesse asked as he watched me, puzzled.

“Just strand back. We can't leave them lying out here for anyone to find.”

With all my power I summoned up the Void, the swirling black vortex that descended all the way to Hell. As soon as it was wide enough I shoved Eric's body so that he rolled sideways and was swallowed by the darkness. Maura's body quickly followed and I broke the connection to the power before it could swallow me too.

Hell could no longer be my safe haven, and I felt a jolt of pain in my chest at the thought that I might never get to go back.

“Where did they go? What was that?”

“They just got a one way ticket straight to Hell.”

“What the fuck are you?” he asked, a wide eyed mixture of fear and fascination on his face.

Was it really time to tell Jesse the truth?