Chapter 52: Taking One For The Team
"Hello, I'm—"
"Anna. Anna Manina."
She stopped mid-sentence.
The flustered look that crossed her face was genuine — the kind of surprise that's hard to fake, a person caught off-balance by something they weren't ready for. She looked at Rango the way people look at someone who just finished their sentence for them, recalibrating.
"You remember me."
"You knocked on this door after midnight," Rango said. "That tends to stick." He stepped back from the entrance and gestured toward the service desk. "Come in. We're closed, but you're already inside, so."
She followed him, composing herself as she walked, the flustered moment already being folded up and put away somewhere. By the time she sat down she was smooth again — good posture, careful hands, the practiced presentation of a woman who was very deliberate about how she moved through rooms.
Her eyes drifted to the area behind the service desk.
Emma sat perfectly still in a chair, sunglasses on despite the low lighting, giving nothing away. Teddy had his phone out and was playing something with the sound off, though his eyes kept wandering — specifically, and without much subtlety, toward Anna's legs. Megan sat with one knee crossed over the other, watching Anna with the direct, assessing stare of someone running a diagnostic.
Anna blinked.
"Don't mind them," Rango said, setting a glass of water on the desk in front of her. "No adults at home tonight, so I brought them with me. Easier to keep an eye on everyone if we're all in the same place."
"Right." Anna looked at the water glass. Didn't touch it. Her fingers rested on the rim and her eyes went somewhere interior, the way eyes do when the body is in a room but the mind is somewhere considerably further away.
Rango gave it a few seconds.
She didn't come back on her own.
"Miss Manina."
She blinked. Refocused. "Sorry. Yes."
"Last time you came in, it was about a book." He kept his tone easy, conversational. "Same reason tonight?"
Something moved across her face — urgency, and underneath the urgency, something that looked a lot like a person arguing with themselves about how much to say.
"Yes," she said. "The book."
And then — without transition, the way weather changes in the Midwest — she leaned forward, extended one finger, and drew it slowly across the front of Rango's shirt.
"Big guy." Her voice had dropped a full register. "Think you could show me around? This place is enormous and I could really use a guide."
Rango looked at her finger. Looked at her face. Moved her hand aside with the calm of a man removing a spider from a surface — no drama, just relocation.
Split frequency, he noted internally. Wholesome to predatory with no detectable transition. Classic dissociative presentation, or something using her like a radio and occasionally changing the station.
"What's the title?" he asked.
"The Rare Devil Records."
He looked at her for a beat longer than was strictly necessary.
Of everything she could have asked for, in a collection that ran to hundreds of thousands of volumes — manuscripts, folios, church records, everything from Mesopotamian tablets to 19th-century pamphlets — she'd asked for the one book he had actually read. Specifically, at Amos's instruction, about three weeks ago.
The Rare Devil Records. Medieval European. Thirty-one documented entities — not the infernal demons of theological tradition, but something the text treated as a categorically different phenomenon. Devils in the older sense: beings that manifested at the intersection of extreme human obsession and specific external conditions. Fed on negative emotion. Resistant to standard exorcism. Required a different approach entirely.
Amos had been very specific about that last part.
"You're in luck," Rango said, standing. "I know exactly where it is. Give me a few minutes."
He took the stairs instead of the elevator.
Amos was in the back archive, between a rack of sealed map drawers and a shelf of 17th-century botanical illustrations, existing in the particular way he did when Rango needed him — present without being intrusive, like a light that had been on in the room the whole time.
"The woman downstairs," Rango said, keeping his voice low. "Anna Manina. What am I looking at?"
Amos was quiet for a moment in the way that meant he was being careful about how to say something.
"You've read the book she's looking for," he said finally.
"I have."
"Then you know what a Devotee looks like."
Rango thought about the woman downstairs. The empty eyes over the water glass. The way her personality seemed to change channels. The urgency she was working very hard to keep underneath the surface.
"She's feeding something," he said.
"She's trying to," Amos said. "There's a distinction. The entity has her in its orbit — she's been making offerings, working through the prescribed rituals. But the book describes a specific threshold. Until she completes the primary rite, the connection is incomplete." He paused. "The rite requires certain information that's only recorded in The Rare Devil Records."
"Which she can't find because she can't access the archive."
"Which she hasn't been able to find," Amos agreed. "Yet."
Rango stood with one hand on the archive shelf, thinking.
"If she gets what she's looking for—"
"The entity fully manifests. At that point it's considerably harder to address." Amos let that sit. "If someone were to get close to her before that happened — close enough to understand the nature of the specific devil she's bound to — the intervention window is much more manageable."
Rango looked at him.
"You're describing reconnaissance."
"I'm describing the most effective approach available, yes."
"You could have led with that."
"I thought you'd work it out."
Rango exhaled through his nose. Picked up The Rare Devil Records from the shelf where he'd left it after his last reading. Turned it over in his hands.
Amos, to his credit, said nothing further. He didn't need to.
Hunters don't get to be squeamish about their entry points, Rango thought. He'd learned that early. The work looked however the work looked, and you adapted.
He headed back to the stairs.
Downstairs, Anna's patience had visibly thinned to something close to transparent. She was standing rather than sitting, arms crossed, and the look she gave the elevator when the doors opened had the quality of someone who had been waiting considerably longer than five minutes and was making sure everyone in the room knew it.
Then she saw the book.
Her face changed completely. A real smile this time — not the composed, deliberate one she'd been wearing — the involuntary kind, the kind that arrives before the person can curate it.
She moved toward him.
He held it just out of reach.
"You can read it here. Five minutes."
The smile didn't exactly leave, but it acquired complications. "Five minutes isn't—"
"It's a sixteenth-century manuscript." Rango kept his voice even. "The binding alone is worth more than this building's security equipment. What I'm doing right now is already a terminable offense. Five minutes."
Anna looked at the book. Looked at him. The calculation running behind her eyes was almost visible.
Then she stepped closer — very close, the kind of close that declares its intentions — and said, at a volume calibrated specifically for his ear:
"What if I told you my husband is in Germany until Friday?" A pause, perfectly timed. "And I have a much more comfortable place to read."
She let that hang there.
Rango looked at her for a long moment.
Thought about what Amos had said. About entry points. About intervention windows. About the thing waiting at the other end of whatever ritual this woman was working toward, and what it would look like once it fully arrived.
He thought about The Entity — the 1983 film, based on a documented case, about something that attached itself to a woman and couldn't be reasoned with, couldn't be exorcised, could only be confronted by someone willing to get completely inside the situation before they acted. The researchers in that film had failed because they kept trying to study it from a safe distance.
Distance was a liability here.
He exhaled. Adjusted the book under his arm.
"Twenty-minute drive, you said?"
Anna's eyes brightened.
"Thereabouts."
"Then let's not waste the commute."
He turned to Ted, found him already watching with an expression that was equal parts concern and something else.
"Hold down the fort. I'll be back before morning."
Teddy straightened. "Should I—"
"I'm good."
"Are you sure you don't need—"
"Teddy." Rango gave him a look. "I've got it."
He tucked the book under his left arm, put his right hand lightly at the small of Anna's back, and guided her toward the door.
She went willingly. Easily. With the confidence of a woman who had gotten what she came for.
One of us is right about that, Rango thought.
The door swung open into the night air. The street was quiet, the museum's architectural silhouette cutting into the orange-gray city sky behind them. Somewhere down the block a cab rolled past, indifferent.
Behind them, the door fell shut.
In the empty foyer, Ted stared at the closed door for a long moment.
Emma hadn't moved. Megan hadn't moved. The display cases stood in their low-lit rows, the mannequins inside them still and watchful the way they always were after dark, when the building shifted from museum to something that merely resembled one.
Teddy put his phone down.
"Back in Ghana," he said, to no one in particular, in the tone of a man filing a formal complaint with the universe, "when there was a dangerous situation, we handled it together." He paused. "Side by side. Like partners. Like professionals." Another pause. "Nobody went alone into a strange woman's house at ten-thirty at night and told their partner to hold down the fort."
Emma, from behind her sunglasses, said nothing.
"I'm just saying," Ted said, picking his phone back up. "It's a pattern."
[Goal Tracker]
PS 500 → 1 Bonus Chapter
Reviews 10 → 1 Bonus Chapter
If you enjoyed it, consider a review.
P1treon Soulforger has 20+advance chapters