by Liz Meldon
Outside of the pain excuse, Ella’s lack of a mark meant she couldn’t leave without someone going with her—which, as Moira had learned the hard way, was probably for the best.
“Yeah, same,” she said distractedly as she unlocked the SUV from a distance, the rear lights flickering at her. “Come on, let’s—”
“Ladies.” Moira spied Gibson approaching out of the corner of her eye, and she forced a smile as she faced the demon, hiding Alaric’s keys behind her back. Although he seldom said a word to her, the guy wasn’t all bad; his sole responsibility was Alaric’s well-being, which, in a weird way, kind of endeared him to her.
Oh, and the purple housecoat didn’t exactly lend itself to the menacing demon aesthetic.
“Oh, hey Gibson,” Ella said brightly, cocking her hip—and thrusting those huge boobs his way. To his credit, he maintained eye contact the whole time, his gaze drifting between Moira’s and Ella’s with a sigh.
“May I ask what you’re doing?”
“Breakfast run,” Ella insisted without missing a beat. “The guys are a bit tired, so we thought we’d treat them.”
The demon arched a black eyebrow. “Oh, really? At six in the morning?”
“Sure. Alaric said it was fine to use the car,” Moira added, forcing her smile to match Ella’s. He hadn’t, of course, but she knew that if she asked, he wouldn’t have a problem with it. It was only a partial lie, right? “We’ll be back in a half hour, tops.”
“And we’ll keep the GPS on,” Ella said, ignoring the sidelong glare Moira shot her. “Text me your breakfast order and I’ll drop it off when we get back.”
“I…” Gibson scratched at the back of his head, then looked toward the grey and black building across the street, the building Moira would be able to see forever now. “Are you sure you don’t want an escort? My shift doesn’t start for another hour.”
“We’re big girls. Farrow’s Hollow natives,” Ella told him, throwing an arm around Moira’s shoulders and squeezing. “Pretty sure we can manage the Monroe’s drive-through by ourselves.”
Her heart skipped a beat as she waited, hoping that Gibson of all demons wasn’t about to ruin her plan. While he hesitated a moment longer, in the end he conceded.
“GPS on the whole time, and you bring me breakfast.”
“Deal,” Ella giggled back, a bubbly, bouncy ball of flirt. “Text me what you want.”
Unsure how to handle the shift in dynamics, Moira just turned on the spot and made a beeline for the SUV, hopping into the driver’s seat with an incredulous smile on her face.
“So, what the hell was that?” she asked once Ella climbed into the passenger side and slammed the door. “Are you and Gibson friends? I was only gone like ten hours, Ella.”
“I am the demon whisperer!” Ella proclaimed triumphantly, then, in a more muted tone, she added, “I don’t know… Gibson and Alaric were really nice to me while you were gone.”
Moira’s eyebrows shot up as the engine revved to life, and she watched Ella’s greedy fingers go right for the radio. “Oh?”
“Yeah, but nice in the way that guys are nice to you when they want you to stop crying,” Ella told her, smirking. “You know, that ‘please stop crying, I have no emotions to deal with your womanly ways’ kind of nice. I just went with it. They kept ordering me takeout and talking really slow and soft.”
“Well, whatever works, I guess,” Moira said as she adjusted all the mirrors. Alaric’s SUV was the biggest, most high-tech vehicle she had ever driven, but once she figured out where all the buttons were, it was fairly intuitive. “Anyway, look at you, navigating the demon world like you were made for it.”
Ella snorted, flicking the AC on high and slumping back in her seat. “Not really. There are some demons I definitely don’t have a handle on.”
Malachi. Neither needed to say it; the guy hadn’t stopped ogling Ella since he stepped out of the hell-gate.
It made Moira want to staple things to his face. Ella, her beautiful, smart, tough, independent best friend, was not for gross guy ogling.
As much as she wanted to delve into it, the expression on Ella’s face read loud and clear that Malachi was the last thing she wanted to talk about. So, she went for the GPS instead, only to have Ella slap her hand away.
“What?”
“I wasn’t serious about putting the GPS on,” her friend said, perfectly plucked brow wrinkled. “We’ll turn it on when we get to Monroe’s.”
The diner just outside of the university campus, which had become so popular that they’d opened a second location and installed a new drive-through, wasn’t their only stop on this morning’s outing. Moira nibbled her lower lip for a moment, hesitant.
“But…Gibson?”
“I’ll just have my boobs out when I tell him I couldn’t work the GPS until we got there,” Ella said as she buckled herself in. “He likes them. I can tell.”
Moira pursed her lips to keep from laughing, then drew her seatbelt across her body and clicked it into the lock. With one final mirror check and just a hint of seat adjusting, she shifted the SUV into drive and gently pressed down on the gas pedal.
“This is the smoothest thing I’ve ever driven,” she said decidedly as they neared the sidewalk.
“Does it make you feel like a pretentious asshole?” Ella waved at Gibson in passing, her bright smile back. He still stood in front of the flower shop, purple housecoat done up a little tighter and his gaze steely. As Moira turned left onto the street, Ella added, “Because I feel like people who drive vehicles this big tend to have an ego.”
“Feel free to deflate mine the second it gets too obnoxious.” One last glance in the rearview mirror had Severus’s home in sight, and she tried and failed to swallow the lump of guilt that had settled in her throat. Severus should have been here with her, but Moira needed to do this by herself. She needed just a few more answers about her parents—and it wasn’t Severus’s responsibility to hold her hand and carry her through everything. He deserved to sleep. He needed to sleep. If they ran into any problems, this giant, smooth SUV would whisk them away to safety.
Her gaze slipped over to Ella when they stopped at a light, her friend already switching away from the morning talk shows to find a station just playing music. In Hell, Moira had seen some shit. She’d fought a hellhound. She’d survived an encounter with Asmodeus and his enforcers. If there was trouble waiting for her in Farrow’s Hollow, she finally felt like she might be able to handle it—and she would never, ever let anything happen to Ella. If someone dared threaten her, Moira would go white-light nuclear on them.
Hopefully. If the light felt like listening to her today—if she clapped hard enough.
Besides, the likelihood of demons prowling the neighbourhood Moira had in mind was low. After listening to all of Severus’s grumblings about his own kind, and her very brief experience with a lot of them in Hell, demons seemed to gravitate toward extremes.
And where she and Ella were headed was the least extreme suburb in Farrow’s Hollow. Located in the southwest corner of the city, the sprawling residential neighbourhood where the pair had grown up consisted of an elementary and high school, a strip mall, a bowling alley, four churches, and a few fast food joints; it was the most vanilla suburb imaginable. Both Moira and Ella could have navigated the roads blindfolded, and as they traveled the familiar streets, they spent time pointing out all the changes—how big the trees had gotten, which neighbour had repainted their garage, which lawn had a for sale sign stuck in it.
They drove by the two-bedroom bungalow Moira had shared with her mom all those years, pausing in front of the driveway for just a few minutes. The pair sat in silence, studying the old place. Moira had always wanted to go inside—see what the new family had done with her bedroom, her mom’s. Did they ever finish the basement? The back deck had been a mess when she sold the house two years ago; had they fixed it up?
With a heavy heart, she eventually pulled away, onward and outward to their
actual destination. She had been checking the mirrors much more than usual, always alert for a car following too closely, making all the same turns she had. However, no one was up at this hour around here, and she figured they had still had lots of time before school buses flooded the narrow residential streets.
They drove to the strip mall, the one she and Ella had frequented as preteens. First at the corner store to raid the candy aisle, then the little shabby pizza place as they got older and their tastes more sophisticated. Everything there was still closed, a good two hours to go before they started up for the day—everywhere except the twenty-four-hour storage facility around back. Moira pulled into one of a dozen empty parking places, then hopped out with Ella at her heels.
She punched in the security code at the chain-link gate, then pushed it aside when the little box buzzed at her. Unit 22—a giant grey rectangle that housed all her mom’s worldly possessions. She and Ella had been here before; her best friend had been the only one to help her move all the boxes, the furniture, the clothes into storage. To stand in front of it now, when she hadn’t visited in nearly a year, made Moira’s heart heavy, her chest tight and prickly. With a deep breath, she jammed her key into the lock and tried to swallow the lump in her throat as she opened it. Together, they raised the metal door up and over, the musty scent of her mom’s old perfume and cardboard wafting out to greet them.
“Less stuff than I remember there being,” Ella muttered, her hands in the pockets of her teeny-tiny jean cutoffs. “Seemed like we were moving boxes forever that day.”
“We were,” Moira told her, arms crossed, holding herself. They had managed to fill half the storage unit, and even though all this time had passed, she still knew where to find everything.
They walked inside holding hands, the glare of the exterior floodlights illuminating the box towers and the sheet-covered armchair. Ella’s hand tightened around hers when she first felt herself starting to shake, and Moira squeezed back. I can do this.
She had to do this.
“So, what are we looking for?”
“Journals,” Moira said, moving in deeper, scanning the labels on the boxes to find what she needed. “Mom liked to journal when she had time.”
“Do you think she wrote about him?”
Him. Aeneas. Moira hadn’t a clue if her mom had written about him, but ever since she got back from Hell, the thought had hovered at the back of her mind, refusing to leave. Now that she had a name, she needed to know for her own sanity what her mom knew about him—if anything at all.
Together, they combed through the boxes, headed straight for the books section of the unit. Eventually, Moira found one of the larger boxes with Journals scribbled across its side in Ella’s loopy cursive. Heart beating just a little harder, she ripped the tape off the top, tossing it aside, and then knelt on the dusty cement floor. Decades of journals sat in this one box; Ella pulled them out one by one, carefully passing them to Moira to arrange by year, handling them like they were ancient artifacts that might crumble to nothing at any moment.
Her mom had a type: spiral-bound, six by nine inches, brown leather jacket, black pen. The dates were scrawled in the top right corner of the interior cover page; it was the same with every journal they examined. Moira tried not to get swept up in the memories, in the images of her mom seated on the old living room armchair, legs curled under her as she scribbled away.
Growing up, Moira had never understood what on earth her mom did that gave her so much to write about, and journaling was a habit that hadn’t passed on from mother to daughter. Now, however, Moira was grateful; even if she wasn’t using these to find details on Aeneas, she could read any random sentence and remember the sound of her mom’s voice—just like that.
Moira had never gone through them before, the idea too painful to consider after the funeral. There had been too many other things going on in her life, and even when she’d started sleuthing about, trying to catch her dad on polaroid, Moira hadn’t thought to turn to them. Stupid, really. Such a valuable resource…
However, after Moira skimmed through the entries roughly nine months before she was born, she found no reference to a man at all. No secret crushes, no one-night stands, no high-school sweethearts—nothing. Her mom mostly talked about work, and Moira flipped through the journals in a huff.
If she couldn’t find anything, this walk down memory lane would only serve to rile her up.
“This is the third time Gibson’s texted me,” Ella interjected softly, a hand on Moira’s shoulder. “Find anything yet?”
“No,” she muttered, adding the last journal she’d looked through to the pile. “I know we have to get going, but I just thought…”
She shook her head. Maybe she had been reaching here. Maybe her mom’s relationship with Aeneas hadn’t been worth documenting. Maybe…
“Oh, there was one book I kind of assumed was a journal. I thought it’d be rude to read it,” Ella said, reaching down to the very bottom of the huge box and pulling out a black book. “When we were packing, I just wanted it to have a home, you know? I tucked it in the side of the box. Maybe this guy has some information.”
Much longer and thinner than all the other journals, the notebook only appeared half used when Moira quickly flipped through it. Her heart sank, however, when she spotted the date on the inside of the cover: a month before her mom had first gotten sick. Two months before she died.
Throat tight, she scanned the three lines on the first page: I once dated a man named Andrew. I thought he was the One. I can now confidently say, as of today, he was not, is not, and never will be.
“Well?”
“Something,” Moira murmured. Without a word, Ella started packing up the rest of the journals as Moira read on. Her heart hammered; it pounded between her ears, lodged up in her throat, and yet somehow fell into her stomach too, a nauseous wave hitting her. Moira couldn’t feel her fingers, but she turned each page frantically, skimming for details, for key words that caught her attention.
I needed to know the truth.
Andrew was not all that he appeared. How could I not have known? How could I not have seen it?
I thought he was a social worker, always at the hospital during my shifts. I fell in love with him. I thought he loved me too.
He paid me a million dollars after I told him I was pregnant with Moira. He made me swear on the Bible never to speak a word of our tryst. I had to promise to never contact him again. I didn’t believe in God. I wasn’t religious. I never thought he was either.
I saved the money for Moira, let the interest grow. It paid for her schooling, until she wanted to pay for university herself. I couldn’t say no. I was so proud of her.
But I couldn’t let him go. I needed to know him. Moira needed a dad—even if it was only a name.
There were no records of the man I knew—the man I loved.
I started digging around.
Demons are real.
Angels too.
I couldn’t believe it. Didn’t understand it.
Something about the number twenty-two. Biblical significance?
Seraphim Securities is a lie, a front.
Moira blinked hard, her vision blurring, and two tracks of tears rolled down her cheeks. Her mom had known—she had tried to do something. It read to Moira like she had recorded her findings first, but then the tenses in her writing changed—switched from past tense to present. And then it all seemed to fall apart.
I feel like I’m being followed.
Something is in the house with us. I felt it last night while I was getting ready for bed. I felt it watching me from down the hallway. I felt it in Moira’s room.
I think the demons I paid told someone. Too dangerous. This is putting Moira at risk.
His name was never Andrew.
What have I done?
“Moira?”
She shook her head, lips quivering, head heavy, chest tight. Setting the journal on the ground, she flipped to the last two pag
es with any writing on them, then pressed her hand to her mouth to muffle a sob.
On the left page, one word, six letters: Aeneas.
On the right page: I think he’s going to kill me.
“She knew,” Moira cried as Ella crouched down and hugged her. “She figured it out by herself—all of it. She found out who he really was, and she was terrified.”
It had been hard enough watching her other best friend, the only real constant familial figure in her life, succumb to a horrific illness. To see the woman she loved so fiercely, whom she had looked up to her entire life, break down into a babbling, unfocused, neurotic mess—it had nearly destroyed her. Toward the end, she had been in so much pain that the doctors sometimes needed to keep her sedated just to ride out the day. Moira had been there, holding her hand, sleeping on a cot in the hospital, keeping her company through the worst of it.
But none of that mattered.
Because Lara Aurelia had been terrified of an angel—a creature that she thought was going to kill her.
“I sh-should have been there to help her—”
“Honey, you couldn’t have known,” Ella murmured, stroking her hair. Her voice had hitched, trembled, and Moira could tell without opening her eyes that she was crying too. Ella pushed her hair back, squatting in front of Moira to dry her tears, the newfound journal pushed to the side. “Listen to me… You did everything you could for her back then. Everything. She knew you loved her, right up until her last breath. I know because I watched it happen. We both did. You were the light of her life, and this—” she pointed an accusatory finger at the journal “—is not your fault. Do you hear me? Whatever that fucker did, to her, to you—”