Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom

by Julie Kenner

  Tears stung my eyes and I hugged my pillow even tighter, one thought circulating through my head—my husband, the man I loved, really was working for a demon.

  Stuart was gone when I woke up, and I have to admit I was glad.

  I’d slept poorly, my dreams filled with demonic images of my husband and my head filled with thoughts of the Lazarus Bones. I know my subconscious had been busily trying to work it out, but at the moment I wished my brain had just kicked back and rested. I was exhausted and grumpy, and in no mood to take any flak from anybody, human or demon.

  Laura, trusty sidekick that she is, agreed to watch my two wards so that I could head to Larson’s office and catch him before he took the bench at nine. Timmy was wrist deep in oatmeal when she arrived, Allie had already rushed outside to catch her ride, and Eddie was still asleep (I think yesterday’s excitement wore him out, although from the way he’d preened after his brilliant maneuver, I’d have to say the exhaustion was worth it).

  I abandoned her with a promise to return at ten to rescue her from my brood. I figured I could take Tim to day care, and then schlep Eddie to the cathedral with me. With any luck, he’d spot something I missed.

  I’d told Larson I had news, and he was waiting for me when I arrived, a pot of coffee brewing on a book-covered credenza in his office.

  “The Lazarus Bones,” I said, then leaned back in his leather chair and took a sip of coffee. I’d come bearing the answer to our big question, and I couldn’t help but feel a little smug.

  “The Lazarus Bones,” he repeated. “You mean the bones of Lazarus, raised from the dead by Jesus? The bones that are thought to have the power to regenerate the dead?”

  I gaped at him. “You know about the bones?”

  “It’s folklore. A fairy tale. Fabrication and conjecture.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Eddie’s seen them. Eddie was betrayed for them.”

  The doubt that lined Larson’s face faded and was replaced by a curious interest. “Really? All right then, enlighten me.”

  I did, setting out the story just the way Eddie had laid it out for me.

  “Interesting.” Larson was behind his desk, and now he steepled his fingers, his mouth turning down into a thoughtful frown.

  “Eddie wasn’t that senile after all,” I said. “Eccentric, maybe, but definitely not senile.”

  “But we still don’t know where the Lazarus Bones are? He hasn’t been able to tell you that?”

  I fidgeted in my seat. “We know they’re in the cathedral somewhere.”

  “But we don’t know where.” He slammed his fist against his desk and stood. “Dammit, Kate, we need to find them. We need to find them before he does.”

  I licked my lips, wanting to say something, but not certain what his reaction would be.

  He eyed me, his shoulders slumping slightly. “What?”

  “I was thinking about something Eddie said. The bones are safe now. I mean, they must be since no one can find them. Maybe we should just leave them there.”

  “Safe,” he said. “Safe?” He started to pace his office, and I watched him, wide-eyed. He was wigging out. “How can they be safe if Goramesh is intent on finding them? Do you really believe the demon will stop because the task isn’t simple? Kate, I need you to think.”

  “I am thinking!” I shouted the words, but my anger was mostly at myself. He was right, damn him. “But I don’t know where the bones are, so what am I supposed to do? All I know is that Brother Michael took them to San Diablo, and then spent the rest of his life in some monastery in Italy. And then suddenly some demons track him down, and rather than reveal the whole secret, he tosses himself out of a window. The secret died with him, Larson. And that’s just the way it is.” I was on my feet by now, but I stopped cold, rewinding my own words in my head. That’s just the way it is.

  Or was it?

  “Mike Florence,” I whispered.

  Larson shook his head, his expression suggesting he feared I’d lost it.

  “Mike—Michael—Florence,” I said. “Florence, Italy.” I ran my fingers through my hair. How could I have been so blind. “Of course. He made a donation. The bones are in the archives, just sitting there, uncataloged in a tiny gold box.”

  “A gold box?”

  “Right,” I said. “About so big.” I demonstrated with my hands. The box wasn’t worth anything, so whoever had pulled out the valuable relics must not have realized the importance of the contents. I frowned, my euphoria fading. “But that can’t be right,” I said. “Bones couldn’t fit in that.”

  “Not intact,” Larson said. “But bones are brittle.”

  I cocked my head. “Crushed?”

  “The dust would still hold the properties, would it not?”

  “You’re the expert,” I said.

  “Go. Get the box. Bring it back to me and I’ll arrange transport with the Vatican.”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice. I was already up and had my purse over my shoulder. “Come with me,” I said. “We’ll take it to the airport together. I’ll make sure you get settled on the plane.”

  “I can’t. This trial.” He rubbed his temple, then looked at his watch. “I can recess after an hour, come up with some excuse. I can meet you then.”

  I wanted to argue, to point out that his responsibilities to his job shouldn’t be more important than mine to my family. But there wasn’t time, and it wasn’t an argument I could win. “Meet me at my house,” I said. “I have to relieve Laura, and maybe Eddie can confirm we’ve got the right thing. I’d hate to go running to the Vatican with dear Uncle Edgar’s ashes.”

  “Good point.” He hesitated just a moment, and then nodded. “Your house. One hour. Now go.”

  Exactly one hour later Larson, Eddie, and I were huddled around my dining room table. Rather than take Timmy to day care, I’d begged Laura to watch him at her house. I didn’t know how long this would take, or what was involved. If I ended up escorting Larson to the Los Angeles Airport, I’d miss the pickup time for Timmy’s day care.

  The box sat next to the salt and pepper shakers, and neither Eddie nor Larson had made a move to touch it.

  “How do we know?” I asked. “I mean, how can we be sure?”

  Both Larson and I turned to Eddie. “Any idea?” Larson asked.

  “Well, now,” Eddie drawled, “I’ve got lots of ideas.”

  “About the box, Eddie,” I said, gently prodding him. I doubted Larson was in the mood to put up with Eddie’s incessant rambling. I know I wasn’t.

  “Charlie only read some of the text to Michael and me,” Eddie said. “Makes sense. Long document, that was.” He blinked, his eyes owlish behind the half-glasses he’d shoved too far up his nose. “What year was that again? Not the sixties . . . none of those flower children. The fifties, maybe?”

  “Eddie.”

  He waved a hand at me. “Sorry. Right. You’re right. Now, then.” He blinked, then peered toward Larson. “What were we talking about?”

  Larson pressed both hands to the tabletop and got nose-to-nose with Eddie. “How do we test the dust?”

  “Right. I remember. Sure. Holy water.”

  I met Larson’s eyes, but he looked just as bewildered as me. “Holy water? How?”

  “Sprinkle a bit on and you’ll see the Lord’s flame. Don’t recall the exact translation, but the text said something about hubris, and the flame was a warning of how not to use the bones. A reminder, of sorts.”

  “A reminder?” I asked.

  “Matthew 25:41,” Eddie said.

  I shook my head. My memory of Scripture has never been very good.

  “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’ ” Larson looked from Eddie to me. “Apropos, don’t you think?”

  I nodded, but couldn’t speak, the reality of what the bones represented finally settling in. I wanted to test them, and then I wanted to get them out of
my house—out of San Diablo altogether. Eddie’s spritzer bottle was next to the salt. I passed it to Larson. “Here,” I said. “You can have the honors.”

  He brushed my hand away, nodding instead toward Eddie. “After so many years, I think Mr. Lohmann deserves the full impact of this moment.”

  “Damn straight, I do.” Eddie drew in a breath, his scrawny shoulders rising with his chest, and then he edged the box toward him. He managed to pry the lid off with little difficulty, then he pointed the nozzle at the dust. “Anyone want to sound a drumroll?”

  “I may not be your alimentatore,” Larson said, “but I’m only going to say this once. Cut the crap and get on with it.”

  Eddie flashed a grin in my direction, his dentures blindingly white. “Ever noticed just how touchy some mentors are?”

  “The test, Eddie,” I said.

  “I’m doing it, I’m doing it.” He tapped a bit of the dust onto a napkin, then squeezed the trigger. A fine mist erupted, then drifted down to blanket the dust.

  I jumped back, anticipating the flames. But they never came. Instead, we were looking at a pile of slightly soggy dust on a slightly soggy napkin.

  Beside me, Larson made a low noise in his throat. “You’re sure that was holy water? You told me the staff was filling his vial with tap water.”

  “I’m sure,” I said, wishing I weren’t. “Father Ben replenishes the holy water every morning, and I filled Eddie’s bottle for him personally.”

  “Well,” Eddie said. “That settles it. I guess we need to keep looking.”

  “Yes,” Larson said, his voice tight. “It appears that we do.”

  Larson left, leaving Eddie and me sitting at the table, alone in a morose silence.

  “I really thought we had it,” I said. “I thought we’d figured it out and we were done.”

  “From my way of looking at things,” Eddie said, “we’ll never really be done.”

  “You maybe, but I’ll be finished as soon as the Lazarus Bones are safely back in the Vatican.”

  “That so?” He chewed on the end of a pen.

  I waited for him to say something more, and when he didn’t, I squirmed in my chair. “I have to think about my family, Eddie. Allie, Timmy, even Stuart.” At Stuart, I looked away. I hadn’t shared my suspicions with Eddie, and I didn’t intend to. Not until I was absolutely certain.

  “Well, we all got to do what we got to do, but this town has more problems than just Goramesh. Maybe he started it and maybe he didn’t, but none of the bad stuff’s going away just because the bones do.”

  “There are other Hunters,” I said, but I knew there weren’t many. Father Corletti had already been over that with me. “I’m retired. Just like you. You don’t really want back in the game, do you?”

  He snorted. “I never left the game.”

  “What?” I blinked at him. “I thought you were retired.”

  His laugh was harsh and not the least bit feeble. Whatever drugs had been dragging him down had worked their way out of his system.

  “I’ve been a lot of places I haven’t wanted to be over the last fifty-some odd years. You ever go fifteen years without a real shower? Not fun, missy, but that’s what I did, and I did it for Forza. And food? Some of the worst food you can imagine. Not even food, just sludge. Sludge with—”

  “Wait.” I held up a hand before Eddie got on one of his rolls. “Back up. What’s the deal?”

  “I already told you the deal, girl,” he said, speaking around the pen. “I was betrayed. I didn’t retire. I left. Didn’t have a choice. Fought some demons in Sri Lanka and a nest of vampires in Nepal. Spent some time in a monastery in South America, and hid out a few years in Borneo.”

  “Hid out? Since the fifties?”

  “They were looking for me. Always looking.”

  “Who? Why?”

  “Demons, of course,” he said. “They were looking for the Lazarus Bones, and that means they were looking for me.”

  “So you’ve been hiding out all that time? Why come back to San Diablo? You knew the bones were here. Didn’t you think the demons would figure it out?”

  At that, Eddie actually laughed so hard he started choking, turning first beet red, and then an unattractive shade of blue. I leaped to my feet and pounded him on the back, until he held up a hand, signaling that he was okay. He tried to speak, but nothing came out. I got him a glass of water, and he tried again. “I didn’t come here, girl. They brought me here.”

  “What?”

  “About three months ago.”

  “That’s when Brother Michael committed suicide,” I said.

  “Yup.”

  “Well, where were you before that?”

  “Six months before that, I was in Algiers, working as a bartender, and taking care of a few of the more preternatural, evil-type clients. Trained some Hunters, too. Under the table, of course. That’s the way it’s got to be done, you ask me. Forza’s moving too slow, and the danger is too strong. Got to get in there and fight. Got to get in there and—”

  “Eddie!”

  His entire body seemed to slump. “They found me there. The demons. Dragged me back to some dump in Inglewood. Pumped me full of drugs. Asked questions. Tried to get answers. I wouldn’t tell ’em. I wouldn’t tell ’em a thing.”

  I wanted to cry, but my eyes were surprisingly clear. Fresh anger lashed through my body. I wanted to make it up to this old man who’d given up the better part of his life to protect a secret. I wanted, more than ever, to destroy Goramesh.

  “Demons brought you here?” I asked.

  “They let up on the drugs when they did, too. Maybe they thought I truly couldn’t remember with my head so scrambled. I don’t know. And I never knew what prompted them to move me to San Diablo.” He looked at me. “Not until you told me your story, anyway.”

  “As soon as they learned from Brother Michael that the bones were here, they brought you, too?”

  “Fat lot of good it did them,” he said with a self-satisfied smirk. “I haven’t said a word. Never told a soul, actually. And there’s not a drug on the planet can make old Eddie talk if he doesn’t want to.”

  My breath hitched. “You talked to me,” I said, my voice little more than a whisper. “Why? Why did you trust me?”

  “Am I wrong to trust you?”

  “No.” I shook my head fervently. “No way.”

  He aimed his toothless grin my way. “In that case, my reasons don’t much make a difference, do they?”

  Eighteen

  In a mere twenty-four hours I went from testing fine white powder with holy water for end-of-the-world potential to serving funnel cakes on the softball field beside St. Mary’s Cathedral.

  Such is the variety that keeps my life so spicy.

  I still didn’t know where the Lazarus Bones were any more than I knew (definitively) who was supposed to schlep them out of the cathedral and into Goramesh’s hot little demon hands. To say I was frustrated would be an understatement, and if my smile was a little less chipper than it should be for a parish fair, well, you can just chalk it up to the demons.

  “Mo-om!” Allie came up, Timmy perched on her hip. “Do I really have to cart him around? I’m not going to meet anyone cool if I’ve got my brother attached to me.”

  “It’s a church fair, sweetheart, not The Dating Game.”

  She made a face. “I told you,” she said. “I don’t always think about boys.”

  “Just on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays?” “Right,” she said, her grin impish. “And on alternating Tuesdays.”

  “Well, it’s Friday,” I said. “Who’s today’s lucky object of your lust?”

  “Nobody,” she said with a heavy sigh. “All the good ones are weird.”

  I knew she was thinking about Stan, and my gut twisted. I’d seen a small item in that morning’s paper. Todd Greer—who’d so miraculously survived an attack by a vicious dog just a few days ago—had raced out of the mall and run in front of a bus. He’d been k
illed instantly. Even though I knew he wasn’t human, I’d still felt a twinge of sadness. Residual, I suppose, for the boy he used to be.

  I smiled at my daughter, the girl I wanted so badly to keep safe. I suppose I should have assured her that there were plenty of nonweird men out there, but I kept my mouth shut. She’d learn soon enough.

  “Why don’t you see if Laura will watch Tim?” I suggested after serving a funnel cake to a man in a UCLA T-shirt.

  “I looked for her. I can’t find her anywhere.” She aimed the puppy-dog pout my way. “Gramps said he’d watch Tim.”

  “Leave the baby with Gramps, and you’ll find yourself cell phone-less.” I could play dirty when I had to.

  An anguished moan, followed by “whatever.”

  “Why don’t you wait for Stuart? He promised to be here by six-thirty.”

  “It’s only six, mom. That’s another half hour.”

  “Oh, the torment,” I said.

  “When do you get off?”

  “Now, actually, but I have some things I have to do.” Like sneak down into the archives and hope that inspiration hit.

  “Mo-ther. You’re ruining my social life.”

  “I know. I’m evil.” I stepped back to let Tracy Baker take over as the funnel-cake queen, then I slid out of the booth and came around to face my daughter. “Your best bet is Laura. I’m sure she’s around here with Mindy, isn’t she?”

  From Allie’s sigh, you’d think I’d just told her she had three weeks to live. “I don’t know. I’ll go look for them. Again.”

  She trudged off, Timmy happily batting at her dangly earrings.

  Allie may not have found Laura, but I had no problems locating her. Although Laura isn’t Catholic, the parish fair is big in the community, and she and I go every year. Usually we scope out the various booths and buy handmade knick-knacks and stupid gifts. This year we were on a quest.

  “I can help, you know,” she said as we headed for the cathedral.

  “No, thanks. If Goramesh is paying attention, he probably already knows you’re helping me. But just in case he doesn’t, I’d like to keep the illusion going.”