by Julie Kenner
“Looking for the captor so they can kill him,” I said, shuddering. “But who’s Andramelech?”
“No idea,” he said, looking completely baffled. “But I do know one thing for certain.”
“There are still demons in San Diablo?”
“Exactly,” he said. “And they’re up to something.”
Two
“Oh, Kate,” Laura said, after I told her about David’s revelation. “Are you okay?”
I shook off her sympathy and took another sip of my morning coffee. “I’m fine. Really.” I even think I was telling the truth. After all, I’d had a few hours to get used to the idea.
I’d called Laura first thing Sunday morning, and she’d come right over. Now we were drinking coffee and eating the coffee cake Laura had made that morning in a fit of unbridled domesticity. Eddie kept wandering into the kitchen to cut himself “just a tad more,” but Allie and Stuart were still upstairs getting dressed for Mass. A good thing, since I didn’t want them overhearing this particular conversation.
Timmy was in the living room, pushing the Thomas the Tank Engine train set he got for Christmas around the room while Frosty the Snowman played in the background. He’d already watched the show at least twelve dozen times over the last few weeks, but so far, he showed no sign of losing interest. I could only hope that he could maintain this level of interest throughout his academic career. If so, I had a Harvard valedictorian on my hands.
“Honestly,” I said in response to Laura’s querying look. “I’m truly okay. It’s for the best,” I added, forcing a cheery note into my tone. “I can get back to my regularly scheduled life.”
The truth is, I believed what I was saying. But knowing what was best in my head didn’t necessarily mean that the truth was easy on my heart.
“It might not be true,” Laura said.
I looked at her curiously. “You think he’s lying to me?”
She shrugged. “There are so many little things, you know? All that stuff you’ve told me about why you thought he was Eric.”
She was right. The way he called me “Katie,” and the way he moved when he fought. So many little hints that had finally built up until I suspected my first husband had come back to me.
Even so, though, I had never been sure. Not until last night, anyway. “He wouldn’t have lied to me,” I said. “It’s one thing to keep quiet. To say nothing and leave me unsure and guessing. But to flat out lie?” I swallowed, realizing I’d done that very thing to Allie. Then I shook my head, banishing the thought. “No. I know Eric, and there’s no way he would do that to me.”
Laura, I could see, disagreed. But she was kind enough to let the subject go, shifting the conversation instead to the demon-related part of the story. “So who is this Andramelech that the demon wants freed?” she asked, as Eddie came in to get yet another serving.
I shook my head. “I wish I knew.”
From his perspective above the coffee cake, Eddie harrumphed. I looked sideways at him. “Do you know who Andramelech is?”
He replied with a sad little shake of his head. “I don’t know what the hell Forza was thinking when your generation of Hunters came along,” he muttered. “Not know who Andramelech is. That’s damn pathetic, Kate.”
I started to retort that I’d been primarily concerned with killing the beasts, not making sure I had their proper names for engraved invitations to formal functions, but bit my tongue. Better to just get the information from Eddie and forgo the Forza bashing. Considering Eddie had been betrayed—and then spent several decades as a rogue demon hunter since he no longer trusted his Forza contacts—I understood where he was coming from. But that didn’t mean I wanted to hear about it again today.
“Just tell me what you know,” I said.
“He’s a bad one,” Eddie said.
“I figured as much. I haven’t met a good one yet.”
His bushy eyebrows rose and he chuckled. “You got a point. My point is that he’s badder than most. One of the high chancellors of Hell. A Throne Demon.”
I grimaced, because that was bad. Apparently your average run-of-the-mill demon had no use for San Diablo. All the demons I’d met so far were either High Demons, or had come to San Diablo to do a High Demon’s bidding.
“Hold on a second,” Laura said. “What’s a Throne Demon?”
“There’s a demon hierarchy,” I explained. “Just like with the angels.”
“Like archangels,” she said.
“Right. So the High Demons are the baddest of the bad, and the chancellors of Hell are pretty much Satan’s right-hand guys.”
“In other words, incredibly, horribly bad,” Laura said. “That’s all I needed to know.”
“So what else do you know?” I asked Eddie as I got up to refill my coffee.
“Not much that would be of use to you,” he said. “Apparently some of the ancient Assyrians sacrificed children to him. But what that has to do with the fellow who jumped David ... well, damned if I know.”
I shivered, then took a step back so that I could see Timmy. I couldn’t find him at first, and a pulse of terror pounded through my body. I opened my mouth to call for him when a little wooden train came barreling down the entrance hall into the living room, stopping with a thud when it hit the leg of our coffee table, leaving a scrape mark I could see from fifteen feet away.
The train’s path had originated near the front door, and I could only assume my little boy was down there, too.
“Timmy?”
Nothing.
“Timmy!”
Soft footsteps, and then the boy himself, his little face peering around the corner, his eyes wide and innocent. “What, Mommy?”
“Are you supposed to be knocking your trains into the furniture, young man?”
His eyes managed to widen even more, and his mouth formed into a little pout. One tiny shake of his head. “I didn’t do it, Mommy.”
“Timmy...”
“I didn’t!” he protested, little hands clenched in fists.
I shot him a frown, then crossed the short distance to the coffee table and picked up the runaway train. “Then how did this end up all the way over here?”
His face scrunched up with concentration. “Rolled there, Mommy,” he finally said, which, technically, was the absolute truth. “I was over there.” He pointed very firmly toward the front door.
I sighed and considered pulling him into my lap and having the short-form discussion on responsibility, along with a toddler-level lecture on physics. More particularly, cause and effect.
At the moment, though, I was more concerned with the local demon population than whether my son battered the furniture with his newly acquired train set. A dishrag around the table legs would save the furniture. Saving the world from the forces of darkness required a bit more finesse.
“Just be more careful,” I said.
“Okay, Mommy,” he said, giving me two thumbs-up.
I shook my head, amused, and headed back to Eddie, but not before calling up to Stuart and Allie. It was already almost ten, and we needed to get out the door soon if we were going to make the eleven o’clock service.
“Are you going to the library after Mass?” I asked Eddie. He’d met the librarian of our local branch library right before the holidays, and although he’d never come right out and said so, I could tell he was smitten. She worked the Sunday afternoon shift, so Eddie had a tendency to drift over there after church on a weekly basis.
“I might do that,” he said, a false casualness in his voice.
“Well, if you do,” I said, “maybe you could do a little research, too? Get on the Internet. Check encyclopedias?”
“That’s what you got Ben for,” he said, referring to Father Ben, my still relatively green alimentatore. “This one, too,” he added, hooking his thumb toward Laura. “Me, I’m done with hunting. We already had this talk.” He squinted at me. “Or is your memory going?”
“My memory is just fine,” I said. “An
d I talked to Ben about it last night when David and I went to the cathedral to hide the body.” A sad fact of my new demon hunting life is that Forza no longer sends out disposal teams. And since demons don’t just conveniently disappear into a puff of smoke with every kill, I’m left to clean up the mess. Not one of the better perks of the job, I assure you, but Father Ben had come up with the brilliant solution of hiding the bodies in the cathedral’s catacombs. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than digging holes in my vegetable garden. Especially since I was too domestically challenged to have a vegetable garden.
“So Ben’s on the case then,” Eddie said. He turned to Laura. “You got your fingers dancing over the keyboard there, girlie?”
“If you mean am I up for doing Internet research,” she answered, “the answer is yes.”
He made a satisfied snort. “There you go,” he said to me. “You’re all set.”
“I was kind of hoping for a little more input. Father Ben and Laura are both new at this. You’re a veteran.”
“I was never much good at research,” he said. “And I’m out of this business. If I told you once, I told you a thousand times.”
“Oh, really? I seem to remember you rushing into the middle of a demonic ceremony just a few weeks ago.” I crossed my arms over my chest and stared him down. “Or had you forgotten?”
“That wasn’t about hunting,” he said. “That was about Allie.”
“So is this,” I argued. “If demons are infesting San Diablo—”
He cut me off with a wave of his hand and a snort. “Bah. This isn’t for Allie. It’s for David.” He looked at me over the rims of his reading glasses. “Or maybe it’s for your sweet patootie.”
“My sweet pa— what?”
“You heard me. You’re getting all your girl parts in a tizzy, wondering is he or isn’t he? Like some damned farmer’s daughter picking daisies in a field. Humph. Woulda thought you’d been trained better, but with Forza in such a mess these days, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“David isn’t Eric,” I said, giving both him and Laura a hard look. “I already told you.”
Eddie gave a sad little shake of his head. “Damn women are just too damn gullible,” he muttered under his breath.
I cursed under mine, reining in my temper, which was about to explode. “You know what?” I finally said. “It doesn’t even matter. All that matters right now is that we’ve got demons again. It’s like the whole town’s been infested and we haven’t managed to find the nest to wipe them out. Whether or not David is Eric is completely moot.”
He aimed a hard stare at me. “I hope so, girlie. Because I may not know everything, but I know one thing for sure.”
“All right,” I said, still battling my temper back down after the gullible comment. “What?”
“Bad news,” Eddie said. “That boy is bad, bad news.”
I didn’t get to grill Eddie about the bad news statement, because Stuart chose that particular moment to rush down the stairs into the living room. Not that I needed to interrogate Eddie; he’d been certain that David was Eric from early on, and even David’s denial wasn’t going to change his mind.
As Stuart came into the kitchen, a tie in each hand, Laura took the opportunity to head home. “Mindy left at the crack of dawn to go paint set pieces for the school musical,” she said. “And since I have the house to myself for a few more hours, I might as well get started on that... um ... little project.”
Her coyness was lost on Stuart, however, who was too absorbed in his fashion dilemma to pay attention to our good-byes. “Which one?” he said, laying them out on the table in front of me, and forcing my mind to shift from contemplating the mysteries of the universe to the more mundane mystery of men’s fashion.
I took the blue one with little gray stripes out of his hand and held it under his chin. Then I switched it out for a gray one with little blue stripes. “This one,” I said, handing him the gray one. “Definitely this one.”
“Thanks, babe,” he said, then proceeded to slip the blue one around his neck. He caught my exasperated expression and grinned. “What can I say? After so many years of marriage, I’ve learned.”
“Just for that,” I said, “you get to handle all potty-training emergencies this week.”
“You’re brutal, sweetheart.”
I blew him a kiss as I headed out of the kitchen and aimed myself for the stairs. If he only knew ...
My retreat was for more than just getting the last word. I was also intending to light a fire under my daughter. We needed to be out the door in fifteen minutes, or else we’d be skulking into the back of the bishop’s hall ten minutes into Mass. That’s awkward enough at any church. When the priest is your alimentatore, those little faux pas become all the more embarrassing.
Allie’s door is at the top of the stairs, and—as usual since she’s hit the wondrous teenage years—it was shut. I tapped lightly, got no answer, then tapped a bit harder.
Still nothing.
I briefly debated whether or not I should go in. She’s almost fifteen (although how that happened, I’ll never know) and privacy is a Big Issue. Our rule is that after one knock, I can go in. But even with that tacit permission, I still like to wait for her to give me the okay.
Today, though, she was giving me nothing.
I frowned. The odds were good that she hadn’t even heard my knock. She’d downloaded a whole slew of new songs to her iPod over the holiday, so she was probably plugged in and completely oblivious to the fact that in about ten minutes, we were going to be officially running late.
I turned the doorknob and gave the door a push. One inch, then, “Allie? Are you about ready?”
Another inch, another question, another deafening silence. Screw it. I pushed the door all the way open, then froze right there on the threshold. The fact that she was still in her pajamas was enough to get my temper flaring. But what stopped my heart was the rest of the picture—my pajama-clad teenager poised in front of her full-length mirror, her feet in a near-perfect fighting stance, her iPod blasting who knows what into her head, and Stuart’s Civil War—replica sword tight in her hands.
Before I could say anything, she lunged at her reflection, the movement changing her perspective and apparently giving her a full view of me. She yelped, then twirled around, managing to shield the sword behind her back as she did so.
“I already saw it, Al,” I said, as soon as she’d yanked the earphones out of her ears. “You want to tell me why you have it?”
“I... well ... you know...”
I was desperately afraid I did know. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She shook her head. “It’s no big. Honest.”
On the contrary, I thought it was totally big. The question, though, was how to handle it. For that, I didn’t have a ready answer.
“Does Stuart know you have his sword?” I asked, mostly because it was the first thing I thought of. “Isn’t that the one he keeps hanging in his office?”
“Um, maybe?” “Well, put it back before he notices it’s gone. And get dressed,” I added, fixing her with my stern mother look. “We need to get going.”
“Okay. Sure thing. No problem.” She started scrambling for her closet, clearly happy to have escaped a full grilling.
As for me, I slipped outside the room and pulled her door closed again. I leaned against the door frame and closed my eyes, certain I’d completely mishandled the situation but too raw emotionally to go back in her room and start over.
Once upon a time, I’d thought demon-hunting was hard. But that was before I’d become a mom.
Trust me. In comparison to parenting, stalking and killing demons is a piece of cake.
“Higher, Mommy! Higher!” Timmy squealed, his little legs dangling over the pea gravel as he flew through the air in the bucket-style swing.
“Hey, squirt,” Allie said, swinging high next to him. “Just kick your legs like me. Then you won’t even need Mom.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said, feeling a little pang in my heart. Because it was true. Allie was almost to an age where she didn’t need me. And even though Timmy wasn’t yet three, one of these days, he’d get there, too. That’s the bittersweet part of being a mom. You slather on all that love and attention so that your kids will grow up strong, confident, and self-sufficient. And if you’ve done your job right, you’ve raised grown-ups who can go off and manage just fine without you.
We were in the cathedral’s play yard, having retrieved Timmy from the infant-to-three nursery (a lifesaver, in my opinion, and an unfortunate rarity among Catholic churches). Now we were surrounded by children of all ages. They were swinging, climbing on monkey bars, teetering on see-saws, and basically burning off all that pent-up energy that comes from sitting (mostly) still through more than an hour of Mass.
We’d come in two cars, and Stuart had already headed on to the office. Technically, today was the last day of his vacation, but I should have known the lure of the job would be too strong to resist. Now, I was waiting for Father Ben to finish the post-Mass meet-and-greet so that we could spend a few minutes discussing this Andramelech thing.
“He’s in a Pull-Ups,” I told Allie. “But if you need to change him, there are some more in the van. And some wipes and a change of clothes, too.”
“Mo-om.” She dragged her heels, skidding to a stop, then twisting around in the swing to look at me. “How come I have to watch him?”
“I already told you. I need to chat with Father Ben for a few minutes.”
From the depth of her sigh, you would have thought I’d told her she had to repeat junior high.
“It’s just for a few minutes, Allie. Have you got anything better to do?”
One shoulder lifted, and she scuffed her toe in the gravel. “Dunno. Why can’t I go with you?”
My heart did that pitter-patter number as I wondered just how much of my secret life Allie suspected. After all, wasn’t it pretty much genetically encoded for teenagers to completely discount everything their parents tell them? If she thought I was still in the demon-hunting biz, then it would make sense that I’d have a priest as a contact.