by Julie Kenner
“I know,” he said, dropping all hint of teasing. “I would say that this isn’t the way I wanted our lives to go, but I don’t really think that needs to be said.”
“No,” I agreed. “With that, you have my full agreement. With a plan for visitation, though . . .” I trailed off with a shrug.
“This conversation isn’t over.”
“Only postponed. I know.” I looked up at him, saw the doubt in his eyes. “Eric,” I said softly. “I understand. So help me, I do. But like it or not, I’m the parent now. It’s my decision to make, and I need to be certain I make the right one.”
“You will,” he said. “You always do.”
His words, however innocent, reminded me of the intimacy we’d once shared. Once upon a time, Eric Crowe had known me better than anyone, and his faith in me had been as unshakeable as mine in him.
I brushed the comment away, feeling unreasonably twitchy. “I don’t think Watson’s going to show here tonight,” I said, firmly shifting the subject away from my personal demons and onto the hellbound variety. “If he’s out there, he’s staying hidden.”
“Still feeling like you’re in the crosshairs?”
I considered the question. “No. I think we’re all alone out here. If Watson was watching from the shadows, I think he’s gone.”
“You may be right,” David said. “Want to do another pass just in case? Try another location?”
I hesitated, trying to decide on our best option. The morning paper had reported the near-death of Sammy Watson, one of the nightclub’s bartenders. Sammy, it seemed, had been mugged in this very location. He was found unconscious and bleeding by a young couple who had wandered into the alley, apparently thinking that the stench of old french fries and rotting buffalo wings would add to the romantic allure of their evening. Instead of finding romance, they found a near-dead Sammy.
The article indicated that he’d been admitted to the hospital in critical condition. A nurse went on record that the staff had anticipated he’d be dead by morning, and they considered it their job to simply make him as comfortable as possible. Imagine their surprise when by morning Sammy appeared to be in perfect health, ready to whip out a few daiquiris and margaritas.
Because he was healthy enough to mix drinks, Sammy was released from the hospital, and the paper reported the tears of joy shed by his mother and girlfriend.
I felt a twinge of solidarity with those women. They’d thought they’d lost Sammy once, but he’d miraculously come back to them. Now, though, they were going to lose him again. I knew, because I was the one who was going to kill him.
Not him, actually. Sammy was already dead and gone. His body, however, was still fully functional, inhabited as it was by a demon. And since demons often returned to the place of their rising, tonight’s alley patrol had seemed like a good plan at the time.
Now, at two-thirty in the morning, I was ready to hand Sammy his Get Out of Jail Free card.
“Maybe this one’s got brains,” David suggested. “Best way for him to stay in one piece is to avoid the local Hunter. At least until he’s up to full strength.”
“Hunters,” I corrected.
David shook his head. “I’m not back on Forza’s payroll.”
“But—”
He cut me off with a wave of his hand. “Not now. It’s late, and we’re both tired. And if we’re giving up on Sammy, I think we should pack it in and get some sleep.”
A queasy sense of guilt and fear snaked through me. “It’s not—you didn’t tell them about the Lazarus Bones, did you?”
He shook his head. “I made you a promise, Katie. Nothing would make me break that.”
I nodded, mollified but still curious. “Then what—”
“Kate,” he said firmly. “We’ll talk about it later.”
I didn’t argue, mostly because it wouldn’t have done any good. Eric, I’d recently learned, had many secrets. And though once upon a time I never would have believed it, now I knew that of all the people in his life, I was the one from whom he’d hidden the most.
David’s continued status as a rogue Demon Hunter plagued me so much on the way home that I was forced—yes, forced—to drive through the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s and down a large order of fries and a Diet Coke simply so that I’d have sufficient caloric energy to mentally process it all.
At least that’s what I told myself as I slurped my soda and maneuvered my way down the deserted streets, stopping dutifully at all the flashing traffic signals even though there wasn’t another car around for a hundred miles.
Part of the reason David had left for Italy a mere two days after the whole rising-from-the-dead thing was that he believed he owed Forza a debriefing. Essentially, David needed to lay out for Forza the full explanation of how Eric’s soul had ended up in David’s body, at least to the extent he could remember what happened. These things don’t happen lightly, and we both knew that the Forza researchers were going to be all over it.
The other part of our adventure—the part where I used the dust from the Lazarus Bones to raise David from the dead—would also be of keen interest to Forza. I’d crossed a line when I’d made the split-second decision to resurrect David, utilizing the kind of magic I’d had no business playing with.
I’d do it again, though. I’m certain I would. But at the same time, I’d put my soul at risk that brisk January evening. Worse, I’d gambled with Eric’s soul, too. Call me chicken, but I didn’t want to hear the disappointment in Father Corletti’s voice if I owned up to that.
Thinking of Father, I smiled and popped another french fry into my mouth. As the priest who headed up Forza, Father Corletti was like a parent to me. I’d been found as a child wandering the streets of Rome and had no solid memories of my own mother and father. It was Father Corletti who’d held my hand and read me bedtime stories. On my fourteenth birthday, he’d given me my very first stiletto (the knife, not the shoe). On my sixteenth, he’d given me a silver crucifix.
And it was Father Corletti who’d said yes when Eric asked for my hand in marriage.
David, of course, understood all that without my having to explain, and it was he who’d suggested we keep the back-from-the-dead aspect of our most recent demonic battle secret. At the suggestion, I’d experienced a quick twinge of guilt. Lately, though, I’d become an expert at keeping secrets and suppressing guilt. If David was willing to keep silent, then so was I.
After all, even without the resurrection aspect, David’s story was amazing. The kind of tale that the Forza researchers would transcribe by hand, then lock away in the restricted area of the Vatican library. In other words, Important Theological Stuff. So important, in fact, that I hadn’t blanched when David told me about his planned departure, even though I knew Allie would be crushed to learn her newfound father was about to fly thousands of miles away.
As for me, I’ll confess to being secretly glad that he was going away for a week or two. I didn’t want him gone forever, not when I’d just gotten him back. But I couldn’t help but crave a little space to process everything that had happened—from the demonic threat we’d managed to thwart, to the powerful magic I’d called on in order to keep Eric in this world with me for at least a little longer.
And to be honest, once she got over her initial disappointment, I think Allie was secretly glad her father was going away, too. As wonderful as Eric’s return might be in theory, in reality, the situation required some major mental processing. It wasn’t the kind of situation she could analyze for hours on end with her girlfriends. She couldn’t go to the library and read a book on a similar subject. She couldn’t do anything, really, except wait and process. In a way, David’s departure was almost like a gift, and part of me couldn’t help but wonder if he realized that, and if that knowledge didn’t spur his departure.
I never expected him to stay gone as long as he did, though. What I’d anticipated to be a one- or two-week jaunt turned into almost three months, requiring David to take unpaid leave
from his job at the high school, claiming he had to go to Europe to tend to an ill relative. And from the conversations during his scattered telephone calls to me and Allie, I got the impression that he fully intended to step back into his Demon Hunter role, possibly even abandoning his high school job all together.
So why was he still rogue? And why was he back to work at Coronado High?
My first guess came to me on the heels of guilt and fear— he’d confessed about the Lazarus Bones, and Forza had deemed his soul tainted and then soundly refused to allow him Hunter status. I shoved that proposition aside. If being resurrected by the bones had tainted his soul, then wielding them had surely seared mine, too. And I really didn’t want to go there.
It wasn’t merely blind denial that drove my hypothesis, though. It was trust. David made a promise. He told me that he’d honored that promise. And I wasn’t inclined to doubt his words.
Which left open the question of why he hadn’t been reinstated as a Hunter. I couldn’t think of a single explanation, and I was still tossing possibilities around in my head as I pulled into our driveway.
I left the van in the driveway where I’d taken to parking it lately. Forza hadn’t officially notified me that hell had frozen over, but I knew it anyway because Stuart had finally gotten around to fixing our creaky, slow, pathetic garage door (or, rather, he’d gotten around to hiring someone to do that very thing). But even though the glorious day had finally arrived, and the formerly painfully squeaky door now rose and fell with only the slightest whisper of noise, I still couldn’t park the van in the garage. Why? Because I’d been so sure that my husband would procrastinate until after the election that I’d filled my half of the garage with various odds and ends I was collecting for a garage sale.
So much for having faith in my husband.
I took a quick sip of soda, shoved the last five fries into my mouth, then climbed out of the van. Then I scooted quickly to the far side of the house, bypassing the front door. The landing in front of the master bedroom has a dead-on view of the entrance hall, and the last thing I wanted was for Stuart to stumble out of bed and see me waltzing back into the house.
The night was dark, the sliver of moon hidden mostly by a blanket of clouds, and I clung to the thick shadows, hoping that no insomniac neighbors wondered what I was doing at this hour of the night.
Not that I was particularly worried about insomniac neighbors. Our neighborhood is about as suburban as they come, and with the exception of parties by a few of the teenagers, it’s pretty much shut down after midnight.
Our yard is encircled by a wooden privacy fence with one gate on the side where we keep our trash cans and recycle bins. We used to keep it locked, but lately I didn’t bother. I often needed to get inside in a hurry, and I’d discovered soon enough that if the demons wanted in, one little padlock wasn’t going to keep them out.
Some might call that attitude pessimistic. I called it practical.
Out of habit, I did a quick sweep of the backyard, illuminating dark corners with the beam of my flashlight. I hadn’t expected to find anything out of sorts, and reality matched my expectations. With any luck, Sammy Watson had decided to take a bus out of town, in which case he’d become someone else’s problem and I could send him a gold-engraved note thanking him for freeing up a few hours of spare time on my behalf.
I slipped the flashlight back into my pocket as I moved from the gravel path onto our back porch. I found my house key in the back pocket of my jeans, and I pulled it out as I reached the door. French style, the door was made up of individual frames of glass, each of which displayed my reflection despite being smeared with the greasy fingerprints of my little boy. A forty-watt yellow bulb lit the back porch, preventing me from seeing inside, but reflecting back an image of the yard—and something gray and fast.
Without thinking, my knife was in my hand, and I sprang off the porch and onto the gravel, craving the darkness to keep me covered. I let my eyes adjust without turning on the flashlight, and carefully examined the yard.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but that hardly comforted me. Something had moved. And in my line of work, when something is something you can’t easily see, that usually means that something is bad.
Though I’d already peered into the dark corners of the yard, I decided to go through the exercise again, this time getting more up close and personal with the shadows and crannies that seemed so familiar during the day and undeniably creepy at night. You might think that after years of fighting demons, I wouldn’t be creeped out by the dark. You’d be wrong. I’ve probably got the willies worse than any five-year-old determined to keep the closet light on and not let fingers or toes dangle over the bed. Because unlike that five-year-old, who’s seen only dust bunnies and stuffed animals, I’ve seen what’s really hiding in the dark. And trust me when I say that it’s not pretty.
Our yard is divided more or less into two parts, delineated by grass and gravel. The grass part is on the left, accentuated by a few fruit trees, some potted plants, and enough toys to supply half the children in a small developing country. The gravel is on the right, and on top of it we’ve got a plastic playscape for Timmy (that he’s quickly outgrowing) and enough toys to supply the other half.
I checked the gravel side first, peering around the playscape, then under the storage shed that sits near the back of the graveled area. I found nothing of interest under there, just the cinder blocks that held the flooring up, a few rubber balls, and a Pyrex casserole that had been missing for more than a month.
All quiet, so I circumnavigated the shed, my feet crunching on the extra area of gravel we’d laid so that we’d have a shady place for Timmy’s purple dinosaur sandbox. Lately, Dino was empty—my son interested more in tossing the sand around the yard than actually playing in it—but the lid was on. And though I didn’t really expect a minuscule demon to be hiding in there, I popped the lid off with my foot, muscles tense and knife ready for action.
I terrorized a few pill bugs, a Go, Diego, Go! action figure, and a truly disgusting ancient racquetball, but otherwise all was well.
The area behind the shed is a haven for all our unsightly neglected stuff: bags of potting soil, loosely covered mounds of dirt and landscaping rocks, a rusty red wagon, and all the miscellaneous gardening tools that I intend to use but never quite get around to organizing. I inspected all of that detritus, found nothing, and moved on to the fence to check the narrow space into which we shoved rakes, shovels, and battered lawn chairs.
Once again, no demons.
I was beginning to think I’d been seeing things, and was tempted to pack it in. It had been a busy day, after all. I’d driven carpool, spent two hours doing laundry, wasted another two at the car dealership getting a tune-up and new tires, whiled away half an hour at Wal-Mart returning a bag of nighttime Pull-Ups I’d accidentally bought in the wrong size, and breezed through forty-five minutes chasing my toddler in the park. After all of that, I was bone-dead tired.
At the same time, I had a feeling I wasn’t wallowing in paranoia. I’d felt eyes on me since the alley with David. And if I’d learned one thing in all my years, it was that Hunters are very rarely paranoid. Usually, there’s a reason those little hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
With that axiom firmly in mind, I shone the light toward the few trees that dotted the other half of our lawn, checking first the ground and then tilting my head back to peer at the branches. Zilch.
Frowning, I stepped farther away from the shed and aimed my light at the roof, standing on my tiptoes as I tried to get a better look. Nada.
“Come out, come out, where ever you are,” I called in a low whisper, more out of frustration than an expectation that any creature of the night would answer my call, and when I heard an answering clack in front of me, I almost jumped in surprise.
I arced my light down, illuminating the rickety potting bench behind the shed. I’d looked there already and seen nothing. Now the clay pots shifted, eve
r so slightly.
I took a firmer hold on my knife and stepped forward, silently at first as the grass crunched under my feet, then louder as I reached the gravel. I was close now, but still didn’t see anything. Certainly not Sammy Watson.
With my heart pounding in my chest, I crossed the final five feet to the bench. As I did, one of the pots tumbled off and a gray blob leaped right at me. I thrust my stiletto forward, realized what I was seeing, and stopped myself an instant before mortally wounding Kabit, our big, gray, and apparently stupid, cat.
The cat, oblivious to having come within a hair’s breadth of losing one of his nine lives, landed softly near my feet and began to twine through my legs, purring loudly.
I sagged with frustration and relief, then reached down and scooped him up. “Hey, dummy. I told you not to go out.” The idiot cat had rocketed past me hours earlier as I’d sneaked outside to go meet David. A pampered fat cat, Kabit’s delicate feline sensibilities weren’t geared for sleeping under the stars.
“You could have been turned into a Kabit-kabob,” I said. To which the little beast responded with a strangled hiss, his ears laid flat to show his utter contempt for such a suggestion. Or, more accurately, his total fear of the monster behind me.
Kabit’s back claws ripped into my arms as he pushed off me even as I turned to face my attacker. Too late, though. Sammy Watson caught me midturn. A swift, hard blow to my arm released both the cat and my knife, and at the same time a steel blade pressed firmly against my throat, its presence quite sufficient to keep my feet planted firmly in place. “You die now, Hunter,” Watson whispered as he grabbed my hair and yanked back, further exposing my throat to his blade. “Never will you wield the Sword of Caelum against my master!”
I didn’t have time to think about my options; I could only react. I brought my left fist straight up between my own body and the demon, then slammed it down against the demon’s knife arm just as his muscles tensed to slice my neck. The move was risky, but considering my predicament, I didn’t much see a downside. Thankfully, the maneuver paid off— at least for the moment. The knife edge dragged along my skin, but didn’t cut deep. I’d survive. Assuming, that is, that I could get myself untangled.