by Julie Kenner
As I watched, horrified, the body rumbled and stretched, as if a battle were going on inside.
“The sword, Kate,” David cried. “Stab him with the sword.”
I lunged to do that, cringing even as I hurled the sword blade over hilt to land deep in Ben’s midsection.
The wound opened, and out poured a black, oily goo.
I left the sword embedded in Ben’s body, and David rushed forward to pull it out, stopping in the act of tossing it back to me as he watched the goo shimmy and shake, then take solid form, a single demon rising, at least eight feet tall with a wingspan of equal breadth.
I pulled out a spare knife and stood ready for battle, but it didn’t matter. The demon was no longer interested in playing, and in a split second, it took off, disappearing into the night sky. A demon, corporeal in its true form.
And, if Father Ben’s dying words were true, invincible.
"Ben,” I whispered, tears streaming down my face as I clutched Ben’s body, now removed from the posts. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Shhh,” David said, loosening my grip on Ben and pulling me close to him.
I buried my face in his chest, taking what comfort I could from his arms, tight and strong around me. “I messed up,” I said. “He’s dead because of me.”
“He’s dead because of evil,” David said. “No other reason. ”
“I should have saved him. That’s my job. That’s what I do. And he’s my alimentatore. I should have—”
He pressed a finger to my lips. “Hush now,” he said, and though my mind kept whirring, thoughts lost in a foggy haze of pain and regret, my lips stayed silent.
We stayed that way for an eternity, David holding me close. Me trying to pull strength from him, finding comfort in his touch, if not absolution. I’d lost people before—friends, fellow Hunters. But the loss of Ben, with his death so vile, and mere minutes before we’d arrived, seemed to rip my soul in two.
When I finally felt strong enough, I pulled back, then noticed the sword on the ground beside us. I reached for it in anger and frustration, prepared to hurl the thing into the bushes.
“No,” David said, stilling my hand. “You might get another opportunity.”
“The damn thing doesn’t work, anyway,” I said. “We never even had a chance.”
“Maybe there is no prophecy. Maybe that’s not the right sword,” David said. “But maybe it is and we’re just missing a piece. Don’t throw away the one bit of hope we have, Kate.”
“Hope,” I repeated harshly as Ben’s body lay lifeless beside us. “I don’t even remember what that is.”
A sad smile touched David’s lips, and he stroked my hair, his own eyes reflecting the hope I desperately needed to find. “It’s time, Kate,” he said. “You need to go home.”
Stuart.
Another shock of loss rippled through me, and I was certain I didn’t have the strength to face my husband now.
“You can do this,” David said, reading my thoughts. “It’s time for you to go.”
“I can’t,” I protested. “I can’t leave him here. Not like this.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he promised. “I’ll call Forza. I’ll handle it.”
“But—”
“I’ll handle it,” he repeated gently. I knew that he would. Though San Diablo might not have a disposal team, they still existed for emergencies. And covering up the death of a priest definitely qualified.
“I should be the one,” I said, my voice small. “I should—”
“You should go home to your family,” David said firmly. “I’ll take good care of him. But now, sweetheart, it’s time for you to go.”
It was well after midnight when I walked through the front door to find the house dark. My breath caught in my throat, and for a moment I had the horrible feeling that the place was empty. That Stuart had left and wasn’t coming back.
I swallowed a strangled cry, determined not to lose it.
“Ben?”
Stuart’s low voice ripped through the dark, sending shock waves of relief through me. I hadn’t lost him. Not yet, anyway.
“Dead,” I said, moving into the living room.
I found him sitting on the couch in the dark. A bit of moonlight filtered in through the back door, casting him in shadows, his expression unreadable.
“Stuart,” I began. “I’m—”
“I almost quit the campaign,” he said, his voice calm, his words startling.
“What?”
“I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. I thought I’d quit, and we’d be close again. Because for the last few months we haven’t been. Something has been driving us apart. Not completely. Not horribly. But it’s been there, like a wedge, threatening to break apart everything.”
I nodded, knowing exactly the wedge of which he spoke.
“I thought it was me,” he continued in that calm, collected politician’s voice. “I thought I would quit. I thought I’d fix it.” He lifted his head, and I could see a glimmer of the whites of his eyes. “But it wasn’t me, was it, Kate?”
“No.” I drew in a breath. “No, it wasn’t.”
“Right,” he said, his voice monotone.
I wanted to shake him. To scream that he should be raging at me, furious and demanding explanations. Breaking furniture and swearing. But he wasn’t. He was calm. And somehow that steady, stable voice scared me more than any of his raging ever could.
“What’s going on, Kate? Allie’s too broken up about what she saw to tell me a damn thing. So you tell. What was that? What did I see? And what the hell was Allie doing with that man?”
I started to sit on the couch next to him, then changed my mind and moved to a chair. I drew in a breath and faced him. “That man is her father,” I said, biting the bullet and jumping straight into the fire.
“David Long?” he said, the suggestion in his voice clear. “You and David Long? And you never once told me?”
“Not David Long,” I said. “I didn’t meet David until a few months ago.”
“Then, what?”
“It’s David’s body,” I explained. “But Eric’s soul.”
“Dammit, Kate,” he said, his voice finally edging toward fury. He stood up and ran his fingers through his hair. “You think this is some kind of a joke? Some asshole teacher is taking advantage of our daughter and—”
“Not an asshole teacher,” I said. “Her father. I swear to God, Stuart.” I crossed myself. “As God as my witness, I’m telling the truth.”
“This had better be good,” he said, his voice harsher than I’d ever heard. “Talk. Now.”
And so I did. Starting all the way back with my childhood. “That’s all I knew,” I said, reaching my teenage years. “I’d grown up in the Forza dorms, studying, training. And when I was old enough, I started hunting, too.”
“And Eric?”
“My partner,” I said. “At first. Then my husband. And we wanted a family, but life expectancy for Demon Hunters isn’t off the charts, so we retired in L.A. And then when I got pregnant, we moved to San Diablo.”
“And the story about Eric being mugged? Dying in San Francisco?”
“True,” I said. “Or, at least, I thought it was at the time. It turns out it’s more complicated than that. But I swear to you, when we met, I was out of the demon-hunting business.”
“This is a lot to take in, Kate.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ve been looking for a way to tell you, but—”
“Maybe you should have looked harder,” he said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Maybe I should have.”
“Does Allie know?” he asked, then immediately answered himself. “I guess she better. Otherwise she thinks he’s just the chemistry teacher.”
“She knows,” I said. “But she’s only known a few months.”
I backtracked then, explaining how I’d first encountered Goramesh, how I’d been sucked back into demon hunting in order to keep
my family safe.
“Doesn’t sound all that safe to me,” Stuart said. “Timmy and Allie were in that graveyard,” he said, referring to a huge battle at the end of last summer. Stuart hadn’t known I’d battled a demon; he’d only known the kids had been thrust into danger.
“It’s not just about us,” I said. “It’s the whole world. It’s good and evil. Life and death. Stuart, you saw that thing tonight. That’s a demon, and now he’s walking the earth, with nothing but death and destruction as a goal. And I’m one of the few people on this earth trained to stop him.”
“And here I was impressed when you managed to make a cake that didn’t sag in the middle.”
I managed a small smile. “I can take out a demon,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I can bake a cake.”
He sat down again, his expression pensive. “The Halloween toy,” he said. “Not from an Italian friend, I take it?”
“Not exactly.”
“Mmm.”
“Stuart?” I dragged my teeth over my lower lip. “What are you thinking?”
“That all this is a bit much to take in. That you should have told me everything ages ago. And—dammit, Kate—I’m jealous as hell that you’ve been spending time with Eric.” He cocked his head. “Only spending time. Working with him. On all this demon stuff. Right?”
“Yes. Of course. How can you even ask that? You’re my husband.”
“But so is he,” Stuart countered.
“I would never be unfaithful to you,” I said. “I would have hoped you knew me well enough to know that.
“Exactly what I would have hoped,” he said, his voice sharp.
Score one for Stuart.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I came home planning to pack a bag for me and Timmy and go to a hotel. I’m not really sure why I didn’t. Maybe I wanted the explanation. Maybe I wanted to believe you when you said you’d explain everything.”
“I did explain,” I said, swallowing a throat full of tears.
“You did,” he said. “And I appreciate that. But my God, Kate. Zombies in our house. Demons in our yard. Our children in danger. I’m not sure if I didn’t have the right idea in the first place, albeit for different reasons.”
A tear trickled down my cheek. “I see.”
“Will you give it up? Can you walk away and tell this Forza thing that you’ve had enough?”
“No,” I said, then saw him wince at the harshness of my answer. “I don’t have a choice. When Eric and I retired here, we thought we could walk away from Forza, from being Hunters. But it’s not a job, Stuart. It’s my life. And life finds you, you know? I made a choice a long time ago to be a Hunter,” I said, though in truth the choice had been made for me. Raised in the Forza dorms, I had known no other life. “And if I had to do it all over again, I’d make the same choice. Because this is important stuff. I’m fighting evil, Stuart. Can you understand that? The world needs people who can fight the good fight.”
I licked my lips, watching his face, but unable to read it. “This life has made me the woman I am. The woman you love. Who loves you. So it’s up to you now, Stuart. Can you live with that? Can you love the woman I am?”
“Oh, Kate . . .”
“Please,” I said, fighting tears. “Please tell me you’ll stay.”
“I love you, too,” he said. “It’s a lot to make work.”
“I know it is. But we can do it. Please, Stuart. Please try.”
He stood there, his usually expressive eyes unreadable, then turned and went to the back door. I saw him hesitate, then open it and go outside. I waited, not sure if I should follow, but after five minutes I couldn’t take it any longer.
I found him on the swing, and his eyes cut toward me as I stepped through the threshold.
“Stuart?” I asked my voice small.
A beat, and then he held out his hand, reaching for me. I went to him, hope and relief vying for space in my heart. He settled me on his lap and pulled me close, tears brimming in his eyes, too. “It’s going to be hard, isn’t it?”
“Everything worthwhile is,” I said. “Are we worth it?”
A silence that seemed to last forever filled the room. Then he nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “We are.”
I woke up feeling warm and loved and relieved. The night had been sheer hell, but in the end it had been worth it. Stuart knew the truth, and yet he’d chosen to stay with me, his body as much as his words assuring me that he loved me.
The bedcovers were horribly rumpled, but Stuart wasn’t buried in the pile. I checked the clock, and saw that it was after ten. I sat up with a start, realizing that Stuart was long gone for the office. My purse was by the bed, and I reached into it, fumbling for my cell phone to call David. I needed to know that Ben had been taken care of. He deserved the best; surely more than he’d gotten.
I found a voice mail waiting for me. David, assuring me that he was arranging everything. That Forza had been called in, and that Father Ben was in good hands. I closed my eyes, crossed myself, and said a silent prayer.
Then I swung my legs off the bed. I wanted revenge— wanted to find this new demon that Goramesh and Abaddon had merged into—and yet I didn’t know where to begin. They were surely gone now. And as much as I’d told Stuart that this was my life now, I couldn’t see hauling myself all over the world chasing demons, even if my husband was home holding down the fort.
The truth, though, was that I was secretly glad it was over. I felt ripped apart from the inside. I needed time to decompress. Time to get over losses and assimilate the changes in my life.
I padded into the hallway and checked Timmy’s room. Empty, which wasn’t too surprising. I was sure Allie had gotten him up, and now I needed to go down and talk with her. I’d checked in on her last night, but she was sound asleep and I couldn’t find it in my heart to wake her. Now, though, I needed to see how she was doing after last night’s horror.
But it wasn’t Allie I found at the kitchen table with my little munchkin. Instead, I found Stuart, a bowl of oatmeal in front of him and a bright blue spoon in his hand.
“Come on, little man,” he was saying. “How are you going to get big and strong if you don’t eat up?”
“Chocolate!” said Timmy, and Stuart laughed.
“Might make you big,” my husband acknowledged, “but I’m not sure about strong.” A flash of melancholy crossed his face, and as I watched, he grabbed Timmy, pulling him from his chair to plunk the boy on his lap and hug him close.
There was nothing unusual about the move. Nothing that should have my antennae twitching. But they were. And when Stuart looked at me over the top of Timmy’s head, I knew what was coming.
I held my hand up, desperate to stave off the words, but it didn’t work. The gauntlet came down anyway.
“I’m sorry, Kate. I can’t do it. I thought I could, but I can’t.”
I swallowed. “What exactly are you saying?”
“I’m saying I need some time to think. And I need to know that Timmy’s safe.”
Ice-cold fear shot through me. “You’re thinking of taking Timmy away.” I stood up straighter, a fighting posture. “I don’t think so.”
“Kate, be reasonable.”
“You talk about taking my son away, and this is as reasonable as I get.”
“You can’t keep him safe.”
“The hell I can’t.”
“Was he safe last night? Was he safe last summer? And how many other times have there been? Times I haven’t even known about when you were keeping him so very safe from the ghosties and ghoulies.”
I shook my head, wishing I had words, but knowing I’d never convince him.
“I’d take Allie with me if I could,” he said. “But you know damn well I’d win a fight with Timmy at the center.” He looked me in the eye, and all I saw was betrayal. “Don’t make me fight that battle.”
“He’s safe,” I repeated stupidly, knowing even as I spoke th
at he wouldn’t believe. Knowing it wasn’t even really true.
“Did you kill that thing last night?” he asked, and I heard a glimmer of hope in his voice.
I wanted to tell him I had. That I’d done the superhero thing and taken out the boogeyman, making the neighborhood safe and secure.
I wanted to say that, but I couldn’t. Instead, I closed my eyes.
“That’s what I thought,” he said, standing up. “I love you, Kate. But Timmy and I have to go.”
"Mom?” I felt the bed dip down as Allie sat, the scent of Earl Grey tea wafting near my head. “Mom, you have to get up. It’s Good Friday. We need to go to mass.”
“I’m taking a pass,” I said without opening my eyes. I’d been in a funk since Stuart left, living in my bed for more than a day, sleeping and coming out only when I desperately needed food. Immature and irresponsible, yes, but that kind of behavior fit my mood just fine.
“But Father Ben,” she said, her voice catching. “We have to go. We have to say a prayer.”
“I’ve done nothing but pray since last night,” I said, my fingers stroking the necklace Stuart had given me. “So far, it’s not helping.”
“Mom,” she said, her voice breaking. I rolled over to face her, feeling like the absolute worst mother in the world. And why not? I was.
“I’m sorry, Al. Yes. We’ll go to mass.” I glanced at the clock. Two hours until the noon service. Surely I could pull myself together in two hours.
I sat up, expecting her to head to the shower herself. Instead, she stayed on the bed, carefully inspecting each of her fingernails.
I pulled her close and gave her a hug. “I’ve been wallowing, and it’s not fair to you.”
“It’s all my fault,” she said, her chin trembling.
“What? How do you figure?”
“I wanted to see Daddy. And Stuart—and, and—and if he’d just found out some other way. But he insisted on following you, and I couldn’t stop him, and—”
“This is not your fault,” I said firmly. “It’s mine. I should have told Stuart a long time ago. There would have been an explosion then, too, but it probably would have been smaller. And maybe we could have survived it.”
“Will you guys survive this explosion?”