California Demon: The Secret Life of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom

by Julie Kenner

  “I’m sure he doesn’t take it personally,” I said, trying to keep my voice light despite the way my insides were twisting and my muscles were screaming for action. “So what happened?”

  “I don’t know. Once they started practicing for the exhibition, he just got tenser and tenser, and . . .” She shrugged. “And he didn’t even seem all that upset when we heard the news about Jason, you know? I mean, I told myself it was because it was such a shock, but it was like all he cared about was getting bumped up to captain and getting that butt-ugly ring. Owwww, Mom! You’re hurting me.”

  “Sorry.” I released my death grip on her arm. “What ring?” I asked, hoping I sounded more casual than I felt.

  “Just these ugly gold rings. Both the team captains had them. They hung them on chains around their necks and wore them under their shirts.”

  “Where’d they get them?”

  “Dunno.” Her forehead creased. “I guess I never thought about it. Cool maybe?”

  That’s what I’d been thinking.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “Troy’s been acting really weird for a while, but as soon as he got his stupid ring, he really started acting like an ass.”

  “That just means he was an ass all along,” I said. “You’re better off without him, sweetie.”

  “I guess,” she said. “But if that’s true, why’s it got to hurt so much?”

  “If I could answer that, I’d have Oprah’s job, and we’d be rich and well-adjusted.” Another smile. “Come here,” I said, holding out my arms. She came, and I held her tight, rocking a little as I remembered all our past crises and imagined all the ones to come. As far as crises involving demonic minions, though, I sincerely hoped that it would be the last.

  My daughter’s heart might be breaking, but I couldn’t help but be a little joyous. There’s no way she’d go to the exhibition tomorrow and risk seeing Troy, so that worry was off my head.

  And now I knew about the rings. Cool—or, rather, Asmodeus—was using the surf captains.

  For what exactly, I didn’t know. But I was certain of one thing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  Eighteen

  l left Allie to Sleep off her depression, and met Stuart in the hall coming out of Timmy’s room. “He’s down for the count,” Stuart said. “How’s Allie?”

  “She’ll survive,” I said. “Boys. It’s never easy.”

  “Never,” he said, with just a hint of apology in his voice.

  “Oh no. Not you, too.”

  “I thought since dinner didn’t happen that I’d run back to the office. I’ve got a stack of files on my desk a mile high, and if you want me home over Christmas, I really need to make a dent.”

  “Go ahead.” Considering my own schedule, it wasn’t much of a hardship to be magnanimous.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Stuart, honey, don’t ask permission twice. When your wife says yes, the smart thing is to take that yes and run with it.”

  “You’re right. What was I thinking?” He caught me around the waist and planted a deep, long kiss on me. “That’s just to keep you thinking about later,” he said.

  I stood there, a little weak in the knees, as he hurried down the stairs. I followed at a more reasonable pace and found Laura, Mindy, and Eddie staring up at me from the living room. “How’s our girl?” Eddie asked, speaking for the group.

  “She’s okay. We had a long talk,” I added, giving Eddie and Laura what I hoped was a meaningful glance.

  “Why don’t you go on up?” Laura asked Mindy, apparently realizing there was a story there, and wanting to hear it.

  “Allie’d probably like the company,” I confirmed. I figured the girls would get so caught up in their own deconstruction of the evening and general bitch session about Troy, that we’d be able to talk without interruption or fear of being overheard.

  While Stuart gathered his various bits of office paraphernalia, I made a pot of coffee. Anything to distract myself until Stuart cleared out and I could talk freely.

  Eddie and Laura relocated to the breakfast table, then kept shooting me meaningful looks, as if I could make Stuart move faster.

  The chime of the doorbell echoed through the house. Eddie and Laura and I looked at each other. Was it Troy? If it was, he was going to regret coming by. Bad enough that he’s in cahoots with a demon, but standing up my daughter? That’s completely unacceptable.

  I checked the peephole, and the wave of righteous indignation receded. Not Troy. Father Ben.

  I tugged the door open, and he burst through, his hair wild and his features tight. He had a thick folder under one arm, and he pushed it into my hands. “We must talk,” he whispered. “Is it safe to talk?”

  Before I could tell him it wasn’t, though, Stuart stepped into the entrance hall, and I swear Father Ben jumped three feet.

  “Father Ben!” Stuart said. “Did I startle you?”

  “No, no,” Ben said. “I’m fine.”

  “What’s up?”

  Father Ben’s eyes were wide, a deer caught in the headlights.

  I stepped away from the wall and lifted the folder. “More things from Delores to catalog,” I said. I’d been doing a lot of volunteer work at the church, and one of the jobs was itemizing the various donations to the church that had been made over the year. The project had been interesting, to say the least. More important, Stuart knew I was doing it, so my fabrication was that much more plausible.

  “Oh,” he said. He looked at his watch.

  “I apologize for the hour,” Father Ben said. “Delores is going out of town and wanted you to have these, and I volunteered to bring them by. I tried to call, but I’m afraid I’ve been unable to get through.”

  Allie. She and Mindy were probably going over Troy’s betrayal with every one of their friends. We have call-waiting, of course, but my daughter was obviously ignoring it.

  “Do you want to come in?” I asked, hoping I sounded casual. “Stuart has to run to the office, but we have some great leftovers, and you could sit and talk for a while.”

  “I’d love a bite. Thanks so much for offering.”

  He followed me into the kitchen, where Laura had put out all the food, along with some Tupperware, foil, and Press’n Seal. Troy’s absence had put a damper on dinner, and leftovers were the order of the day.

  Not that the boy’s faux pas had queered Eddie’s appetite. He looked up from where he was digging into Laura’s lasagna, gestured with his fork, and ordered Father Ben to “pull up a chair and start shovelin’ it in.”

  Stuart stepped into the room, and we all looked at each other, making awkward small talk while we waited for my husband to gather his keys and wallet and head into the garage. Except that he didn’t. Instead, he was looking thoughtfully around the room at us.

  “Stuart?” I said, my voice wary. “What’s up?”

  “I’m being a lousy host,” he said. He tossed his briefcase up in front of the microwave. “The least I can do is stay and chat with everyone for a while.”

  “Oh, no, no,” I said, as the others joined in with similar protests. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “It’s really not necessary,” Father Ben said.

  “Get your tail to the office and earn your keep,” Eddie added.

  Stuart looked from Eddie to Father Ben and back to me. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re trying to get rid of me.” His eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”

  “Of course not,” I said, standing up and steering him toward the garage. “But there’s no reason to change your plans. You have work, right?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “And you have to go into the office to do it, right?”

  “Kate . . .”

  “Just hear me out, Stuart. If you’re going to spend time at the office catching up, I’d much rather you do it now while Timmy’s asleep. If you stay here with us, all it’s going to mean is that you have to go in tomorrow when your little boy wants to pl
ay with you. And for what? So you can have some of Laura’s cobbler? If that’s what you want I’ll put some in Tupperware for you.”

  I stepped back and took in a deep breath, a little exhausted by my speech. Stuart was still staring at me. “Father Ben won’t mind,” I added lamely. “Will you, Father?”

  “On the contrary,” the padre said. “I’m sure Timmy will be thrilled to have his daddy around in the morning.”

  “All right,” Stuart said. “I can take a hint. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I’ll go.”

  I smiled, then fell back, exhausted, against the closed door as soon as he stepped through it. We all waited in silence like conspirators, which in a way I guess we were. The sound of the engine faded as Stuart pulled out, then the garage door creaked its way down. As soon as we heard the thump when it hit the concrete, we all started talking at once.

  Father Ben held up a hand. “Whatever you have to say can wait,” he said.

  I leaned forward, my mouth open, desperate to tell him about the rings. He tapped a finger on the table in front of me. “Trust me, Kate. It can wait.”

  With that kind of conviction, how could I argue? I nodded, sat down in a chair, and absently nibbled at a carrot stick.

  “We were right,” he said, looking to each of us in turn. “It’s all about the two demons imprisoned in Tartarus.” He slammed the folder onto the table, then opened it, revealing an assortment of papers covered with ornate writing—in Greek, as far as I could tell—and intricate line drawings depicting the torments of the damned.

  “I spoke with Father Corletti at length this morning. He found these references within the Vatican library. His assistant scanned the images and e-mailed them to me.”

  I shot Eddie a significant look, which he, of course, ignored.

  I rifled through the papers, realized I had no clue what any of it meant, and asked Father Ben to boil it down to the bottom line.

  “Two imprisoned demons,” he said. “Two demons on Earth in the service of the imprisoned. And two humans who have given assistance to the forces of evil.”

  “What kind of assistance?” Eddie asked.

  “The act itself doesn’t matter, but the evil taints the human. The ritual takes place when the sun is at its peak. At the conclusion, the humans will be sucked into Tartarus, taking the place of the imprisoned demons, lost forever in eternal torment.”

  “Someone pushed the janitor and made him a demon,” I said, stepping back so I could look into the living room. “Did any of you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Laura asked.

  “Maybe nothing. I just thought I heard a swishing sound.”

  “Swishing,” Eddie repeated. “Probably your damn cat.”

  Actually, Kabit was camped out in the corner by the drapes, his tail going back and forth, every other swoosh or so hitting the drapes and making them shimmy. “I guess you’re right.”

  I turned my attention back to the group in the kitchen. “Is something like killing the janitor what you meant? By assistance, I mean?”

  “Absolutely,” Father Ben said.

  “Before he died, the janitor griped about kids. He was cursing them as if they’d bothered him in the past. So maybe the kids had been sneaking into his basement.”

  “And talking to demons,” Father Ben finished. “Yes, I think that’s likely. They found the book, read the pages, and learned what they had to do.”

  Dear God, the thought made me ill.

  “Well the janitor’s now one dead demon,” Eddie said. “So he doesn’t count. But Cool makes one.”

  “And Creasley’s the other,” I said.

  “It’s the assistants we should focus on,” Father Ben said. “They are the key to the ritual. If we can find and stop them, perhaps we can forestall Asmodeus’s plan.”

  “I think we’ve already found them,” I said. I explained what Allie had told me, about the surf club captains and their rings.

  “But what I don’t understand is why these kids would do this,” Laura said. “I mean, why would they want to get sucked into Hell?”

  “Demons lie, remember?” I said.

  Father Ben nodded. “Perhaps the Tartarus demons used the book to promise the boys wealth, power, immortality. Who knows? The point is the boys believed.”

  “And were willing to kill for the lie,” I said with a shiver. To think my daughter actually fell for a boy like that. Not for the first time, I wished I could wrap her up in some sort of force field and just keep her safe forever.

  Laura still looked confused. “So is that how the book fits in to all this?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Father Ben said. “The book is also essential to the ritual. The imprisoned demons will rise up through the pages of the book.”

  “That’s good news, at least,” I said. “We’ve got the book.”

  “There are other things that must fall into place, too,” Father Ben said. “The ritual involves the rendering of a geometric symbol.” He ran his hands through his hair, making it stick up even more. “I’ve tried to find a description or drawing, but haven’t had any luck. Something, though. Lines and angles.”

  “A pentagram,” Laura said.

  “Cliché,” Eddie said.

  Laura shrugged. “Works in the movies.”

  “I don’t think it matters what it looks like,” I said. “They’re going to be at the beach, right? They’ll just draw the symbol in the sand.”

  “I’m afraid you’re probably right,” Father Ben said. “At the same time, this is a complex plot. Foil any piece of it, and we may be able to prevent the whole.”

  We all stood quietly, thinking about that. And then I heard that swishing noise. “There it is again! Like a soft scraping sound. Don’t you guys hear it?”

  “I don’t hear anything,” Laura said, but I was already out of my chair and around the divider into the living room. No one.

  No one, that is, except Kabit, who was sharpening his claws on Eddie’s recliner.

  Just to be certain, I tiptoed upstairs, tapped once, then opened Allie’s door. The girls—plugged into their iPods— didn’t even notice.

  “Anything?” Laura asked when I returned.

  “Nothing.”

  “You know,” she said, “I’m wondering if all this may not be as bad as we think.”

  We all looked at her.

  “Go on, girl,” Eddie said. “If you’ve got good news, now’s the time to share it.”

  “Well, I was thinking about the book. They need that, right? And they don’t have it. So even if they do have two demons, they still can’t do their ritual.” She looked to Father Ben and then to me. “Right?”

  I shrugged. “That’s the padre’s department.”

  “I think Laura has a good point. And probably an accurate one,” he said. “But as far as we know, this ritual has never been performed before. We might have mistranslated the texts. Or the texts might be purposefully inaccurate, designed to deceive. We just don’t know.”

  Laura’s smile was thin. “So much for my theory.”

  I gave her a quick hug. “It’s a sound theory. And no matter what, I know I feel better knowing that some freaky book that can speak for demons is safely hidden in the altar.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I just want this to be over.”

  “It will be,” I said. “Somehow, it’s ending tomorrow. Timmy’s old enough to get the whole Christmas thing this year, and there is no way my baby’s holiday is getting spoiled by some demon who decided to throw his own holiday bash.”

  I bit back a sigh. I meant my words even if I wasn’t sure how to carry them out. But that was the nature of my life lately: question after question.

  Would my current husband win the election? Was my first husband wandering San Diablo in the body of another man? Would I finish my Christmas shopping in time? Would we ever get around to buying a Christmas tree or hanging Christmas lights? Would my daughter survive her first heartbreak and at the hand of a demon-serving te
enage thug? The usual stuff.

  I could handle some uncertainty. I mean, that’s life, right? But there was one question I intended to see answered only in the affirmative: Would we stop Asmodeus and prevent the release of the Tartarus demons? The answer had to be yes.

  And the sooner the better.

  Because Eddie And Father Ben plowed through so much of the food, we ended up needing only about half of the Tupperware that Laura had set out. Even after Ben left, Eddie was still working on the dessert (a truly yummy peach cobbler that Laura swore she could teach me how to make).

  Laura and I ended up drinking coffee in the living room, trying to get our minds off the demon/Eric/Paul thing by watching The Bishop’s Wife.

  “I don’t know,” Laura said as the end credits rolled. “I just like Cary Grant so much better. David Niven’s so clueless. And Cary obviously loves her so much. And she loves him . . .”

  “But Cary’s an angel,” I pointed out.

  “The wedding would be a little unorthodox, sure . . .”

  That reminded me of the nephalim. “Did I ever tell you why the demons were put into Tartarus in the first place?”

  She made a face. “We’re back on demons?”

  I waved a hand. “This is interesting,” I said. “In a sick and disgusting sort of way.” I filled her in on what Father Ben had told me a few days before.

  “So, these demons looked like humans? And then they slept with women to make them pregnant with these super nephalim babies?”

  “Pretty much,” I said. “Although, I guess technically they were still angels when they did it. That’s why they got booted.”

  “Angels or demons,” she said, “the whole thing is icky.”

  I laughed. “And on that note . . .” I stood up. “I’m exhausted. You want me to walk you back to your place?”

  “I feel like a six-year-old, but yeah. I do.”

  I grabbed my purse and shoved an ice pick in my back pocket. Just in case. When we got to the back door, though, I stopped cold. The dead bolt already was turned.

  What the hell?

  I grabbed the doorknob and turned slowly. The latch gave, and I pushed the door open easily. The alarm didn’t beep to signal a breech, and I paused, suddenly fearful. Then I checked the keypad, and relaxed. Stuart had disabled that feature earlier since we had so many people coming and going tonight. After Troy’s no-show, he must have forgotten to reset.