We ran, and ran, and ran. We ran around the high school track, then another five miles through the local neighborhood, took those five miles back, and then, after all of that, he made me do intervals with my hands over my head. No lie. I was out of breath, sweaty, and focused on putting one foot in front of the other, not asking questions.
“Ask me what you want to know,” Ovid said, breathing in and out like he hadn’t run ten miles at a seven-minute mile pace. I, on the other hand, was so out of breath that I couldn’t speak and held up my index finger to indicate I’d get to it in a moment. That’s when he decided I needed more core work, followed by knife throwing target practice. I couldn’t think at all. My feet hurt, as did my abs, my knees, and my lower back. I heaved up my lunch, which earned a pat on the back from Ovid.
“Finally! You’re giving it your all. About time.”
“Did my mom train like this?” I wheezed this question.
“She could run ten miles like it was nothing. Let’s go, cupcake. One more round of intervals, this time juggling three tomatoes. Don’t drop them.”
I did drop them, and the replacement tomatoes after that, and the onions, apples, and oranges. The grapes were a complete washout.
After three days of this, I rebelled. “Ovid, tell me about my mother. I’m not moving until you do.” I sat on the grass and made it clear that I wasn’t going anywhere. “Did you train my mom? Wait, that can’t be right. You aren’t old enough.”
“My father trained your mom, and then I trained with them.”
“Why aren’t you a Monster Hunter?”
“I get startled easy.”
“Huh?”
Ovid huffed a breath and turned to me, but his eyes were down, and he hesitated for several moments. Finally, he said, “I startle super easy. If we were walking down a hallway having a normal conversation and someone came up behind us, a friend even, and tapped me on the shoulder, I’d jump so high, I’d cling to the ceiling. I don’t have the personality for it.”
“I didn’t know this.” My mind was already whirling.
He shook his finger at me. “Don’t use this knowledge for evil, cupcake,” he snarled. I’d never seen him this angry. “I’ll crush you.” He squeezed his thumb and index finger to show me how flat I’d be. “I’ll annihilate you. Don’t forget, I’m in charge of your training, so anything you do will come back to haunt you.”
Chastised and respectful, not, I later taped an air horn to the bottom of his adjustable chair, and I planted grass seed in his spare pair of shoes. I’ve never, ever seen a man leap so far or heard one screech at such a decibel as when I dressed as a bear and jumped out from behind a wall, growling at the top of my lungs.
The best one was when I inserted chicken-flavored bouillon cubes into his shower head and cut off his hot water. A cold chicken soup shower is hilarious when it happens to someone else. Trust me.
“Fuuuuuuuucccccccck! Jess, what did you do this time? What is this? Why is my water yellow and freezing cold? Why do I smell like soup?”
I laughed until I couldn’t stand, but Ovid was done with me. He stomped out of the shower wrapped in two towels, dripping wet, leaving a gold puddle on the floor, which made me laugh all over again because I think pee is funny. He didn’t.
“That’s it. I quit!”
“What? No! You can’t quit. I was playing a prank. I didn’t mean anything by it.” I stood in front of him, my hands together in prayer. It never occurred to me that he’d react like that. I thought it was fun and games in the middle of hard training. He did not.
He got in my face. “What I’m training you for is serious, and you’re treating it like it’s a game. Do you not remember Pascal and how unprepared you were? Well, that freak is coming for you, and if you don’t value your life, I’m not spending any more time with you. You’re disrespectful, and on top of it, you don’t value Liam’s life either. Pascal isn’t going to stop with you.”
The problem was, I was still furious that no one had told me about my mother—he still hadn’t given me any real information—and playing practical jokes on Ovid was a way to get back at him for withholding information from me.
So, while he yelled, I froze in place, muscles straining to pummel him, to take him down a peg or two. I leaned in, pushing hard against him, and shouted. “I value my life and Liam’s, but you obviously don’t, you and your little team of church mice, because you never warned me about what my mother’s real job was. You let me go out into the world in complete ignorance! Pascal was looking for me, for my vulnerabilities, and he picked a good one alright—Liam! It’s Liam who has paid the price for your silence!”
Ovid yelled right back at me, not two inches from my face. “It wasn’t our choice!”
I shook my head hard, not believing him. “Bullshit! If it wasn’t your choice, whose was it?”
The air went out of him, and his voice lowered, his head hanging low. “It was your father’s. He didn’t want you to know, and we honored his wishes.”
My father was sitting in his easy chair, mind elsewhere, staring out into space. The television was on, but he wasn’t watching, and its flickering screen was the only light in the room. Seeing him like that forced me to take a few moments to calm down. I had veered into the driveway, leaving tire marks on the pavement, planning on flying up the stairs and demanding my father tell me the truth, but he was broken and I needed to respect that.
I stood in the hallway and took ten deep, cleansing breaths until my pulse slowed and my blood pressure decreased. I was still angry as hell.
“Dad?”
His face brightened. “Yes, honey?”
I had thought this through, how I was going to broach the subject with deliberate questions, taking time so as not to not hit him over the head with it. I’d first ask about how he was feeling, then ask if he could tell me more about my mother, offering him the chance to fess up. Maybe ask if she had any secrets, or if she might have left something behind for me that I didn’t know of yet. Step-by-step. Careful.
Utter fail.
“Dad, was Mom a Monster Hunter? Did she work for the Catholic Diocese, and is that what got her killed?”
As fast as his faced had brightened was as fast as it crumpled, and my father, the strongest man I knew, the man who ruled the house with a tip of his reading glasses, a perfect pocket square, and a shot of bourbon, broke down into tears.
This was not what I expected, and I rushed to his side to hold his hand. “Dad, I’m sorry I’m such a klutz at these kinds of things. I was going to approach the subject in a better way, but…well, I’m sorry I’ve hurt you.”
He took a handkerchief from his pocket. It was a soiled, crumpled ball, and my alarm rose several notches at the sight of it.
“How did you find out?” he asked, gulping down another sob.
“I had a run-in with Pascal and an imp named Zric. Ovid told me the rest.”
He popped up to his feet. “Ovid! Are you training? After all I have done to keep you away from them? Those Church zealots who think they are recreating the Knights Templar? The ones who got your mother killed, and probably you almost killed?”
“Uhhmmm…”
He stormed past me and paced the kitchen.
“I tried everything. Everything! Do something else, I said. Go into law, I said. But your mother had infiltrated your thinking by having you trained in gymnastics and martial arts. I was thrilled when you played softball, only to find that you thought the bat could make a fine weapon! When you told that to your mom and she laughed, I almost had a fit right then and there. How did they get their claws into you so quickly?”
“The Church?”
“Yes.”
“Uh, well, I think they’ve kept tabs on me for a while, and after Pascal accosted us…”
“Who’s us?”
“Me and Liam.”
My father whirled on me. “What did that sadistic vampire do to Liam?”
I swallowed. That’s all. I couldn’t br
ing myself to tell him the answer.
My father stepped back, hands to his mouth. “Oh no. He turned him? Have you killed Liam yet? That poor boy.”
I blew so hard my bangs flew up. “Dad, I have not killed Liam. We are working on a way to keep him connected to his humanity.”
My father let out a hollow laugh. “Just like your mother, always believing the monsters could be saved. There is no coming back from being a vampire, Jess. They’re the bane of human existence and need to be exterminated one-by-one.”
I clenched my fists, unclenched, clenched, struggled to find words. “Dad, I get that you are upset, but why didn’t you tell me the truth? Why was this kept from me my whole life? I deserved to know!”
“No, you didn’t! I wanted to keep you safe. I didn’t want you to get involved, but it seems I’ve failed. It was all for naught.” He collapsed into a kitchen chair, shoulders heaving with anger and sadness. “Once you’re in, you’re in, Jess. Your job will be to kill the most loathsome, beastly, depraved monsters on the planet, and that is all it will be. It won’t ever be anything else, and take a lesson from what happened to you, to your mom. You can’t have a family because you can’t risk their lives as well as yours. Think carefully, Jess.”
He leaned back in his chair, still breathing heavily but not crying. I sat at his feet, like I used to when I was a little girl, and put my head on his knee. “Tell me something about her, Dad. Please.”
My dad stared into the middle distance, his eyes unfocused and wet with unshed tears. He stayed like that for several minutes, and I waited next to him, letting him get lost in his own memories. Finally, he took a deep breath and spoke. His voice was different, a little softer, a bit slower, as if he’d decided that if he was going to talk about my mom, he wanted to take his time, stroll down memory lane, not race.
“Your mom was the toughest chick I’d ever met. I fell in love with her the moment I saw her. She was in an advanced math class, one I was barely passing, and she was arguing a point with a graduate assistant. She was so persistent, the grad student gave her the points for the problem, just to get rid of her. She was so fierce, so passionate. I couldn’t stay away. I asked her out, and we were dating for about a month when we encountered a spider the size of a car.”
“What? Really?” I asked.
He nodded, a small smile on his face. “Yup, some kind of gigantic spider species that was supposed to stay underground, but this one surfaced and discovered it liked people for breakfast. It looked like Shelob, from Tolkien, remember? I think Shelob was based on this species. Most damnable thing you’ve ever seen, or at least, I’d ever seen. I hid in the car like a baby while your mom faced off with it, holding, of all things, a broom. The broom was leaning against a wall where someone had left it, and she grabbed. In her hand, it became a weapon of arachnid destruction.”
Now I laughed.
“She tried to reason with it and get it to go back to its nest, but this thing was foul and had lost reason a while ago, if it ever had any. Your mom tried anyway, not wanting to kill it if she didn’t have to.”
He got misty-eyed, remembering the scene.
“Eventually, she knew she had to destroy it. She—I swear this is true—grabbed a rope she swiped from somewhere, lassoed the damn thing, and jumped on its back like she was riding a bucking bronco. She broke the broom into two jagged pieces and shoved both of them into the spider, right behind its eyes. That didn’t kill it, but it sure as hell blinded it. Your mom pulled on the rope until she flipped the screaming, flailing, blinded spider onto its back, tore one of the broom stakes out from behind the spider’s eyes, and slammed it into the creature’s abdomen. That did it. She placed a phone call and someone came out to clean up the mess.”
I stared at him, wishing I had heard this story before, rapt and proud of my mom.
“What happened next?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, looking down at me, “the cat was out of the bag then. She explained everything to me, told me she’d understand if I chose to leave, and waited for me run for the hills.”
“But you didn’t.”
He petted my hair. “No, sweetheart, I didn’t. I couldn’t. By that time, she was the center of my life. It’s hard though, knowing that your spouse, your best friend, put herself in danger every single day.”
“Like the police. Or firefighters.”
He cocked his head at that and appeared to consider it. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but yes, the difference being that I wasn’t afraid of a man with a gun, or an out-of-control fire. I was afraid of things I couldn’t even imagine. Things that I never knew existed. There was no place to focus my anxiety because she fought monsters out of fairy tales.”
He turned to me and placed his hand under my chin. “And, now, I have to worry about you, too.”
“You don’t have to worry about me, Dad. I’m careful.”
“That’s what your mom said, but something got her in the end. I knew that car accident was more than it seemed, but what was I going to say to the police? ‘Maybe it was an enormous spider?’ Not likely.”
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“Me too, pumpkin. Me too.”
Chapter Ten
The memories of my mom made me wonder what she’d do now if she were in my position. I sure wished she could tell me, but since she wasn’t, I was going to have to make do.
Whenever I heard the words “petrified wood,” I tried to imagine what could possibly scare wood so much that it was petrified. Fire, I guess. Axes. Woodpeckers. Tent caterpillars. Gypsy moths. Ewww…Japanese beetles.
Of course, I know that isn’t what petrified means, but my mind is an unusual place.
I weaved my way to the Gems and Minerals section, slowing down enough to admire the pretty, flashy stones as well as an actual moon rock in the middle of the exhibit. I wondered if you could even fence some of those jewels. Probably not.
The petrified wood turned out to be right next to the volcano section, where there were—Eureka!—volcanic rocks as well. I was in business. Add the water that Officer Bob was getting, and we had all the ingredients for the exorcism. Even if I couldn’t get the life-force balls from Zric, I could at least release the kitsune, and maybe the kappa.
I was reaching for a nice solid piece of wood when a gale wind gusted through and snatched it out of my hand. I turned in time to catch sight of the fox’s tails flipping around the corner. It moved roadrunner fast, char marks on the floor blistering with the friction of its speed.
“Fine, you can have that one,” I called. “I know you are being ordered around by that imp and can’t help but obey, but if you and Professor Noyoko join forces, we can free you both.”
I reached for a second piece, snatching at it with my left hand, holding the tomahawk in my right. I was ready this time, and as the fox zoomed past, I brought the blade down, cutting off two of the fox’s tails. Despite being a spirit fox, the tails were remarkably solid, a mixture of the fox spirit and the human body it inhabited. I jolted backward with the effort, recoiling with the force and speed I’d had to put into that move, and crashed into a display case of exotic diamonds and sapphires, as well as a separate display of peridot, amber, and some spectacular jade. Oops. At least the diamonds couldn’t break.
I held the tails, scrambled to my feet, snatched the last piece of petrified wood, and sprinted for the Asian artifact’s room. I dropped the tails next to the Buddha, the egg, and the cherry tree twig, waving to a confused Officer Bob as I did so. I ran back to the Gem and Mineral room to grab the volcanic rock…
And tripped on my way there, as the fox tackled my legs and snapped at my face while I hit the floor. I landed on my knees and heard a worrisome crack. I grabbed at the fox, trying to catch it around the waist, but was stopped by two slimy arms grabbing me from behind. Juro/Kappa had slithered his way in, by order of Zric, and the fish wrapped me with Juro’s arms, which were now part fin. The fox pulled on my sock with its teeth while the fish he
ld me fast, and I screamed bloody murder.
“Get OFFFFFFFFFFF!” I yelled. “I’m trying to help you!”
Officer Bob tobogganed into the room, arms outstretched. He grabbed Juro around the knees, but the man was so much fish by this time that Bob slid right off, cutting his hands on the top frill that had suddenly sprouted from the man’s back and thighs. Juro’s mustache straightened and lengthened, becoming whiskers.
“Hey!” I said. “You’re a catfish. Cool!”
I was so happy to have that question answered that I almost didn’t notice Zric, who appeared out of nowhere and dangled the life-force balls in my face while I struggled with the irony of being hooked by a fish. The fox, now missing two tails, glared at me from the floor where it held my big toe in its teeth. Officer Bob was nursing a bleeding hand, a black eye, and he might have been missing a tooth. I didn’t have time to look for sure.
Zric eyes gleamed red, and he held the balls high, flaunting them in my face. “I have control of the spirits,” he said. “They will do exactly as I say. I’m thinking of having the fox tear off your toes one-by-one while the kappa punctures your face repeatedly with its spines. Really hurt you head to toe.”
“How creative.” I caught the fox’s eye and once again noticed the prominent white patch on the fox’s red fur. “Hey, Spot, you don’t look like you want to tear off my toes, and I’m certain Professor Noyoko doesn’t want to taste human flesh, so what say you turn your clever mind to figuring out a way to get out of this.”
Spot grimaced and glanced at the glowing balls.
“Yeah,” I sighed. “I know.”
A shot rang out, which made me duck. The bullet ricocheted around the room, pinging artifacts, irreplaceable relics, and almost people, i.e., me. It sounded like a pinball game but ten times louder.
“Officer Bob! Don’t shoot!”
“Sorry, Mrs. Friedman, but I’m bleeding and can’t see out of one eye. My patience is gone.”
“Is it your gun hand that’s bleeding?”
The Devil's Been Busy Page 16