Anthology.The.Mammoth.Book.of.Angels.And.Demons.2013.Paula.Guran (56 page)

If he reversed this one, they would have nothing to indict the killer on.

The boy’s breath hitched as he watched Kincaid. Kincaid turned and looked over his shoulder at the killer tied to the chair near the entrance. Holes the size of fists marred the drywall and made one perfect circle in the center of the cardboard model for a bacon-double cheeseburger. It would be enough.

He grabbed the body’s shoulders, feeling the grease of the uniform beneath his fingers. The spirit slid back in as if it had never left, and the wounds sealed themselves as they would on a videotape run backwards.

All those years. All those wasted years.

“How did you do that?” the pimply faced boy asked, his face shiny with tears.

“He was only stunned,” Kincaid said.

When he was done, he went outside to find the backup team interviewing witnesses, the ambulances just arriving, five minutes too late.

“All yours,” he said, before taking off into the sun-drenched crowded streets.

Now he had to keep moving. No jobs with police departments, no comfortable apartments. He had to stay one step ahead of a victim’s shock, one step ahead of the press who would someday catch wind of his ability. He couldn’t let them corner him, because the power was not his to control.

He was still trapped.

He stopped outside the Roosevelt, lit a cigarette, and peered into the plate glass. His own tennis shoes were stained red, and a long brown streak of drying blood marked his Levi’s. The cigarette had burned to a coal between his nicotine-stained fingers before he had a chance to take a drag, and he tossed it, stamping it out on the star of a celebrity whose name he didn’t recognize.

All those years and he never knew. The kiss made some kind of cosmic sense. Even Satan, the head of the fallen angels, was once beloved of God. Even Satan must have felt remorse at the pain he caused. He would never be accepted back into the fold, but he might use his powers to repair some of the pain he caused. Only he wouldn’t be able to alone, for each time he touched the earth, he would cause another death. What better to do, then, but to give healing power to a child, who would learn and grow into the role.

Kincaid’s hands were still shaking. The blood had crusted beneath his fingernails.

“I never asked for this!” he shouted, and people didn’t even turn as they passed on the street. Shouting crazies were common in Hollywood. He held his hands to the sky. “I never asked for this!”

Above him, angels flew like eagles, soaring and dipping and diving, never coming close enough to endanger the Earth. Their featureless faces radiated a kind of joy. And, although he would never admit it, he felt that joy too.

Although he would not slay the dragon, he wouldn’t have to live with its carnage either. Finally, at last, he could make some kind of difference. He let his hands fall to his side, and wondered if the Roosevelt would shirk at letting him wash the blood off inside. He was about to ask when a stray dog pushed its muzzle against his thigh.

“Ah, hell,” he said, looking down and recognizing the mottled fur, the wary yet trusting eyes. He glanced up, saw one angel hovering. A gift then, for finally understanding. He touched the dog on the back of its neck, and led it to the Olds. The dog jumped inside as if it knew the car. Kincaid sat for a moment, resting his shaking hands against the steering column.

A hooker knocked on the window. He thought he could smell the sweat and perfume through the rolled-up glass. Her cleavage was mottled, her cheap elastic top revealing the top edge of brown nipple.

He shook his head, then turned the ignition and grabbed the gearshift on the column to take the car out of park. The dog barked once, and he grinned at it, before driving home to get his things. This time he wouldn’t try Big Bear. This time he would go wherever the spirit led him.

Demons, Your Body, and You

Genevieve Valentine

Modern paranormal romance and urban fantasy often depict love and sexual activity with demons or angels. In these alternate fictional worlds, supernatural creatures and powers are part of a world that, otherwise, closely resembles our own. The romantic beings with whom humans get involved have little resemblance to traditional asexual angels or sexual (if not endearing) demons, but are fun twists on past lore and convention. Genevieve Valentine, however, takes a different look at the consequences of a teenage romance with a hot (pun intended) demon. Her story and its young protagonists entertain while introducing some very real social issues and commentary. Unlike many provocative novels of paranormal desire, this story provokes thought.

Between sophomore and junior years was the summer my parents sent me to the urban day camp, and Katie got impregnated by the demon.

My parents told me the day I came home, so that I would know why she might not be coming back to school.

Finally I managed, “How is she?”

“Feeling pretty badly about what she did, I imagine,” said my dad, like that had better be the case or else.

“Can I see her?”

“Sure,” said my dad. “But let’s wait a while, hey? You have a lot on your mind with school coming up.”

My mom nodded. “Now do you see why we sent you to that day camp?”

Only if she got pregnant on a school day while I was at a museum, I thought.

The way my parents had sounded, Katie would never have the disrespect to show her face after what had happened, but when I went out to the bus stop on the first day of school, there she was.

Katie and I weren’t close. We were just proximity friends; three houses down. (For Winter Ball freshmen year her mom had driven there and my dad had driven back, and we knew each other just well enough to be happy because my dad was less likely to take photos and her mom was less likely to shout the pickup time out the car window in front of everyone.)

I don’t know what I had expected Katie to look like now – maybe that she’d have the little horns coming out of her forehead or something. But she looked the same as last year, except for the circles under her eyes, and since we weren’t really friends I didn’t know what to say.

Finally I said helpfully, “You don’t look pregnant.”

She frowned, shrugged. “It might not be as accelerated as they tell you. Usually it takes, like, six months for a demon to gestate, and since it’s half-human, nobody knows.”

“Are you feeling okay?”

“I guess,” she said. “My dad’s talking to this coven. They’re going to try to summon him.”

I tried to imagine the magnitude of my embarrassment if my dad was tracking down some demon I had gone all the way with. “Are you okay?”

For a second Katie’s eyes welled up; then she looked down the street, gripping the straps of her book bag in both hands.

“We’re going to miss opening bell,” she said.

*    *    *   

By the end of lunch on the first day of school, this was what everyone knew:

– Katie was disgusting. (“How could she let that happen? What was she
thinking
?”)

– It was probably rape. (“Sure you can drink like a rock star if you want, but look what it gets you.”)

– There was no way it was rape. (“Do you know how much sex you have to have with a demon before he can get you pregnant? Forget it. That is a two-person pregnancy.”)

–The demon was hot. (“Like,
so
hot. You would have ripped his pants off, don’t even fool yourself. I’m proud of her for getting it when she could. Too bad that ship sails as soon as your ankles blow up.”)

– She had stopped coming to church. (“Just as well. What if she bursts into flames or something?”)

– She was looking swollen. (“I mean, she already has two chins. Poor thing.”)

What actually happened was, Katie sat all lunch period at one of the loser tables near the assembly stage, the tables that only had three chairs, and didn’t say a word.

Ms Parker began our first health studies class with a speech about abstinence.

She started reading from a binder labeled
YOUR BODY AND YOU
, but after a little while she got carried away and went off-book, looking very seriously at everyone in the room, one at a time, except Katie.

“It’s imperative that you use self-control,” she said, pointing at a projection of two teens holding hands. “Sexual feelings are perfectly normal, but you are simply too immature to handle the consequences. Your teenage years are no time to be thinking about getting some sex.”

Next to me, Cody Reese snickered.

“There’s just no way for you, at this age, to be ready for all the possible consequences once you’ve given in to sex,” Ms Parker said. “This is the best reason to practice abstinence
now
, before your hormones run away with you. Forewarned is forearmed.”

There was a pause as the class made an effort not to look at Katie.

“You have to be careful,” Ms Parker said, dropping her fist into her palm for emphasis. “Sex is a big commitment, and you never know what can go wrong. For example,” she said, both eyebrows up, “you can get pregnant the very first time you have sex.”

Cody went a little pale.

“For example,” Ms Parker said, “you can get pregnant even if you use a condom. Condoms break.”

“And demon sperm eats right through a condom,” Katie said. “For example.”

The whole class turned to look at her.

“Forewarned is forearmed,” she said.

Katie’s dad stopped by to ask Dad to help with the coven that was coming over.

“We don’t want you to worry,” Mr Banks said to my mom and me. “I mean, in case it looks unorthodox. Things will be fine.”

Behind him, three women in business casual were walking up his driveway.

“Of course,” said my mom, all sympathetic. “Good luck with the summoning.”

When they had gone we went back to the dinner table, and my mom said a lot of things like, “I hope it works out for the best,” and, “It must be so hard for them,” that were all Adult Code for, “Thank God my daughter’s not knocked up.”

If you looked out the window to Katie’s house, there were little flickers of light in the family room.

When my dad came home I was already in bed, and I crept down the hallway until I could hear what was going on downstairs.

“The summoning got so bad Tom and I had to hold her down,” my dad was saying, “but not a damn thing happened. If you ask me, that coven’s overcharging. Bunch of nonsense effects, and she’s still as pregnant as ever.”

“Well, that’s what happens,” said my mom, like it was all exactly what she figured if you brought some cut-rate coven into the house.

Even though the teachers had been told not to mention it, we heard a lot about fertilization and demons in the next couple of months.

I don’t know if it was because they were trying to prepare us for Katie’s pregnancy somehow, or they wanted to punish Katie for getting pregnant. I guess it was the kind of thing you couldn’t stop thinking about, and it was just weirder to see it coming from the grown-ups.

(“This week, let’s take a look at some of the religious history of the demon people,” said Mr Harris, the history teacher, and he gave Katie a look so disappointed that even Cody made a face.)

Other kids talked about Katie all the time, which was kind of awful but at least it was more honest than what the teachers were doing.

I kept hearing the report that the demon had been hot. No one had seen him, but it seemed to be the consensus, and Katie hadn’t contradicted it.

Sumati said that it didn’t matter how hot he was if he had gotten Katie pregnant and then just left her. She had a point, but he was a demon, so what did Katie expect?

(Everyone knew demons didn’t stick around. I guess. People seemed to know a lot about demons that I had never known, all of a sudden.)

We studied the mitosis of demon cells, and the history of human–demon relations, and the importance of self-control when it came to sex, until even I started feeling ashamed when I walked into school in the morning.

Katie must have lodged a complaint after the human/demon Punnett square worksheet in bio, because the assignment was reissued with sweet peas like usual.

But Cody was her lab partner, and he told everyone at our lunch table that Katie had done the demon Punnett anyway and just stared at the outcome.

“Turns out horns are a dominant trait,” he said, “and her kid’s chances do not look good.”

The doctor Katie had been seeing told her after ten weeks that he felt unsafe handling a fetus that would soon burst out of her stomach and devour her immortal soul in its ungodly crawl forth from her womb, so she texted me and asked me for a ride to Planned Parenthood.

When we got there, there were people in church T-shirts waving signs with fetuses on them, screaming and chanting.

“That’s my church,” Katie said when she saw them.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

Katie sat in the car for a long time before she took a deep breath, opened the door and got out.

The crowd looked over at us and started the screaming again, louder, but as they saw Katie, one by one, everybody stopped chanting.

There was a long, confused silence.

Even after Katie started forward (with me following her, trying to look intimidating), the crowd didn’t pick up the chanting again; they were looking at one another, baffled about what exactly to tell her to do.

By the time she opened the clinic door, two people in the crowd were arguing.

“But it’s a DEMON.”

“It’s still God’s creature!”

“By definition, that’s not true,” Katie called over her shoulder, and then we were inside.

The receptionist asked Katie if she wanted me to go in with her. She looked at me.

“Sure,” I said. I’d never seen a demon baby.

(Turns out it looks like a rolled-up shrimpy smudge, with tiny horns.)

She might have teared up a little during the sonogram. I looked really intently at the posters on the wall until we were alone.

“You going to keep it?” I asked, as she was getting dressed again.