Bedeviled (9 page)

He reappeared in the alley an instant later with one arm wrapped around the throat of a furious Baranca demon.

“What’d you bring it
here
for?” Bezel shouted.

“Let me go; you have no right!” The demon disguised as a woman stabbed one of its high heels at Culhane’s shin.

Culhane sidestepped, ignored the pixie, tossed the demon to the trash-strewn asphalt and braced himself when the Baranca rolled quickly to its feet. It straightened its shirt, smoothed its slacks and sneered, “The woman is mine.”

“You’re wrong.” Culhane swept in low and fast, taking the demon’s legs out from under it. It hit hard, but swiped out one clawed hand at his face. He dodged the blow, slipped his knife from the scabbard and stabbed it down into the center of the demon’s chest. Then he blew a stream of gold-dusted air at the demon and stood back while it exploded with a shriek of outrage.

“Now I got demon dust all over my damn suit,” Bezel complained. “Did you have to kill it here?”

Culhane wasn’t looking at him, though. Instead his gaze was fixed on Maggie, still painting, unaware of what had just happened.

“Yeah.” Bezel shook his head in disgust. “You’re horny, and she’s oblivious. This is gonna work out great.”

Eileen hopped in the car that afternoon with bright eyes and an excited smile.

“Good day, huh?”

“The best.” The girl squirmed around in her seat, buckled her seat belt, then turned to face Maggie. “First, Grant sent me a note—”

“What’d it say?”

“Private, hello?”

Maggie didn’t like the pleased gleam in her niece’s eyes, but after the weekend it would be Nora’s problem again.
Please, God, let nothing else happen between now and the weekend.
Was that too much to ask?

“Anyway, that’s not the best part.”

“Okay . . .” Maggie steered her car into traffic and headed for home. Her hands on the still-ruined steering wheel looked as festive as the coming season. She really lived her work. She had white, red, green and blue paint splashes all the way up her arms and collecting into dried clumps under her nails. A quick glance into the rearview mirror told her that her face hadn’t come out much better. She had streaks of white paint in her hair, and the splashes of red paint on her cheeks made her look like she was crying blood. No wonder the barista at Starbucks had looked at her so oddly.

Sighing, she asked, “What else, then?”

“In study hall I went on the Internet to check on—”

“Excuse me?”

Dramatic sigh. “Please. They have so many child locks on the Internet connection, we can barely sign on.”

“Good to know. Yay, PTA.”
Hmm.
Child locks. Maybe that was a thought for their home computer. Maggie’d have to talk to Nora about that when she got back.
Please, God, let her come back soon.
Maggie had far too much going on in her life right now: gorgeous Faeries and dead demons and golden tornadoes and floating feet and . . .

“Earth to Aunt Maggie!”

“Huh? Oh. sorry.”

“
Anyway
,” Eileen said pointedly before continuing, “I looked up
Fae
and
Fenian warrior
and
Otherworld
and everything else I could think of, and there’s some really good stuff there.”

Biting her lip, Maggie knew she shouldn’t be encouraging Eileen to follow up on all of this weirdness. In fact, she should be pretending that none of it was happening. But on the other hand she could really use some information. “Did you print it out?”

“Duh.”

“Right. So what’s it say?”

“All kinds of things.” Eileen bent over, unzipped her backpack and rummaged inside for a minute. When she straightened up she had a stack of papers clutched in her hand. “I told my teacher it was for a report, so I guess I’ll have to write one.”

Since Eileen actually liked writing and was really good at it already, Maggie didn’t see how that would be a hardship.

As Eileen read, Maggie worked to concentrate on her driving. It wasn’t easy. While one corner of your brain was cataloging Faeries and pixies and banshees, of all things, another was watching out for pedestrians and cars driven by people who clearly got their licenses from mail-order catalogs. “Oh, for God’s sake, if you’re afraid to step on the gas stay home and call a cab!”

Eileen snorted but, when Maggie glared at her, went back to her reading. “So the Otherworld is where the Fae went when they left our world.”

“Then where exactly is this Otherworld?” She couldn’t believe she’d just asked that.

“It’s here—but not.”

“Ah.” Maggie nodded. “That’s clear.”

Eileen sighed. Was there anything more mortifying than having a kid take a patient tone with you? “It’s, like, on a different plane of existence.”

Maggie laughed as she pulled into a left-turn bay. “Now you sound like your mom.”

“I know, but maybe she’s right about this stuff. I mean, it would have to be here but not here or everyone would see Faeries, right? Not just us.”

“We didn’t . . .” Oh, what was the point? Eileen was too smart to try to fool. They’d both seen Culhane, and they both knew he was a little less—or more—than human. “What’s it say in there about Mab?” The light turned green and she turned into the grocery store parking lot.

“Mab is queen.” Eileen thumbed through her stack of papers, found the one she wanted and waved it like the Olympic torch. “Some people think she’s also this kind of Faery thing called Mara.”

“Huh?” Maggie stomped on the brake when a moron backed out of his parking place, apparently trusting in God to keep cars out of his way.

“It’s another name for Mab, I guess. It says that Mara is a kind of ‘malignant female wraith.’ ”

“That doesn’t sound good.” Maggie frowned and pulled into the now-empty parking spot.

“Really. Anyway, Mab is queen, and she, like . . . visits people when they’re sleeping and gives them nightmares.”

“Oh, very nice.”

“Yeah. Guess she gets bored or something. Anyway, women are in charge in Otherworld. It’s a completely matriarchal society, and the men are, like, second-class citizens, which isn’t good, really, but think about women being in charge.” She sighed. “I think it’s totally cool, because if women were in charge here, things would be totally better than they are now, and—”

“Revolution later, information now.”

Another sigh. “Okay.”

Maggie turned off the engine, opened her car door and said, “Talk and shop.”

Eileen followed her into the store and trailed behind as Maggie pushed a dark blue cart with a bad wheel. Over the
whacketa-whacketa
sound, Eileen continued.

“Mab’s been queen for, like, forever, and they say that she’s really powerful.”

Maggie tossed two boxes of Double Stuf Oreos into the cart and seriously considered a third.

“The Fae warriors—like Culhane,” Eileen explained, in case Maggie had forgotten about him, “fight the battles Mab wants them to, and spend most of their time protecting the other Fae.”

“From what?” Maggie asked, and grabbed a box of Cheerios.

“From demons, mostly. But there are bad Fae that have to be taken care of, too.”

“Bad Fae?” Maggie wondered which side of the coin Culhane fell on.

Eileen whipped through her stack of papers again. “Oh yeah. There’s all kinds of things in Otherworld. I told you about banshees and pooka, and there’re shape-shifters and demons and Gray men and dark men and demon brides—”

“I get it.” The wheel on the cart got louder as Maggie moved faster, and she got a couple of baleful looks from other shoppers, like
she
was the one making all the noise. She reached for a gallon jug of milk, since she’d clocked Culhane with the one at home, then headed for the butcher department. “Lots of creepy-crawlies in this Otherworld.”

Here, too,
her mind whispered, reminding her of the thing that had eaten Joe.

“Oh, they don’t stay in Otherworld,” Eileen said solemnly. “They come and go all the time. And they can make themselves look like us, so you don’t know if you’re talking to a Faery or a pixie—”

“Wasn’t Tinker Bell a pixie? I think I’d notice if I saw a fluttery thing about four inches tall. . . .”

“Okay, but—”

“Spaghetti for dinner?” Maggie picked up some hamburger and sweet sausage and tossed them into the cart. She had pasta at home, so she didn’t need more. Wheeling the cart toward produce, she was forced to stop when a man and his cart were blocking the aisle.
Men should not be allowed to grocery shop alone,
she told herself. They didn’t know the rules. Worse, they didn’t
care
about the rules.

Behind her, Eileen read, “ ‘Demons who kill members of the Fae capture their essence and use it to enhance their own strength. They must keep Faery dust in a recept ...’ ”

“Receptacle,” Maggie murmured, still waiting as the old guy in front of her studied bottles of salad dressing. “Excuse me . . .”

He ignored her.

“Receptacle. Right. ‘If Faery dust touches a demon, the demon’s destroyed.’ Ooh.”

Yeah. Ooh. Or ick.
The memory of the Joe-eating demon was still fresh in Maggie’s mind, and she really didn’t want to dredge it back up.

“Seriously?” Shaking her head, she spoke up just in case the old guy in front of her was deaf as well as rude. “Could you just move your cart to one side so I can—”

Slowly the man swiveled his head to look at her, and his eyes were narrowed slits of solid black in a time-worn, weathered face. Evil pumped from him in what felt like thick, dark syrup. Maggie jerked and instinctively tightened her grip on the cart handle. It snapped in two, and the old guy smiled at her.

Not a happy smile, either.

“Uh-oh.” Eileen sounded scared.

Maggie was, too. But her niece’s worried voice was enough to jolt her into action. Pulling the girl behind her, she stared at the demon shopper and said, “Get out of my way.”

“You reek of Fae power.” His voice was a sly whisper that scraped across her raw nerve endings like sandpaper. “I could take it from you.”

“You could try.”
Oh, good bluff.
Could he actually
hear
her knees rattling? She backed up, dragging her
whacketa-whacketa
cart and Eileen with her. Keeping her gaze fixed on the man she now knew was an enemy, she watched as his eyes changed from an inky black to a watery gray, and only then did she begin to draw an easy breath.

He couldn’t do anything to her here. In the middle of Albertsons? It wasn’t as if he could kill her and get away with it. People wouldn’t just announce, “Cleanup in aisle five” and let him go.

No, she was safe, and he knew it.

“Go on, then,” he told her, still smiling that weirdly chilling smile. “I’ll find you another day.”

“Bring it on,” she boasted, feeling the need to do a little intimidating of her own. “How do you think I got this power, huh? By watching one of your pals turn into dust bunnies, that’s how. So maybe you should think about that.”

His features creased into a worried frown, and Maggie felt a little better. Then she reached the end of the aisle and made a sharp right. “Screw the salad,” she told Eileen. “We’re going home.”

Chapter Five

B
y the following day Maggie was starting to get used to the whole power thing. Or maybe she was just delusional. She was still getting floaty at odd times, and she was strong enough that she had to remember to pick things up gently or all she was left with were shards of whatever she’d had before.

Her eyesight was now incredible, but her ears were starting to look a little pointy—so thank God her hair was long. But the best part so far? Faery power did a real number on her metabolism, so she could eat as much as she wanted without worrying about it. Apparently flying/floating really burned up the calories. And she was thinking about putting in a bid to paint the local law office’s windows. Those fifteen-footers had intimidated her before, but now no window was too high—as long as she painted when there was no one around. Finally: good news. She hadn’t seen Culhane in a while, but she didn’t know whether to classify that as good or bad.

Her hormones were disappointed, but Maggie wasn’t sure she agreed.

Dinner was over, and Maggie and Eileen did the dishes together. In the otherwise quiet house they listened to the wail of the wind as it swept in off the ocean and rattled the windowpanes. Outside, the night was thick, and as cold as it got on a Southern California winter evening. Inside, lamplight burned, and Eileen sat at the kitchen table to do her homework, much as her mother and Maggie had done when they were girls.

“I hate math.”

“Who doesn’t?” Maggie reached across, tapped her finger on Eileen’s paper and said, “You forgot to divide that fraction first.”

“How’d you know that? You don’t do math, either.”

“Some things you have to learn, whether you like it or not.”
Hmm.
Hadn’t she just told Culhane she wasn’t interested in his version of education? Maybe she’d been wrong about that. Remembering that guy in the grocery store, she told herself that maybe this training was something she’d just have to do—at least until she found a way out of this mess. After all, if she could deal with numbers, how hard could training be?

Eileen lifted her gaze. “Why do I need to know this? Isn’t that why people invented calculators?”

Maggie’d once wondered the same thing, but since opening her own business she’d found it helped to understand more about numbers than you found on a keypad. “Who do you think invented calculators?”

Eileen brightened. “Nerds?”

“Rich ones,” Maggie pointed out with a grin. “Understanding math made them rich.”

The girl blew out a single disgusted breath. “Fine, fine, but I’m going to be a writer, and we don’t need math.”

“Yeah? What about making sure people aren’t stealing from you? And counting all your royalties? Knowing how much of your money you need for taxes and living and saving? And what about retirement?”