Demon 04 - Deja Demon (28 page)

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Authors: Julie Kenner

BOOK: Demon 04 - Deja Demon
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“Um, no,” she said, clearly covering for her dad. “I mean, nothing specific. Just that he liked hanging with me at the carnival.”
Secrets.
I took a sip of my coffee and looked at my daughter’s face. Years ago, I could read every emotion. Now she was keeping secrets and I no longer knew the language of her eyes, her smile. That loss made a little hollow part in my stomach, and what made it worse was knowing that the secrets had gotten bigger and more closely held since her father had returned.
His death had brought Allie and me close together, closer, I think, than a lot of moms and daughters. Now I feared that his return was driving us apart, and I wasn’t sure what to do about that. I didn’t want to lose my daughter. Didn’t want to lose the closeness and the relationship we’d once had.
And I didn’t want to resent David for taking that away from me.
Because the truth was, no matter how much I’d loved Eric, if I had to choose between husband and child, I would choose my kids, no doubt in my mind. With David, I’d brought him back.
I’d
made the choice and done the deed. And how painfully ironic would it be to find out that by giving my daughter back her father, I’d managed to push her away from me?
“So back to my question—now that you’re ungrounded and unencumbered by cheerleading obligations, what were you thinking about doing today?”
“I thought I’d hang with you,” she said, which had the immediate effect of soothing my tattered mommy ego.
“Yeah? Today is egg-stuffing day.”
“Oh.” Her expression was not one of overwhelming excitement.
“Not what you had in mind?”
“I was hoping for something more meaty. Like maybe training in the backyard with the crossbow?”
“Maybe later,” I said. “Somehow the middle of day doesn’t seem like the best choice for crossbow training.”
“We’ve done it before,” she protested.
“Yes, but I’m thinking that the backyard three hours before the hordes are supposed to descend on our house may not be the most prudent choice.”
She kicked back in her chair. “Whatever.”
“That was your only idea? Crossbows?”
“I could go to Cutter’s and spar,” she suggested, referring to our martial arts instructor. “You have to be in top-notch shape to be a Hunter. It’s really all about the reflexes,” she added seriously.
“Is that a fact?”
“Definitely,” she said, so seriously I had to look away to hide my smile. Apparently my assumption had been right: David and Allie had been deep in hunting-related conversations at the carnival.
“You’re right, of course,” I said. “But you can’t go to the studio today.”
“But Mom! That’s so totally unfair. I’m on break. It’s not like—”
“It’s closed, remember?”
“Oh.” She thought about that. “Right. I forgot. He’s in New York at some tournament. So what about me doing some research? I could help with that, right? I know Aunt Laura’s on the Internet and all, but would it hurt to have me looking, too?”
“For what?” I asked. “Zombie info?” I thought about my conversation with David—about how there must be something big brewing in San Diablo if a demon marked for death at my hand had decided to send his minions here to take care of me. “I’ve actually got a better idea. How about you look into—”
“The Sword of Caelum?” she asked, bouncing a little on the seat cushion. “If it’s really some über-cool tool that lets you whack out demons with a single blow, then I think we really need to be focusing on where it might be. I mean, maybe we’ll have to go to Rome. Or Argentina. Or, or,” she added excitedly, “maybe it’s frozen in a glacier. Like at the end of
Frankenstein
. I mean, that’s where folks send things they don’t want found in this world, right? And Abaddon obviously doesn’t know it’s lost if he’s worried about you having it. So if we figured out where it had been hidden, we could—”
“Allie!” I said, holding up a hand to cut her off. “Slow down there, kid.”
She looked up at me with wide, eager eyes, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that her biological father was now in So. Much. Trouble.
“Mom?”
“Sure, honey. You go ahead and research the sword. You find anything interesting—anything at all—you let me know.”
“Will do,” she said, standing up and firing off a little salute. She looked so full of purpose and importance I couldn’t help but smile, not to mention feel a little guilty for not already suggesting she get busy on the research. I also made a mental note to run up into the attic and get some of my old
Forza
mission reports out of my hunting trunk. Even if they didn’t help with her research, I knew they’d be the kind of thing Allie would like to read through.
She grabbed my computer and headed for the stairs, pausing only once to look back at me. “Mom?”
“Hmm?”
“How come you didn’t tell me? What the demon in the backyard said, I mean.”
A dozen lies flitted through my head, but I ended up landing on the truth. “Because I didn’t want you to worry about me, baby.”
“But Mom,” she said, with the slightest hint of a shadow in her eyes. “I do that anyway.”

 

Fourteen
When I was fifteen,
Eric and I found a demon’s lair and stopped the creature from becoming both corporeal and invincible.
When I was sixteen, I located a nest of vampires in Prague and took them out with the help of a local schoolteacher and a handy-dandy blowtorch.
When I was nineteen, I heard rumors that a succubus was preying on Swiss men. Eric and I investigated, took the bitch out, and still had time to ski the Alps before reporting for duty back at the Vatican the next Monday.
With a résumé like that, you might think that I could tackle any task, handle any emergency, totally hold it together in a time of crisis.
Apparently not. Because this damn bunny fiasco had pretty much put me under the table.
“No, no, no,” I said into the phone, enunciating as clearly as possible. “It really needs to be a bunny. Who’s ever heard of the Easter chicken?”
“Makes sense to me,” the guy at the other end of the phone said. “Ya got eggs, doncha? So why wouldn’t you have a chicken?”
I extricated myself from that conversation as quickly as possible, then immediately dialed Laura. Not for moral support. Not for suggestions. But for that most basic of primal needs—
whining
.
“It will all work out,” she assured me. “Honest. These things always do.”
“
How
? How do they work out? Timmy is convinced this party is all about him, I have a swarm of women descending on my house in three hours, demons are trying to kill me— which wouldn’t be unusual except that they now have zombie cohorts, and unless I think of a solution fast, the kids are going to be getting baskets for the egg hunt handed to them by Freddy the Easter Chicken. Honest, Laura, I really don’t see it getting better any time soon.”
“Stuart,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Stuart is the answer to your prayers.”
I held the phone away from my head and stared at it, as if somehow she would be able to sense my disbelief through the phone wires. “I love the man, don’t get me wrong. And there have been times when I’ve thought that very thing. But if you think that Stuart is going to step up to the plate and spend hours on the phone locating an Easter Bunny for me, then you obviously haven’t been spending time with the same man I married.”
“Not finding,” Laura said. “
Being
.”
“Huh?”
“A costume, Kate.”
“There are no costumes. There are no actors. There is a complete moratorium in the world on bunnies.” I could hear my voice rising to a hysterical pitch. Zombie parts on my kitchen floor, no big deal. But toss me into a domestic crisis, and you’d think the world was coming to an end. Clearly, I needed to get a grip.
“Just leave it to me,” she said.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Nope, totally serious. You concentrate on saving the world. I’ll concentrate on the bunny suit. It’s my little contribution to the fate of humanity. Besides,” she added wryly, “with Mindy gone, the house is empty, and I’m all alone with my soon-to-be-divorced thoughts. Trust me. It’s better that I keep myself occupied.”
“Fair enough,” I said, because I’d be a fool to say anything else. “But what exactly are you planning?”
“You’ll see,” she said, and as she did, I was almost positive I heard a smile in her voice. And for some reason, that—more than demons, more than zombies, more than freaky mystical swords—made me very, very nervous.
Three hours later,
I was on the floor in the playroom letting Timmy use me as a highway for his trucks when I heard a pounding on the back door. I left the kiddo to his trucks and his Duplo blocks, stuck my head in Allie’s room and asked her to keep an eye on her brother, then trotted down the stairs to find my soon-to-be-no-longer best friend standing at the door clutching an in-progress bunny costume.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said, holding up her free hand. “You don’t have to wear it. You just have to try it on so that I can make adjustments.”
“I’m not even close to Stuart’s size,” I protested, as she had me pull on the pants she’d pinned together out of fuzzy gray material. “How’d you do this so fast, anyway?”
“Honey, while you were gallivanting around the streets of Rome, some of us were forced to learn how to sew and cook. I may not be a total domestic goddess, but I’ve been making Mindy’s Halloween costumes for the last thirteen years.”
“But it’s only been three hours.”
She waved a hand, indicating that was nothing. “Please. Do you know how many times Mindy changed her mind about her costume at the last minute? If I can turn a princess into a penguin in one afternoon, I think I can manage to pull together a rabbit costume from a pattern in three hours.”
She had a point. And although I’d done the same for Allie, our situations weren’t exactly equivalent. When my six-year-old daughter decided that she didn’t want to be a princess but instead wanted to be an octopus, I convinced her that because it was Halloween, she needed to be the ghost of an octopus. One white sheet, two holes, and a few snips of the scissors to make eight tentacles, and I was done.
And that’s about as domestic as my personal goddess ever gets.
“Okay,” Laura said, inserting another pin. “I think this is good. Now I need you to put on the top. I’m just checking the shape,” she added when I protested.
I wasn’t at all convinced, but I trusted her, then shimmied into the getup, careful to avoid the pins. Essentially, I was wearing a big gray hoodie. Later, I assumed, she’d add the ears, the cotton tail, and whatever other accoutrements this season’s fashionable Easter Bunny was wearing. At the moment, though, I looked like something Kabit coughed up, big and gray and slightly fuzzy.
Naturally, the doorbell rang.
“Don’t move. I’ll get it.”
Laura disappeared into my entrance hall, then returned almost immediately trailed by Marissa Cartwright and her hyperspoiled daughter Danielle. Behind them came Fran, her daughter Elena, and Betsy Muldrow from two streets over. Not the entire gang, but a darn good start.
“We’ll be starting in the kitchen, of course,” Marissa said, giving me a look that suggested that if I dared to argue, I was stupider than I looked. And considering I was wearing a bunny suit, I imagined I looked pretty stupid.
“Where else?” I said, my smile so forced it hurt.
A loud guffaw sounded from the top of the stairs and I looked up to see Eddie staring at my outfit.
“It’s a costume,” I said. “Not an evening formal.”
“I ain’t saying a word,” he said, clomping down the stairs. He took a look around at all the women. “You girls working on that Easter party today?”
"Want to help?”
“Rather stick pins in my eyes,” he said, a sentiment I understood completely. He turned around and headed back up the stairs, exactly the way he’d come, muttering something about his room, cable, and escaping a tornado of estrogen.
I watched him go, wondering how painfully he’d kill me if I sent all the kids upstairs to the playroom and then begged him to help Allie with child care.
Probably very, very painfully.
A timid knock sounded at the front door and I turned, momentarily distracted from my thoughts of tormenting Eddie. “Hello?” I peered into the foyer, saw Wanda Abernathy, and waved at her to come in.
“Lovely outfit, dear,” she said sincerely.
“Thanks.” I turned away and rolled my eyes at Laura. Apparently my fragile neighbor was now a comedian. “Are you on the committee?”
Wanda blinked at me. “Committee? Where do I sign up?”
“Never mind. I’ll take care of it for you.” I took her hand and led her to the living room. She might be a character, but she’d just saved Eddie’s butt and he didn’t even know it. Plus, the neighborhood kids loved her, primarily because she would sit on her front porch and wave to every child who passed, whether taking his first steps or zipping by on a souped-up skateboard.

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