Speed Demon

Table of Contents

DEMON ENVY
SPEED DEMON

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2008 by Erin McCarthy.

 

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PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley JAM trade paperback edition / November 2008
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lynn, Erin.
Speed demon / Erin Lynn.—Berkley JAM trade paperback ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Grounded for having used her mother’s minivan to close to demon portal, sixteen-year-old
Kenzie is grounded and must spend even more time with demon Levi, who informs her that when she
closed one portal she opened another and it is up to her to save the day—again.

eISBN : 978-1-440-60803-2

1. Demonology—Fiction. 2. Cats—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction.
5. Family life—Ohio—Fiction. 6. Ohio—Fiction. I. Title.
PZ7.L993Spe 2008
[Fic]—dc22
2008027328

Chapter One

You’d think I was the first sixteen-year-old ever to drive a minivan through the kitchen the way my parents were acting.

Seriously. It’s had to have happened before. Somewhere. Maybe. For reasons clearly not as good as mine.

But instead of credit—hello, I did save my family from being overrun by demons—I got yanked out of sleep. At seven a.m. on a Saturday. Does that sound even remotely fair to you?

Me neither.

But there was no denying that there was the most obnoxiously loud banging sounds coming from downstairs, jack-hammering straight into my head and making it absolutely impossible to sleep.

Yep. Reconstruction had started on the kitchen wall that imploded when I hit it with my mom’s van and closed the demon portal.

On a Saturday. At seven a.m.

Putting a pillow over my head didn’t help one flipping bit, and I knew that at eight my mother was going to wake me up to help her chaperone my little sister’s Daisy Girl Scout meeting (part of my punishment for the minivan through the wall), so it seemed futile to force sleep, anyway. The minute I got back into REM, she’d be ripping the blanket off my head.

Trying to talk and yawn at the same time as I shuffled down the stairs twenty minutes later, I pulled the hood of my sweat-shirt over my dark hair, the dyed pink tips sticking out and poking me in the mouth. “Why is this Girl Scout meeting so early?” I asked my mother, who was trying to fill the coffeepot from the bathroom sink. “Eight a.m. on a Saturday should be illegal.”

There were several strange and random men wandering around our kitchen, and the source of the banging became apparent when I saw one of them was knocking pieces of drywall out of the damaged wall. That seemed a little counterproductive. They were supposed to be fixing it, not destroying it even more. I shifted to the other side of the island, aware that I was still in pajama pants and that the one construction dude looked like he was on the short side of twenty. Big and brawny, he was staring at me.

I knew that look. It was the prologue to flirting and I so didn’t want to go there. He had shoulders wider than my bedroom door and hair that looked like it had suffered an accidental encounter with his electric saw. Not my type. Not even in the same genus, let alone species, as my preferred dating category.

The water to the kitchen had been shut off for the momentous start of Kitchen Wall Repair (this event was to repeat every day for the next three weeks), and it was making my mother more than a little edgy not to have easy access to her morning caffeine. There were vicious and impatient clanking sounds as she tried to maneuver the pot under the bathroom faucet to fill it.

“Kenzie, I really don’t want to hear it,” she snapped at me.

What? It was a simple question. No need to bite my head off. “You know you could just fill a glass then use that to fill the coffeemaker,” I pointed out.

She glared at me from the open bathroom door, my helpful hint obviously not appreciated. “Go make sure your sister is awake.”

I wanted to say something sarcastic, but didn’t dare. I was currently not my mother’s favorite person (see six-page itemized construction bill for Kitchen Wall Repair lying on my father’s desk), and I figured that I was going to have to just ride out the horror of being grounded in agonizing silence.

“And throw in a load of laundry when you come down!” she called after me as I stomped up the stairs to arouse my five-year-old sister from her beauty sleep so I could stand around and watch her and a pack of squealing friends twist yarn around Popsicle sticks. And my mother needed my help for that, why? Not exactly my idea of a happening time for a Saturday morning. Saturday is for sleeping. For shopping. For calling my boyfriend, Adam, and spending lots of time listening to him describe all the ways he adores me.

That sounded like a much better use of my time, but the problem was, given that parents were parents, I couldn’t exactly announce that I saved them from demon servitude, so the end result was servitude for me. Also known as Being Grounded.

The anatomy of a Grounding for the offense of driving car through kitchen wall was as follows:

• No driver’s license until I was eighteen (whimper).
  
• No allowance for a year, to make up for the five-hundred-dollar deductible on crushed front end of minivan. (Dad said there was no way to make up for the cost of the kitchen and that instead of a two-hundred-guest wedding hosted by him in ten years, I would now have to hold my reception in our kitchen as it had cost the same as a wedding.)
  
• No going out with Adam unsupervised. (Like I was going to agree to supervision? Please.) Though he was allowed to come over in two-hour blocks.
  
• No going out in any capacity for four weeks. (Think of all the movies and parties that would sail by without me. Tragic.)
  
• Saturday servitude for three months. (Do anything my mother or father demanded which so far had involved lots of laundry, dishes, and now assisting Daisy Troop 1347.)
  

Like I knew anything about corralling a group of five-year-olds. But I could play along. Technically, if I wanted to be rational about it, it was sort of almost a fair grounding. I guess I wouldn’t be thrilled if my kid took out the kitchen wall either, though I’m not sure that I would be so utterly cruel as to deny her a driver’s license for eighteen months. The loss of a future wedding reception didn’t really bother me—I could slap on a pair of jeans with a white dress and have a rockin’ wedding in the park if I ever decided I was going to actually take that step. And I could wiggle around the no-dating-Adam thing if they dragged that out for too long. Cleaning the house, okay, fine, whatever.

But the driver’s license? That hurt. What, like they’d never had a fender bender? And of course I was stuck accepting all consequences, sucky as they may be, because I couldn’t exactly explain to my mother that not only had I driven the minivan through the kitchen, I had in fact
meant
to do it. My parents would be calling up the Horizons Psychological Center and admitting me if I said that I had driven the car into the wall to close a demon portal that had opened in my shower when I dropped my acne meds down the drain.

Parents tend to be a little reactionary about things like premarital sex, recreational drugs, and demonic activity. It wouldn’t matter that I wasn’t doing the first two, they would hone in on my paranormal problem and pack me off to psych prison.

No thanks on that. I had plans for the rest of the fall and they didn’t include a fashion-forward snap-up hospital gown and Dixie cups filled with a rainbow of pills.

So the demon thing was a secret, and it would have been really easy to pretend that it had never happened, despite the reconstruction on the kitchen wall, if the source of all my original problems wasn’t living in my house and currently strolling out of the room he shared with my brother, Brandon.

“Morning, K,” Levi said, looking wide-awake and cheerful.

Demons shouldn’t be chipper. It should be a rule. Or maybe just my rule. Rule Number 1: Levi must never be perky in my presence. I needed to work on enforcing that.

“Hey.” Morning never made me feel wide-awake and pleasant on a good day, and at the moment I was feeling doubly bitter.

“What has you so bent?” he asked.

“Nothing.” There was no point in explaining it to Levi, because he didn’t have to live under the same restrictions I did. He had no parents, an obscenely easy class load at school, a driver’s license, and the demonic ability to coax people to do what he wanted. What did he know about being Kenzie Sutcliffe? Nothing. Exactly. That would be correct.

Do I sound a little whiny? I try not to be, but you know, sometimes you just can’t help feeling seriously sorry for yourself, like when you try on bathing suits or when you get dumped or when your best friend is suddenly hot and heavy with some random dude and you’re left in her dating dust. This was one of those days. I was just feeling like I’d gotten a bit of a raw deal.

“Okay, whatever,” he said, pretending to look hurt. “No reason to confide in me, your friend, who loves you like a sister.”

My raw deal was named Levi Athan.

Annoying from day one, he had appeared in my shower (I wasn’t in it at the time,
thank God
) and proceeded to become the new It guy at school, despite the fact that he was in fact a demon (but not a totally evil one) escaped from demon prison. Not that anyone knew any of that but me, which somehow made it all worse. Now I was stuck with him living in my house and having every girl crushing on him while I took the fall for closing the demon portal.