by Kiki Howell
“I knew I shouldn’t have hired her,” he said, now working at the fastenings of his pants. “I should have realized he was lying.”
“Not exactly lying,” Nicholas said, his gaze still following Andrew’s every movement. “He’s trying to convince himself, too.”
He curled an arm back behind his head; his other hand was under the sheet, and while Andrew couldn’t see it, he could see the sheet move with each slow slide of fingers. His mind was still too preoccupied for sex, but his cock didn’t seem to care. It twitched in the confines of his boxers. Andrew knew Nicholas wasn’t wearing any of those under that sheet. He had stopped wearing anything to bed at about the same time Jacob had learned to knock and wait for an invitation before entering a room.
Taking his pajamas into the en suite bathroom, Andrew stepped into the shower and tried to tell himself again why hiring Kirsten had been a good decision. The agency had needed a magic user ever since Julie and Craig had left town seven months earlier. Andrew had reached out to Julie’s students, he’d also asked her to send a message through the network of mages she belonged to. But these days, few people wanted to move to a town where demons were sighted so regularly. On top of that, qualified mages were in high demand all over the country, so they had their pick of where they wanted to work—and for whom.
Two months earlier, Andrew had thought he had finally found the right person. The mage, a young man just a little older than Jacob, had been enthusiastic the first week, focused the second, depressed the third. He had never bothered showing up to get his things back after he had summarily announced he was quitting. Andrew understood that the job was a hard one, and with little result, night after night, it could be soul-crushing. But he also knew he needed a mage.
All around the world, scientists, mages, and armies were trying to figure out why demons had suddenly started appearing, and more importantly, how to stop them. Andrew knew the answer to the first of these questions, and he suspected it was also the answer to the second: magic. A magic spell had brought the demons to this world—the same spell that had made his son’s existence possible. Nothing but magic would close the door, so to speak.
Andrew still couldn’t make himself do it, though. He still couldn’t show to a mage the diaries Jacob’s mother had kept about her magic. He knew Cara—and himself, by extension—were responsible. He didn’t need to hear it confirmed. And he didn’t want Jacob’s sheer existence to be placed in jeopardy by a spell meant to repel the demons.
As he turned off the water, he made the conscious effort to push away those thoughts. They would soon see how well Kirsten did, and if she was even suited for the job. And in the meantime...
He was still toweling his hair dry when he stepped out of the bathroom. He picked up his conversation with Nicholas where he had left it.
“Did he ever tell you what happened?” he asked. “With Kirsten, I mean. How they broke up.”
Nicholas eyed Andrew’s pajamas pants and sighed.
“No,” he muttered. “And if he hasn’t told us in the past three years, he’s not going to now.”
“Think we should pry?” Andrew asked.
Nicholas’ answer was emphatic.
“No. If he wants to talk, he knows we’re here for him.”
Drawing the sheet aside, Andrew slipped into bed. “I meant, we could ask her.”
But Nicholas’ mouth was already too busy to offer an answer.
Chapter Two
IT FELT ODD to be back to town after being away for so long. It felt even stranger to be back in Jacob’s house, not as a guest and girlfriend like Kirsten had once been, but as an employee and friend. Or at least, she was hoping she and Jacob would be friends. He’d seemed okay with the idea when she had voiced it the previous day, but the whole thing still felt awkward. Part of her wished there had been another place for her. She had known, though, from her first dabbling with magic, that this was where she’d end up.
“It was the best thing to do,” she murmured, a phrase that had become her mantra in the past three years—and immediately regretted her words. She looked behind her, checking that no one was there. She’d have to be more careful with her habit of talking to herself. In this house, sharp ears would catch every word she said aloud.
Returning to her work, she continued to inventory the books that covered an entire wall in her new office. A few were about vampires, but most were magic books. Kirsten remembered the first time she had entered this room. It had been during her junior year that she had asked Julie about magic—three years after she had first noticed that something about herself might be different. Julie had tested her, in this very room, and been very cautious when she delivered the news that yes, Kirsten was able to do magic.
“That doesn’t mean you have to do anything about it,” she’d continued, sotto voce, after closing her office door. “Doing magic can sound fun, but once you start you sometimes find yourself caught in situations you might not enjoy all that much.”
That she was unhappy at the agency was a secret she had kept to herself, but when Kirsten gently prodded, Julie had explained.
“I always wanted to use my magic to help people. That’s why I joined a Special Enforcer agency. But we’re dealing more with demons than vampires these days, and there’s little I can do to help with that.”
She hadn’t added that she didn’t like watching her husband, Craig, get hurt in those fights. She hadn’t needed to.
Julie’s little speech had had the opposite effect she intended. Kirsten had known even then that Jacob was planning to join the fight after he graduated. At the time, she couldn’t imagine anything better than to work alongside him. And now...
A knock against the open door startled her out of her thoughts, and she barely missed dropping the book she had been browsing through. Bound in old leather, the delicate pages probably wouldn’t have escaped a fall unscathed. She carefully set the book back on the shelf and turned to her visitor.
Andrew had told her the agency employed two Special Enforcers other than Jacob. She had met Vinnie already, a large, muscled man that was what most people had to imagine when they thought of demon fighters. He had shaken her hand almost delicately, as though afraid to hurt her. The woman now standing at the entrance of the room had to be the other new hire Andrew had told Kirsten about.
“Are women strong enough to fight demons?” Kirsten had asked him, surprised. “Demons are so much taller and stronger than humans...”
“But they’re slower,” Andrew had explained. “We fight in pairs or trios. In that situation, strength is not as important as technique or agility.”
Stepping to the woman, Kirsten offered her a smile and her hand.
“Hi. You’re Rachel, right? I’m Kirsten.”
Rachel smiled back and shook Kirsten’s hand firmly but warmly. She was taller than Kirsten, although that might have been due to the fact that Kirsten wore flat Converse shoes while Rachel wore combat boots with thick soles. She was dressed in black jeans and a tight tee-shirt, and her hair, set in a long braid, rested on her shoulder.
“Nice to meet you,” Rachel said, and her smile widened a little more. “And even nicer to have another girl here.”
Kirsten chuckled. “If you don’t like working with men, I think you might have picked the wrong job.”
“Oh, it’s not that! Just the opposite. There’s too many good looking men around here. I never know where to look.”
She winked as she finished. Kirsten struggled to keep her grin in place.
“Sometimes,” Rachel continued, stepping inside the office and dropping her voice to a whisper, “I don’t know who’s more attractive, the fathers or the son. What do you think?”
Mostly, Kirsten thought that this wasn’t a topic she felt comfortable discussing, especially when she didn’t know if fathers and son, as Rachel called them, were anywhere close enough to hear them even if they whispered. She stepped behind her desk and picked one of the books from her personal collect
ion. She set it on a shelf she had emptied and chose her words carefully.
“I’ve known all of them since I was a teen, so for me Andrew and Nicholas are firmly in the ‘old enough to be my dad’ category, regardless of the way they look.”
“And Jacob?” Rachel insisted, with enough forced casualness in the words that Kirsten knew she was very interested in the answer.
Before Kirsten could decide how much she wanted to reveal—after all, she had just met Rachel, and she didn’t know yet if they’d be friends or simply co-workers—a third voice intruded. Kirsten’s heart jumped painfully inside her chest.
“Talking about me? Should I be worried?”
Jacob appeared past the open door. He leaned against the doorjamb, his arms crossed and a smile firmly set on his face. He seemed to be trying as hard as the previous day to look casual—and failing just as miserably.
“I was telling Rachel we went to high school together,” Kirsten said, because ‘Rachel was asking me if I think you’re hot’ would not have helped anything.
A shadow crossed Jacob’s face.
“It seems like a lifetime ago,” he said after a beat. “Doesn’t it?”
Kirsten nodded. It broke her heart that he was trying so hard. She doubted someone else might notice, but to her, his pain was obvious. She’d once prided herself at how well she could decipher his emotions from his expressions. Now, it didn’t help anything.
“A lifetime,” she repeated. And truly, a lot had happened in the past few years. They’d both grown a lot, learned a lot, and changed. Maybe they hadn’t changed enough, though.
“Rachel?” Jacob’s gaze turned to the other woman in the room. “Time to spar?”
Rachel was beaming as she sauntered out after him. Kirsten stepped over to the doorway and watched them go together. Shaking her head, she pulled her mind away from Jacob and went back to work.
AS HE TOOK POSITION, shifting his bare feet on the mat, Jacob carefully observed Rachel’s stance but found nothing to criticize. Unlike him, she was wearing heavy shoes, the same that had been standard at the Academy. She’d asked, the first time they had trained together, why he was barefoot; he hadn’t been able to give her an answer.
He knew he ought to wear shoes when he trained, and mimic the conditions in which he fought as closely as possible. Thinking back to her question, however, he had realized that this was how he had always sparred, from the first time when wielding a foam sword against Nicholas had been nothing more than a game. These days, it was anything but.
“Am I supposed to attack first today?” she asked when a few moments had passed and Jacob still hadn’t moved.
She didn’t wait for his answer. Three steps took her to him, her training sword rising over her shoulder and quickly slashing down toward him.
Jacob cursed his inattention and parried at the last second, twisting his wrist in a position that was less than comfortable. Rachel pushed once against his sword before pulling back.
“You had me at a disadvantage,” Jacob pointed out. “Don’t break away when that happens. Push forward.”
Rachel snorted and attacked again. This time, Jacob was ready and their swords clashed back and forth as they stepped around each other.
“Yeah, because... getting you hurt... is definitely gonna help us fight demons.”
Jacob grinned. He feinted left, plunged right, and stabbed his sword forward until the point was pressed against her ribs. He stilled, waiting for her to nod and acknowledge he had won that round, and moved back again.
“I heal fast. The whole point is for you to learn to play dirty. Don’t hesitate. Demons won’t.”
She must have taken his words to heart because she didn’t wait for him to finish or get into position before she attacked again. For a few minutes, the only sounds in the training room were those of the swords clashing together and their breathing, increasingly faster but controlled.
When they broke apart again, Jacob offered her a tight smile.
“You’re getting a lot better.”
She beamed at him, raising a hand to her face to tuck a lock of hair that had escaped her braid back behind her ear. Her eyes gleamed with satisfaction.
“You’re a better teacher than the trainers at the Academy,” she said. “I learned more in two weeks of sparring with you than two years of training there.”
Jacob nodded, not at her assessment of his skills but at her description of Academy training. It was sufficient for Special Enforcers who intended to fight by killing vampires, most of whom were young and inexperienced fighters. Confronting demons, however, was an entirely different thing.
“That's pretty much why my father won’t let SEs go straight to battle anymore,” he said, walking over to the bench to pick up his water bottle. “I told him what my training was like and he wasn’t particularly impressed.”
Rachel had followed him and she drank too, almost emptying her bottle. The image on the side of the clear plastic, She Ra with her sword raised above her head, was old and faded but it never ceased to amuse Jacob. Was this how Rachel saw herself?
“Can I ask you a question?” she asked, and at Jacob’s curious nod she continued. “Why did you become an S.E.? With the family you have, I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to learn to kill vampires.”
“Not vampires. Demons. I thought going to the Academy would round up my training.” He shrugged. “Clearly I overestimated the instructors’ skills. None of them would have lasted ten minutes against either of my dads.”
He tilted his head toward the center of the room to invite her to resume training. After another sip, she joined him. She wasn’t done asking questions, though.
“Did they train you? Your dads, I mean.”
They exchanged a few blows before Jacob answered.
“Yeah. Nicholas, at first. Andrew when I got older.”
It struck him, then. Years earlier, when Andrew had started to give Jacob formal lessons, Kirsten had been the only person Jacob had been able to tell about it.
Kirsten, whom Jacob had managed to lock out of his thoughts until that very moment.
Maybe keeping busy was the answer. Taking two steps back, he broke away from Rachel and pointed to her right leg.
“Try the same thing again,” he said, “but widen your stance a bit. You’ll be more grounded.”
She did as he suggested, they continued to spar, and Jacob, too, found firmer ground on which to stand.
WHEN HE CAME DOWNSTAIRS, Nicholas peeked into Kirsten’s office first, checking that she wasn’t there, before he entered Andrew’s office and closed the door behind him. Andrew glanced up for a second before returning his attention to the mounds of paper in front of him. Unfazed by this apparent lack of attention, Nicholas let himself drop into the armchair across from him.
“Did you hire her on purpose?”
Andrew frowned though he kept his eyes on his work.
“Who?” he asked absently. “Kirsten? You know I couldn’t find another mage.”
Nicholas clucked his tongue in annoyance.
“Not her. Rachel. Blonde, great smile, bouncy personality... just like Kirsten was.”
With a sigh, Andrew sat back in his chair, abandoning all pretense of working.
“Should I be worried you’re paying so much attention to my employee? My female employee?”
Snorting, Nicholas jumped to his feet and walked around the desk. He sat on the edge and crossed his arms as he looked down at Andrew.
“Don’t be ridiculous and answer the question.”
Andrew met his eyes, but for a long time he didn’t say anything. When he finally did, his words were no louder than a murmur.
“He’s been alone for a long time.”
Nicholas would have disputed that it hadn’t been that long; after all, the past three years had rushed by them, with more demon attacks than ever, and Jacob hadn’t had much time to date. Nicholas still couldn’t tell if Andrew was actively trying to do something about it or
if he hadn’t thought of the consequences.
“Is that a yes?” he insisted.
“I want him to be happy,” Andrew deflected again. “If that means helping him find someone else...”
He left the end of that sentence unvoiced, but Nicholas didn’t really need to hear it. He knew quite well that Andrew would do anything in his power to make sure his son was happy, and it didn’t matter that Jacob was an adult and more than able to take care of himself. Nicholas wanted him to be happy too, but he trusted that Jacob would find his own way—unless Andrew put obstacles on his path.
“So,” he said very slowly, “you put him, Kirsten and a possible replacement in the same building? And wait for what, fireworks? Did you think that one through?”
Andrew stood; he looked and smelled mildly angry, as though Nicholas had insulted him.
“As a matter of fact, I did.” He walked around Nicholas and toward the door as he said, “If he’s going to move on, he needs to confront what he felt for her. He says it’s over. Now he needs to accept that it is.”
Watching him walk out, Nicholas swallowed a sigh. Like father, like son; Andrew and Jacob could be just as stubborn, at times. And just as unwilling to see the truth even when it stared them in the face.
“What if it’s not over?” he asked the empty room.
Chapter Three
“SO WHEN DID you figure out your calling was to fight demons?”
They’d been running for half an hour, but Rachel’s voice remained level; she wasn’t even breathing all that hard. Jacob had always prided himself on his endurance, but he knew it was a gift from his genetic heritage and he only needed to maintain it. Rachel’s was all hard work and determination, and those were qualities as important to a fighter as his or her ability to keep fighting for a long time. He could admire that, and that was why in the past month he’d enjoyed running with her.
