A Line in the Sand

by K. A. Stewart

  My daughter’s room held no answers. Her stuffed animals were still scattered about the floor, and in the back of my mind I could hear Mira telling her to pick them up over and over. Her little sneakers were at the corner of her bed, and an absurd part of my mind was upset that she’d obviously left without them.

  The last place I could look was my own bedroom, and I was disappointed there as well. Nothing. No sign of my wife or my children, my dog, or my other bodyguard. Even knowing it was futile, I raised my voice again. “Mira! Anna! Billy!”

  Nonononono... I was drowning. There wasn’t enough air in the world, and I knew that my entire body was glowing like a beacon to heaven, my passengers ready to burn themselves to cinders to defend me, if they just had a target.

  Estéban appeared in my doorway, shaking his head. “Checked the yard and the garage. They’re not here. But Sveta’s weapons are gone.”

  I grasped at that tiny fact like the last molecule of oxygen in the world. Sveta was with them, and she was armed. The kid moved out of my way as I stalked back down the hallway. “Try her phone again, maybe—”

  “Jesse?” The voice came from the front of the house, maybe even outside, standing on my front porch. I didn’t really care at that moment. It was Mira’s voice.

  “Mir??” Rounding the corner, I could see her standing in the wreckage of our living room, peering into the gloom of our darkened home. Dropping my sword, I crossed the space in an instant, yanking her into my arms and crushing her tightly against me.

  “We’re okay,” was the first thing she said after I released her, but the smile she offered was tremulous at best. “We’re fine. The kids are across the street at Dixie’s.”

  “What happened?” Glancing over, I saw that Estéban had collected my sword, and was keeping a watch on the backdoor as best he could. Good boy.

  “Something came.” Mira shook her head, her green eyes dark against her pale skin. “I didn’t see what it was, but it was strong enough that it just blasted through the wards.” Her hand stroked our burned door jamb and came away black with soot. “Thank the goddess we weren’t here.”

  “I heard the door shatter, and you were still in the house.”

  Mira grimaced. “Uh, yeah… That might have been me. I was a little angry.”

  “Can we discuss this somewhere with lockable doors?” Estéban’s frown reminded me that I still wasn’t thinking clearly. I could feel the tremors starting in my fingers as the adrenaline rush faded, and the passenger souls receded back into their tattoos on my back.

  “Come on over to Dixie’s. We told her we thought we had a gas leak, and Sveta’s trying to keep her from calling the fire department.”

  I took my sword back from the kid with one hand and held tightly to my wife’s hand with my other. Estéban shadowed our steps as we crossed the street, holding his machete tight against his thigh to try to hide it from nosey neighbors. “Let her call them. The more people we get here, the less likely they are to come back, whoever or whatever it was.”

  As we stepped up on our neighbor’s porch, the kid asked, “So, why weren’t you in the house when it came?”

  “We were warned.”

  Mira pushed the door open as I asked “By whom?”

  A tall blond man stepped into the foyer as we entered, mumbling through a mouth full of something. “This is the best fucking cookie I’ve ever had.” Even muffled under cookie crumbs, he sounded like me. Exactly like me. It was creepy.

  “Language, Axel!” Mira snapped like chiding a demon was something she did every day, and Estéban and I just stared in amazement.

  The lanky demon just blinked and looked back and forth between the three of us. “What? They’re really good. I’m telling you, Jesse, I never would have screwed with her cat if I’d known.” Not so long ago, Axel had come to visit me by possessing Dixie’s over-sized orange tabby, dubbed Garfield. I’d persuaded the demon not to kill the animal, but Garfield hadn’t been quite the same since.

  “Deal with this,” Mira muttered to me, managing to push past Axel without actually touching him.

  The man-demon turned to watch her go for a moment, then shook his head. “You need to see about some anger management therapy for her. Did you see what she did to the door?”

  “Shut up. Just…shut up.” I grabbed him by one thin arm and dragged him into Dixie’s living room. Suddenly, we were surrounded by lace doilies, decorative kitten plates, and more lilac perfume than a person should use in a year. Estéban took up a post in the doorway, watching down the hallway. “What the hell just happened?”

  The man-demon calmly shoved another snickerdoodle into his mouth, whole, and munched thoughtfully. “Someone got ambitious. I heard about it in time to get your family out.”

  “Why?” Demons never did anything for free, and I’d paid dearly for the last favor I’d returned to this one.

  He raised a pierced brow at me. “You’d rather I let them die?”

  “I mean, what do you want?”

  “Can’t I just do something out of the goodness of my heart?” He did his best to give me an innocent look, but a smug grin twitched at the edges of his mouth.

  “No. As far as I know, you don’t actually have a heart.” Demons had bodies on this side of the divide, but they were made up of a substance I called blight. No organs, no bones, just a solid mass of toxic black goo that would wisp away as you sliced bits off.

  “Point.” Another cookie went in his mouth, and he rolled his eyes in ecstasy. “I’d swear she sold her soul to learn to make these, but the old bat still has hers. It’s crazy.”

  “I swear to god, I’m going to stab you in the face.”

  All hint of humor and human nature instantly drained out of the demon’s face, and his eyes flared red for a heartbeat. “Be careful, Jesse. I saved them, and I’ve asked nothing. Don’t try my patience.” Something sinister crept in behind that voice, speaking of rancid oil slicks and foul, sulfurous fumes. A demon’s voice, just in case I’d forgotten what this creature actually was.

  “Don’t.”

  Axel smirked. “That’s better.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you.” I jerked my chin toward the doorway behind him, and he turned to see Mira and the kid both standing there, spells hovering at the tip of their tongues. To my eyes, they both blazed with light, Esteban’s golden with tongues of red flame licking at the edges, while Mira’s was pale green blending to soft yellow at the center where a knot of deep swirling magenta waited.

  Axel was silent for a long moment, and I knew he was weighing his chances. He was the most powerful demon I’d ever seen, but the sight of my wife and protégé ready to blast him into the beyond gave him pause. “Well. I see how it is. See if I do you any favors again.” With a poof of wispy blight fog, he vanished into thin air, taking the handful of cookies with him.

  After a moment of tense silence, Estéban released the magic he was holding, and snorted. “I think we hurt his feelings.”

  “Like I give a fuck.” Mira let her own spell go, and I swore I could feel a soft breeze as the magic went wafting by me.

  “Language, Mira?” I raised a brow at her. She wasn’t prone to cursing (not like me, who cussed every other word if I wasn’t careful), and it spoke to how rattled the day’s events had left her.

  “Fuck you, too.” I could see her shaking, though, and I moved to draw her into my arms again, tucking her head under my chin.

  Estéban silently asked me a question, and I nodded him on into the house. “Go check on Sveta and the kids. Make sure Chunk isn’t chewing through anything.” I wasn’t sure that the dog wouldn’t try to eat his way into the house to get at Axel, even though the demon had departed. Dogs and demons were never the best of friends, which is why we had the giant Mastiff in the first place.

  “On it.” The young man vanished down the hallway.

  Mira and I stood in stillness for a long time, both of us waiting for the shakes to subside. I buried my face in her wealth of curl
y chestnut hair, breathing in her scent of strawberries with a hint of the cloves that came from her magic, and she wrapped her arms around my waist and squeezed as tightly as she could manage.

  Finally, she broke the silence first, her voice more than a little teary. “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Can’t do what, baby?” Looking down, I tilted her head up so I could see her eyes.

  “This. Any of this. The whole demons…souls…thing.” Tears clung to her lashes, but her green eyes were clear, serious. “We can’t go on like this. Our safety today depended on a creature that could just as easily been the one blasting through the front door.”

  “I know. I agree.” I traced the line of her jaw with my thumb, trying not to think about how I almost never got the chance to do that again. “I don’t know how to fix this, Mir.”

  “Find it. Find a way. Before we lose everything.”

  Outside, I could hear the plaintive wail of an emergency siren drawing ever closer. Someone had finally called the fire department. This time, they’d show up with nothing to do but search for a nonexistent gas leak and make sure my door wasn’t going to set the rest of the house on fire. The next time… There couldn’t be a next time. I couldn’t allow it.

  I hugged her tightly to me again. “I’ll figure it out. I swear.”

  Chapter 3

  The firemen clambered all over, under and through our house, and could find no evidence of a gas leak. We were strongly advised to call an inspector for a more thorough examination and stay elsewhere in the meantime, and of course I nodded and made all the appropriate noises until the nice men in their fancy red truck went away.

  Leaving Sveta with the kids and our very nosy, but well-intentioned neighbor, Mira and I set about cleaning up the mess, aided by Estéban. He held up the massive sheet of plywood as I nailed it over the gaping back door, grunting each time my hammer hit, and Mira went about collecting the shards of glass.

  “Maybe they’re right. Maybe you should go stay somewhere else.”

  Mira raised a brow at me as she stood up straight, stretching her sore muscles. The spell backlash had held off until her body had decided it was safe, and then she’d been wracked with nasty muscle spasms. We’d hunkered down in Dixie’s bathroom, my wife muffling her cries on a mouthful of bath towel while I tried to massage the worst of it out of her calves and feet. Given the sheer amount of power she had to have unleashed to shatter the door, we were lucky it hadn’t been worse. I’d watched a man nearly die from something very similar.

  “And where should we go?”

  “Bridget’s?” My wife’s best friend was a doctor, if nothing else. She didn’t know about demons and souls and champions and magic, but she could take care of my wife and children for me. That much I knew.

  “Bridget’s house isn’t warded.”

  “Neither is ours.” I gestured around flippantly, but in truth, the sudden absence of the spells I’d become so accustomed to over the years made my skin itch. My home no longer felt right, no longer felt familiar. Even worse was the question of just what was so powerful that it could negate so much magic. Axel himself had never tested the protective boundaries of my home, and there was only one thing I knew to be as strong, or stronger, than him. Reina.

  Only three months ago, I’d faced down with the fallen angel, absolutely willing to destroy the two hundred and seventy-five souls I carried with me just to save Estéban’s life. She’d retreated then, not because she was afraid of me, but because she was afraid that I’d go through with my threat, and thereby destroy the source of power she was so desperate to claim. She needed the souls intact, and that was the only reason any of us were still alive. If she’d managed to grab Mira or the kids, though… There was nothing I wouldn’t trade for them, and I had a feeling that everyone in the world knew it.

  Wisely, Estéban stayed out of our discussion, just moving as needed so I could hammer more nails into place. After a few moments, my wife sighed. “You’re probably right. At least until the doors get repaired. We can’t have Chunk running loose in the neighborhood.”

  “Keep him with you. He’ll be your first warning if something nasty shows up.” I nodded for Estéban to step back, and we surveyed our handiwork. It’d do, for now. The kid took the broom and dustpan away from Mira and set about finishing the floor.

  “I get the feeling you’re not coming.” She leaned her hip against the counter, fixing me with an unflinching gaze.

  “You know I can’t.” I sighed, running a hand through my hair, absently noting how long it had gotten again. “I’m a danger to you all so long as I’m not alone in here.” I gestured to my temple, as if she needed reminding.

  Mira was quiet for a moment, then nodded. “So what are you going to do?”

  I’d been thinking about it for a while, actually, and as much as I hated to do it, I didn’t see another choice. “Ivan’s on his way. The kid called him while we were talking to the fire chief. We’re gonna go talk to Cameron, see what it’ll take to get help from his people.”

  Cameron was also a champion, but not like me and the kid. Instead, he was a Catholic priest, belonging to their secret order of demons slayers, the Order of Saint Silvius, a saint that didn’t really exist as far as most people knew. Sanctioned by the Vatican, they not only fought to retrieve souls from demon clutches, but they took it upon themselves to police the magic-using community too, removing the less-than-savory characters from the population.

  I didn’t have any proof of that last part, of course. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing that an organization would advertise. But Ivan believed it, and he wasn’t the only person I’d heard similar things from. Besides, what else would a super-secret team of holy warriors do in their spare time?

  Cameron was currently living in sin with my wife’s best friend, dear Doctor Bridget, and hey we were headed over there later anyway. How convenient.

  “Do you think they can help you?” Mira tilted her head a bit.

  “Carlotta and Terrence haven’t made any progress. The Church is the next logical step.” Estéban’s mother and a former champion who was older than dirt had been trying to come up with a way to divest me of the souls I currently harbored. While we’d established that my passengers could be passed to another person (or demon), that wasn’t an acceptable solution to me. We needed to free them, or at least put them where no one else could get at them.

  In my mind, the question wasn’t whether the Catholic Church could help me, it was whether they would. My only dealings with them had been through Cameron, and while he was a nice enough guy (don’t you dare tell him I said that), the rest of the Order had always come across as snobby and rude. Appropriately, in a very mature and professional manner, I had dubbed them the Knights Stuckupidus. Like the demons I so often parlayed with, I was sure there’d be a price of some kind. “I don’t see how I have another choice.”

  The young man with the broom cleared his throat a little, and both of us turned to look at him. “I’ll start packing bags for the little ones.”

  I nodded. “Pack one for yourself, too.” That earned me an instant frown, and he opened his mouth to protest. I held up one hand to stop him. “I’ll keep Sveta with me, and I want you to stay with Mir and the kids. At least until we figure out what the next part of the plan is.” I wasn’t ready to inflict Sveta on poor Doctor Bridget. The prickly Ukrainian champion could stay with me.

  Estéban headed down the hallway, reluctance evident in the set of his lanky shoulders, and Mira shook her head at me. “He thinks you’re trying to protect him.”

  “I’m not. You’re used to working with him, magic-wise. If you have to, the two of you are better together.” At one time, she’d have been right. It wasn’t too long ago what I’d viewed him as just another one of my children, someone to shelter and keep out of harm’s way. In the last few months, he’d proven that he could more than take care of himself, and while the occasional “kid” still slipped out when I was talking to him, I t
rusted him with my life. And now, with my family’s lives.

  Mira grimaced, shoving off the counter. “Well, I need to go feed my son, or I’m going to explode. I’ll come back over and pack up my own stuff.”

  “Yeah, whatever you need to do. I’m gonna…work on the mess. Probably make some phone calls.” I hadn’t forgotten that I’d dashed out of work without so much as a “’kay bye” to my boss. And I had a feeling I’d be taking more time off in fairly short order, so I’d need to get that arranged. I needed to find out when Ivan’s flight was going to arrive, and then maybe a trip to the home improvement store to get a new front door…

  I stood in the middle of my trashed kitchen, spotting the remnants of Mira’s phone poking out from under the fridge. Fishing it out, I saw that the screen had been reduced to so much glass dust, and the little device smelled of burned out electronics. No doubt a victim of the same magical blast that had exploded the sliding door.

  Things had been good, for a little while at least. At least we had that.

  The next few hours were lost to the simple administrative process of being an adult. There was an insurance company to call, my absence from my job to explain, lodgings to arrange for my wife and children. Sweet Dixie offered to let us stay with her until we could fix the doors, and we politely turned her down in unison. Neither Mira nor I wanted to think about what would happen if a demon came visiting our elderly neighbor. It was bad enough that Axel had invaded her home, and he was at least semi-friendly.

  Ivan’s flight was due in around seven, but before the kid and I could go fetch, I had one last thing to take care of. Making sure that my well-meaning bodyguards were preoccupied with Mira and the little ones, I escaped to my own back yard, noting how far the glass shards had flown. Mowing the grass was going to be perilous for a while, until we could find them all.

  Standing near my little bonsai garden, I closed my eyes and stretched out my senses, testing for anything out of the ordinary. My ghostly passengers roused, curious, and it was their “eyes” I would use to see.