A Line in the Sand

by K. A. Stewart

Ivan was the first to appear, though I was fairly certain that Sveta had been awake just as long as I had. The old man shuffled down the stairs and straight to the coffee maker that had switched itself on a few minutes before.

  Without his intimidating black coat shrouding him, wearing only a thin T-shirt and paisley pajama pants, he looked even more wasted than before. There was a slight tremor in his right hand as he went about making his coffee.

  “So.” I leaned against the sink, crossing my arms over my chest. “You gonna tell me what’s going on, or are we gonna keep pretending I don’t see it?”

  “It is not to being your concern.” Despite his obvious physical ailments, the big Ukrainian could still fix me with a look that made my insides turn to water. Not unlike Sveta, come to think of it. Must be a Ukrainian thing.

  “Man, if something’s wrong, you know we’ll do anything we can to help, right?” I got the feeling that maybe Ivan didn’t have a lot of actual friends.

  A ghost of a smile crossed his craggy face. “I am to be knowing this. Thank you.”

  “Daddy!” That shriek was all the warning I got before I was hit by a flying soon-to-be-seven-year-old. I hoisted my daughter up for a tight good morning hug.

  “Hush, kiddo. Sveta and Estéban are still sleeping.”

  “No we aren’t.” Esteban’s dark head appeared first, sleep-spiked like a startled porcupine, and Sveta followed close behind him as they ascended the stairs from the living room below. Both helped themselves to the coffee, clutching it like it was the last lifeline in the universe.

  “What are we going to do today, Daddy?” Anna tilted her curly red head at me in a manner that reminded me so much of her mother.

  “Not sure, Button. Depends on what Cam has to say when he gets up.” It was barely past dawn, I didn’t expect to see the priest until Doctor Bridget got up to go to work.

  The feisty child frowned and squirmed to get down. “You’re going away again.”

  What can I say, my child is perceptive. “Probably. Just for a few days. How did you know?”

  “Mommy cried last night.” Anna fixed me with a glare. “When you go away, she cries when you can’t see.”

  Great. Now I felt about two inches tall. Glancing around the kitchen, the other adults were very studiously looking everywhere but at me and my tiny, but fierce, daughter. Sighing, I crouched down to look her in the eyes. “Button, I always come home. You know that, right?” Solemnly, she nodded her curly head. “And I’m hoping, after this trip, I won’t have to go away anymore.

  She wrinkled her pert little nose for a moment, processing that. “If you don’t have to go away again, does that mean that Sveta and Estéban won’t live with us anymore?”

  Again, I glanced at the other grownups in the room. Dear god, someone save me from having to adult on my own. I’m not good at it! Estéban was the only one who would meet my gaze, and he just raised one dark brow at me. “We haven’t gotten that far in our planning yet, Button. Let’s see how this trip goes first, okay?”

  After a moment, she nodded. “Okay. But you better bring Mommy something nice. And me too. And Billy.”

  “As you wish.” I kissed her on the forehead, and my nearly worthless protégé-slash-bodyguard finally stepped forward to offer his hand to Annabelle.

  “Come, Bellita. Let’s go see that Señor Chunk has his morning outing before he makes a mess in Miss Bridget’s house.”

  I watched Estéban lead her off to tend to her dog, and ran a hand through my long hair with a sigh. It had been easier, when she was younger. She didn’t understand about my abrupt absences or frequent hospital stays. Now…she was old enough to start asking questions, and I would soon have to make the decision whether or not to lie right to my child’s face. It wasn’t something I was looking forward to.

  “Children are to being precious. You should to be cherishing the time you have with her before she is to being grown, and gone.” When I glanced up, Ivan wasn’t watching me, but Sveta instead.

  The dark-haired woman drained the last of her coffee in one gulp and stopped just short of slamming the mug down on the kitchen counter. Without a word, she trotted off after the kids. I gave Ivan a questioning look, which he completely ignored.

  Somewhere deeper in the house, an alarm clock sounded for a few moments before being silenced, and shortly thereafter, a sleep-muddled Cameron appeared at the top of the stairs. He shuffled toward the coffee maker as if Ivan and I were both invisible, then stood there blinking when he discovered the pot nearly empty. Finally, he sighed, his shoulders slumping. “Aw, coffee, no…”

  Ivan snorted softly into his own cup, but when Cam turned around, it was me he glared at. “You’re evil, you know that?”

  “What the hell did I do?” I held up my hands, the picture of innocence. “I didn’t even have any.”

  Cam grumbled as he went about making a new batch, and I couldn’t help but smirk a little. Getting the machine reassembled, he stared intently at it, like he could make it brew faster by sheer force of will. The priest wasn’t a morning person. Who knew?

  For a little bit, morning went on like a perfectly normal family. If that family consisted of an incognito priest, five demon slayers, a witch, a doctor, two small children and a dog the size of a pony. It’s amazing what you can come to think of as normal.

  All discussions of the impending European vacation were tabled until Bridget left for work. Though no one had ever expressly commanded me to keep my strange world a secret from her, it had become the unspoken rule of our lives, all of us guarding the good doctor’s innocence with extreme prejudice. Like, if we could somehow keep her from knowing there were actual monsters out there, it would somehow make it all better.

  I’m sure she wondered. I frequently turned up with bizarre injuries after sudden and inexplicable absences, and I kept company with some extremely odd characters. But she didn’t ask, and none of us were about to tell.

  Cameron, revived by a fresh pot of coffee, got her off to her office with a homemade lunch and a disgustingly sweet kiss at the door. When he turned to find us all giving him the smirk-and-brow, he at least had the good grace to blush. “Shut up.”

  “If we can to be focusing now?” Trust Ivan to rain on our parade. “Are we to be having a response from the Order?”

  Cam nodded, then shrugged a little. “Sort of. It’s being forwarded up the chain, but my direct superior believes that we can get you an audience with the Cardinal.”

  “When?”

  “That’s…trickier.” He grimaced a little. “I don’t know how long it’ll take to go through typical church bureaucracy, but when the summons comes, you better be there on site. They won’t give you much time.”

  “So, what I’m hearing is that we need to get our butts to Rome, where we will sit upon them until someone deigns to acknowledge our existence.”

  “More or less. Yes.” There was something else bugging Cam, besides the idiocy of red tape, and his gaze finally landed on Mira. “And I’m being recalled.”

  My wife frowned, adjusting her hold on our infant son to soothingly pat the baby’s back. “What does that mean?”

  “That means we’re out of here on the first flight we can get today. It means I won’t get to say goodbye to Bridget before we go, and I don’t know if I’ll be coming back.”

  Though Mira’s face remained calm, the extra souls in my back felt the flare of power from her. There were few things that would rile my beautiful wife, but hurting her best friend was one of them. “Jesse told you what would happen if you hurt her.”

  Cam glanced toward me, and I did my best to melt into the woodwork. Sure, I’d told Cam a long time ago that if he hurt Doctor Bridget, I’d kick his ass, but I didn’t expect to actually have to follow through on it. “I don’t want to hurt her. I love her. More than…” He left it unsaid, but we all heard the “more than the Church” hanging in the air.

  “What am I supposed to tell her when she gets home tonight?” Mira’s jaw
was clenched, and Billy fussed a little, sensing his mother’s ire.

  Cam hung his head, and I realized that even if I did try to pummel him, he’d probably just stand there and let me. That wouldn’t be any fun at all. “I don’t know.”

  “You could to be telling her the truth.” Ivan’s blessing was all any of us needed, but Cameron shook his dark head.

  “No. No, if she’s going to hear the truth, it needs to come from me. I owe her that. But…when I come back. If I come back. I’ll tell her everything, then. If I don’t come back…it won’t matter anyway.”

  Mira’s power licked around her in a faint halo, then subsided. I had to wonder if any of the others had even seen it, since no one had reacted. “I’ll tell her it was a family emergency. Call her when you get to Rome.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I think in that moment, she could have told him to cut off his own ear and mail it home, and he would have agreed.

  I cleared my throat, drawing attention away from the cowed priest. “Okay, if we’re moving out, we need to go back to the house and pack up anything we don’t have with us, and we need flight arrangements.”

  Obtaining airline tickets was actually the easy part. As everyone scattered to dress and get ready for what promised to be an excruciatingly long day, I thumbed open an app on my phone, then pressed my pinky finger to the screen, letting it read my fingerprint. After a bit of buffering, a face appeared in the window, blinking owlishly.

  “Jesse? What time is it there?” Viljo didn’t look like I’d woken him up. In fact, he looked like he might have been snorting energy drinks. His pale skin looked whiter than usual, his dyed-black hair seemed a bit lank, and there was a hit of red around his eyes behind his thick glasses.

  Once upon a time, Viljo had sold his soul for the hack of all hacks, bringing down the Great Firewall of China. I didn’t know what champion had fought for him, but ever since, he had been in charge of the technological system that kept all of Ivan’s champions organized, catalogued, and safe. The app on my phone was the latest in his long line of creations, allowing us instantaneous access to Grapevine, our champion database. There, we had records of all champions, a catalogue of their past fights, and their current locations. Everyone logged in at set times, and if anyone missed a check-in, an alert would go out to all nearby champions. So far, we hadn’t had to test that function.

  “Morning, Viljo. When was the last time you slept?”

  “Sleep is for the weak.” The goth-geek snorted, then craned his neck like he was trying to look behind me. “Is Svetlana there?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Dude, I’m not helping you stalk her.”

  Even on the tiny screen, he managed to look mortally offended. “I will have you know that my love is pure. Now, since you are obviously not going to help me win the love of my life, what can I do for you?”

  “We need passage for four to Rome, soonest possible flight.”

  I could hear the click-clack of the keyboard as Viljo’s fingers flew over the keys. “You, Svetlana, Estéban and Ivan?”

  “Not Estéban.”

  The typing clatter paused, and Viljo blinked. “Who is your fourth, then?”

  “Cameron.”

  “I do not have data on him.” The hacker’s brow furrowed, as if the simple lack of information had locked up all his neurological systems. Sometimes, I thought he was so accustomed to having the world’s knowledge at his finger tips that he forgot there were other ways to get it.

  “I’ll put him on the phone in a second, you can get what you need.”

  “Oh. Okay.” His fingers started up again. “Return flight?”

  “Yes, but I’m not sure when, or for how many. We’ll get with you when we’re ready to come home.”

  “Done. Put Cameron on the line, and I will have the tickets waiting for you at the airport. One thirty departure.”

  “Before that…” I glanced around to make sure I was truly alone, and then for good measure, I stepped outside on Bridget’s back deck. “Have you talked to Ivan lately?”

  Viljo screwed his mouth into weird shapes as he tried to remember. “In person, or online?”

  “Either.”

  “Well, he logged his trip to KC yesterday…”

  “Has he said anything to you about health problems?”

  The geek shook his head. “No. Why?”

  “His flight yesterday. Where did it originate?”

  “Um…Bethesda. He checked in from there about a week ago, then flew out when Estéban called him. Do you want his itinerary? I can send it through the app.”

  “No. I believe you.” There were no champions stationed in Bethesda, currently. Hell, there were no champions on the east coast at all, and hadn’t been since I started my tenure. But there were hospitals in Bethesda, good ones. I wondered. “Look, if you happen to think of anything, Ivan’s being kinda cagey and I’m worried. Let me know, okay?”

  “You got it.”

  “Everything else all right? Everybody making their check-ins?” Ivan had made noises in the past about me taking over leadership of our loose organization. I hadn’t really intended to go through with it, but now that Ivan’s health seemed to be flagging, I felt like maybe I should start being a bit more responsible. At least until I could talk him into choosing someone else.

  He nodded, a lock of lank black hair falling into his face. “Everything is green. No active challenges logged at this time.”

  “Flag me if anyone does. I have a feeling things may start getting a little wonky, real quick.” If Reina had made a play for me, through my wife and kids, it was possible that she’d try the same thing going after the other champions. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d been targeted.

  “You got it.”

  “I’ll go get Cam.” I started back inside. “Hey, Vil? Start a file on him, just in case.” Cameron wasn’t one of ours, technically, but…just in case. Like I said.

  “On it, boss.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  A one thirty international flight required that we be at the airport by at least noon, and that was pushing it. Sveta and Estéban disappeared briefly, returning with a rental van that could haul all of us and our gear, and we spent a few minutes loading up our locked and warded crates of weaponry and armor. Just when we thought we were done, Cameron came out of the house with another long box laid over one shoulder and added it to the collection. Sometimes, I forgot that Cam was a champion too, and that surely, he must have a weapon of some kind.

  The important stuff was loaded into the van, along with our duffel bags, but there was still the stop we’d need to make at the house to pick up anything we hadn’t grabbed in our exodus the previous day. That meant the hard part came up real quick.

  Anna’s eyes welled up with tears, and she buried her face in my chest. “I don’t want you to go, Daddy. It feels bad.”

  I exchanged a glance with Mira over our daughter’s head. While neither one of us truly believed in precognition, I’d always had my early warning system in place, and at least one prophetic dream that couldn’t be ignored. So when Anna said that something felt bad, I tended to believe her. “Button, I’m gonna be just fine. See all these people going with me? They’re not going to let anything happen to me. I’ll be home, and I’ll bring you something from Italy, all right?”

  She sniffled, but nodded, and I stood up to gather Mira and my son into my arms. “Miss you.”

  “Miss you more.” Her smile was fine, her eyes dry. We’d done this before. “Eat some gelato for me, and be good.”

  I gave her a cocky grin. “Darlin’, I’m always good.”

  “You’re incorrigible.”

  “I’m incredible.” It was what we did, this banter. It kept me from breaking down in her arms and crushing her against me. It kept her from crying and begging me not to go. It kept it from being goodbye, and just left it at “until later.”

  I clasped arms with Estéban, giving him some last minute instructions that he totally d
idn’t need, but again, it’s what we did. There was a small kerfuffle when it appeared that Sveta was about to leave without saying goodbye to the dog, of all things, but once the Ukrainian indulgently patted the slobbering beast on the head, Annabelle was mollified and willing to let us go without a scene.

  It was strange to realize that even Sveta, with her frosty, prickly ways, had become like family. Once this was all over, and she was free to go her merry way, she would be missed. Cam once again promised to call Bridget when we got to Rome, no matter what time it happened to be, and then we were on our way.

  The house was just as we’d left it, front and back doors boarded up and awaiting my brother’s handy touch when he finished his shift at the police station today. Remembering my feeling of foreboding as we’d left previously, I mocked myself silently. See? You saw it again. Idiot.

  Really, all we needed was more of the daily necessities for a long trip. For me, that involved stuffing about ten snarky T-shirts and more pairs of boxers in my already straining suitcase. For Sveta, it meant scavenging every weapon she had stashed around the house and finding places to stick them where the TSA couldn’t find them.

  I ducked out to the back yard for a brief moment, waiting to see if Henry would appear with news, but the little demon was a no show. Axel too, and I had to wonder what he was up to now. Nothing that would bode well for me, I was sure.

  Too soon, and not soon enough, it was time to go, and we all piled into the van to head for the airport.

  Chapter 6

  Our tickets were waiting for us as promised, along with some paperwork that Ivan flashed at security to insure that our locked crates were not opened for inspection. When I asked to see the documents myself, I was amused to find out that Ivan had us traveling as antiquities dealers. I had always assumed that we’d be hiding the weapons we were transporting, but instead, Ivan got through security by detailing exactly what we had, and declaring them historical artifacts. Why lie when the truth would serve just as well?

  We produced passports, got poked and prodded and scrutinized, then herded onto our plane. Ivan sat in first class while the rest of us were shoved into coach, and I made a mental note to kick Viljo in the shin the next time I saw him. Cameron and I had seats next to each other, but Sveta was farther back in the exit aisle where she had room to stretch her legs out. By the third time Cam and I jostled each other’s elbows, trying to use the same armrest, I had already planned out my trip to Colorado to strangle Viljo with his own ponytail.