by Krista Walsh
That was it. No other explanation or description, and it didn’t appear the journalist who had written the article had done any further digging.
Probably thought it meant nothing. Zach’s lip curled in disgust at the narrow-mindedness humans displayed on a far-too-regular basis.
His more generous side knew he should cut the guy some slack. As a human, the journalist wouldn’t know how far outside the box he should be thinking. He’d have been concerned about economic or environmental consequences, not the possibility that demons might be involved. Unfortunately, his lack of curiosity meant Zach still had no idea what Karl might want to drag him into.
If he could discover where the new factory was located, he could slip inside one night to see for himself what was going on. It wouldn’t be impossible to give his demon spies the slip, and as long as he was careful, he could be in and out before anyone noticed him.
He did a quick online search to see if Mayzell had any properties on public record aside from their known factory locations, and when that failed, he resigned himself to spending a day — tomorrow, maybe — at the county clerk’s office going through paperwork. It would be a pain in the ass to get it done, but worth it if he gained the advantage over his stalkers.
He still couldn’t believe he’d changed so quickly over the last couple of days, that a few words spoken by a high school student could make him see how much time he’d wasted. If he’d been paying attention to what mattered, maybe he’d already know what Mayes and Wenzell were up to.
An idea dropped into his head, and he sat up straight in his chair, upsetting the mouse on the computer desk. The sphinx cast him another look, but this time he didn’t bother to respond to her.
If Mayzell was looking to shift its focus elsewhere, then there would likely be changes happening around their current factories. Maybe even information on where the new factory was located.
It would be worth a look if it meant skipping the trip to the county clerk’s office.
“All right, Karl,” he grumbled to himself. “Before I decide whether or not to believe a word you say, I think it’s time for a little field trip.”
7
Molly yawned, only covering her mouth halfway through — one of those social graces she’d been taught in classes as a kid, but had to make a conscious effort to remember when she was tired or distracted. After four nights of sneaking out of the house, she was riding on the fumes of her exhilaration.
School had been an increasing struggle, but not for the reasons she would have imagined, considering her lack of sleep. She just found it impossible to care about abstract concepts like history and geometry when her mind was expanding with more concrete knowledge, like how to know when a sorcerer was about to let off a spell — a specific sort of tingle in the air — or how to recognize whether certain types of demons might be present — Ghurgzic demons reeked of raw goat.
She found herself addicted to her lessons with Zach. Every morning, she came home swearing she would take the next night off, but as soon as her parents went to bed, she couldn’t sit still. The carpet in her room was starting to wear thin with her pacing as she tried to tire herself out so she could go to sleep without her fix, but before she knew it, she was climbing down the tree and heading back to the college to hear some new story or pick up some new defensive tactic.
Through Zach, she was learning more about the real world. The world that would actually help her succeed in life. Each bruise he gave her in their sparring lessons helped her gain confidence in her skill to keep herself safe; each new detail opened her mind further to the truth.
It would help her far more than algebra, anyway. When would she ever need that again after she graduated?
Although she believed she was making the only decision she could, she’d worked hard to keep the truth away from Steve. On the whole, she thought she’d been managing pretty well. On the second day, Steve had asked if she’d sneaked out again, but he’d seemed to believe her when she’d lied and told him no, and he hadn’t brought it up since.
It felt weird lying to his face like that, but she didn’t want to suffer through another one of his lectures when it was clear he just didn’t understand the full scope of what she was telling him. Maybe it was one of those situations where you had to experience it for yourself to really appreciate it.
All she knew for sure was that, for the first time since being transported out of that locked room, she understood her place in the world. Zach had told her more about Antony’s incubus nature, how he absorbed women’s souls by having sex with them and left their corpses to rot in cold hotel rooms. Although she still hated the idea that she’d killed him, her nightmares had finally stopped.
Things with her parents had been a little more strained. She had less of an issue holding things back from them than she had with Steve — as a teenager, she felt it was her job to stretch the truth with her parents — but it still didn’t feel great to keep such an important aspect of her life secret.
She’d always enjoyed sharing class lectures over the dinner table. Teaching her mom and dad what she was being taught helped her make sense of concepts as she learned them, but it also gave them something interesting to talk about as a family. She would have loved to hear their opinions on the topics she and Zach discussed. What would they think about demons walking around hidden in human form? Would they think there would ever be an opportunity for equality with the otherworldly?
Instead, she’d had to explain to her mother why she looked so tired every morning, and why she’d wanted to take on extra archery lessons. She’d decided to wait for her life to settle down before she asked about the fencing.
Her father seemed to accept everything she said at face value, but Molly could tell her mother was getting tired of her short temper and exhausted mood swings. Molly did her best to rein them in, but she was so drained.
At school she forced herself to concentrate on all of her classes so Steve wouldn’t notice any change, though she had to slip to her locker between each class to grab handfuls of chocolate-covered coffee beans just to keep herself awake.
Still, she thought she was nailing the whole being sneaky thing, until Steve prodded her in the ribs with his elbow on their walk home.
“That’s the fifth time you’ve yawned in the last ten minutes,” he said.
Oops. Molly hadn’t even noticed.
Part of her wanted to snap at him to butt out of her business, but mostly she warmed over the fact that he’d been keeping track.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Molly didn’t answer right way, wanting time to compose her thoughts, but it turned out not to be necessary. Her silence seemed to do the work of an actual response.
His long fingers circled her arm and drew her closer. “You’ve been sneaking out of the house again, haven’t you?”
“I—” she tried to reply, but the question had come so quickly, she hadn’t prepared herself for another lie. After so many years of telling him everything, spinning the truth wasn’t something that came naturally.
A deep groan of disapproval rumbled from Steve’s throat, and he released her arm. By the sound of creaking leather, she guessed he’d crossed his arms over his fall jacket. “What are you thinking, Molly? You didn’t listen to anything I said the other day, did you?”
She didn’t answer, but that didn’t stop him.
“What have you been doing? Just walking around hoping to get into another fight?”
“Of course not,” she snapped. Fatigued as she was, she could only hold on to her temper for so long. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“What else do you call climbing out of your bedroom window in the middle of the night to walk alone in the dark, huh?”
“Who says I’m alone?” she shot back, and then bit down on her tongue as she realized what she’d revealed. This was what came of stepping into conversations she wasn’t ready for on very little sleep.
She hoped Steve might have mish
eard or misunderstood what she’d said, but wishful thinking didn’t save her.
“Who are you with?” he asked. The question came slow and wary, as though he knew he wasn’t going to like the answer.
Molly debated lying to protect Zach’s secret. She’d left him out of their conversations for the last year, what was one more time?
At the beginning of her visits, she’d longed to tell Steve about Zach. She’d even considered inviting him to come with her one night so the two could meet, imagining how different her life would be if Steve weren’t hearing all of these stories secondhand. She was sure that if he met Zach, he’d have a much greater respect for the real impact of her revelation that humans weren’t the only dominant life force on the planet. Forget aliens, there were a whole slew of species sharing their air.
But after four nights of getting to know Zach better through their conversations — despite his reluctance to have those conversations — she’d come to realize that she liked having something that was all hers. Zach was her friend, someone she had no feelings for other than kinship for a fellow oddball. That was something she couldn’t share with Steve, no matter how much she felt for him.
Now that he’d confronted her on the subject, she wanted to keep her secrets, but she couldn’t bring herself to make up a story just to keep him in the dark, either. He’d always been there for her and was obviously worried. As her best friend, he deserved to know. Maybe if he had all the information, he would stop thinking that she was out playing demon hunter like some irresponsible TV-heroine wannabe.
Besides, who would he tell? It wasn’t like anyone would believe him. And that was assuming he betrayed her confidence, which she didn’t think he would. She knew too many of his secrets for him to risk it.
The air around her was full of voices, so she rested her hand on his arm and guided him off the main street. It would take them a little longer to get home taking this route, but that was fine by her. It would give them more time to talk, and she never minded a few extra minutes in Steve’s company.
“You know the story I told you about the locked room?”
“Are you about to tell me it never happened?” Steve asked.
“Of course it happened, there’s just more to it than I told you at the time. See…that man I saved, the one who was being tortured until I sent some arrows across the alley to say hi? Well, he’s one of the otherworldly. He believed he owed me this honor debt thing because I saved his life, so he took it upon himself to watch out for me. For the last year, he’s kind of been…following me around to make sure I wasn’t attacked by demons. It’s not as creepy as it sounds. He’s not that kind of guy. More like a sort of angry guardian angel. Literally, I guess. Anyway, he stepped in and saved me from the ghouls that first night out, and since then I’ve been going to his place. He’s been teaching me all this stuff about the otherworld. It’s really cool. Did you know that there are thousands of otherworldly beings living in New Haven alone? It makes me think that Mrs. Francis actually is a troll.”
Mrs. Francis, the school librarian, had been a common point of frustration for Molly and Steve over the years. If you were one day late returning a book, she banned you from the library for a month. There was no mercy. But today Steve didn’t laugh.
“Let me get this straight,” he said, drawing Molly to a halt. “You’re sneaking out of the house at night to meet an older guy who’s been stalking you?”
Molly made a noise of disgust. “I just told you, it’s not like that. Think of it more like extra tutoring in a subject that I would never learn about in one of our classrooms. It’s an extracurricular activity.”
“That doesn’t make it sound any better.”
“Steve, come on,” Molly said. Frustration tugged at her patience. He wasn’t listening. She couldn’t tell if he was just messing with her or if he was consciously misunderstanding. “I’m sharing one of my most important secrets with you. Can’t you at least try to take it seriously?”
“I am,” he said. “Extremely. What I can tell you is that you’ve shown a drastic personality change in the last week. I was already concerned, and now I find out that instead of sleeping, you’re hanging out with a guy you hardly know? Get your head together, Molly. What’s really going on here?”
She swallowed hard, suddenly unsure what to do. Steve had always been her closest confidante, and now he was judging her for wanting to learn more about the unknowable? She was the one who had supported him through his goth days, putting up with him talking for hours about a band that didn’t seem to do much other than scream into the ether, and she’d never made fun of him for his choices.
Okay, she’d stepped in when he’d started smoking, but that was just good sense.
His question still hung between them, and she didn’t know how to answer. She thought she’d explained herself well after the ghoul incident, but clearly it hadn’t gotten through to him.
After a while, he rested his hand on her shoulder. “We’ve both got a lot going on with midterms and whatnot, and I’m sure neither of us are handling the stress as well as we could. Just promise me you won’t go see this guy again, all right?”
A flutter started deep in Molly’s stomach at his concern for her, but it was quickly tamped down by the roughness of her anger.
She forced herself to smile. “You’re probably right. At the very least, I should try to get a good night’s sleep. We have that math test tomorrow. Calculus forever!”
“Exactly,” he said, and she recognized the relief in his words.
She changed the subject to tonight’s homework as they continued their way home. When they reached his street, she wished him a good afternoon a few blocks earlier than she usually would have. Pretending not to be upset with him was wearing on her already fragile energy reserves, and she wanted time to recharge a little before she got home and had to discuss her day with her parents.
Then there was still her homework to do, which was part of the deal she’d made with herself when she’d chosen to continue her visits with Zach. She knew she had to do everything possible to keep up appearances.
At least there was no archery tonight. The one thing Steve was right about was that she needed to sleep.
The thought of Steve pinched her heart, and she shoved her conversation with him out of her mind. It drove her crazy that he didn’t understand her interest and desire to learn, but there was obviously nothing she could say to him that would change his mind. Instead, she would just have to continue with her previous plan of not letting him in on her secret. And she’d have to work harder at showing the world that nothing strange or unusual was going on. But hey, if the members of the otherworld could do it, so could she.
She reached her house and stepped inside to find her mother in the kitchen.
“Hey, honey,” she greeted. “There’s a snack waiting for you on the table. I thought you might want a pick-me-up.”
Molly sat down, felt for her plate, then leaned in to inhale the sharp scents of apple and cheese. Her stomach grumbled, and she bit into a piece of apple. Sour and tart. Definitely a Granny Smith. If she finished the apple, she could sneak half the cheese away to bring to Dusty.
“Did you have a good day?” her mom asked.
Molly removed her sunglasses and set them on the table. “It was a day.”
Depending on what they had for dinner, maybe Molly could sneak out some extra dessert. Zach had sped through the last of the apple pie quickly enough, and she was pretty sure her mother had grabbed a peach cobbler from the grocery store last night.
“Learn anything exciting?”
“Not really.”
She’d already started putting together a new list of questions she wanted to ask Zach. Last night he’d told her a little more about his life growing up, how he’d been confined to his home with a mother who’d spent her life trying to keep him safe. He hadn’t gone into too much detail about personal matters, but he’d told her about the company his mother had kept, demons
of various species who’d used her knowledge of the human world to navigate lives of their own.
He still avoided talking about his angel side, which she found interesting. She wanted to know why he pretended he didn’t have that half of him. There had to be more to it than his dislike of being too judgmental. That didn’t seem to be an issue for him most of the time.
“Weren’t you supposed to get into the Napoleonic wars this week? That was one of my favorite history topics in school,” said her mother, drawing Molly’s attention back to the kitchen.
“Oh, yeah, that was pretty neat. Sounded cold.”
“If you don’t feel like talking to me, just tell me, Molly,” her mother said, her tone hurt.
Molly felt a pinch of guilt and tried to focus on their conversation. She wasn’t trying to be evasive. She just had too many thoughts in her head to focus on anything as mundane as school. She usually liked talking with her mom, who always seemed to know everything about everything — except for computers, but that was where her dad filled in the blanks. Her mom was a librarian at the public library, one of the two full-time staff there, and she spent the quiet days reading reference books, refusing to stop learning just because she was no longer in school.
Molly appreciated that. She understood the curiosity and the drive to know. But she doubted she and her mother would share the same opinion about her latest excursions.
No doubt her mom’s reaction would be even more severe than Steve’s.
At the thought of Steve, Molly’s appetite drifted away, and she pushed her plate aside.
“Molly, what’s going on?” her mom asked. The floor beneath Molly’s feet vibrated as she pulled out the chair beside her, sat down, and dragged it back in. “You’ve been really distant the last couple of days. Exhausted, quiet. Your appetite hasn’t been good. Is it trouble at school?”
