by Julie Kenner
We were in the kitchen, and he looked around, as if he hoped Lisa and John-John would leap from the cabinets and put a stop on this conversation.
I took his hands, pulled him until he had no choice but to shift on the bench and face me. “It’s me, Eric. It’s Katie. Whatever you tell me, it will be okay.”
For a moment, his eyes searched my face. Then he nodded, one quick jerk of the head before pulling his hands free and pacing in front of me. “It wasn’t an accident,” he said, his voice flat, controlled. “There was nothing surprising to them about the fact that there was a demon in me. Just the opposite, actually. It’s what they wanted. It’s what they planned.” He spit the last word out with such vitriol I closed my hands into fists by reflex alone.
“Who?”
He faced me, and the pain I saw in his eyes about broke my heart. “My parents.”
“Your parents?” The words hung there between us, vicious and surreal. “But that’s—But you don’t know your parents. Don’t know anything about them?” Obviously he did, of course, but reality was about two steps behind my mouth.
“I did,” he said. “I do.”
“Dear God. Why didn’t you ever tell me?” I hadn’t meant to ask. I didn’t want to sound whiny or needy or hurt. Especially considering we were no longer married, my hurt feelings hardly compared to the pure hell—literally—that Eric was going through.
“Why didn’t you tell Stuart?” he asked.
It was a rhetorical question, of course. Eric knew perfectly well why I hadn’t told Stuart about my demon-hunting days. I’d married him as Kate, an ordinary widow with an ordinary suburban life. That was the woman Stuart had fallen in love with, and I didn’t want him looking at me and seeing another girl.
Yes, that had probably been extraordinarily neurotic of me, but the heart can’t always be controlled.
“But I knew,” I said. “I knew about demons and things that go bump in the night.”
“You knew about evil,” he said. “You knew what it did and how it could hurt.” He stopped pacing long enough to take my chin in his hand. “And I couldn’t bear the thought that you’d look at me the way you’re looking right now, with the knowledge that something dark is inside, that it was put there by my parents, and that one of these days, it’s going to come out.”
“That’s not how I’m looking,” I said, forcing my eyes to stay on him.
“Isn’t it? It’s what I think when I look in the mirror every day.”
“You’re not your parents any more than you’re the thing inside you,” I said, moving to him and holding his face in my hands so he had no choice but to look into my eyes. “Whatever is inside you, it’s not you. You can beat it back, Eric. You can and you will.”
A troubled expression passed over his face. “I used to think so, Katie. I really did. Do you think I could have lived with you, had a family with you, loved you if I believed that somehow I was putting you in danger? And I kept looking, even when we were living here, for a way to make it stop. That’s why I kept in contact with Forza. Why I met with Father Oliver and worked with Father Donnelly to become an alimentatore,” he added, referring to other secrets he’d kept that I’d only recently discovered. And now I knew a little bit more about why he’d done it.
He drew in a breath and continued. “And doing all of that made me feel safe. Like I had it under control. I had to believe that, you know, because I could never have done anything to do you harm. Even after I died,” he added, clenching his fists at his sides and then drawing in a deep breath. “Do you think I would have sought you out after I came back if I didn’t believe I could fight it down? That’s what I used to believe. That’s what I had to believe.”
Something tickled on my cheek, and I brushed it away, felt the wetness, and realized I was crying. “Used to think so?”
“It’s winning, Katie,” he said simply. “I try—I try so hard—but it’s winning.” He lashed out, kicking a cabinet so hard it not only made a dent, but made me jump.
“Try harder,” I said, angry now, too. “Dammit, Eric, you’ve beaten this thing back before. You can do it again.”
“Every damn day I try. Every. Damn. Day.” He drew in a breath, and I saw real fear in his eyes. “I go to Mass now, and it hurts, Kate. It hurts inside like a fire is ripping through me.”
I swallowed, not wanting to hear this. That was bad, very bad.
A demon can walk on holy ground, but it hurts like hell, and the longer they stay, the more it hurts. That’s one of the best tests, actually, for determining if a creature is a demon. Certainly it’s more accurate than breath, which could easily be present in a human simply because of poor hygiene.
In the past, Eric had no problems entering the cathedral, but if it now caused him pain . . .
I shook my head, wanting it to all go away. Wanting to fly back in time to the year Allie was born, when we were safe and Odayne was bound up tight, not causing trouble. Not doing anything.
But there was no going back, and even if we could, would I want to? Yes, I’d been blissfully ignorant, but the truth was that even then, Eric was tainted, his soul entwined with a demon.
What if he had lived to a ripe old age? What if we’d grown old, had grandchildren, and one day died peacefully in our sleep? I believed in heaven, believed in the tenets of my faith, and I believed that despite my lies and my secrets and my multitude of sins, that upon my death, my soul would go to heaven. And though I’d never actually sat down and considered the parameters of my afterlife, I think I’d always believed that Eric would be there with me. He was my first love so how could he not?
I knew now that I’d been both blind and naive. Nothing in this world is a given, and that is true times ten when you walk in the shadow of demons. Eric wouldn’t have met me in heaven. He was bound to Odayne, to the demon realm.
Bound to hell, unless we could find a way to untangle Eric’s soul from the demon.
“We’ll find a way,” I said. “I don’t care if I have to fight until my fingernails bleed and research until my eyes fall out. We’re going to get answers, and we’re going to save you.”
“I wish I was as confident,” he said.
“I’m confident enough for the both of us.”
That sad smile touched his mouth again. “I’m glad to hear that. But you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.”
I started to shake my head no, but he took my chin in hand. “Yes,” he said. “I know it. Forza knows it. And Katie,” he said, the knife edge coming back into his voice, “even your parents knew it.”
“What?” The words seemed to swirl around me, a thick, viscous soup of nonsense. “I’m not—what?”
He turned away so that I was facing his back, and though I wanted to see his face, my legs didn’t seem to be working. So I sat and let his familiar voice wash over me, telling me things I’d never known and had never imagined. “I was six, maybe seven,” he began. “Not when the demon first came inside—that was before. That was at birth, maybe even conception. But there were things that had to be done. Rituals that had to be performed to bring the demon out, to infuse him through me. To make us one.” His shoulders shook as a shudder passed through him. I wanted to go to him, to hold him, but I couldn’t move. I could only listen and hope that it wasn’t going to be as bad as I feared.
“I don’t remember much, but I remember candlelight. And chanting. And the ritual cuts made into my back. They wanted to scar me, Katie,” he said, finally turning around. “They had to scar me in order to mark me, and I can still feel the sting of the blade digging in, ripping off flesh, and the feel of the salt in the wounds to ensure the scar remained.”
“I’ve seen your back, Eric,” I said. “There’s no scar.”
“They finished only part of it,” he said. “A serpent’s head, fangs bared, forked tongue lashing out.”
“It’s not there,” I insisted. “Eric, there’s no scar.”
His smile was thin. “It’s there,” he
said. “Even if you can’t see it, it’s there.”
“Eric—”
But he held up a hand, cutting me off. “No. Let me finish. Because they didn’t finish. They didn’t bring it out, didn’t twine it with me. Not fully, anyway. And not for lack of trying. But they were stopped. The ritual interrupted.”
“By who?” I asked, though I feared I already knew.
“Your parents,” he said.
“They were Demon Hunters?”
“Not with Forza. I don’t think anyone ever really knew where they came from or how they got a bead on what my parents were up to. But they did, and they came, wandering the streets of Rome posing as a young couple on vacation. And they tracked my parents down and they burst into the ritual.”
“Intent on killing your parents,” I said, following the story although I felt numb.
“No,” he said. “Intent on killing me.”
“But—”
“But nothing,” he said. “They came in. They tried to take me out. My father wasn’t having it, and they fought. I don’t remember it. I only know what they told me. But at the end of it, my father and your parents were dead.”
“And your mother?”
“Lived three days. Long enough to come out of a coma and tell Wilson everything,” he said, referring to the man who would later become my—our—first alimentatore.
“Were they with a cult? Did she tell Forza who they were?”
“She didn’t have to,” he said. “He knew them. My parents were Hunters, Kate.”
“What? No. That’s impossible. Why would they do that?”
“They thought they were doing good. They’d been working with Father Donnelly, and they thought they’d made a breakthrough. A giant step in this centuries-old game we play.” He paused and drew in a long breath. “They thought they’d figured out a way to castrate the demon and yet steal its strength. They didn’t know what they were doing to me,” he said, and I knew he had to believe that. Had to believe that his parents had only wanted the best for him because otherwise it was too painful to look at what they did to him, no matter what they’d hoped the endgame would be.
“You were supposed to be some sort of Super-Hunter,” I said. “Stronger, faster, able to anticipate their every move.” I frowned, realizing that some of what his parents had planned had actually come through; Eric had always had an uncanny knack for anticipating a demon’s next move. We used to joke that it was our secret weapon. Apparently, we’d been right.
“It wouldn’t have worked, of course,” he said, “and your parents stopped it before the ritual was complete. But the demon was still inside me, and Forza needed to make sure it wasn’t going to come out. There were rituals. Binding rituals. And they trapped it inside. Bound it tight. Suspended animation, just like in the movies.”
“How did they know what to do? Did your mom tell them?”
“Wilson knew,” he said, his eyes dark. “He’d worked with my parents, but pulled out at the end, tried to convince them they shouldn’t go through with what they planned before I was born. And then when I came along, he said I seemed like such a normal baby that he assumed they’d taken his word. Decided they couldn’t do it. He was wrong. And before my mom died, she told him everything.”
I cringed, both from what his parents had done to him as from the hand that Wilson had played in it. I’d trusted Wilson. Believed in him. And I’d never once had even an inkling of a clue that he knew secrets about Eric. Or about me, for that matter.
“And my parents?”
“Forza tried to identify them, never managed. But they did track them to a shabby hotel, and apparently they found something that suggested they were traveling with a child.”
“But they didn’t find me?”
“You were found exactly where they told you. Wandering the streets of Rome.”
“And Father Corletti? How much of this did he know?”
“None, Kate, I swear. All he knew was that a child was found, an orphan. And he took you in. He didn’t even learn the truth about me until after the mission in the catacombs. After I used the Cardinal Fire.” He met my eyes, his sad. “That’s when I learned, too. Because the demon was trying to get out, and Forza had to shove it back in. Bind it tight again.”
“But they did bind it,” I said.
He nodded. “We’ve been over this ground. The demon’s stronger now.”
“Maybe,” I muttered, my thoughts in turmoil. I stood and began pacing. “You were so young, and you carried so much. You should have told me, Eric,” I said. “Everything we were to each other—everything we are. You should have told me. You shouldn’t have gone through it alone.”
“I didn’t want to, Katie,” he said, his voice raw. “I loved you, and I was so afraid I would lose you.” He moved closer, only inches from me, and I took a step backward until my rear pressed against the kitchen countertop of Lisa and John-John’s tidy little house. “I was afraid,” he repeated. “Afraid you wouldn’t want me.”
The breath hitched in my throat. “Never,” I whispered. “How could you think that?”
“Kate,” he said, and before I could think, his arm hooked around me and pulled me close.
“Eric, no—”
But he kissed me, hard and deep and long, and with such pure need that I thought I would drown in the desperation of that moment. My hands knotted automatically in his shirt, and I opened myself to him, all while my head was screaming for me to stop.
I didn’t. I took comfort in the kiss. Comfort in the familiarity, and comfort that this wasn’t a demon in my arms.
It was my husband.
Except it wasn’t.
My senses rushed back to me, and suddenly mortified by what I was doing, I moved my hands to his shoulders and pushed back. He murmured a protest and pulled me closer, a move that I countered with flat hands against his chest and a forceful shove. “No, Eric. We can’t.”
His eyes, soft and warm, flashed with fury, and I watched, strangely fascinated, as he reined it in.
“We need to go,” I said, moving sideways along the counter away from him. “Let’s finish the patrol.” I needed to get outside and get some air. Mostly, I needed out and away, and I went, not caring if he was following.
I was a block down the alley when he fell into step beside me.
“We were married, Kate. You don’t have to be ashamed.”
“I’m married now. Yes, I do.”
I heard him sigh and expected an argument, but none came. Instead, we walked in silence, moving through the streets and weaving down alleys.
Nothing jumped out at us. Probably good, considering my mood. I hated myself for my weakness with him, but even when I tried to shove that aside, I was left staring at the bombshell that was my parents. For so long, they’d been ghosts to me. Eric’s news drove home that they’d been real people. People with names and purposes and a little girl who I could only hope they had loved.
I was sniffling when Eric stopped.
“What?” I asked, my voice low. “Do you see something?”
“Look,” he said.
I followed the direction of his gaze and gasped. Our house. We’d circled through the neighborhood and ended up at our house.
“It’s for sale,” he said, nodding at the realtor’s sign. “Think anyone’s living in it?”
“Let’s look,” I said, though I knew we shouldn’t. We crept closer and peered in the windows. Empty. No furniture. No people. Barely even any dust left behind.
Eric grinned, so quick and playful it tweaked my heart. “Let’s go in.”
“Are you nuts?”
“Probably,” he said, then moved swiftly to the back of the house. He used his elbow to break a pane of glass, then reached in and flipped the lock, all while I stood there, mortified, not quite able to believe we were really doing this. “I want to see it again,” he said. “I need to.”
He stepped inside, and since I wasn’t going to hang out on the back porch by myself, I
stepped in after him.
The place was as I remembered it. The big kitchen with the glass-front cabinets. The huge pantry that we’d rarely filled, being young enough to eat out more than we ate in. The black-and-white tile floor that had at first seemed so silly, but had soon grown on me.
I crossed through to the living room, and there my breath hitched. Eric was sitting on the window seat, grinning like a little kid. “Wanna look?”
“There’s nothing there,” I said, unable to keep the laugh out of my voice.
“You never know. The elves might have come while we were gone.”
I shook my head, but moved closer. “Fine. Let’s look.”
He hopped off the seat and lifted the wood to reveal a compartment probably designed for linens. We’d lived in the house for two months before we even knew the compartment was there, so good was the craftsmanship. Once we’d found it, we’d acted like giddy children and left presents for each other at disgustingly sappy intervals. “Nothing,” he said, peering inside. “Damn.”
I smiled despite the fact that we’d found no hidden treasure, because it reminded me of all the silly secret games we’d played. Eric had always loved to share secrets—it had even become a special game with Allie—and it hurt to think now about the huge secret those smaller ones were shielding.
“Kate?” He was looking at me, watching my face, and I shook my head, forcing my expression back to normal.
“Did you try the loose board?” I asked. One of the floorboards inside the compartment had come loose, and one Christmas I’d hidden his present inside.
He reached in and tugged the board out, then looked in the small space. “Nope. Nothing.”
“Bummer,” I said, then sat back on the seat next to him once he closed up the compartment.
There may have been no presents, but the adventure had cleared my mood, and now that we were inside, I knew that I’d needed this little excursion as much as Eric had. We’d been a family in this house, and although I once again had a family I loved, it was nice to remember where it had started. After growing up with dorms and living in ratty hotels or even on the street when we hunted, this little house had seemed like a gift of normalcy. Hard to believe I’d gone from being a street urchin in Rome to a suburban mom. But I had.
