A Wolf at the Door

by Stewart, K. A.

  “How’s that?” I eyed the shadowy ceiling and the murky layer of smoke that was accumulating up there.

  “Eventually, we’ll pass out from lack of oxygen.”

  “And that’s safer?” That’s it, they were all nuts, every one of them.

  “If you’re unconscious, you can’t pray anymore. Better to wake up with a raging headache than not wake up at all.”

  He was right. Even magic use had its addicts, and apparently the church wasn’t immune. There were those who would simply cast and cast until they fell over dead, and they would do it willingly. Power of all kinds corrupts.

  Armor and sword sufficiently tingly to my senses, Cam went about arranging a few other things for me. Lengths of the thick string became portable wards—or so he said. He blessed my demon-mace canister on my key chain, and gave me a charmed disk to add to my collection that was supposed to change color in the presence of danger. I didn’t bother to tell him about my own ingrained danger sense. Mira insists it’s the one vestige of magic I possess. I don’t care what we call it, so long as it works.

  All the while, the air got thicker with smoke and clove-scent. My eyes burned, and I wasn’t sure if it was the torches, or the magic. And with every spell he cast—wait, sorry, prayer he said—Cameron’s face got paler, and the shadows under his eyes got darker. When his hands were visibly shaking, I stopped him.

  “That’s enough. I don’t need anything else.” For just a moment, I thought he was going to argue with me. Like I said, power is tempting, even for a priest. I guess maybe I don’t really envy them after all. Finally, he nodded and I started helping him pack up his gear. “You can’t drive home like this.”

  Cameron shook his head. “I’ll stay here for a bit, have some coffee with Ricky or something. I’ll be fine.”

  “What are you gonna tell Bridget?”

  He snorted. “I’m gonna tell her you took me out back and kicked my ass. What do you think I’m gonna tell her?”

  Okay, I had to smile at that. I left him down there, making sure I propped the outer door open so there would be a little fresh air.

  Estéban was right where I’d left him, but he was leaning back in the seat instead of being all hunched over his clasped hands. There was a sense of peace in his face that hadn’t been there before, and for a moment, I wished I could have that too.

  He hopped up when he saw me coming, and I hit him in the chest with my duffel bag of armor. He threw it over one lanky shoulder, looking like a demented Santa. “C’mon, kid. We gotta go home so Mira can rip my head off.”

  “What exactly did you do, by the way?”

  I waited until we were outside before I answered him. “I’m heading out to L.A. tomorrow.”

  “For what?”

  “It’s…complicated.” But if anyone was going to understand my reasoning, it would be Estéban. He was from a family of demon slayers. He’d lost a father and two brothers to it already.

  As we drove home, I tried to lay it all out, as I knew it. The actress, the botched deal, the extra souls. The promise I’d made to Axel. His dark brows drew closer together, the more I talked, his frown deepening with each passing mile.

  “Can’t you just…tell him no? You are not tattooed, it isn’t a contract.”

  Yeah, I probably could have. I hadn’t promised Axel my soul. I’d just promised him a favor. What could really happen, if I said no? I’d cease to be the kind of man I wanted to be, that’s what would happen. I was already straining the limits of what the bushido might call acceptable. I couldn’t ditch my honor too. “No, kid. I owe him a legitimate debt. Cole would be dead without him. You’d have done the same for Miguel.”

  Estéban shook his head slowly. “You are either braver than I realized, or crazy as fuck.”

  “Language.” I’d had a bad influence on his English since he’d been living with us.

  He only snorted at my admonition. “I don’t think there is anything in the world that would compel me to anger Miss Mira. The only thing worse would be angering mi madre.”

  He was right. Either woman was likely to take a skillet to my head. “Well, you work on her while I’m gone then, okay? See if you can get her to soften up.”

  The teenager snorted again. “Oh, hell no. You are on your own with this one.”

  “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  5

  The discussion with Mira got put off for a few more hours, even after we got home. There was the Christmas wrapping mess to clean up still, and dinner to get on. There was the promised outing in the snow with my daughter, which somehow turned into an impromptu lesson in hand-to-hand combat for Estéban. I put him down twice, but the third time he managed to sweep my legs out from under me, and I landed in a giant heap of snow. I was so proud.

  Anna was in bed and Estéban had retreated to his room before Mira and I found time to actually converse.

  I was carrying the trash out through the garage when I caught her standing near my truck, examining my duffel bag of armor. “Hey!” I moved quickly and snatched her hand away from the bag. “Don’t even think about it.”

  She looked a bit shamefaced, proving that she had been thinking about it. “I wasn’t going to do anything. I was just checking it. Cam’s work?”

  “Yeah. Figured he may as well be useful, right?” Taking a chance, I slipped my arm around her waist. She leaned into me, which was way better than the elbow in the ribs I was expecting. I rested my chin on top of her head. “You doing okay?”

  She was quiet for a while, before taking a deep breath. “I’m pissed off, Jesse. I’m scared, and worried, and I desperately do not want you to go to Los Angeles. I think this is a horrible idea, and I wish you’d never asked for that thing’s help.”

  “If I’d have had another way, baby…” Standing in the middle of a dark road in Colorado, so many months ago, it had seemed like the only course of action. I hadn’t had time to think of something better.

  “I know.” She patted my chest lightly. “I do know, I just…I’m not happy about it. It seems like this whole thing suddenly got way more complicated than we bargained for.”

  Boy howdy, did it. “What do you want me to do, baby?”

  I wasn’t sure if the sound she made was a laugh or a sob. “Run far, far away? Go hide in a cave somewhere? Just…quit?”

  A simple request, one she’d been very careful not to make before. But you know…I could. After this little errand for Axel, all I had to do was never take another contract again. That simple. My own retirement plan. Let it all be someone else’s problem. Hell, as of last fall, I knew there were way more champions under Ivan’s watchful eye than I had ever realized. Surely one of them could take up my slack? “Can we revisit this again when I get back?”

  “Yeah.” She straightened herself, squaring her shoulders. “Come on, we need to get you packed up. You’d head out there with a pair of underwear and one clean sock if I let you.”

  “Mir?” I caught her hand as she turned to head back inside, and when she stopped, I rested my other hand on her flat stomach. “You call me the second you know something, okay? No matter what time it is.”

  She nodded, but her smile was faint at best. “I will. You’ll be the second to know.”

  The night passed uneventfully. I even managed about seven hours of actual sleep. My dreams, when they came now, seemed to be ordinary, boring things. Showing up at work in my underwear, running late to take a test I hadn’t studied for, and once this really weird thing involving a penguin and an escalator made of Gummi bears. (I blamed the buffalo chicken pizza for that one.) The Yeti no longer visited me in my sleep, tearing out my heart night after night after night. Guess once you kick a guy’s ass twice, he’s just not as scary.

  When dawn came, I kissed Mira and Anna good-bye, patted Chunk on the head, and crawled into the truck to let Estéban drive me to the airport.

  We stopped briefly on the way to mail off my sword and armor. They don’t like it when you try to take stuff like
that on an airplane, and it was easier to just ship it ahead. I charged it to Axel’s credit card. S’what he gave it to me for, right? Now I just had to hope that nothing requiring weaponry happened until tomorrow morning.

  Hitting the highway toward the airport, Estéban shifted gears smoothly in my old clunker, and I nodded a little. Teaching him to drive this past summer had actually been way easier than I’d expected. I almost felt okay, leaving my baby with him.

  “You put a single scratch on this truck while I’m gone, and we’re gonna have problems.”

  He gave me a sidelong smirk. “How would you even find a new scratch in all the old ones?”

  “Trust me, I know every mark on this truck. A new one will shine like a beacon.” Still, I grinned to myself. I wasn’t worried, not really. Not about the truck at least. About another mile down the road, I asked him, “You can take care of Mira and Anna, right?”

  He took his eyes off the road just long enough to give me a quizzical look. “I think Miss Mira can take care of herself.”

  “She can’t use magic right now, kid.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s possible that she’s pregnant.” I cringed when the truck gave a little swerve, Estéban glancing with his whole body instead of just his head.

  “Really? That’s great!”

  “Simmer down. We don’t know for sure yet. But until we do, she absolutely cannot cast any spells, okay? If something happens, you do it yourself, or call Cameron. Got it?”

  “Yessir.” The kid was grinning ear to ear, and it was a little contagious. I found myself smiling right along with him. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks, kid.” You know, it did feel kinda good to be congratulated. Maybe this wasn’t going to be such a terrible thing after all. Maybe I could walk away after this. Just be a dad. Get a real job. Join the PTA. Hell, I dunno. Something.

  After a few minutes of silence, the kid glanced at me again. “Jesse, are you sure this is a good idea? This trip, I mean. Demons…they lie.”

  Yeah, I knew that. Except Axel never had. Not that I could remember. “Pretty sure this is one of the worst ideas I’ve ever had, kid. But I gotta go. I gave my word.”

  He frowned, keeping his eyes on the road. “I know that you say honor is the most important thing, but…does it count if the person you gave your word to isn’t honorable themselves?”

  “That’s when it matters the most. You can’t control what other people do. All you can do is, at the end of the day, make sure you can still hold your own head up and think ‘Hey, I did right.’”

  “Have you ever had to do something bad, because it was right?”

  “Not yet. That’s one of those dilemmas you gotta hope you never run up against.”

  He mulled that over in silence for the rest of the drive. I think, at the end of my day, I just wanted to be able to think “Hey, I taught the kid well.” I owed his family that much.

  I just had the kid dump me out at the airport, checking the suitcase Mira had insisted I pack, and taking my backpack in as a carry-on. (’Cause really, that’s where my important stuff was.) In order to make my trip more cheerful, Annabelle had decorated the pack with a bunch of fluorescent stickers, all of which had a garish logo that read SOLDYOURSOUL.COM! Thanks, Viljo.

  Our pet computer geek had started the Web site as a joke, I think, an exercise in Web design. Self-help for the demon-sworn among us. But despite the fact that most of the world viewed it as only amusement, it had found an audience, and was going like gangbusters last I heard, getting however many hits a day they considered a lot. If any of those hits had resulted in an actual soul challenge, no one had told me, mostly because I think Viljo thought I was pissed at him.

  He was right. I wasn’t as mad at him as I was at Ivan, because Viljo had just been following the old man’s orders, but still. He’d lied to me too.

  And because even on my best days I have a petty streak, I was leaving town without registering with Viljo’s champion database, Grapevine. Yeah, that’s right, I’m a rebel through and through. Wasn’t any of Ivan’s business where the hell I was, anyway.

  Getting through security at the airport was its own kind of special hell. My backpack, my steel-toed boots and my collection of anti-demon key chains got dumped in the tub to be scrutinized by overworked and underpaid TSA folks. One of them poked and prodded at my tangle of gizmos with a pen. I had a blessed mirror for seeing invisible creepies, a carnival token that could turn any vessel of water into holy water, Cam’s mood-ring danger device (which stayed neutral, thankfully), a pentacle of my wife’s for extra protection, and a small photo of my girls, which had no magical properties, but made me smile every time I looked at it. The security lady finally decided I couldn’t take over a plane with that stuff, and passed me with a grumpy snort. Damn good thing I’d thought to take off my demon mace canister. It was currently stuffed in my checked suitcase, and I could only hope the damn thing didn’t leak cayenne all over my clothes.

  I got a window seat in the plane and set my backpack by my feet. Hopefully, I could put on some headphones and ignore the world while we zoomed along overhead. Give me time to do some thinking, some meditating. Get my head on straight about this whole baby thing.

  For a few brief, joyful minutes, I thought I was going to have the row all to myself, but right as the attendants were getting ready to button us up, a man came scrambling on board, out of breath and flushed. “Woo! Almost missed it, didn’t I?” And of course, he was directed right toward me.

  The guy plopped down in the seat beside me, jostling my elbow without even saying excuse me. I tried to ignore him. It didn’t work. “Hey, how’s it going? I’m Spencer, Spencer Law.” He stuck his hand in front of me with every expectation of me shaking it. I did so with the barest modicum of enthusiasm.

  “Hey.”

  “Man, had to run for my connection! Just knew I was gonna miss it and be stuck in this hick town forever.” I suppose it never occurred to him that I was very fond of this “hick town,” but my frown was wasted as he busied himself stowing his bag.

  He was preppy, in a fresh-out-of-college kind of way. Looked a lot like Cameron, with short dark hair in stylishly gelled spikes. His khaki pants were already wrinkled from whatever flight he’d just dashed off of, and his polo shirt was salmon pink. Seriously? Pink? He flopped down, jostling me once again. “Can’t wait to hit L.A. Babes in bikinis beats waist-deep snow any day.”

  I snorted to myself. The snow was barely ankle deep. A dusting, really. Wuss.

  “So, what’re you headed out to La La Land for?” Before I could answer him (even if I’d had any intention of doing so) he held up his hand. “Wait, don’t tell me, let me guess. I’m pretty good at reading people.”

  While he looked me over good, I contemplated what his face would look like if I had him in a choke hold. He took in my blond ponytail, still at shoulder-length, the fading scar high on my cheek. His eyes narrowed as he observed my steel-toed combat boots, my worn jeans and my T-shirt that said I HATE YOUR FAVORITE BAND.

  Finally, he nodded as if he’d discovered the answer to life, the universe and everything. “I’m thinking…stunt man.”

  Seriously? “No, not really.”

  “Really? Damn, I’m usually so good at this stuff.” Chatty-Spencer made himself comfortable as the plane started to taxi, and I fished in my backpack for my headphones. I was going to need them. “Sold your soul dot com? What’s that?”

  Inwardly, I sighed. Damn Viljo and his freakin’ stickers! I could tell already that this was one of those airplane buddies who was just not going to shut up, even if the plane went down in a fiery heap. We’d plummet to our deaths with this guy narrating all the way down. “It’s a Web site a buddy of mine runs.”

  “Yeah, what’s it about? One of those Christian things?”

  “No.” I have never wished for teleportation technology so hard as I did just then. “It’s just a thing.” I put my headphones on, even though I had
no music playing, and pretended to be fascinated with the takeoff process.

  The ruse seemed to work, at first, Chatty-Spencer settling in for the flight and directing his incessant babbling to the flight attendant and the lucky passenger across the aisle. But the moment we got up in the air, he whipped out a laptop and pulled up Viljo’s Web site. “Oh wow…is this guy serious?”

  “Mmf.” Maybe if I didn’t look at him, he’d go away?

  “He really believes that people sell their souls to the devil, hunh?” He snorted. “Geez, if somebody can point me at one of those demons, I’ll do it in a heartbeat. There’s stuff I need to do!”

  I had to turn and look then, checking out every inch of bare skin I could see on the man. No demon brands. No twisting, writhing tattoo to scramble my senses and add to the ache I was already getting behind my eyes. Hey, it was worth a look. You never know. “And just what do you deem important enough to sell your soul for?” I swear, if he said something stupid, I was going to punch him.

  “Well, see…like, I’m heading out to L.A. ’cause I have this movie idea. I’m a writer! A screenwriter, anyway, and a buddy of mine knows a guy who knows a guy…you know how Hollywood is.” He rolled his eyes and chuckled, deciding that, with no evidence to support his assumption, I must know all about Hollywood.

  “And you think a movie deal is more important than your soul?”

  Chatty-Spencer laughed. “Hell, what are you gonna do with a soul? I figure in Hollywood, you’re a nobody if you still have one. Amirite?” He elbowed me jovially, and I imagined myself crushing his skull. It was a sweet thought. I also set my mental clock for six months, a year at the outside. Viljo’d be getting an e-mail from this idiot, I just knew it, wanting one of us to come save his ass.