by Julie Kenner
I rubbed my face with the palm of my hands, listened gratefully to the still-silent baby monitor, and plotted ways to kill Stuart for setting the alarm so early.
Then I remembered.
I lunged for the remote and clicked the TV on just in time. Sure enough, there was my honey, all decked out in his best suit and tie, chatting with the morning-show host about the details of his campaign platform.
After his five-minute interview was over, I clicked pause on the TiVo control and let Stuart’s image fill the screen as I got dressed. Ask me about the details he’d discussed during the interview, and I doubt I could repeat even one. But I was certain that the polished, articulate man I saw on television was sure to draw voters by the droves.
Honestly, I couldn’t have been more proud. And the real upside? I was awake a full hour before I’d planned to get up. On a normal day, that would be grounds for divorce. Today, I was happy to have the extra time. With any luck, I could rid the couch of Cheerios, peel a few gummy bears off the bookshelf, suck a few dust bunnies into the vacuum, and still shower and change before the neighborhood hordes descended on my front stoop. And, honestly, who doesn’t want to spend her morning couch diving for loose change and Cheerios?
I’d already found sixty-seven cents, two dice, and a Candy Land game piece by the time Allie stumbled downstairs, blinking and tugging her robe tight around her, and looking even more comatose than she usually does in the mornings.
“Help yourself to breakfast,” I said. “I’m going to go wake up the Timster.”
On a normal day, we’d be dressed and out of the house already. This was spring break, though. So while Allie vegetated on the couch watching scintillating morning programs, I started to clean the kitchen, stopping only when I heard signs of life coming from Timmy’s room. I headed up that way, tossing off the suggestion to Allie that perhaps she might want to finish wiping down the counters in the kitchen while I got her brother dressed, but I wasn’t taking bets that she’d actually do it. So imagine my surprise when I came downstairs to find her breakfast dishes put away, the dishwasher loaded and turned on, and the counters sparkling.
It was, I thought, shaping up to be an amazing day.
That’s when the phone rang and suddenly I was thrust into a hell the likes of which I’d never experienced in all my demon-hunting days: finding a replacement Easter Bunny less than a week before the big day.
“No, an Easter Bunny,” I said into the phone, trying to communicate the direness of my need to the guy at the other end. As soon as my bunny had bagged, I’d let my fingers do the walking, turning up absolutely nothing useful. Desperate, I’d called a temp agency. “Do you guys have any Easter Bunnies who can work this coming Saturday?”
“Lady, we send out professional temps. You want a bunny, you’ll have to call for an acting gig.”
All well and good, but that was what I’d tried to do in the first place. The phone book, however, wasn’t my friend.
“We really need to drag you into the twenty-first century, Mom,” Allie said from her perch on the couch. She pointed to my laptop, now sitting forlornly on the breakfast bar. “The Internet.”
Now I’m not nearly as techno-savvy as Laura or my daughter, but I can handle Google. And though I didn’t find anything promising in San Diablo or Santa Barbara, I found a couple of agencies in the L.A. area that seemed amenable to sending their actors up the coast for worthy gigs.
And, really, what could be more worthy than making small children happy at Easter?
“I certainly understand your dilemma,” the manager at one such agency said, “but in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s the Monday before Easter. We’re all out of bunnies.”
No problem. After all, I had eight more agencies on my list to try. Unfortunately, all eight said essentially the same thing. Rough translation: Lady, are you insane?
Great. Just great.
“Any luck?” Allie asked, following me as I headed toward the kitchen to refill my coffee, sit at the table, and eat frozen M&Ms for breakfast.
“Lots,” I said. “All of it bad.”
She took the seat across from me and snagged a brown M&M.
“Anything you want to tell me?” I asked, thinking about the candy and, more specifically, about the many times she’d complained that if she ate one more piece of candy she’d burst out of her cheerleading uniform. Patently untrue, but definitely fourteen.
Her eyes widened in a classic deer-in-the-headlights manner, and then a wash of something that could only be described as guilt painted her face. “Um, no?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Tell me another one. Seriously, Al. Why didn’t you tell me you’d dropped out of cheerleading?”
Her shoulders sagged and she closed her eyes. “Oh, right. I should have,” she rambled, sounding completely relieved to finally have it out there on the table. “Absolutely. I’m sorry. Totally.”
“So why’d you do it? I thought you loved cheerleading.”
She lifted on shoulder, then let it fall again. “Dunno. I guess with all the demon stuff it just didn’t seem important anymore.”
“But sweetie, it’s part of high school, part of growing up. And you were having fun.”
“I guess.”
I leaned back in my chair, not sure where to go from there. “I don’t know, Al. I wish you’d asked me before you dropped off the team. Cheerleading is the kind of thing I missed out on by not going to high school, and looking back, I wish I’d had the chance to do something like that.”
“Do you really?”
I considered the question, wanting to give my daughter an honest answer. “Sometimes,” I said. “Most of the time I’m content, but that’s because my life was my life.” So much for deep philosophy. “My point is that I’m not going to stand back and regret the way I grew up. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want more for my kids. That I don’t want normal for my kids.”
“But I’m not you, Mom,” she said, slapping me without even meaning to. “And besides, I’ve done the cheerleading thing. So I can mark it down, and if my kids ever ask, I can say I was a cheerleader. Right?”
How could I argue with that?
“So what are your plans for the day?” I asked, shifting away from the deep mother/daughter discussions. “Hanging with Mindy?”
"She’s in L.A. today, remember? With her dad.”
"Right. I forgot. We should make a trip to L.A. soon,” I said. “A girls’ day out.”
“Really? That would be so cool.”
“You’d like that?” I asked, probably sounding completely desperate for reassurance that my teenager still wanted some closeness with her mom.
“Totally,” she said, beaming. After a moment, the beam turned to a frown. “So is that what’s gonna happen with me?” she asked.
I didn’t follow.
“Getting shuffled between you and Daddy,” she explained. “Mindy hates it, but her parents hate each other. At least you and Daddy still love each other, even if you’re not supposed to,” she added, her words like a knife blade twisting in my heart.
“Allie . . .” I trailed off, not even sure where to begin.
“No, it’s okay. I get it. Daddy died. It’s not a divorce, so it’s not the same.”
“It’s not,” I agreed. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not hard. Your father’s here now, but he’s—”
“Not exactly my dad? Yeah, I kind of get that.”
I pressed my lips together, not sure where to go from here. “Do you want me to talk to Laura again? Maybe if you could talk about this with Mindy, it might help.”
She shook her head and sighed. “It’s not talking I need,” she said. “Honest. And even if it were, how big a jerk would I be to shove my dad in Mindy’s face right when hers is packing up with his new fiancée and moving to L.A.?”
The kid had a point. I’d certainly had similar thoughts about sharing all of my secrets with Laura.
“The only thing I really want is to spend time
with Daddy.”
“I know. And we’ll figure that out soon. But we—”
“He wants to spend time with me, too,” she said, her chin rising and her voice a little too sharp.
“You talked to him about that?” If David was airing our parental laundry, I was going to do way more damage to him than any zombie ever would.
“Um, no,” she said, clearly covering for her dad. “I mean, nothing specific. Just that he liked hanging with me at the carnival.”
Secrets. I took a sip of my coffee and looked at my daughter’s face. Years ago, I could read every emotion. Now she was keeping secrets and I no longer knew the language of her eyes, her smile. That loss made a little hollow part in my stomach, and what made it worse was knowing that the secrets had gotten bigger and more closely held since her father had returned.
His death had brought Allie and me close together, closer, I think, than a lot of moms and daughters. Now I feared that his return was driving us apart, and I wasn’t sure what to do about that. I didn’t want to lose my daughter. Didn’t want to lose the closeness and the relationship we’d once had.
And I didn’t want to resent David for taking that away from me.
Because the truth was, no matter how much I’d loved Eric, if I had to choose between husband and child, I would choose my kids, no doubt in my mind. With David, I’d brought him back. I’d made the choice and done the deed. And how painfully ironic would it be to find out that by giving my daughter back her father, I’d managed to push her away from me?
“So back to my question—now that you’re ungrounded and unencumbered by cheerleading obligations, what were you thinking about doing today?”
“I thought I’d hang with you,” she said, which had the immediate effect of soothing my tattered mommy ego.
“Yeah? Today is egg-stuffing day.”
“Oh.” Her expression was not one of overwhelming excitement.
“Not what you had in mind?”
“I was hoping for something more meaty. Like maybe training in the backyard with the crossbow?”
“Maybe later,” I said. “Somehow the middle of day doesn’t seem like the best choice for crossbow training.”
“We’ve done it before,” she protested.
“Yes, but I’m thinking that the backyard three hours before the hordes are supposed to descend on our house may not be the most prudent choice.”
She kicked back in her chair. “Whatever.”
“That was your only idea? Crossbows?”
“I could go to Cutter’s and spar,” she suggested, referring to our martial arts instructor. “You have to be in top-notch shape to be a Hunter. It’s really all about the reflexes,” she added seriously.
“Is that a fact?”
“Definitely,” she said, so seriously I had to look away to hide my smile. Apparently my assumption had been right: David and Allie had been deep in hunting-related conversations at the carnival.
“You’re right, of course,” I said. “But you can’t go to the studio today.”
“But Mom! That’s so totally unfair. I’m on break. It’s not like—”
“It’s closed, remember?”
“Oh.” She thought about that. “Right. I forgot. He’s in New York at some tournament. So what about me doing some research? I could help with that, right? I know Aunt Laura’s on the Internet and all, but would it hurt to have me looking, too?”
“For what?” I asked. “Zombie info?” I thought about my conversation with David—about how there must be something big brewing in San Diablo if a demon marked for death at my hand had decided to send his minions here to take care of me. “I’ve actually got a better idea. How about you look into—”
“The Sword of Caelum?” she asked, bouncing a little on the seat cushion. “If it’s really some über-cool tool that lets you whack out demons with a single blow, then I think we really need to be focusing on where it might be. I mean, maybe we’ll have to go to Rome. Or Argentina. Or, or,” she added excitedly, “maybe it’s frozen in a glacier. Like at the end of Frankenstein. I mean, that’s where folks send things they don’t want found in this world, right? And Abaddon obviously doesn’t know it’s lost if he’s worried about you having it. So if we figured out where it had been hidden, we could—”
“Allie!” I said, holding up a hand to cut her off. “Slow down there, kid.”
She looked up at me with wide, eager eyes, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that her biological father was now in So. Much. Trouble.
“Mom?”
“Sure, honey. You go ahead and research the sword. You find anything interesting—anything at all—you let me know.”
“Will do,” she said, standing up and firing off a little salute. She looked so full of purpose and importance I couldn’t help but smile, not to mention feel a little guilty for not already suggesting she get busy on the research. I also made a mental note to run up into the attic and get some of my old Forza mission reports out of my hunting trunk. Even if they didn’t help with her research, I knew they’d be the kind of thing Allie would like to read through.
She grabbed my computer and headed for the stairs, pausing only once to look back at me. “Mom?”
“Hmm?”
“How come you didn’t tell me? What the demon in the backyard said, I mean.”
A dozen lies flitted through my head, but I ended up landing on the truth. “Because I didn’t want you to worry about me, baby.”
“But Mom,” she said, with the slightest hint of a shadow in her eyes. “I do that anyway.”
Fourteen
When I was fifteen, Eric and I found a demon’s lair and stopped the creature from becoming both corporeal and invincible.
When I was sixteen, I located a nest of vampires in Prague and took them out with the help of a local schoolteacher and a handy-dandy blowtorch.
When I was nineteen, I heard rumors that a succubus was preying on Swiss men. Eric and I investigated, took the bitch out, and still had time to ski the Alps before reporting for duty back at the Vatican the next Monday.
With a résumé like that, you might think that I could tackle any task, handle any emergency, totally hold it together in a time of crisis.
Apparently not. Because this damn bunny fiasco had pretty much put me under the table.
“No, no, no,” I said into the phone, enunciating as clearly as possible. “It really needs to be a bunny. Who’s ever heard of the Easter chicken?”
“Makes sense to me,” the guy at the other end of the phone said. “Ya got eggs, doncha? So why wouldn’t you have a chicken?”
I extricated myself from that conversation as quickly as possible, then immediately dialed Laura. Not for moral support. Not for suggestions. But for that most basic of primal needs—whining.
“It will all work out,” she assured me. “Honest. These things always do.”
“How? How do they work out? Timmy is convinced this party is all about him, I have a swarm of women descending on my house in three hours, demons are trying to kill me— which wouldn’t be unusual except that they now have zombie cohorts, and unless I think of a solution fast, the kids are going to be getting baskets for the egg hunt handed to them by Freddy the Easter Chicken. Honest, Laura, I really don’t see it getting better any time soon.”
“Stuart,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Stuart is the answer to your prayers.”
I held the phone away from my head and stared at it, as if somehow she would be able to sense my disbelief through the phone wires. “I love the man, don’t get me wrong. And there have been times when I’ve thought that very thing. But if you think that Stuart is going to step up to the plate and spend hours on the phone locating an Easter Bunny for me, then you obviously haven’t been spending time with the same man I married.”
“Not finding,” Laura said. “Being.”
“Huh?”
“A costume, Kate.”
“There are no cos
tumes. There are no actors. There is a complete moratorium in the world on bunnies.” I could hear my voice rising to a hysterical pitch. Zombie parts on my kitchen floor, no big deal. But toss me into a domestic crisis, and you’d think the world was coming to an end. Clearly, I needed to get a grip.
“Just leave it to me,” she said.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Nope, totally serious. You concentrate on saving the world. I’ll concentrate on the bunny suit. It’s my little contribution to the fate of humanity. Besides,” she added wryly, “with Mindy gone, the house is empty, and I’m all alone with my soon-to-be-divorced thoughts. Trust me. It’s better that I keep myself occupied.”
“Fair enough,” I said, because I’d be a fool to say anything else. “But what exactly are you planning?”
“You’ll see,” she said, and as she did, I was almost positive I heard a smile in her voice. And for some reason, that—more than demons, more than zombies, more than freaky mystical swords—made me very, very nervous.
Three hours later, I was on the floor in the playroom letting Timmy use me as a highway for his trucks when I heard a pounding on the back door. I left the kiddo to his trucks and his Duplo blocks, stuck my head in Allie’s room and asked her to keep an eye on her brother, then trotted down the stairs to find my soon-to-be-no-longer best friend standing at the door clutching an in-progress bunny costume.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said, holding up her free hand. “You don’t have to wear it. You just have to try it on so that I can make adjustments.”
“I’m not even close to Stuart’s size,” I protested, as she had me pull on the pants she’d pinned together out of fuzzy gray material. “How’d you do this so fast, anyway?”
“Honey, while you were gallivanting around the streets of Rome, some of us were forced to learn how to sew and cook. I may not be a total domestic goddess, but I’ve been making Mindy’s Halloween costumes for the last thirteen years.”
“But it’s only been three hours.”
