by Holley Trent
Don’t dwell on that. Change the subject.
“She was fine with you getting marked?”
“No. She didn’t know until it was too late.” He reached across the body pillow between them and tenderly smoothed the hair at her forehead. “I was on campus at the time at Princeton and he found me in the library. He didn’t have to say a word, but I knew who he was. We’re just … wired to know him when he finally comes around. Naturally, I told him to fuck off.”
She laughed and clapped a hand over her mouth, lest she wake her parents across the hall. Wouldn’t do to have her father running in wearing that white tank top with his hair standing on end, and pointing his big shotgun at her mostly harmless demonic baby-daddy.
Not that it would hurt Charles. At least, not permanently. She giggled at the thought of Charles picking buckshot out of his flesh.
She cut her gaze to the right and found Charles’s bright blue eyes narrowed in amusement at her. She was glad they’d lightened the mood.
“Sorry. Uh … you ended up going with him. Gulielmus, I mean.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
He raised his right shoulder and let it fall. “I guess I felt betrayed. He told me what my mother was and … how much do you know about mythology?”
“More and more each day, living with you all, but probably not enough. I probably skipped a few too many classes in high school.”
“Okay. Well, the Romans had Cupid, right? Well, the Greeks had Eros. Same guy, more or less. He was a god of love, and as old as time. He probably knew Pop way back when. Anyway, he and a few other love gods comprised a group collectively known as the erotes. There was one named Anteros. He was the god of requited love. I’m descended from him through my mother.”
“So, you really are a demigod in addition to being a demon.”
“I suppose. That’s why I told you it’s difficult to determine how human I am. I don’t know how many generations there were between my mother and Anteros. There could have been many or just a few. My mother was rather coy about the depth of the family tree.”
“Fuck.”
“What?”
“Are you as powerful as your father?”
“That’s difficult to qualify. Could I beat him in a fair fight? No. He could smite me before I even drew a breath, but of course I have powers he doesn’t. Powers he doesn’t particularly care about.”
“The Cupid thing.”
“Yes. I get the psychic shit from both sides. What I get from my mother, I use to make matches. I matched Calvin and Julia, actually.”
“She told me.”
“Really? You believed her?”
She shrugged. “After a while.”
“I don’t know why your cynicism still surprises me after all this time. I keep forgetting that you weren’t raised in our world.”
“I do wish someone would tell me how I fit into it.” She didn’t like knowing there was something unusual about her that neither her parents nor grandmother would discuss. Was she less human than she thought?
God, to think nine months ago and she was a plucky truck driver who didn’t know shit about anything. She reached across the pillow for the hand Charles drew back.
He twined his fingers through hers and said nothing for a while.
“They’re nearly a perfect fit, Calvin and Julia,” he said quietly. “As are John and Ariel. I didn’t pair them, but knew when I met the two of them that the Fates had been hard at work. It just clicked in my head that they belonged to each other. I was a low-functioning alcoholic at the time and didn’t tell them, though. I doubt they would have believed me. I was a fucking mess.”
“Did you … confront your mother?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“And she didn’t deny it. She said she hadn’t told me because she was forbidden to. There’s a code amongst the godlings who live and work around humans. Their hope is that in a few generations, no one will remember what they were. That they’ll just fade in.”
“Huh. That’s interesting.”
“Why?”
“Julia had said something about her mother knowing more than she pretended to. Why would they want to do that? Hide what they are, I mean. Don’t they like being powerful?”
“Do you think I like it? Not being able to touch human beings except to harm them? Imagine it like you and your werewolf sensitivity. You have to work hard to ignore it so you can behave normally. Imagine feeling like that all the time, and always being on, always having to push back part of yourself. I can’t turn it off, sweetheart. None of it. I suspect your grandmother and parents are doing the same thing. Trying to cut you off from the information so you don’t live as whatever they are.”
Oh. Fat lot of good that did them seeing as how she’d hooked up with a—
With Charles.
“What happened after she admitted it?” She kicked the big pillow down to the foot of the bed, sick of it being between them. He’d never spent the night before, and she didn’t want the sun to rise with there being yet another barrier between the two of them. Enough obstacles. There’d been too many.
With the pillow now gone, he pulled her closer to him and helped her turn onto her left side so they could spoon. He draped an arm over her belly and traced around her ticklish, protruding bellybutton just long enough to feel the baby perform a bladder-bursting shimmy.
She groaned.
He chuckled near her ear, and dragged his soft lips along her earlobe.
Her right fingers dug into the mattress in response to the sinful tease that made her body thrum. Surely he wasn’t going to try to make up for lost time right now when she was puffed up like the Michelin Man.
“I stormed out,” he continued, drawing his lips back just slightly so his voice didn’t boom in her ear. “Pop found me again later. I was stumbling home from a pub and was so pissing drunk I couldn’t even remember my name, much less speak coherently. He pulled me into an alley and gave me the Team Hell sales pitch.”
“And you said yes?”
“He appealed to my sense of pride. Told me Cupid was a twink in a diaper, and if I didn’t let him fix me, I’d be fluttering around like a dandy spreading love and shit. He said it was just a matter of time, and that it was unavoidable given what my mother was.”
“Your father sounds like an epic douche.”
“We keep telling you that. Anyhow, people paid her to find their love matches. Discreetly, of course. She didn’t hang out a shingle or anything, and most people didn’t know what she was, only that she was a hell of a matchmaker. She put every yenta in a five-mile radius out of business. She wasn’t just guessing, you know? If she had a person in front of her, she could picture their match.”
“But how did she find them? I mean, that was pre-Internet. It wasn’t like she could launch a Facebook campaign in search of the mystery person.”
Psychic stuff, came his whisper in her mind.
“Oh.” She knew enough about psychics now that she recognized some things just weren’t easy to explain.
“I’m glad you switched sides,” she said as his hand burrowed under her shirt hem and up toward her bra band.
She was about to chastise him for being handsy so quickly, but he didn’t grope or fondle the way she’d expected. He just pressed his hand over her heart and left it there.
She threaded her legs through his and he nestled her head beneath his chin.
“I would have done it sooner if I knew you were the prize.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Pop had been summoning Charles pretty much nonstop for weeks, and because the demon could no longer teleport anywhere near Clarissa’s property without risk of immediate harm, Charles had been successfully avoiding him. However, during each instance when Charles left the property, a demon scout managed to sniff him out.
Pop had a psychic tether connecting him to each of his children, and when he wanted to talk, he yanked it, metaphorically speaking. If
the children didn’t respond for whatever reason, he went to wherever they were, assuming they weren’t off the grid like Julia. Julia moved from one “safe” zone to the next, and outside of them wore magical charms provided by Claude that kept her more or less off the radar. But Pop was impatient, and if he couldn’t hone on them quickly, he sent a beast.
Supposedly, the scouts had been bred to transfer messages from one far-flung demon to the next, but some industrious devil figured out they had a more useful skill. Each little monster had its own territory, and if their prey left it, they passed on their job to the next scout.
They were well trained, but not very smart. Charles had figured that out even as a drunkard.
He flew all the way to Maine and let a scout catch up to him before confusing it and taking to the air again. The message Pop would receive was that Charles was somewhere in the Northeast, which would have thrown him off of Charles’s real whereabouts long enough for Charles to move Ross.
And move him, he had to.
Charles pressed a shot glass across the laminate table and splashed three fingers of gin into it. He twisted on the lid and set his elbows on the table, watching his son.
Ross gave him a long blink, snarled at him, and then bent his head to the table, wrapped his lips around the glass, and sucked back the liquor without using his hands.
He loosed his lips and let the glass fall back to the table.
“You want another one?” Charles asked.
He’d dreaded this chore all day, and tried to think of any possible substitution for going about it this way. The last thing a former alcoholic wanted to be doing was liquoring up his own kid, but Ross was his father’s son, and nothing else worked as well.
The feral cambion became damned near angelic when his blood alcohol level surpassed two percent. John had discovered that accidentally.
Ross squirmed in his seat, struggling against the chains securing his torso to the chair and the rope binding his wrists. “Fuck you so much.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.” Charles uncapped the bottle and this time held the neck near Ross’s running mouth. “Tip your head back and take your medicine.”
Ross bared his teeth, but did what he was asked.
Charles sighed and stood a bit to pour the liquor down the man’s throat. A human man would have drowned from the fast surge of liquor, but Ross swallowed it thirstily, grunting as it went down.
Half the bottle had emptied when Charles pulled it back and put the cap on.
He rested his elbows on the tabletop again and threaded his fingers. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”
“That’s ’cause you’re weak,” Ross said with a sage nod in that accent Charles had never been able to place. “The weak have inherited the Earth. It’s up to me to purge them and send them to Hell where they all belong.” His bloodshot gray eyes went wide. He added in a whisper, “I will be victorious.”
“You’re deluded.”
Ross bowed his head. “I serve a far greater master than the world has ever beheld, as do you.”
“I serve no one.”
Ross faked a gasp. “Blasphemy, Daddy.”
“So be it.” Charles rolled his shoulders back and forced a breath through his lips. “I’d hoped that being here all these months would have tempered you a bit, with all these charms and holy symbols here.” He scanned the small trailer and took in all the powerful icons Clarissa and Claude had bedecked the place with. They didn’t seem to be doing much good. Usually, they worked on beings who were hell-bent on doing the inhabitants of a property harm, but apparently, Ross was too human for them to be effective. He was a perfect weapon for Pop’s purposes, but Pop hadn’t predicted that Ross’s humanness also made him the perfect little guinea pig for binding by more traditional methods. He couldn’t get out of the trailer because the windows were welded shut and he didn’t have the strength of his father and uncles to break the door down.
“Why would you want to temper me? You should be proud of my superiority.” Ross laughed, and the sound was so crazed and manic, Charles couldn’t tell if his son believed his own hype or if he was just trying to unsettle him.
That liquor should be kicking in at any moment.
“I don’t want to have to hurt you, but I’ll do what I have to, to make sure you don’t do any harm to—”
“To who?” he interrupted, blinking rapidly. “Myself?”
“You, too, but you’re a grown-up, whether you behave like one or not, and should be able to care for yourself. I won’t have you doing harm to—”
“My sweet baby sister?” He blinked some more and laid his head to the side. “Oh, kindly Uncle Claude has already insinuated that he’ll ensure my untimely demise if I harm a single hair on her wee head.” He laughed. “Something’s wrong with your generation, Daddy. You’re all pathetic. You and Uncle Claude and Uncle John. Aunt Julia. The rest of your beautiful siblings?” He blew a raspberry, and Charles felt inclined to uncap that bottle again. “They’re lazy. They aren’t nearly as productive as me.”
Charles grunted. He didn’t keep tabs with most of his other siblings. Maybe a few of them had consciences, after all. He filed that information away for later. He might be able to recruit some willing soldiers to his cause.
“I may not be pretty as you all, but I get the job done.”
“Okay, then.” Why had Charles thought he could reason with this man—no, this boy in a man’s body?
He’d wanted to talk to him and maybe give him a little freedom once he trusted him, but Charles didn’t know if that would ever be possible. He wanted to make up for being an absentee father during all those years he spent in the downward spiral, but maybe Ross didn’t want him to make it up. He wanted to be bad, and if that were the case, Charles needed to keep him far away from Marion. As it were, she’d never have a normal life, but he would die, if he had to, if it meant she could have something that was close.
Ross was a megalomaniac just like his grandfather, and Charles had never been gladder that trait had skipped a generation.
“Aren’t you going to tell me I’m pretty, Daddy? Don’t you care about my feelings?”
“I doubt you’ve ever had any. You seem to have a black hole where they should reside,” Charles said. He stood and walked around to the back of Ross’s chair. “Did you ever love your mother? Did you think about how being the way you are affected her?”
“My mother?” Ross sputtered his lips. “Do you know my mother’s name? What she looked like?”
Charles’s hands stilled over the padlock he’d intended to open. “No. I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not, and fuck you so very much. You don’t remember her, and that’s okay. She died alone and probably floated off to heaven with your name on her lips. She always thought you were an angel visiting in the night. Poor deluded thing. You didn’t even love her. Isn’t that a big deal for you? Love?” He said it as if the word tasted of venom—as if it were something that would burn his tongue and lips.
“If you knew what it was, you wouldn’t speak of it that way.”
“And if you knew what it was, I bet I wouldn’t be alive.” Ross tipped his head back over the chair and blinked at his father some more. “Boom.”
The dull thud of footsteps sounded up the flimsy stairs, and Calvin poked his head into the trailer. “’Bout ready?”
Charles nodded. “I hate to burden you with this … errand, but I don’t want to be far from Marion when she’s due any day now.”
“Don’t worry about it. That’s what family does.”
Ross blew another raspberry. “Aren’t I lucky? Another uncle who’d like to slit my throat.”
Calvin stepped up into the narrow room and scoffed. “Boy, you do realize people would hate you a little less if you weren’t such a sniveling pissant, right? Yeah, your Auntie Julia and I are going to take real good care of you. I’ve got a special little shed on my property all ready for you. It’s got a space heater and
bucket for you to do your business in. If you’re a real good boy, maybe we’ll let you into the house for a proper shower.” Calvin’s eyes shifted to their wolfish gold and a low rumble emitted from his chest.
Ross flinched.
Ah. It seemed he’d not only inherited his grandfather’s megalomania, but also his aversion to werewolves.
Charles moved to unfasten the chains, but Calvin held out his hand.
“Give me the key.”
Charles handed it over, and Calvin dropped it into his jeans pocket before picking Ross, chair and all, up by the seat and carrying him to the door.
“Gonna put him in the back of my SUV like this,” he said by way of explanation.
“Wish I’d thought of that.”
“You were busy at the moment. Can’t be expected to think of everything.” He turned around and descended the staircase backward, carrying Ross as if he weighed nothing.
Charles waited there in the trailer for a while, pacing and thinking.
He wanted to do the right thing by everyone, but not if it meant he was abetting some parties in hurting others.
He’d never had the drive to kill anyone, even when he’d been a drunk, and so he couldn’t see himself killing his own child or letting anyone else do it, either.
Could Ross be saved? He didn’t know, but he owed it to his angry son to at least try. If he tried and failed, at least he wouldn’t harbor regrets. If push came to shove, there were places for people like Ross, though Charles wouldn’t wish them on his worst enemy.
He climbed down the stairs into the night and closed the door, and to his surprise, saw Marion striding through the dry grass in the back field toward him.
“Fuck.”
What had she seen? He was pretty sure Calvin had pulled into the road just through the woods, but maybe he was wrong.
“Saw the lights though my bedroom window back here,” she said when she got close. Her gaze flitted over the trailer, taking it in obviously for the first time. “Wanted to see what they were.”
“In horror movies, women who walk toward strange lights generally get abducted by aliens or slaughtered, sweetheart.”
