Reaping Willow

by D. N. Hoxa

“All right, all right, calm down. Where is your friend now? What’s his name?” Adrian asked.

  He was definitely handling this situation better than me. I just couldn’t bring myself to decide whether to trust Cirko’s crazy story or not.

  “Vincent Montero. I took him out of town last night. We barely got away. He’s safe for now, but he won’t be for long. Once Loretta sets her eyes on someone, they’re as good as dead,” Cirko said. “That’s why she needs to be sent to hell right now.” He turned to his computer. “I was able to find a few pictures of her with the humans she killed while they were still alive.” He clicked on a picture of Loretta sitting on the lap of a man. I couldn’t see her face, but I recognized her shiny, wavy, red hair. My senses didn’t work with pictures, but it looked like the guy was mesmerized by whatever she was telling him.

  Cirko showed us two more pictures of her with another guy and then a woman. Both looked like they’d died and gone to heaven, and they were just looking at her face.

  That was hardly evidence. If she was a demon that was reason enough for me to go after her, but if Cirko was lying, I wanted to know why.

  “So what, you thought you’d call us here, show us these pictures, and hope for the best?” It was naive, even for him because last time we saw each other, I’d tried to kill him.

  “You’re looking at me like I had another choice,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “All right, Cirko.” Adrian dragged a chair from across the room closer to the desk. “We heard what you had to say. Now, you’re going to answer some questions for us.” And he patted the chair for me to sit.

  “He is?” I asked, unsure of what he meant exactly.

  Adrian raised his brows. “He’s a demon. He knows things we don’t.”

  Did he?

  “I’m fine right here,” I said instead. I didn’t want to put my guard down, no matter how harmless Cirko looked at the moment. I still didn’t trust that this wasn’t a set up, just a stupid game he was playing. I’d rather I was prepared if he tried something funny.

  With a sigh, Adrian sat down across from Cirko.

  “Look, I’ll answer anything you want, but you have to promise me you’ll help me first,” the demon said, looking at Adrian now.

  “Like hell,” I mumbled. I wasn’t making any promises to a demon.

  “The thing is, we’re not entirely convinced that you’re telling the truth, Cirko,” Adrian said. I envied his patience. He spoke so calmly. “Let’s talk some more, okay? That’ll give us more time to make up our minds.”

  But Cirko stood up and looked at me. “No. I want your word that you’ll go after her first.”

  Shit, this kept getting weirder and weirder. How dare he look at me like I was his only hope? Like he was going to die if I didn’t help him. Like I should care if he did.

  “You said it yourself—you have no other choice,” Adrian said, saving me yet again. “We do this our way, or we don’t do this at all. Your call.”

  “Damn it,” Cirko said, slamming his hands on the table, but he sat down again. “Fine. I’ll answer your questions. Ask ‘em quick.”

  And Adrian did.

  “How long have you been here?” he said, and I knew exactly what kind of questions he’d been talking about: questions about everything, the kind of things my father wouldn’t have known. The kind of things only demons knew.

  “Eighty-eight years,” Cirko said.

  Fuck, that was longer than I’d expected.

  “How many people have you killed in those years?” I couldn’t believe how calm Adrian was.

  “None. I don’t kill people, okay? I never did,” Cirko said.

  I was going to call bullshit, but Adrian continued.

  “Whose body are you wearing right now?”

  “A dead guy’s body.”

  “So you have killed before!” Filthy liar.

  “I dig graves! I didn’t kill anyone. This body I have now? The kid died when he was seven, and I dug out his corpse and ate his hair sixteen years ago,” he shouted. “Satisfied?”

  Oh. “You can do that? You can shift into a dead guy?” I never knew that was possible.

  “I can if the body’s fresh,” Cirko said. “I have to dig the corpse out the first night it’s buried; otherwise it won’t work.”

  “So you can shift into a kid and then…what, grow up?”

  “It’s how I do it. I pick a body far away from where I’m going to live, so it gives me a couple of years to grow before anybody can recognize me. And before you ask, yes, my body ages just like yours.”

  I would have never guessed.

  “Why go through all that trouble?” I asked.

  “Because I don’t shift into living people.”

  “No, I mean, why dig graves? There’s plenty of corpses in morgues and funeral homes.” Not that I was trying to give him ideas, but I was curious.

  Cirko’s brows shot up. “I hadn’t thought of that, actually.”

  Great. Now I was giving demons ideas. I pursed my lips to keep from talking.

  “Where do you come from?” Adrian continued.

  “Hell,” Cirko said without missing a beat.

  “And how did you come from hell?”

  Aha. That was a question I really wanted to know the answer to. My father didn’t know how demons came to earth. I bet he’d piss his pants if he was here right now, about to get an answer.

  “I’m not going to tell you that,” Cirko said. I frowned.

  “Why not?”

  “Because.” He crossed his arms in front of his chest. “I’m just not.”

  “But you—” I was going to make him tell us, obviously, but Adrian had other ideas.

  “How many of you are there here?”

  “I don’t know, probably hundreds. Maybe thousands,” Cirko said.

  “Why come here? Why not just stay home?”

  Cirko laughed dryly. “You wouldn’t have asked me that if you knew what hell looked like.”

  “Tell me how this works: you come here on Earth because it’s apparently a better place than hell, and do what? What’s the point?” Adrian continued.

  “The point is to get people to do bad shit. That’s the point,” Cirko said. “Killing’s not part of that, but a lot of demons do it anyway.” Nothing I didn’t already know.

  “Tell me about the Devil.” This time, Adrian’s voice shook.

  “He’s the Devil. What more do you want to hear?” Cirko said, suddenly going pale. “He’s worse than anything you heard about or read in books.”

  “But why does he make deals with humans? Why does he take their souls and make them do bad things when he has you guys to do that job for him?”

  That was a very good question, actually.

  “Because he’s the Devil?” Cirko shrugged. “It’s faster that way. Winning a soul, I mean. We’re supposed to make people do bad things, but it takes a lot of those things to wither a soul. If a human gives it away willingly, on the other hand, it’s a much simpler, cleaner deal.”

  Adrian didn’t move a single inch. I doubted he was even breathing.

  “Are you done?” said Cirko when a second passed and Adrian didn’t ask another question.

  “What about the other side?” I asked, both because I wanted to know and because I wanted to distract Adrian. I could almost feel his pain radiating like heat from his body, and it made me feel like shit. I didn’t want him to hurt.

  “The upstairs,” Cirko said, pointing his finger toward the ceiling with a nod. “Yeah, the good guys.” He rolled his eyes.

  “The angels, right?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about them. I’m not one, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “Oh, I have.” I’d noticed since the second he walked into Cece’s shop. “So are there angels here, on earth? Do they, like, fight demons, send them back to hell and stuff?”

  He laughed. “No, nothing of that sort. There are no angels hunting down demons around here. There
was one angel, though, but he’s gone now. He disappeared way before I came here.” Well, that sucked balls. “It’s just you guys.”

  “Trappers, Inc.,” Adrian said, his voice still not like his own. “What do you know about them?”

  Cirko was surprised. “Why do you need me to tell you about them?”

  “Because I’m not one of them. I never was.” But my father was, apparently. He’d even co-founded it.

  Suddenly, Cirko jumped to his feet. “You’re not one of them?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Wait…wait…” He raised his hands, shaking his head. “But you tried to kill me.”

  “Because that’s what I do. I kill demons.” I thought he already had that clear.

  “No, no, this was a mistake. I thought…” He grabbed his head in his hands. “But you were there! I saw you. You were there.”

  “I went to see who they were after you told me their name,” I said, pissed off now that he’d confirmed that he’d been following me. And I, like a fool, hadn’t even noticed.

  “So you’re just…you? This…this is it?” He pointed at me and Adrian.

  I rolled my eyes. “What, we’re suddenly not good enough for you now?”

  “No! Of course you’re not! Not just the two of you,” he said, even more freaked out.

  “Hey, calm down, man. Sit down,” Adrian said, but Cirko wouldn’t listen.

  “It’s going to take an army to kill Loretta. A fucking army!” he shouted. “I thought you would have backup, weapons, means to find and take her down.”

  “I do have backup and weapons and means to find and take her down,” I spit. I couldn’t believe this guy. What the hell did he think I was?

  “She’ll kill you before you can blink,” he said, a dumbfounded smile on his face.

  “Not if I kill her first.” Was he really going to make me defend myself like this?

  “You couldn’t even kill me!”

  Ouch. That hurt.

  “I couldn’t kill you because he was there,” I said, pointing at Adrian. “Trust me, I’ve killed a lot of your kind. Stronger demons, much stronger than you.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  That was as far as I was willing to let him go. I jumped him and threw him against the wall in a second and pressed the tip of my knife to his chest.

  “All it takes is a little push,” I whispered against his mouth. “Just a tiny push of my hand and you’ll be gone. Do you believe me now?”

  “Okay, okay, fine,” he said, trying to become one with the wall behind him. “Fine, just get that thing away from me. It hurts like hell.”

  I smiled. That was more like it.

  “You better remember that the next time you decide to tell me I’m not good enough.” I was, damn it. My father had made sure of that.

  When I stepped back, Cirko moved away from me and back to the desk again.

  “It’s not going to be enough,” he whispered. “Not only is she strong, but she has others of her kind protecting her at all times.”

  “Why don’t you let us worry about that part?” said Adrian.

  “So you’ll help me?” he asked halfheartedly.

  Adrian looked at me. What the hell did he expect me to say?

  “These pictures don’t prove anything, Cirko,” he finally said, waving at the laptop.

  “They do if you go to the police and check out their missing persons’ board.”

  “Now that would have been proof,” I said.

  “I couldn’t risk it. I think I…” He pressed his lips and sighed. “I think I screwed up looking for these pictures. I think Loretta knows something’s up with me.”

  “Then you’re a bigger fool than I thought.” And I was an even bigger one for standing there, talking to him when I could have killed him a thousand times by now.

  “I had no choice, okay? I needed to prove it to you so you’d help me.”

  “You could have been more careful. For all we know, she’s after you right now.”

  Cirko smiled. “I think it was worth it. You seem to believe me.”

  Ah, shit. “I didn’t say that,” I mumbled, but the truth was, I did. I believe him, which was all shades of fucked up.

  “We do believe you,” said Adrian. The guy wasn’t afraid to speak his mind, apparently. “And we’ll consider helping you with Loretta, but we’d need something from you, too.”

  “Anything, man. You name it.”

  I could hardly believe it.

  “You’re a demon, so you know where other demons are. Bad guys, like Loretta, right?”

  “Well, I mean, I don’t know where all of them are, but I know some,” Cirko said.

  “If we decide to help you, you’re going to tell us where they are. You’re going to help us find them.”

  Uh… “Adrian, what are you doing?”

  “I’m making sure we have an easier way to find demons, that’s all.”

  Yes, I got that, and it was a good plan, but—

  “Done,” Cirko said, throwing me off guard.

  “Are you sure about that? Because you know what happens if you’re lying to us,” I said.

  “I’m not lying to you. You take down Loretta, and I’ll help you find all the demons in the world if you want me to.”

  I smiled. “So you’re willing to give up your own kind to save your human friend?” It just didn’t add up.

  “He’s not just a friend. We grew up together. He’s like a brother to me,” he said. “I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to him, and I don’t expect you to understand. You think I’m evil just because I’m a demon.”

  “But you are!” His name said it all, for God’s sake!

  “And you’re a racist asshole,” Cirko said.

  “Racist?” Now I’d heard it all.

  “I didn’t ask to be born a demon, Willow. It’s not like someone came to me and said, hey Cirko, you’re about to be born. Please choose what you want to be from this list right here. It didn’t work that way—I didn’t ask for any of this.”

  I genuinely had nothing to say to that. He’d done it. He’d left me speechless.

  “So what’s it going to be?” he said, his eyes moving from Adrian to me. “Are you going to help me or not?”

  As bad as it sounds, I already had an answer to that. I needed to watch out from then on, in case the sky fell down on earth.

  Because I was about to help out a demon.

  Chapter Thirteen

  We went back to Adrian’s apartment to get some rest and to wait for Cirko.

  Yes, you read that right. We were waiting for Cirko to show up with a bag full of guns. Hey, he’d offered himself. He said he could get us as many firearms as we could carry, right after we told him that we would hunt down the vampire and kill her.

  “It was the right thing to do,” Adrian said as soon as he closed the door to his apartment. It was like he’d read my mind.

  “I’m not so sure.” In fact, I was certain of the opposite.

  “He was telling the truth. No man is that good an actor.”

  “Except he isn’t a man. He can’t be trusted.”

  “If you really thought that, you wouldn’t have agreed to help him.”

  “And if you hadn’t made me listen to him, he’d be where he belongs!” I snapped.

  “I didn’t make you do anything, Willow. You chose to listen to him yourself because you knew it was the right thing to do.”

  Goddamn it, he was impossible. “All my life I’ve trained to kill demons for a reason. Cirko said it himself—they’re here to make people do bad things. And now I’m helping one? What would—”

  I stopped speaking. What would my father think of me if he knew?

  In the end, it all came down to that. It always came down to that, no matter how much I hated it.

  “This was a mistake.” I should have ignored that stupid note. I should have never gone to meet Cirko in the first place.

  “N
o one’s making you stay, Willow. You know where the door is,” Adrian said, completely pissed off. “If you don’t want to help, I’ll understand.”

  I laughed. “And you’ll go after the vampire yourself?” Really hilarious.

  “I will because someone has to. She’s killing people, unlike Cirko.” He stepped in front of me and looked like he wanted to slap me. God, how he pissed me off.

  “You don’t know the first thing about demons! You’ll die, you fool!”

  “I’m not as weak as you seem to think,” he spit.

  “Oh, I don’t think you’re weak. I just think you’re stupid.”

  He pointed his finger at my face. “And you’re a spoiled little brat. You couldn’t tell right from wrong if it slaps you in the face because you think you’re always right, even when you know you aren’t.”

  “You know what, I might be a brat, but at least I have a soul, and I’m not so desperate as to try to make up for it by pretending to be a good guy and helping out a demon!”

  I saw it in his face the second I said the words. I’d crossed the line.

  Adrian smiled, and for a second, he looked like a completely different person. “The only one who’s pretending here is you,” he said, completely calm again. “If you made up your mind, you know how to leave. Just don’t expect me to stop you.”

  He turned around and disappeared into the hallway. The sound of a door slamming shut almost brought me to my knees. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. There was nothing I wanted more than to leave. Turn my back on all of this and be done with it.

  But I also knew that if I left, there would be no turning back. Adrian wasn’t going to stop me this time—he said it himself. And I would never come back. It would be over for real.

  I sat on the couch and allowed myself a second to calm down. Maybe he was right—I couldn’t tell what was right or wrong anymore. I’d met a man who’d made a deal with the Devil, who wasn’t a bad man, who saved my life by beating up his own brothers. I’d talked to a demon, who was, you know, a demon, and he wasn’t pure evil like he was supposed to be.

  Was Adrian right? Was this really the right thing to do?

  Or did I believe in what I always believed in—my father? Where was he now that I needed him?

  “Why did you do it, Dad?” I asked the ceiling. “Why did you leave me?”