Chapter 13
“Titi?” Ella asks when my voice trails off for too long.
“Yes?”
“I was just thinking. Maybe we should try my skateboard again.”
(Someone was skateboarding a few pages back in the book we’re reading.)
I nod automatically. I bought her the skateboard for her birthday, to encourage bravery. She tried it once, fell, and that was the end of that.
“Remember I got that big scrape? And it bled?” She twists up her face at the awful memory.
“I remember.”
“Maybe I can try again anyway, though.” She looks at me, searching my face for the right reaction.
“I love that idea,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “Let’s do it.”
“Yeah.” She nestles in closer. “Okay, now read more.”
How exactly am I planning to kill this potentially mythical being? What if he is not even remotely human? Why am I assuming he is?
Because he’s on the internet, writing messages. Or maybe that’s, like, a minion of his. He could be a fire-breathing dragon for all I know.
No. He is probably at least humanoid.
Grub thought the hunter might be one of us. Someone with a DP. He was right so much more often than I gave him credit for. Right in all the worst ways. But why would another Dow want to kill us? Self-hatred? Denial? A megalomaniacal plan to be the only one in the world with powers?
I’ve been thinking about all the other victims. As I read aloud the insipid adventures of The Pretzel Princess, I am cataloging deaths.
The ones Grub was keeping track of. I have been trying to remember all the details.
What did he say about the grad student in Brooklyn?
That he jumped off a bridge. But what about the makeup entrepreneur?
Did he say how she died? Is there a pattern?
None of the deaths seemed suspicious. It must be mind control. Like Dick Face.
The very real possibility that I am signing up to die hits me with a lung-flattening thunk. I am inwardly knocked off my feet.
I will need to act very quickly.
How am I supposed to have sex with the demon hunter at an old-fashioned speakeasy?
I won’t need to, I tell myself. I will just need a kiss, if I do what Dick Face said. Which is what exactly?
I need to want him to die. I need to want to use my power against him.
And I know I can do that.
That I am completely certain of.
* * *
Maybe it isn’t really the hunter, I think at 1:15, helping Ella practice violin. Maybe it’s actually a coincidence. A series of coincidences.
Right, my mind says, darkly sarcastic. Like the boys you kissed all dying.
That’s what Dee thinks. That’s what any reasonable person has to think. Because the only other explanation is literal magic.
But I haven’t believed in coincidences like that for a long time.
Maybe I’m paranoid.
But Grub is dead. And I watched Dick Face in his stained shorts, bending people to his contemptible will.
“Keep your bow in the middle lane,” I say. Ella’s face tightens. She is already at her breaking point, driven to the edge of furious defeat by the mere suggestion that she might not be getting something right.
How am I doing any of this? Grub is dead. I have no one to talk to.
I pick up my phone from the top of the upright piano. I scroll to Joel’s name. My thumb hovers over it.
No. Obviously not.
I go to my last conversation with Grub. It’s automatic.
What am I going to do? Text him that I really need to talk to him?
That we need to put on a movie where a brilliant astrophysicist flies her tiny spaceship into a wormhole in an effort to go back in time to when her daughter was alive.
We can put it on in the background while we talk about how he is dead now, too.
Ella squeaks through another measure, which sounds the same as the last one. Maybe she’s lost.
I am scrolling pointlessly, my eyes stuck on the screen.
And then I stop. I focus. Check signal, he wrote.
I totally forgot. I got completely sidetracked by the rest of it, the part about meeting someone.
The part where he stopped because he was already dying, already gone.
It must have happened quickly, because he would’ve written otherwise.
Unless the demon hunter took his phone. Another real possibility. Which would explain how he found me.
I can no longer hear Ella’s violin. A humming, aggressive silence fills my ears. I stumble through pages of apps, get to Signal. I click on the link Grub sent, I follow the instructions, download a “decoder bot.” I select the file he emailed me. I run the program.
“Is that enough?” Ella asks.
“Fine,” I say.
“Really?” She sounds like she’s getting away with something.
I nod. It says it has decrypted 0.3 percent of the file. This is going to be slow.
“Can I watch a movie?” she tries.
“Do the podcast. The . . .” I’m forgetting the name. I remember: “Once Upon the World.”
“Okay.” She puts her violin down on the nearest chair.
She studies me, her eyes concerned. “You look sad, Titi.” She says it tentatively, as though she suspects this may be rude, or presumptuous, or just not something children should say to their caretakers.
Sometimes she is so fine-tuned, so alertly aware, it stuns me.
I feel tears fill my eyes like I’m a pitcher pouring from the inside. I turn quickly away. “I’m okay, baby.”
“Are you really okay?” Outside the living room window, our dogwood tree is purplish red and the patch of visible sky is obliviously blue. The colors seem wrong, callous.
“I’m a little sad, sweetie,” I choke.
Her arms instantly go around me, and she hugs me so hard I think one of us is going to bruise.
* * *
I am on the New Jersey turnpike, driving to the city.
It’s 7:03 and I meant to leave much sooner, to be there really early, for a stakeout.
The obvious move. But Mom forgot she was supposed to cancel her yoga club tarot night, and by the time I could get through to her friend Joyce— Anyway, yes, I missed the stakeout.
I am late to what may be the most treacherous, important event of my life.
That is what happens when you are responsible for a child.
You can’t get out of the house even when you really need to kill someone. Even when it’s someone very evil.
* * *
Parking is impossible. I parallel park in town sometimes, but when I try it here in a too-small spot that turns out to have a hydrant in it anyway, the guy behind me starts honking like I’m committing a crime.
I end up in a garage that charges a shocking amount for a couple hours.
Then I’m walking to the speakeasy off Seventh Avenue.
It’s 8:04 and chilly.
He will already be there. I know that.
Stay strong, I tell myself, the words meaningless mush in my mind.
I fish around in my bag for my pepper spray in the cute pink canister.
It feels small under my fingers, and when I lift it, a loose Band-Aid comes along.
I carry them at all times in case Ella gets a scrape or even an imaginary scrape.
Dick Face said I could do this. But he was really drunk.
This is a terrible, ridiculous plan. It’s not even a plan at all.
I am utterly alone.
I should turn around now. I should run.
I think of Ella and the skateboard. She is finally brave enough to try.
I think about what might happen if the demon hunter has my address, if he comes to the brown house.
Can he sense which of us are cursed?
He has already killed a child.
I need to protect Ella.
I’m wearing black yoga pants and a charcoal sweater with a cowl neck.
It seemed like the right outfit for this type of thing when I put it on.
Now the very idea of a right outfit for a meeting with a murderer seems patently absurd, and also the sweater is too frumpy.
These women going in ahead of me are so stylish, wearing tall leather boots.
Why am I noticing anyone’s shoes right now?
Will one of my last thoughts be about whether DSW would even carry those green suede ones?
What a misleading representation of who I am, what my life has been.
What the hell has my life been?
And it’s not like God is screenshotting my last thoughts. Or maybe God is doing exactly that.
“Can I help you?” the bouncer/host by the metal door is asking.
Witnesses. There are plenty of witnesses. Will he really try to kill me in front of everyone?
No, I remind myself with a burst of confidence. No one has died in public, that I know of. He has a different MO. He will try something else, and I will not fall for it. Because I am the only one who sees this coming.
This is my advantage.
Everyone else was caught off guard.
Even Grub?
Yes. Even Grub. He would’ve said something to me otherwise.
“Ma’am?” says the guy at the door. “Did you need help?”
I realize I’m standing there staring at him. “Uh, I’m meeting someone inside.”
“Right down the stairs,” he says, and down I go. Down and down. It’s a steep staircase that descends into what feels increasingly like the underworld.
A server in suspenders is waiting at the bottom.
“I’m meeting someone,” I explain. “In the—um, the last booth on the end of the row?” These are the instructions I’ve been given.
“Oh, your party is already here,” he says, and one or more of my organs seem to lose all their heat; I am much too cold inside.
He is already here.
“Right this way.”
Right this way to the end of the story. To the horrible truth. Right this way to meet your fate.
I take a step after the server. Another.
It’s a 1930s fantasy in here: Someone is playing ragtime piano, gold light glows on amber bottles behind the long bar, the floor is stained deep brown, everything is dark and sexy and cozily warm after the cool night air.
We brush by some people coming the other way.
They’re laughing. They have their whole lives ahead of them.
My stupid father in the loud bar in South Beach, and now this—another crowded, dark space, another bar. For someone who doesn’t drink, I’m certainly spending a surprising percentage of my life’s most pivotal moments in bars.
My phone dings in my hand. I look down. That’s not a sound it usually makes. Decryption Complete! announces a little red bar in the middle of the screen. Access File?
I’ve somehow forgotten again about this little project of Grub’s. I click Yes. The message opens suddenly, text in a blocky font.
We come around the corner into the crowded main area. A low, rust-orange ceiling, warm brown walls. Booths in a row, beautiful people talking, partially obscured by the high backs.
I glance down. I pause to read.
I’m pretty sure angels are demon hunters lorelei.
Not positive but like 65%. Possible they don’t just heal people but they’re also on a mission to kill everyone like us.
They have some weird power over us, like your stuff maybe.
Like we can’t resist them? I saw someone say it’s “like a pull.” Unfair advantage.
There’s some ancient shit going on here and I don’t understand it yet but you need to get the fuck out of town and ABORT SHERLOCK MISSION on this one.
You’re in danger. I knew it. But I didn’t know just how serious. He’s right there Lorelei.
Which is of course when I see him.
He’s right there.
The man waiting for me in the last booth. The demon hunter.
The familiar curls. The glasses catching the candlelight.
He stands up as I come forward. He seems larger than I remember, even though I saw him so recently.
“Joel?” I whisper.
“Tempest,” he says.