Chapter 6
“Allie?” Laura gaped at me. “What are you talking about?”
“She’s the one the demons are all twitchy about,” I said. “The one that’s new. Or, at least, I think she is. I don’t know,” I admitted, sagging down to the ground and pulling my knees up to my chest.
After a moment, Laura settled onto the damp grass, too. “I think I need a little more context. How the heck is Allie new? And what does that mean, anyway?”
“What it means? Not really sure,” I admitted, then gave her the quick and dirty rundown of everything I knew.
She nodded sagely. “So the bottom line is that Father Donnelly and Eric’s parents weren’t expecting that Eric would be the kick-ass Demon Hunter. His child would.”
“Pretty much.”
She let that settle for a bit, then her eyes widened. “Is she—I mean, not to worry you, but Eric went a little off the rails.”
“I know. But it’s different,” I said firmly, as much to convince myself as her. “She locked the gate to hell. What’s inside her is there for good.”
“So she’s the happy ending, and Eric was the tumultuous third act.”
This time, it was my turn to gape. “Huh?”
“It’s Mindy,” she said dismissively. “Now that she’s in that musical, everything is about plays and movies and story structure.
Last Friday, she spent dinner telling me about the story structure in the episode of The Simpsons we’d just watched.
Then she told me that Paul’s affair was the inciting incident in my romance with Cutter. What does that even mean?”
I bit back a laugh. “And I thought I was the one with problems.”
“Nah, I’d say we’re about even.”
“Thanks.”
Her brow furrowed. “For what?”
“For surprising me. Or really, for not surprising me. For acting the same way that I knew you would but was afraid you wouldn’t.”
“There’s a lot to unpack in that sentence, but I’m guessing you’re trying to say that you worried that I’d freak out, then tell you to get your daughter out of my house?”
I felt the tears prick my eyes, and my throat was thick as I said, “Yeah.”
“Oh, Kate. I love Allie, you know that. Like you said, she’s the same kid she always was.
With more issues than most teens, but nothing we can’t handle.
But on that same note,” she added with a mischievous grin, “I bought one of those tasers Rita used on Eric. If Allie gets out of hand, I’ll just give her a jolt. ”
“And by out of hand, I assume you mean something more nefarious than leaving your best dishes scattered about.”
She shrugged. “Hey, whatever works.”
And you know what? She had a point.
“The demons are gearing up for something,” I said once I was back in the house with Timmy and Eddie. “They want Allie for some reason.”
“Harumph. She’s the same kid she’s always been. Nothing’s changed, right? Now you just know what’s inside her. But it’s always been there.”
We were in the living room, and I dropped down onto the couch, pulling a pillow up into my lap and hugging my knees to it. “I know. I know, I do. It’s just—well, you weren’t there. In Rome, I mean. There was a glow. This golden glow that covered everything after Allie locked the gate.”
His brow furrowed, and he squinted as he rubbed his straggly beard. “A glow? Or fire?”
It was a fair question. I didn’t know anything about the golden glow that had been in that crypt after Allie slapped her hand onto the dais and stopped the gates of Hell from opening. But I did know a little bit about Cardinal Fire.
Years ago, back when Eric and I were still hunting, we’d been on the trail of one of the most vile High Demons out there—Abaddon.
We were the only two surviving members of the team of Hunters that had gone into a series of caverns beneath the streets of Rome.
We’d found Abaddon, and we’d been trapped.
We’d managed to escape through the use of Cardinal Fire, mystical fire that could cleanse away and destroy demons.
It hadn’t destroyed Abaddon that day—he’d managed to escape back into the bowels of the earth, the fire not touching him.
But it did touch Eric, and in doing so, it eradicated the mystical bond that kept the demon inside him buried deep.
Another round of Cardinal Fire would have probably killed both him and the demon.
But there was no more, and we were able to escape, none the wiser at the time.
I only recently learned about the demon that had been hidden in my first husband, then loosed within him that day. The demonic presence affected him, all the way down to a cellular level, and he passed that essence to his daughter.
And because of that heritage, she’d been able to shut the gate in Rome.
That, of course, was a very good thing.
But there’s no escaping the fact that the source of her power is demonic, and I don’t know what that means.
For that matter, I don’t even know if she has special powers.
Sure, she’s faster and stronger, but she really has been training.
And, yes, she shut the gate. But for all I know that was a one-time thing.
Handy in the moment, but not a useful trick most days.
(And thank God for that! I have plenty to do without gates to hell popping up all over creation.)
So maybe Eddie was right. Unless the golden glow changed her, she’s the same sweet kid she’s always been.
Even if it did change her, it wouldn’t necessarily be for the bad.
She kept the demons at bay, after all. All of which made me feel like a horrible mother to even consider the possibility that there was something dark growing inside her.
“Momma, momma, MOMMA!”
Speaking of being a horrible parent…
I pulled myself away from my thoughts to find Timmy bouncing in front of me. “Do you need to go potty?”
“No, Momma. Wanna be the band!”
Across the room, Eddie groaned.
“You want to have a conversation or not?” I asked. “Because if I don’t let him, he’s just going to whine.”
“And if you do let him, we ain’t gonna be able to hear ourselves think.”
He had a point.
“Band it is,” I said, standing and leading the way to the kitchen. “But this is quiet band.” I took my voice down to a whisper. “It’s for special music. Can you do whisper singing and quiet playing?”
He shook his head. “No, Momma.”
At least the kid was honest.
“I bet you can. And if you let me and Gramps finish talking, you can have a packet of Goldfish crackers.”
His little face lit up the way it often does when he tells me he loves me and gives me big cuddles. Considering that put me on the same par as cheesy crackers, I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that.
Wisely, I chose to table that question, focusing instead on putting together his music studio. A rubber spatula with a wooden handle. Tupperware instead of metal bowls to serve as drums. A plastic spoon still wrapped from ice cream take-out one day.
And, the pièce de la résistance … an empty paper towel tube.
“You’re all set, kiddo,” I whispered. “Remember, it’s quiet band.”
“Aye-aye, Momma,” he said, putting Boo Bear on the floor beside him, then saluting me with the tube.
I mentally crossed my fingers that I’d just bought seven to ten minutes of quality adult conversation time, then headed back into the living room.
Eddie snorted. ”You really think that’ll keep the boy occupied?”
“A girl can dream.”
“Fair enough.” He pointed a bony finger at me. “And a girl should quit worrying about things she don’t understand.”
It took me a second to shift gears back to my daughter, but I’d caught up with the conversation by the time he added, “You got to look at the basics. Allie’s your daughter.
You love Allie. Allie’s a good kid. Allie’s the same kid she’s always been.
Ergo, unless you know for certain something’s different, not a damn thing’s changed. ”
I nodded. He was right. It’s not as if this just happened yesterday. We stayed in Rome after saving the world, and part of that was so that Allie could talk with the priests at Forza and train and learn more about what she was. Nobody saw any hint that there was anything evil inside her.
But even without the possibility of evil forces gathering inside her, I was still worried. Because it seemed to me that for some reason, the local demon population was looking for my daughter.
“Still might be Eliza,” Eddie said when I voiced as much. “For that matter, could be someone else in town.”
I scowled at the thought. “All that means is that I have more to figure out. We need to know who the demons are after and why. You remember what it was like before. And I’m not keen on having the oldest and most powerful demon in the world come back again.”
He made a snorting noise. “You sent that Lilith bitch and her consort Odayne packing. She’s gone. She’s dead.”
I sighed, then glanced toward the rising noise now coming from the kitchen. I figured we had maybe four minutes left for a real conversation.
”Lilith’s not dead, and you know it,” I said.
In addition to being a High Demon, Lilith is also one of the first and most powerful demons.
Getting rid of her is like trying to remove a purple Sharpie stain from a white T-shirt.
It just never quite seems to work. Ask me how I know.
“And how could a demon ever really be dead, anyway?” I continued, because thinking about demons is almost always better than thinking about laundry.
To be brutally honest, I should have known the answer to that—and I sort of did, even though I never really wrapped my head around it.
It’s the kind of thing they taught us in the long, boring classes that every Hunter-in-Training had to take.
I was always more about kicking ass than learning the details.
The book stuff was Eric’s love, not mine. Theory, theology, the whole shebang.