Chapter 21
“Hey there, birthday boy,” Eric said, scooping Timmy up as soon as he stepped into the entrance hall. He hung my kiddo upside down from his ankles the same way he’d done with Allie when she was little. And Timmy loved it just as much as his big sister had.
“Swing me, Unca David! Swing me!”
Eric was doing just that and Timmy was shrieking with glee when Stuart emerged from his office where he’d been wrangling with some sort of forms he needed for some regulation having to do with something about the Forza West plans.
“Wow,” Stuart said, grinning at Eric. “Looks like you caught a very big fish.”
“I’m a boy, Daddy. And I’m three!”
“Yes, you are. Good to see you, Eric. Careful, or you’ll be carrying him around upside down all day.”
“We could handle that, couldn’t we, Timster?”
“Higher! Swing higher!”
As Eric chuckled, I beamed. I was getting used to the civil chatter between these men of mine, but I wasn’t about to let myself hope that it would continue. That would be too good to be true.
“Daddy!” Allie bounded into the room, then stopped short. “Timmy! You stole my hug,” she teased. “How is Uncle Eric supposed to hug me if he’s dangling you?”
“My birthday. My Unca David.”
“Okey-dokey. I’ll get a hug from Stuart.”
She sidled up to him for a hug, which he returned with a half-hearted squeeze. I don’t know if Allie noticed, but I did. I met Stuart’s eyes, saw the guilt there, and excused myself back to the kitchen.
“What’s wrong?” Laura asked, the moment I rounded the corner. She was standing by the sink, sipping a Mimosa and chatting with Cutter.
I stopped short, not realizing they’d arrived from the back while the rest of us had been gathered by the front door. “Nothing. I’ll tell you later. I’ll be fine.”
I closed my eyes, exhaled, and when I opened them again, she was holding a Mimosa out to me. “And see? I’m better already.”
She tilted her head in question, but I waved it away. “Seriously. I’m fine.” I glanced around. “Where’s Mindy?”
“Bringing the cake,” she said. “She’ll be here in a few.”
“Great. I think we’re ready.” I glanced at the clock. A quarter-to-one, and the party started at two with cake in the middle and a loosey-goosey end time of four. I could make it. I’d be exhausted at the end, but I could make it.
I turned in a circle, taking in the house, trying to think of what I might have forgotten.
That’s when I spied the box. Not that there was anything wrong with having a cardboard box under a side table, but I didn’t want an eager toddler using whatever family documents Eliza had gathered as drawing paper.
I headed that way, tugged the box out, then hefted it, intending to take it to Stuart’s study for safe keeping.
Naturally, I took one step and tripped over my own feet, dropping the box and sending papers tumbling. Well, hell.
Cutter and Laura dropped down by me, and Allie hurried over to help, too. With the exception of a few photos, the box was filled with nothing but paper, and we scooped it up and tossed it in the box.
I wasn’t really even paying attention to what what I was gathering, so I’m not sure how it caught my eye, but I stopped short when I saw Eliza’s family tree. A tree that shot off in one direction to my mother, Amanda, but had another familiar name up near the top.
Donnelly.
I pulled the paper closer and studied it, getting lost in the ancestry lines. A Donnelly was one of my great-uncles? I wasn’t sure.
But though I’d seen nothing specific on the paper, something buried deep inside me was certain that Father Donnelly’s name was penned in somewhere on that tree. Just as I was.
If that was true, though, what did it mean?
“Mom?”
I jumped. “Sorry. Distracted.” I shoved the family tree into the box and pushed it toward Allie. “Put this in the closet. I need to make a phone call.”
“Sure. No problem. I just wanted to tell you that Jared’s here. He came on this really cool vintage motorcycle and Daddy and I are going out front to see it. Stuart’s got Timmy. They’re getting the ice cream out of the freezer in the garage.”
“Fine. Great. Sounds fun.” I barely heard her.
My mind was too full of questions, and as Allie flew toward the front door, I hurried into Stuart’s study.
I slammed the door behind me, and snatched up the phone.
Then I tapped a pencil impatiently on Stuart’s desk as I got routed through the switchboard to Father Corletti.
“Katherine, mia cara, thank goodness you are returning my messages.”
“Father, I—wait. What? You called me?” I said a silent curse, then crossed myself, all the while wondering where I’d left my mobile phone. “Father, what’s going on?”
“My child. Things are not as they seem.”
“Wait. What? Which things?”
“The reports you have made. The reason the demons are protecting Allie … Kate, it has all been horribly twisted.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The demons do not want to keep Allie alive because she is the only one who can defeat Lilith.”
“Then why—”
“They wish to keep her alive because she is the only human who can contain Lilith’s energy without consent.”
I sat down in Stuart’s chair. Lilith was ridiculously powerful, so of course she would burn through a human body in an instant.
She’d manifested only one time in the last millennium that I was aware of, and that had been when she’d moved into Nadia’s body.
Nadia, however, was a power-hungry ex-Demon Hunter who’d known the score and had traded her body for power.
She’d consented, and Lilith had hitched a ride into this dimension.
But there weren’t very many Nadia’s in the world, thank God.
Which meant that now we knew for certain—the baddest bitch in the demon realm was once again coming after my family. And this time, she wanted my daughter.
No. Way.
No. Freaking. Way.
I stood up, needing to tell Allie right away, only then processing what she’d just told me—she and Eric had gone outside to look at Jared’s bike.
Jared.
The boy who supposedly wanted to protect my little girl so she could kill Lilith.
The lousy son-of-a-bitch.
“Father, hang on. I’ll be right back.”
I didn’t wait for him to answer. Just shoved the handset into my back pocket as I raced out of the study and toward the front door, taking one of Stuart’s pencils with me.
I barely noticed Laura standing with Mindy and Cutter, all three of whom looked completely perplexed.
Stuart was at the top of the stairs, calling my name.
I ignored them all.
I’d just reached the hallway when the front door burst open, and Jared raced in, the skin on his face raw from what looked like lash marks. “Kate! Kate! They took Allie and Eric! A van. They stopped, and they ripped off Allie’s necklace, and—”
I didn’t let him finish. Instead, I leaped on him, knocking him to the ground as I straddled him, the sharp end of the pencil over his heart. “Believe me when I say I can get this through your clothes and your skin and right into that cold, dead heart. I am highly, highly motivated.”
“Kate—I didn’t do anything. What the hell? What’s going on?”
“You bastard. You unimaginable bastard. I trusted you. I thought you wanted to protect Allie, not hurt her.”
“Hurt her?” That was Mindy’s voice, but I ignored her as well.
“What are you talking about?” Jared asked. “I don’t want to hurt Allie.”
“She can defeat Lilith? Bullshit. You want her because she can be Lilith.”
“No.” He shook his head. “No, no, no. I don’t want any of that. I want Lilith gone.”
“Bullshit.”
I heard a strange buzzing, and realized it was coming from my back pocket. The unpleasant beeping sound of a call that had been disconnected. “Stuart. Can you—”
Thankfully, he understood and took the phone from my jeans, then ended the call. I needed to call Father back, but first I needed to deal with this traitor.
“He’s telling the truth,” Mindy said, stepping into my line of sight. “At least, he mostly is. At least about wanting Lilith gone.”
I looked between her and Stuart, then over to Laura, who shook her head as if to say she didn’t know what Mindy was talking about.
“Stuart, can you find something solid and wooden and pointy. And a mallet. I want you to babysit this guy.”
“On it,” he said, then headed toward the garage.
“Okay, Mindy. What are you talking about?”
She took a tentative step closer to Jared. “They’re blackmailing you, aren’t they? You really do hate Lilith, but they’re blackmailing you.”
Jared stayed silent, so I jabbed the pencil down until he nodded. “Yes.” He turned his head away, not meeting my eyes. And he didn’t say another word.
I considered torturing it out of him—it was tempting, that was for sure—but I turned to Mindy instead. Right then, I needed information. “What do you know, Mindy? And how on earth do you know it?”
“I—well, when I was pissed at Allie I started researching him.” She nodded to the vampire on the floor. “I told you I didn’t trust him.”
“You researched a vampire?”
“Well, he moves in the world like a human, right? So I checked what I could find. Addresses, driver’s licenses, his parent’s information. Which was really him, right? So I just kept going backward. It was kind of fun, actually, and I—”
“Mindy, sweetheart,” Laura said. “What did you learn?”
“He’s got a sister. Three generations back, there was always a sister. So I figure she’s a vamp, too. But where is she now?”
“Staked?” Cutter asked, but I shook my head.
“Blackmail. That’s what you said, right?” I directed the question to Mindy, who nodded.
“Blackmail?” Stuart repeated, as he came back in with a garden stake and a rubber mallet.
I nodded to Cutter. “Can you two keep that stake at his heart and get him in a chair. And if he lies, pound it home.”
They did, with Stuart holding Jared in place by the shoulders, and Cutter keeping him in place with a well-placed stake and a clear willingness to use the mallet.
“Are you sure?” I asked Mindy.