19. Vesper
Vesper
“You are doing the right thing, Ves,” Valefar tells me.
I grip the wheel and watch the highway looming ahead of us, the tree line thickening as we push further west. In the late morning hours, the light of the Oregon coast turns a soft grey-gold.
I realize my hands are trembling slightly against the leather.
“Vesper…” his tone lowers, serious but reassuring. “Please, you must not fear for Bethie. There is no reason to.”
For the last forty-five minutes, he’s been telling me this in one form or another. And each time he says it, his tail makes another slow pass along the outside of my arm. Like punctuation. Like he’s signing the words into my skin.
“Even though the mother bunny was ready to follow her little bunny wherever he ran—” he goes on, and I can’t help but lift a brow—“she was also ready to be the safe place he came home to. After today, you will still be that safe place.”
His tail skims along my shoulder where the curve meets my collarbone. I shiver, but not from cold. A smile forms on my lips. The emotion laces my throat, but I push it down to focus on the road.
I know I did the right thing.
Robby was easy. He’s always easy. He secretly enjoys the days I’m not there because he gets to reorganize the back storage. He’s also like an uncle to Bethie. Sometimes, I’ll bring her to work, and he says she’s a good luck charm since sales go up.
I’d sent him a voice note at seven-fifteen. He’d responded with a thumbs up and a note that he could come in. The shop was handled. The shop was fine.
We spent the early morning at Bethie’s favorite restaurant with its play place, then went to Manny’s for a drop-off.
Manny was only too happy for a day out at the museum with her.
She’d pressed her face into Valefar’s side at the front doorstep and made a sound like a disgruntled kitten, and he’d said, very gravely, the museum awaits, little beastie, and she’d perked up immediately.
Valefar told me, quietly, while she was putting on her shoes, that Lucifer’s demons follow him. Not her. Not Manny. Bethie is safe.
The cemetery, however, came from Harold.
Or rather, the leather-bound book he left me.
After we cleaned the last of the shadow sludge out of my kitchen this morning, I went through it, hunting for anything stronger than salt and found a section on celestial wards buried between two pages of protection work.
In Harold’s cramped handwriting beside one entry: Elias Doran.
St. Brendan’s. Tillamook. Truth-bound threshold stone.
Because of course Harold couldn’t just write In case Hell invades your kitchen, go here.
So, Valefar and I agreed to send Bethie away with Manny while he and I would take a drive to the coast. I know he’s right. It doesn’t make it easier.
Valefar lifts his tail from my arm to skim through the curls at the nape of my neck, coiling slowly, and more warmth spreads through me like heat moving through water.
The trembling stops.
“Would you like to tell me what you are feeling, Ves?”
I breathe in deep, then let it out slowly.
“It’s just surreal,” I say. “Everything that’s happened over the past few months.
All of it.” I watch the road. “It’s been amazing, Valefar.
Honestly—some of the best days of my life.
Maybe the best.” My voice stays even because I’ve had practice when I mean something to this degree.
“And that’s what scares me so much. Because if this doesn’t work—”
His hand finds my thigh, light but certain.
“It will work,” he says. “I know this stone. When you showed me the picture and the composition of the minerals, it is a powerful agent, one of the oldest celestial wards I have encountered.”
“I know,” I say. “But what if it holds against you? What if we get it back and it protects us from you, too?”
His hand stills. He draws a slow breath. “I won’t pretend your concerns don’t matter, Mistress.” He says it simply. No performance. “But I must believe our bond will shield me from any ill effects. The claim. Your summons.” His thumb traces a small circle on my thigh.
“And what if we’re wrong?”
His thumb stills against my leg. “Then we do not bring it home.” I glance over. He gives me a steady look. “We test it there first, Ves. If it considers me a threat, we find another solution.”
“Just like that?” I swallow the knot in my throat.
“I have no interest in acquiring protection for your home which prevents me from entering it.” He squeezes my knee. “We have cause to be cautious. We do not yet have cause to assume the worst. And, as they say in the movies—” A pause, genuine. “—we shall cross that bridge when we come to it?”
I feel the smile pull at my mouth. “Funny you should say that,” I tell him. “We actually have to cross a bridge to get there.”
He turns to me. I glance over.
We both hold it for a second—that shared absurdity—and then we’re both grinning at the windshield, and the moment is lighter than it was thirty seconds ago, which I think was his exact intention.
“Ugh! Dammit!” I curse, slamming on my brakes when another car cuts me off. “Jerk,” I mutter.
Valefar bristles and tries the handle, but the doors are locked. “Such grievous sin of social customs and a potentiality for danger. Please, Vesper, I must torture him on your behalf.” He narrows his blazing eyes.
I can’t help but laugh. “Let’s listen to some music instead,” I say, tapping my phone on the dashboard and handing it to him. “Tap Shuffle.”
He studies the screen with the focused consideration of someone presented with a small, powerful artifact. “Ahh, yes, the musical sorcery. I have been reading much about such a significant feature in your culture.” He locates the button and taps it.
The opening chords come through the speakers, and I look over at him with a sneaky expression. He turns to me, slowly, with the most enormous, unguarded, delighted smile I have ever seen on his face. Every tooth is showing.
“I’ll be there for you—”
The laugh starts in my chest and takes over completely.
It comes out embarrassingly loud in the small car, and his shoulders shake with it too, his tail whipping in pure undignified joy, and for a moment, we are two idiots driving west on Highway 6, losing our minds over a nineties sitcom theme song.
Less of a sitcom and more of a psychological case study to him. I consider the one time he paused an episode to rant about “catastrophic communication failures,” while genuinely believing the entire series could have been avoided if any of them had simply been honest for five consecutive minutes.
When he caught me dancing in the kitchen sometime in June to David Bowie while I was doing dishes, Valefar insisted on learning more. He said David Bowie must have been a fallen angel. I introduced him to more—Ozzy Osbourne, whom he insists was “almost certainly a god of metal,” and the Beatles.
He went completely crazy during “Sympathy for the Devil,” and I didn’t get him to calm down until I played “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” Lucifer’s defeat apparently bringing him a great deal of comfort.
And now, in the car, it’s a refreshing change from all of Bethie’s children’s music. He cried. Genuine, authentic tears at Bring Me to Life by Evanescence. I love his opinions. And how he prefers anything with “real instruments and genuine human suffering.”
I switch to KPop Demon Hunters to break him out of it.
The first time, he hated the premise—until he discovered Rumi was half demon and watched her ultimately embrace that part of herself.
Then he was hooked. Bethie’s obsessive movie phases mean he’s probably seen it a thousand times by now, though he still considers the ending “emotionally insufficient.” Oh, he was thrilled at the idea of a sequel.
But learning it would take three years had him accusing the studio of mortal torture.
Valefar also asks questions about everything outside the window. The logging trucks. The roadside fruit stand we pass. The way the trees change as we get closer to the coast.
He asks about my childhood—what did you love, Vesper, specifically, before anyone told you what to love—and I find myself telling him things I haven’t said out loud in years. By now, I’ve shared so much with him, but there always seems to be more.
I tell him about the summer I spent at the library.
The way I used to draw maps of imaginary places in the margins of my school notebooks.
Or how I collected pretty rocks and made witch soups in the woods behind my house.
How I wrote spells in my notebooks. And spent a summer at the library researching goddesses like Hecate and Lilith.
Something good little Catholic girls certainly should not do.
He listens intently, like nothing else exists but me.
He already learned about Bethie’s first smile, her first laugh, and how she learned to take her first steps. But I share how she once handed a stranger’s dog an entire granola bar she’d been saving for herself and then cried for twenty minutes about it because she hadn’t meant to give it all.
His tail is in my hair again by the time I finish the story. He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “She is extraordinary.”
“She really is,” I agree.
“Just like her mother.”
A quick sigh leaves my throat, but I focus on the road, or I’ll risk the tears.
The coast opens up ahead of us—grey-green water visible now between the trees, the sky a flat silver that makes everything look like the inside of an oyster shell. But the terror creeps in my blood. And it’s not about the demons or the stone or the crypt waiting for us.
I’m terrified because losing him would be the hardest thing I have ever survived. Harder than rebuilding myself. I spent years building walls strong enough to make sure loss could never destroy me again.
And Bethie comes first—past, present, and future—but the thought of losing Valefar is one my mind cannot follow to the end. It just stops. Like a word I can’t force myself to say.
But he said them.