California Demon (41 page)

Even now, over two decades later, I can still remember the intensity of emotions. The drive of the chase despite bone-numbing exhaustion. And the certain knowledge that this was Important Stuff. From an overall life perspective, after all, very little ranks above thwarting the minions of Hell.

As far as my duties as a Demon Hunter went, my youth was an issue only to the extent that my strength and training gave me a fighting chance to stay alive. By age fourteen, I was physically ready. As for mentally? Well, there was never any question. I knew what had to be done, and I was expected to do it. My age never factored into the equation.

With all that in my personal history, you might think that I would understand better than anyone that fourteen-year-old girls are both strong and resilient.

You might think that, but you would be wrong. Because when it came time to actually have the talk with
my
fourteen-year-old daughter, I was a tongue-tied mess.

And, just so we’re on the same page, when I say
the talk,
I’m not talking about the sex one. That one I managed to muddle through. I’m talking about the other conversation. The one where I sat her down and confessed my deep, dark secret life.

My name is Kate Connor, and I’m a Level Four Demon Hunter with
Forza Scura,
a super secret arm of the Vatican charged with keeping the forces of darkness at bay. That particular piece of familial history, however, had been withheld from my daughter her entire life despite the fact that her father and I had hunted demons all over the globe until just a few years before Allie was born.

I’ve always planned to tell her the truth someday. But somehow “someday” kept getting pushed further and further back. Allie was my baby, after all. For fourteen years, my job had been to nurture and protect her. Skewing her entire worldview with insider information about how evil truly walks among us wasn’t something I’d been looking forward to. I knew I had to tell her, though; demon hunting is part of her family history, even though I often wish it weren’t.

It was one thing knowing that someday I’d have to come clean with my daughter. Having the conversation forced on me was something entirely different. But after a High Demon kidnapped her, I knew without a doubt that the mother-daughter lines of communication needed to be opened.

And so there we were, sitting on the steps in front of one of San Diablo’s most well-funded museums. We were huddled together under an EMS-issued blanket, waiting to make sure the police and medical folks clustered in the parking lot didn’t have any more questions for us and also waiting for Stuart to come pick us up. My second husband doesn’t have a clue about my demon-hunting past. And although this might be the day that Allie learns most of my secrets, Stuart was going to remain blissfully clueless.

“Mom?” she prodded. “So, like, you said you were going to tell me what’s going on.”

“Right,” I said, still not ready, but figuring I never would be. I looked around, ostensibly making sure no one was paying attention to us, but half hoping that someone was signaling for me to come over and answer questions.

No such luck. I was stuck in this conversation, whether I wanted to be or not. And since there’s not really an easy way to ease into the whole demon thing, I decided to just cut to the chase. “What you saw in there,” I began, a little hesitantly. “Those creatures, I mean. They’re demons, Allie. Honest-to-goodness, from the bowels of Hell, evil-incarnate demons.”

I wasn’t sure what I expected her initial reaction to be, but I balled my hands into fists, readying myself for anything.

“Oh,” she said after a moment’s pause. “That makes sense. And?”

And?
My hands relaxed and I stumbled a bit because I really wasn’t expecting
and
. Not yet anyway. I figured we had a good half hour of working through the whole demon thing before we got to
and
. Toss
and
into the mix now and it would throw my whole equilibrium off.

“And?” I repeated. “I’m talking demons, kiddo. Isn’t that enough?”

As if to prove to me that some things never change, my teenage daughter rolled her eyes. “Mo-
ther
,” she said, as if she were talking to an idiot. “I mean,
duh
. Monsters, demons, boogeymen from Hell. I was there, you know. I kinda grasp the concept.”

Under the circumstances, the kid had a point. After all, there are only so many things that a sulfur-scented creature with paws and claws climbing its way out of a portal to Hell can be. And none of them are good.

“But what about
you
?” she continued before I could say anything else. “I mean, you were like Wonder Woman in there. It was pretty cool, Mom. But it was also pretty weird, too. And you said you were going to tell me.”

That I had. I’d rushed to her rescue, just like any mom would. But by doing that, I’d shown her a side of me I’d carefully kept hidden. So when she’d asked me point-blank if I had a few secrets, I’d had no choice but to admit that I did. Honestly, I’d hoped to ease a bit more slowly into my revelation. Allie, though, wanted answers now.

I can’t say I blamed her.

“Let’s walk,” I said, standing up.

“But what about Stuart?”

I glanced down the road and didn’t see any cars coming. Within the cluster of people still in the parking lot, I saw David Long talking with a uniformed officer. He noticed me and turned, a question in his eyes. I indicated Allie and made a walking motion with my fingers. He nodded, and I knew he understood. If Stuart came while we were walking the museum grounds, David would let my husband know.

The irony of the situation didn’t escape me. Because I was pretty sure that David
was
my husband, or that he had been once. Which sounds a bit weird when you say it that way, but it was true: I was reasonably certain that the soul of my first husband had taken residence in the body of Coronado High chemistry teacher David Long. I wasn’t positive, though, and today wasn’t the day I was going to find out for sure. Someday, maybe. But not today.

Allie didn’t miss our exchange. “Something’s up with Mr. Long, too,” she said. “If you were Wonder Woman, then he was totally Superman.”

I had to laugh at the image, but the truth is that she’s right. Telling my secrets means giving some of his away, too.

“Come on,” I said, taking her hand as I led us down the stairs and over to the gravel walking path that twisted through the museum’s landscaped grounds. She didn’t try to pull away, which left me feeling both surprised and nostalgic for the long-ago years when I could reach out and expect her little hand to close around mine immediately.

“You know I grew up in Italy,” I began, looking sideways at her. “In an orphanage.”

She nodded because that part of my past had never been a secret. She didn’t know how I ended up in an orphanage, or who my parents were, or why an obviously American kid ended up wandering the streets, lost and abandoned, in Rome. But I didn’t know those answers, either. And for years, I’d told myself that I didn’t care. To my mind, my life started the day I met Father Corletti. Everything before that was just noise.

“Well, I wasn’t just raised in a Church-sponsored orphanage,” I said. “I was actually raised by the Church. By a small group within the Church, actually.”

“Daddy, too, right?”

“Daddy, too,” I said. Allie had more than once heard the story about how I had a crush on Eric when I was thirteen. But he—much more wise and mature at fourteen—hadn’t been the least bit interested in a kid like me. Not at first, anyway.

What Allie didn’t know was that Eric had finally come around during our training sessions. He’d been assigned to help me with my pathetic knife-throwing skills, and after a few months of one-on-one time, Eric was just as much in love with me as I was with him. Plus, I could hit the target dead-on every time.

“Okay,” she said. “And?”

“You’re getting an awful lot of mileage out of that word today,” I countered.

To which my drama-queen daughter responded by stopping on the path, tapping her foot, and asking me if she was going to have to repeat the word
another
time.

“Once was fine,” I said, managing not to laugh. “But remind me when you grew up?”

“About an hour ago,” she said, then turned and pointed back toward the museum. “In there.”

Point taken.

“
Forza Scura,
” I said. “It’s Latin. Translates roughly to the Dark Force.
And,
” I continued before she could toss the word at me one more time, “it’s the name of the organization within the Church that your father and I were trained to work for.”

“Trained,” she repeated. I nodded, then watched as she processed that new bit of information. “Okay,” she finally said. “But trained to do what?”

Now it was my turn to point back toward the museum. “Take a guess.”

“Whoa,”
she said. “No shit?” And then, “Sorry, Mom.”

I smiled and gave her hand a squeeze. “No shit,” I said. “
Forza
trained us to hunt demons. And that’s what we did for years. All the way up until right before you were born, actually.”

“Oh.” Her voice was small, even a little shy.

“Al?”

“Is that why you stopped? Because of me?”

For a second, I was tempted to tell her I hadn’t actually stopped. But I wasn’t ready to go there. If she wanted to think the demonic battle in the bowels of the museum was nothing more than a fluke, I was more than happy not to correct that misunderstanding. For now, anyway.

“No, baby,” I said. “We wanted to retire. Enjoy being married, you know? And, yes, we wanted to have a family. But we didn’t quit because you were on the way. Just the opposite.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Anything else you want to ask?” There’s a lot I could tell her at this point. I could describe traveling Europe with Eric and chasing down the types of creatures she’d met in the museum. I could talk about living in the
Forza
dorms, staying up all night and sharing the kinds of scary stories that all kids tell. Only the stories we told were true. I could tell her about Wilson Endicott, my first
alimentatore,
who helped Eric and me by doing the research even as we went out armed to the teeth.

I could tell her all of that, but I wasn’t going to. Not unless she asked. Because this was Big Stuff. And I knew she had to take it in at her own pace.

That, at least, was what I told myself. And I really think that I was mostly being honest. But even so, I have to admit that a small part of me hoped that she wouldn’t be too curious. Because once you truly know about evil, it’s hard to be a kid anymore. And I didn’t want to be the mother who’d ripped what was left of childhood out from under her daughter.

She took a look around the grounds, taking in the wooden gazebo and the crushed-stone paths. Bird-of-paradise and other tropical flowers that thrive in California lined the walkways, marking the way back to the museum in one direction and the San Diablo City Park in the other. Except for us, there was no one to be seen, and after a few moments of silence, I guess Allie decided we had time to hit a few more of the high points.

“So Gramps and Mr. Long,” she began. “How come they were with you? Do they hunt demons, too? Are they with that
Forza
thing?”

“Gramps was,” I said, referring to Eddie Lohmann, an eighty-something retired Demon Hunter who had taken up temporary residence in our guest bedroom and permanent residence in our lives. Allie was under the impression that Eddie was her long-lost great-grandfather, and that wasn’t an illusion I felt compelled to dissolve. “He’s been retired for a long time.”

“And Mr. Long?”

Wasn’t
that
a loaded question? But I fielded it the best I could, explaining that David Long was not just a mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher, but also a rogue Demon Hunter. In other words, a Hunter not affiliated with
Forza
. He was also, I added, a friend of Allie’s father. Which, for all I knew, was the God’s honest truth. Because as much as I might suspect that Eric was somehow hiding in David’s body, at the same time, I knew that would be beyond remarkable.

Could it really be true? Or was I just grasping at straws, desperate to believe that my beloved Eric hadn’t really perished that foggy night in San Francisco? That somehow the man who’d been my lover and my partner for so many years could still be alive?

It was almost too much to hope for, and at the same time, if David was Eric, what would that mean for me? For my kids? For my marriage?

I didn’t know, and every time I tried to think about it, I got lost in a quagmire of emotion so thick that I was certain I could drown in it if I wasn’t careful.

Allie started walking again, and I shoved the melancholy aside and moved into step beside her, forcing my thoughts back to my daughter and away from Eric.

“So, what I don’t get is how come you were there,” she said. “In the museum, I mean.”

“To rescue you, baby.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah,
that
part I got. But if you’re not in this
Forza
thing anymore, then how did you know where to find me? And how’d you know that I’d been taken by demons and not just by a bunch of creepy guys?”

“We have David to thank for that,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true. But the truth would require admitting that I was back on active duty with
Forza,
and I didn’t think that was a good idea. It was one thing for Allie to know the truth about my past—and to know I survived it. It was another thing altogether to have her worry about me every time I went out at night. Since I already worried about her every second she was out of my sight, I knew what a burden that could be. And it wasn’t something I intended to dump on my kid. Not so long as I could help it, anyway.

“So what about Stuart?” she asked. “He doesn’t know, right?”

Astute kid. “No,” I admitted. “He doesn’t.”