Pax Demonica (5 page)

A big fat lie, of course. I’d seen more than I cared to think about, actually. I’d seen Duvall catch sight of a maintenance man and then turn the other direction. And I’d seen another maintenance man guarding the door to the men’s room in order to, I now assumed, keep unsuspecting travelers away from the sight of the dead demon sprawled out on the shiny Italian tile. Were the maintenance men with
Forza
? Rogue demon hunters? Unsuspecting civilians?

I didn’t know and, frankly, I hoped I wouldn’t have to find out. After all,
Forza
headquarters was just a ten minute walk from here. Even if something was up—and, really, where demons are concerned, when is something
not
up?—that didn’t mean I’d end up knee deep in it.

Did it?

“Poor bastard,” Stuart said. “I hope they catch who did this.”

“I hope they find out why,” I said.

“Is for the police,” Mrs. Micari said. “Is no way to start a vacation. You forget about this, yes? Rest now. Nap. And when you wake I will make you lunch and you explore the city.
Si?”

“That sounds like heaven,” I said.

“Seriously?” Allie countered. “You’re really tired?”

“Yes,” Stuart said, and Allie rolled her eyes in apparent astonishment at how completely lame adults were when it came to traveling.

“Relax,” I said. “Enjoy having a room all to yourself.” She snorted. “A room without adult supervision,” I corrected.

“Elmo!”
Timmy shouted. He’d picked up the remote and had started flipping channels. Sure enough, Italian Elmo was there on the screen. Timmy couldn’t understand a word, but considering he’d probably memorized every episode of
Sesame Street
, I don’t think it mattered.

“Oh, great,” Allie said.

“That’s why God invented the iPod. Two hours,” I promised. “Then we’ll go explore.”

The truth was that I had more than enough energy to go with her right then. But there were other things I needed to deal with first.

Stuart and I left the kids in their room, and once we reached ours he tugged me down to the bed beside him. “A room all to ourselves,” he said. “Too bad I’m too exhausted to enjoy it.”

“I won’t consider it a mark against your manliness,” I promised. “And the room will still be here tonight.”

“Set an alarm?” His eyes were drooping, already half on his way to sleep.

“I’ll take care of it.” I sat up. “I’m going to find the bathroom. Back in a sec.”

In a sec, I had a feeling he’d be out cold.

I didn’t actually need the bathroom, but I did want out of the room, and that seemed like as good a place to make a phone call as any. When I got there, though, I found the door locked. I tapped. “Allie?”

I didn’t get an answer, but I thought I heard a short sob, followed by the splash of water.

“
Allie
?” I repeated, my mommy senses in overdrive.

“No.” The word was low and harsh, but the voice was definitely teenage. I remembered what
Signora
Micari had said about our floormate—a teenage girl doing the backpacking around Europe thing. I pictured Allie just a few years older than she was now traveling by herself with nothing but some cash, a train pass and her iPod, and my heart twisted a little for the girl.

“Are you okay? Can I get you anything?”

Silence, and then the distinct sound of a nose being very soundly blown. “I’m okay,” she said. “Sorry to hog the bathroom. I’m—I’m going to be a few more minutes. Okay?”

I hesitated, wanting to help but at the same time knowing it wasn’t my place. I didn’t know this girl. Didn’t know if she was missing her family or if she’d just had a fight with her boyfriend. For that matter, maybe she’d just spent the last two hours watching
Sleepless in Seattle
on her iPod and all she wanted was a good cry. Bottom line, I had problems of my own.

“My name’s Kate,” I said before I walked away. “If you need anything, I’m in the room at the top of the stairs.”

Not that I was going right back to my room, but I didn’t expect that the girl would come calling any time soon. And if she did? Well, Stuart had lived with a teenage girl in the house for years now. I figured he could handle the drama.

I found an ornate powder room on the ground floor just off the foyer. I went in, turned on the water, sat down on the closed toilet, and pulled out my phone, intending to make one of those extremely expensive international calls to my best friend, Laura. Despite the fact that demon hunting was supposed to be one big huge secret, Laura had known about my extracurricular activities almost from the moment I got sucked out of retirement. At the time, I needed to either tell her or let her believe she was going stark-raving mad. What can I say? I considered it my duty save my friend’s sanity. And, yeah, I was keen to have a confidante.

Since then, pretty much the entire population of San Diablo had learned my secret (okay, not really, but sometimes it felt that way), but Laura was still the first one I turned to when I needed help with the hunting of demons, the commiserating about marital problems, or the creation of truly delicious baked goods. What can I say? The woman was a goddess in the kitchen. Me? Not so much.

Today, demons were on the agenda. Pepperdine University was in Los Angeles, just a short drive from San Diablo. I was hoping Laura could get on the Internet and find out when Thomas Duvall—the real Thomas Duvall—had died. Because the poor kid
had
died—and not in a Roman restroom. No, he’d died back in the States, and as soon as he had, a demon had moved in.

That’s how most demons take human form. Sure, there are other ways, but possessing a body is messy, and time-sharing with a human means you have to find a human who’s either so evil or so power-hungry that they’re willing to give up some free will to let a demon’s essence move into the body with them. Fortunately for the world at large, there aren’t too many people like that.

No, most demons are opportunistic. When a person dies, their soul leaves their body, and for a short window of time, a portal is open allowing the demon—who was previously wandering around in the ether all noncorporeal and frustrated—to slide inside, just as pretty as you please. Usually it’s the victim of a heart attack, a drowning, a violent car crash. The kind of situation where EMS is certain they’ve lost the guy, but then to everyone’s surprise he draws a sharp breath and the flatline jumps into a nice, steady pulse. The newspapers often call those incidents miracles. The newspapers are wrong.

Fortunately, demons can’t just hop into any dead body. If they could, we’d be surrounded by corporeal demons. (The truth is, we
are
surrounded by noncorporeal demons. They’re out there in the ether, all around us, all the time. Kind of creepy when you think about it. I try not to. I figure until they’ve got a solid form they can’t bother me. And once they are solid, I know what to do about it: kill them.)

No, demons have to find just the right body. It has to be newly dead, and the demon has to slide in before the portal closes. Even then, it’s not necessarily a sure thing. Some bodies reject a demon. I’m no theologian, but the way I understand it, the souls of the faithful hang around, protecting the mortal shell until it’s safe from infestation. In other words, the faithful fight.

Thomas Duvall, I assumed, hadn’t put up much of a struggle. He’d dropped dead, and a demon had dropped in.

What I wanted to know was why.

Most demons slide into humans simply because that’s what they want—
humanity.
Sure, they want to traipse around stirring up trouble, but they want to be flesh while they do it. They want the sensations. The emotion. The highs and the lows. But that doesn’t usually include international travel. If a demon wants to be flesh in Italy, it makes a lot more sense to slide into an Italian body.

But Duvall went from Los Angeles to Rome. Why? And was it coincidence that he was on the same plane as a Demon Hunter who had recently defeated some of the most powerful demons in the world? (Not to seem immodest, but I’m talking about me.) Had he been on some kind of vendetta? And if so, why not just take me out in the airport? Why play nice and return my son’s bear?

And if Duvall had been planning to take me out, then who stepped in to protect me?

I didn’t know, but I wanted to find out. And I figured that starting with the man himself was the best place to begin. Especially since I had no other starting point.

I pulled out my phone, then realized I’d forgotten to turn the thing back on after we got off the plane. I pressed the button and waited for the signal bars to show up, irritated when I realized I’d missed a voicemail. Probably Laura calling to make sure we arrived safely.

But the call wasn’t from Laura. It was from Eric.

“It’s me,” he said, his voice sounding far away and hollow. “I know I may be the last person you want to hear from, but I thought you needed to know.” My chest tightened as he continued. “I just found out that the cathedral’s altar was destroyed a few months ago. Apparently the bishop kept it quiet because he didn’t want the press descending, but someone leaked it and there was an article in the paper this week. Seems the bishop had a replacement brought in, and with the cloth covering it, no one was the wiser.”

He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I called Delores as soon as I read the article,” he said, referring to the cathedral’s volunteer coordinator, a woman who had her hand in all the church’s business. “She said they don’t have any idea who the culprit was or why anyone would desecrate the altar.”

I shivered, disturbed. The altar in San Diablo was infused with the bones of saints, as was the mortar of the cathedral itself. In theory, that kept demons away, although San Diablo had more than its fair share of the beasties lately. Humans, though, could come and go as they pleased. And humans often did the bidding of demons, stealing holy relics for use in black magic rituals.

Maybe it was just random mayhem, but I doubted it. Some demon was up to something, and I didn’t have a clue as to what.

On the line, Eric continued. “Listen, maybe this could have waited until you got back. But the truth is, I’ve got a bad feeling. Don’t trust anyone. I know you’re half a world away, but watch your back, okay? And for God’s sake, keep an eye on Allie. I—I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to either one of you.”

The words were simple and straightforward, but they weren’t what I heard. Instead, I heard, “I love you,” and my eyes brimmed with tears. This was the Eric of my past—a man I loved, the father to my oldest child.

“Dammit,” I muttered, then shoved the phone in my pocket. I forced thoughts of Eric-the-ex-husband from my mind and concentrated on the words of Eric-the-Demon-Hunter. He’d always had a sixth sense about danger. Couple that with the fact that Mr. Pepperdine had schlepped from California to Rome, and I had to believe that my gut instinct was right. Something bad was brewing, and I didn’t have a clue what it was.

I hit the speed dial button for Laura and tapped my finger on the side of the toilet as the phone rang and rang, finally dropping into voicemail. “Hey,” I said. “It’s me. I just realized it’s after midnight, so you’re probably asleep, but I could use your help. Not a crisis,” I said, hoping that was the truth. “But call me as soon as you get this. Okay?”

I ended the call, frustrated because I doubted I’d hear from her for at least six or seven hours. I considered calling Eric—I’d never known him to go to sleep before 2 a.m.—but I wasn’t yet strong enough to make that call. His voice I could handle. A full-blown conversation? Not yet. And certainly not on one tiny catnap.

I am nothing, however, if not motivated, and I left the bathroom determined to do my own research. And, yes, cursing the fact that I still hadn’t taken Laura’s advice and bought an iPhone when I’d given in to the demands and bought one for Allie as a pre-trip treat. Now I was going to have to get the laptop out of Allie’s room. More important, I was either going to have to lie about what I was doing or tell my daughter the whole sorry truth.

I was saved from deciding which route to go by Mrs. Micari. She was sweeping the foyer when I stepped out of the powder room, and her face lit up when she saw me. “You do not sleep?”

“Restroom,” I said. “The one on our floor was occupied.”

“My young guest,” the woman said. “She is a good girl, I think. Not much older than your Allie.”

“And she’s traveling by herself?”

Mrs. Micari shrugged, as if to say
these kids today.
I didn’t question further. Maybe the young woman was a prodigy. Maybe she and Allie could hang out and the other girl would be a good influence on my easily distracted daughter. Who, I had to admit, did a damn good job when she put her mind to it. I just wanted to see her excelling at her actual schoolwork. Not at the researching of demon lore.

“You are hungry? Thirsty? You do not sleep, but perhaps you would like the coffee?”

“I’d like coffee very much, thank you.”

What was probably once a morning room right off the foyer now served as a dining area. Light flooded in through a wall of windows that overlooked an herb-filled back garden with a small statue of the Virgin Mary. In the garden, two cushioned outdoor chairs sat on either side of a small tiled table. An elderly man slept in one of the chairs, a newspaper folded in his lap. “Your husband?” I asked.

“No, no. That is
Signor
Tagelli.” She offered no further information and, since it really wasn’t my business, I didn’t pry. “Sit,” she said, indicating a small table near the door with a white table cloth and a bowl of fruit on display. “You like the cream? The sugar?”

“Just cream,” I said. Usually I drank my coffee black—demon hunting only burned so many calories, you know—but I was on vacation. Time to go a little wild and crazy.

She bustled out through a set of swinging doors at the far end of the room, and I took the opportunity to take a look around. I liked what I saw. The place was warm and inviting. Knickknacks, flowers, and small framed photographs filled dozens of shelves, and yet the room didn’t look cluttered. There was no dust. No collections of knick-knacks. Either Mrs. Micari was a far better housekeeper than I was, or business was good enough that she could hire help. The second was better for my ego, but it was the first that I believed.