Demon 04 - Deja Demon (5 page)

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Authors: Julie Kenner

BOOK: Demon 04 - Deja Demon
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Exactly the response I didn’t expect. “Excuse me?” I blurted.
“He’s a zombie, right? So you kill ’em by cutting off their heads and arms and stuff, don’t you?”
I squinted at her, bouncing a little as the zombie fought to get his limbs free. I smacked a flailing arm back down and readjusted my position. “Have you been in the attic? I thought we agreed you’d only read what I assigned or approved.”
“I
have
,” she said, standing taller and looking downright offended. “I totally swear.”
“Then how—”
“Come on, Mom. It’s not like I never watch cable.”
“Cable?” I repeated, wondering what exactly they were airing on the Discovery Channel these days.
“Movies, Mom,” she said, in such an exasperated tone that I had to assume she’d read my mind.
“Right. Of course.” I considered for a second, quickly finding the flaw in her little speech. “Alison Crowe, you know perfectly well you aren’t allowed to watch R-rated movies that Stuart or I haven’t signed off on.”
“Oh, come on! It’s not like the movies are scarier than my life.”
She had a point. I had absolutely no intention of letting her know that, but silently I had to admit that she had a point.
“Rules are rules, Allie.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Whatever.”
“Allie . . .”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said, trying again.
“Better.”
“So would you like to tell me when you’ve seen all of these zombie movies?”
“Um, Mom? Is this really the time?”
I indicated the zombie, more or less immobile beneath me. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She hesitated, probably deciding if she should press the point. I put on my sternest mom face, though, and she relented.
“Bethany’s,” she said. “But I don’t think they were R. Honest. She’s got the Monster Channel in HD, which is totally cool, except that a lot of the movies are pretty lame.” She frowned at the zombie. “For that matter, he’s kinda lame.”
“Trust me. We got lucky. These suckers are stronger than they look. You end up trapped in a cave with a hundred of these creatures, and they won’t seem lame at all. Completely lacking in personality and pretty damn quiet, but not lame.”
That seemed to sober her up. “So what do we do with him?”
I sighed. “Exactly what you said. Cut off their limbs.”
“Cool!”
“
I’ll
do it.” R-rated life or not, I wasn’t going to have my daughter dismember corpses, of either the totally dead or the living dead variety.
“Can I watch?”
I shook my head, wondering what had happened to my little girl who liked to put on ballerina tutus, flit around the living room, and insist that her life’s blood was oozing out of her if she so much as stubbed a toe during her evening performance. Apparently she’d grown up. And gotten considerably less squeamish in the process.
“You can find me something more efficient to cut with,” I said. “And fast.”
She looked from me to the struggling zombie and then back to me again. “Right,” she said with a firm nod. “Be right back.” She hurried for the storage shed. Once upon a time, we’d kept it locked. Lately, though, we hadn’t bothered. It’s filled to the brim with stuff that we have no room for in the house. I’ve pretty much decided that if the thieves want to haul it away in the dead of night, they can have it.
Of course, if thieves can get in, so can other species of bad guys. “Allie!” I called out, suddenly fearful.
She turned, the door now wide open and my daughter unmolested. I exhaled in relief. “What?” she said.
“Nothing. Just . . . just thank you.”
Her brows lifted in curiosity.
“For saving my butt back there. Tossing the cat was a stroke of brilliance.”
The smile she flashed me was at least as broad as the grin from her second-grade class picture. “No problem, Mom. I think we make a pretty good team.”
"Um ... is it supposed
to keep doing
that?”
I looked down at the arm that was crawling toward me, powered by five determined fingers. I stepped out of the way and then stomped on the disgusting thing. “Unfortunately, yes. Hacking zombies apart only slows them down. It doesn’t kill them.”
“You have got to be kidding me!” Allie said, starting to sound a tad freaked out.
I had to laugh. She’d just spent the last fifteen minutes watching her mother whack the limbs off a zombie with a dull ax she found in the storage shed. And
now
she was freaking out.
“At least there’s no blood,” she said, her nose wrinkling as she scooted out of the way of the other spiderlike hand that was scrambling over the gravel toward her.
“Be careful around that thing,” I warned. “It may look funny, but those hands are still deadly. It grabs hold of your ankle and climbs up to your neck, and I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to pry those fingers off.”
“Right.” She stomped down hard on it, and the hand flattened into the gravel. “So can it still talk?” She nodded toward the eyeless head that had lolled to one side, mouth moving and tongue wagging. Kabit, stupid cat that he is, trotted up and sniffed it, then batted at the nose with one curious paw.
“They can’t talk, period,” I said. “Dismembered or not.”
“Oh.” She glanced uneasily at it. “That’s good.”
“That pretty much sums up my feelings.”
“So how do we kill it?”
“
We
don’t,” I said. “You need to get inside and get some sleep. As for why you were out here in the first place, I’ll give you a pass for tonight since you saved my life. Tomorrow, though, I think we need to have a little talk.”
“
Now
you’re sending me inside? I already saw the übergross part.” Her forehead creased. “Didn’t I?”
“Allie . . .”
“Mom, please? Please, please, pleeeeeze? I really, really want to help.”
She got down on her knees, her hands clasped in front of her. When she did, of course, she released the squashed zombie hand, and I had to admit I was more than a little impressed with the lightning-quick reflexes that snatched the thing back as it tried to scurry away.
She wasn’t queasy, she was determined, and I really did need the help.
I probably wasn’t going to win Mother of the Year by letting my fourteen-year-old daughter help me clean up a dead demon and a dismembered zombie, but maybe I could write it down to mother-daughter bonding.
“Fine,” I said. “You can stay. But that means you talk now. What were you doing in the yard at three in the morning?”
“Can’t you tell me how we kill this guy first?”
“Allie,” I said, edging toward my Wrath of Mom voice.
“Fine, fine. Whatever.”
I twirled my hand, hopefully prompting forward motion in the confession department. At the same time, I picked up the ax again and prepared to hack off the fingers. I’d been serious in my admonition to Allie. And though I didn’t relish more zombie mutilation, once I removed the fingers, the zombie would be more or less harmless.
Gross, but harmless.
“I overheard you on the phone,” she said, as I brought the ax down, neatly removing two fingers in one blow.
I picked up the fingers and dropped them in an empty flowerpot, making a mental note to not forget they were there. Considering they weren’t going to decay anymore, zombie fingers were never going to become the new rage in fertilizing products. “You did? When?”
“Well, I didn’t exactly
hear
you. But early this morning, you got a call on your cell. And you looked at the number and then said you needed to get something out of your car to answer the question. And you told Stuart it had to do with an oil change or something.”
“So?”
She rolled her eyes. “Like you could answer a question about an oil change.”
The kid had a point. Put like that, it was a wonder Stuart hadn’t picked up on my little game of smoke and mirrors.
“That still doesn’t answer why you were in the backyard at three A.M.”
“I figured it was Daddy on the phone,” she said. She added a little shrug, shifting her weight a bit as she looked at the ground instead of at me. “He’s been gone for so long and, well, you got that look on your face when you answered the phone.”
“A look? What look?”
“Just . . . you know.”
I had a feeling I did know, and decided not to press the point. I made a mental note to suppress any and all looks upon answering my cell phone. Especially if my husband happened to be in the room.
“So you figured it was David,” I prompted, intentionally using his new name. “Then what?” I knew Allie understood intellectually that David couldn’t slide back into the daddy role. Emotionally, though, I think she was still processing.
“That’s all,” she said, looking up to meet my eyes. I held her gaze, trying hard to project myself as the understanding mom. I knew this was hard on Allie—it was hard on me. More than that, though, I had no road map for helping her through this. We were both floundering, and the only thing that was going to get us through this was love and trust and faith that we’d come through unscathed.
“I watched from the front door while you talked,” Allie continued. “But I couldn’t hear anything. It’s not like I was eavesdropping. Honest.”
“I believe you,” I said. “But?”
“But then I heard you go out in the middle of the night, and so I figured you guys must have planned to meet up somewhere. And that must mean that he was back. Here, I mean. In San Diablo.”
“So that’s it?” I asked gently.
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“And you came into the backyard to wait for me . . . why?”
“To find out if I was right,” she said, her tone suggesting
duh
even if she didn’t voice the word.
“Why not ask me in the morning?”
She tilted her head up to look at me. Her eyes glistened with tears, and my heart started to shatter. “Mom,” she said. “He’s my dad. How come he didn’t call to talk to
me
?”
“Oh, baby,” I said, my heart breaking. “It’s not like that at all. Your father loves you desperately.” I held out my arms, but she didn’t come to me. Instead she let loose with a hysterical “
Aaaahhh
.”
She kicked, shaking her leg to try to release the hand that was making its way up her shin.
“Allie!” I abandoned my mutilated arm to rush toward my daughter and grab the runaway limb immediately below the wrist. “Pull,” I yelled, even as I tugged from my end, my fingers prying at the dead fingers clutching my daughter’s leg.
“
Mom
,” she wailed as the fingers clutched tighter. “It hurts.”
“I know. I know. I’m sorry.” I looked wildly around. I was managing to keep the thing from crawling up her leg, but I wasn’t having any luck getting it off her. And those fingers were just going to get tighter and tighter.
“Okay,” I said. “This way.”
With me still holding the zombie limb, I scooted backwards toward the shed. “Did you see the pruning shears when you got the ax?”
She shook her leg, trying ineffectively to shake the thing off. “I think they’re hanging just inside the door.”
We maneuvered in that direction and with me still holding the zombie at bay—and Allie balancing on one foot so that I could reach inside without letting go of her new companion—I managed to grab the shears off the peg.
“Okay,” I said. “Now hold still.”
Her eyes widened. “This is so totally disgusting.”
“Well, if it offends you, we could just leave it on. But people will ask questions. Especially at cheerleading. And I think it’ll mess up your balance.”
She scowled and rolled her eyes. “Just do it, already.”
I opened the shears, then tried to pry a finger up to get the bottom blade underneath. No luck. I ended up cutting from the top, little by little, until I’d managed to slice off an entire finger.
It dropped harmlessly to the ground, and I went to work on the other four.
“This is absolutely the grossest thing ever,” Allie said.
I tended to agree. “Just be glad there’s no blood.” I shot her a wry look. “And when you’re all grown up, I don’t ever want to hear you say that we never did anything together when you were a kid.”
“Ha, ha. Just get it off me, okay?”
“Working on it.”
“What about the legs?”
“Not much they can do,” I said, casting a sideways glance at a zombie foot that was tapping time, impatiently waiting to kick a little Demon Hunter ass. “With shoes on, they can’t crawl. And so long as you don’t get close—”
Allie held her hands up in a familiar surrender gesture. “Don’t worry,” she said as I finally snapped through the last digit. I get it.” She looked around at our backyard, now more or less resembling the set of a horror movie. “What now?”

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