Servants of the Storm (30 page)

“Sorry, y’all. The toilet’s stuck. Be there in a minute,” I call in my sweet Southern girl voice. “And I’m feeling awfully sleepy.”

I slip into the hallway and gently close the locked bathroom door behind me. I’ve got to work fast before the demon dog eats through both doors and gets in my way again.

“Lovey Dovey, you are wasting my time,” Mr. Hathaway shouts irritably from the dining room. “Do I need to have another talk with your mama? Maybe another talk with your grandmother? That last one we had didn’t turn out too well.”

If I have hackles, they rise. If that nasty old demon man had anything to do with my nana’s passing, I will see to it he goes in the ground.

“Coming, Mr. Hathaway,” I call, making my voice a little dreamy and slurring.

I don’t care what Isaac and Baker say. I’m starting this war now, on my own terms.

For Carly. For Savannah. For me.

“Lovey Dovey, I’m going to count to three, and if I don’t see you and my dog, heads are going to roll,” Mr. Hathaway barks. I hear Isaac’s voice, but I can’t tell what he’s saying. He doesn’t know about the switched pills, and he can’t know what I’m about to do. I just hope he’ll stay out of my way.

I tiptoe down the hall and slip into my father’s study. For the tiniest moment the smells wash over me, the pipe smoke and gun oil and model glue and radiator heat and love.

Then Mr. Hathaway says, “One.”

I reach into the little niche in the decorative arch over the door. It’s like whoever built this house in the 1800s knew that it
would be the perfect place to hide a gun. I grab my dad’s .38 pistol and check to see that it’s loaded. Which it is. It always is. This is Savannah, for chrissakes.

“Two.”

I think about cocking it, but Mr. Hathaway will know that sound. Even people who didn’t grow up with guns know that sound. But my dad’s been taking me to the range since I was eight. He may be a dreamy playwright at heart, but he’s a Savannah boy, after all. I know exactly how much pressure it takes to pull the trigger.

“Two and a half.”

I smirk. Who’d have guessed? Demon Mr. Hathaway is a softy.

With one last breath and a whispered “This is for you, Carly,” I walk into the dining room and point the gun at Mr. Hathaway’s chest.

“Three,” I say.

MUCH TO MY SURPRISE, MR. HATHAWAY
grins.

“Well, look who grew some—”

The gun kicks in my hand, and the old man hits the wall and slumps to the ground. There’s a black stain on the flowered wallpaper. I always wondered what kind of damage a revolver could do at point-blank range, although I don’t assume that Mr. Hathaway’s body is at all normal.

“Do you have any idea what you just did?” Isaac says.

“Yep. I killed a demon.”

Honestly, I’m pretty proud of myself. I’ve always hated heroes who just get strung along in a story, doing what they’re told and letting bad guys finish their speeches.

“Not yet, you didn’t,” he says, jaw set. “You’ve got to cut off his distal and destroy it before he heals himself and wakes up angry.
And then you’d better hope that whatever bigger, meaner demon possesses his other distal doesn’t come looking for you.”

“Goddammit, Isaac,” I say, putting the gun on the table. “That would have been a lot more helpful to know yesterday. And Grendel’s in the bathroom.”

“Alive?”

“If that’s what you call it.”

“Then we don’t have much time. Get a knife.”

I get my mom’s superexpensive knife from the kitchen, the one that can supposedly cut through tomato cans. When I come back into the dining room, Isaac swings around to face me. My dad’s gun is pointed at my chest.

“What are you doing?” I ask, voice low.

“Just being safe,” he says, tucking it into the waistband of his jeans.

I snort.

“If you’re being safe, I wouldn’t stick a recently fired, loaded revolver in your pants.”

With a pretty comical face he sets it gently on the dining room table. But not, I notice, within my mom’s reach. She’s still out and snoring softly.

“Okay, so now I just cut off his pinkie, and we’re home free?”

I kneel by Mr. Hathaway. He looks dead, from the black bloom on the front of his grungy white shirt to the fact that he’s not breathing. I never noticed before, but he’s missing the end of his pinkie on one hand. Of course.

“It’s not as easy as it sounds, Dovey.”

“How much time do we have?”

Isaac runs a hand through his hair and squats next to me. The gun’s back in his hand, and for some reason that makes me uneasy.

“How the hell should I know? Do you think I do this all the time? I know stuff, but it’s not like there’s a manual on killing lesser demons. Just hurry up before the dog gets out.”

He stands and puts a boot on Mr. Hathaway’s chest, right where the bullet went in. Aiming the gun at the old man’s head, he says, “Really. Hurry.”

I stretch out Mr. Hathaway’s hand on our new blue carpet. His skin is calloused, his nails thick and gray like Old Murph’s. I curl all his fingers under his hand, leaving his pinkie out.

“Do I—”

“Just do it!”

I pin his hand down and grip the knife. I don’t know where to cut, or how to cut through bone, or if the knife will slide into demon flesh as easily as it would a juicy tomato. But I have to do this before he wakes up and does something even worse to me. With a small prayer I settle the knife over the same place where my finger ends, close my eyes, and press down with a violent jerk.

The knife sinks in like he’s made of Silly Putty and lodges in bone. The force jars up my arms and sends pins and needles up and down my wrist.

“It’s stuck,” I say.

“Then get it unstuck,” Isaac says through gritted teeth.

I wiggle the knife back and forth, trying to figure out what to do with it. It won’t budge. Mr. Hathaway’s eyes flutter. I stand up, lift my foot, and stomp on the knife with everything I’ve got. Mr. Hathaway lurches up with a gurgled shriek, and I stomp again just as Isaac shoots him in the chest. The third stomp, thankfully, pushes the knife right through, and I sigh in relief, my ears ringing.

“Now what?”

“You get a plate and some matches or a lighter or something. We burn that thing and scatter the ashes.”

I dump out the bowl of peas on the table and throw in the pinkie finger and wipe my hand off on my pants. I head to my dad’s study, where the matches live. I can hear Grendel’s claws shredding wood, but I can tell he’s still in the closet, thank goodness.

I catch myself in the hall mirror. I look like I haven’t slept in days. Worst of all, though, are my eyes. They’re not honey-gold anymore.

They’re black.

Not black like Kitty and the lynx-eared man. Not black all over like a demon.

Black like Crane’s and Isaac’s eyes, opaque and deep and dark as a black hole. Black with anger. And black with determination.

I guess I know for sure now what I am. And I know what I have to do.

Matches in hand, I round the corner back into the dining
room, and Isaac spins with a gasp. There’s an explosion, and the scent of gunpowder fills the air as a framed picture beside me shatters and falls to the ground. Normally I would cower, but I’m so filled with rage and purpose that I don’t even flinch.

“Sorry,” Isaac says.

I exhale through my teeth, sick to death of this crap.

“You can’t aim for shit,” I mutter. “Now give me the gun.”

“I will right after you burn Mr. Hathaway’s distal.”

“Seeing as how I haven’t accidentally almost shot you today, maybe you could do the burning and I could hold the gun?”

“I can’t. You took the first shot at Hathaway. It has to be you.”

“Why?”

“You started it, you end it. Demon rules,” he says.

“Demon rules suck. It’s like you’re making them up as you go along.”

“It’s not my fault you keep doing increasingly stupid things. Half of these rules—I never thought I’d need them. But you’re damned lucky I have a good memory. Now shut up and burn it.”

I stand over the bowl that holds Mr. Hathaway’s pinkie. It looks like a movie prop or a gag gift, just rattling around in my nana’s best china bowl in a puddle of black blood. It doesn’t even look real.

“Now I just burn it? And then that old asshat can’t come back?”

“Supposedly.”

I light a match and drop it in, and the flame hits the porcelain
and fizzes out. The next match does too. The third one I hold to the thick, gray nail, and it catches. The scent of charred, rotten meat and sulfur fills the dining room, and I want to gag. Isaac takes the bowl from me and swirls it around until the old man’s finger bursts into hot, green flames, which I’m guessing a human finger wouldn’t do. We watch it burn, and within moments there’s nothing left but smoldering ash.

“Now you have to spread the ashes,” Isaac says.

I take the bowl to the kitchen, dump the ashes down the disposal, turn on the water, and flick the switch. A puff of gray smoke makes me cough, and I run the faucet harder to force it down into the Savannah sewers. I think of my nana’s stories about how people would flush baby alligators and snakes down their toilets, and then they would grow huge on rats in the sewers and come up as man-eaters. Maybe that wasn’t the best place for demon ashes, after all. Who knows what might crawl back up one day? But it’s too late now. The disposal gurgles innocently, and I turn it off.

I head back to the dining room. My mom is snoring away on the table. Mr. Hathaway is sinking into himself like a rotting watermelon. There’s a loud crunch from the bathroom, and I imagine demon Grendel finally breaking through the linen closet and getting to work on the bathroom door.

“Good job on Hathaway, by the way,” Isaac says, voice shaky. He plunks down into a chair like he’s the one who had to do all the dirty work. I stay standing, adrenaline and energy shooting through me. I guess those pills were aspirin after all.

“We’ve got to get out of here before Grendel gets out,” I say.

“With Hathaway gone, the dog’s pretty much useless. There’s time. This is your show. You tell me what’s next. Did you get the necklace?”

I undo the scrunchie and unwind the chain from my ponytail. It gets stuck, and I pull out a few hairs, grunting in frustration and trying to tug it free.

“Let me help,” Isaac says.

I turn my back to him, and he stands up and steps close. I feel his fingers in my hair, soft and gentle.

“It’s tangled. Hold on.”

While he messes around with my hair, I focus on the family portrait hanging on the dining room wall. Isaac’s bad shot took down the one from when I was in third grade, but the one from eighth grade is still there, chronicling my braces and awkward, poufy hair for eternity. My parents stand on either side of me like bookends. Or chess pieces. One dark, one light, both smiling. It’s hard to believe that I wasn’t a product of their love so much as the plotting and magic of demons. But I don’t feel evil. I don’t feel any sort of kinship with Mr. Hathaway and Grendel, and especially not with Kitty and Josephine. And I sure as hell don’t want to end up like Crane.

“There,” Isaac says, and I sigh as he pulls the necklace free. He hands it to me but stays behind me, and after a moment I feel his fingers back in my hair, massaging the place where the chain was caught.

“What are you doing?” I pull away. I’m freaked out, and my heart is hammering. My hands are still speckled with black blood. An old door is the only thing between us and a demon dog. A head massage isn’t what I need right now.

“I know what it’s like to have a ponytail in too long,” he says sympathetically. “You need to relax, Dovey. It’s over for now. Be still. Be calm.”

His words, spoken near my ear, unlock something in me. I exhale and relax into his hands. It’s been a long couple of days, filled with confusion and fear and discomfort. It feels good to be touched.

His fingers slide down my scalp to my neck, and I let my shoulders drop and my eyes close. For a moment I forget about Kitty and feel that same closeness I felt in the car outside Crane’s trailer, the comfort and giddy freedom of camaraderie, of being cared for. Part of me wants to turn around and face him, this close, and see what his eyes say, whether they’ll be blue or black. Whether he’ll kiss me again, and if it would feel more real or less. But I don’t want to open my eyes and see what’s really there. I don’t want to think about how close the demon dog is to escaping. I don’t want reality to come crashing down yet.

Without meaning to I let out a little moan as he works out the tension between my shoulders. I can almost hear him smile.

I’m a heartbeat away from leaning back and tipping my head over his shoulder, eyes closed, right into kissing range, when the house phone rings. The old-fashioned bleating screams over
Grendel’s frantic scratching and growling, and the moment is over.

“Don’t get that,” Isaac murmurs into my ear, but I’m back to business.

“Didn’t plan on it,” I say, stepping away to face him, face red with anger. “And while we’re at it, what the hell do you think you’re doing to me?”

But I know exactly what he was doing. He was using those sneaky-ass cambion powers on me. Persuading me. Taking away my fire. Touching me with hands that touched Kitty.

“I was trying to help you calm down,” he says.

“I don’t need to calm down. I just killed my first demon, and it’s perfectly normal for a girl to freak out after that. Don’t you ever use your magic swoony powers on me again, you hear me?”

“I just wanted to . . .” He looks down, runs a hand through his hair. He looks conflicted. “Hell, Dovey. I don’t know what I wanted. I don’t even know why I did that.” His head cocks a little. “Wait. Were you using your powers on
me
?”

“What do you think?”

He holds one hand out like he wants to touch me, and I bare my teeth like I might snap his other pinkie right off myself. Then he looks at my face.

“Dovey, your eyes . . .”

“Yeah, they’re black! You were right, okay? Are you happy?”

“Of course I’m not. . . . I mean . . .” He trails off and gestures around the room, to the dead, mushy demon and the ravaged
walls and the table of decaying food where my mom is snoring. “Do you think I want this for you? Any of this?”