A Girl's Guide to Demon Hunting (8 page)

Chapter 14

"There will be no more plans involving a blow gun."
                                                              
       -Jenny

    I felt the car come to a stop and opened my eyes to find us parked on the side of the street in front of a weathered apartment complex. I recognized the lime green painted building; we were about two miles from the casino. Max stared straight ahead, his hands wrapped tightly around the steering wheel. Not wanting to be trapped in the car with Mr. Pissypants, I reached for the door. Before I could even touch the handle Max’s hand slammed down on the lock button and he turned on me.
    “What the hell happened back there? Are you out of your mind?!” he yelled at me, “And that Demon! Have you any idea just how strong it is? It could have snapped you in two without breaking a sweat. If that’s your typical MO it’s a miracle you haven’t been killed yet.”
    All remnants of my earlier fear washed away in the face of his anger. Keeping a tight hold on my anger I calmly told him, “I’m perfectly aware of the danger and I must be doing something right since I’ve survived here so long.”
    My non-yelling must have calmed him a bit as he unclenched his fists and started the car.
    Me: 1.  Douche-tasmo: 0.   
    We’d driven a few miles in silence when he asked, “Do you even think about your team or what would happen to them if you were killed? It’s your responsibility to take care of them.”
    Anger flashed through me. “I really don’t see how you’re qualified to lecture me on how I do things when you asked me for help. Oh, I know there must be others coming to find Julie. I mean, really; with your charisma Guardians must just be lining up to work with you.”
    I made a show of looking in the backseat of the car. “Nope, I don’t see anyone.” Seeing his jaw clench and his eyes flare, I went in for the kill. “Hmm, I guess that leaves you with us. Four humans and one
little girl
.”
    I heard the unmistakable sound of his teeth grinding as he started the car. I couldn’t help but smile. Neither of us spoke except when he asked for directions to Jenny’s.
Me : 2.  Dumbass: 0.
    The small amount of pleasure at pissing Max off faded quickly as I replayed Simone’s words over and over in my head. I had no doubt she was referring to Mateo. It wasn’t a coincidence he was waiting outside my apartment last night. But why would Sylvia know? She wasn’t connected to Mateo, unless he’d sent his Demons to look for me. Most likely they stopped in her casino and put the word out. Great, ‘cause things weren’t already complicated enough.
    Max parked in an empty spot behind the café and without a word I climbed out of the car and walked through the back door. I was halfway up the stairs that led to Jenny’s apartment when I heard Max’s heavy footsteps behind me. I grudgingly waited for Max at the top. I blocked the keypad with my body and entered the access code on the keypad next to the door. The little display glowed green as the locks on the door slid back and I opened it.
    Before Jenny’s dad went to prison, he converted the top floor of the café to a two-bedroom apartment. The majority was made up of an open area that comprised the kitchen, living room and a large work area. Two bedrooms with attached bathrooms sat on either side. At Jenny’s insistence he kept as much of the original details of the building as possible. Large arched windows were set in the exposed brick walls, giving a view of the distant lights of The Strip. Jenny’s artist side shone in the brightly colored furniture scattered throughout the room.
    The faint sound of typing clicked through the apartment. Taking my coat off, I laid it on the back of the red couch and crossed the room to the kitchen to get a soda. I cracked the tab and peeked around the filled book case that divided Jenny’s studio from the rest of the room. She sat at the metal table that held her computer, the soft glow of the screen the only light in the room.
    When Jenny was in work mode she had the somewhat irritating ability to tune everything and everyone out. It was one of the biggest reasons for the security system and why she didn’t bother to say hi; she didn’t even know I was here. Shaking my head, I put the soda on the corner of the desk for her and went about her little work space to turn on a few lights. It wasn’t until I turned on the lamp next to her computer that she looked up and saw me.
    “Hey.” I said, leaning against the desk next to her and trying my best to ignore Max, who had made his way in behind me and was standing next to the bookcase, watching us.
    “That was fast, I thought you’d be a few more hours.” She said, sitting back in her chair.
    “Any luck?” I asked, looking at the computer screen and seeing nothing but gibberish. Some sort of Jenny-gets-it-but-mere-mortals-don’t computer code maybe.
    “It’s slow but I should be able to get into both her bank and cell phone records. We should totally check out her bank; these firewalls are crazy hard to bypass.”
    “Those are Guardian measures.” Max said from next to the bookcase. “You may as well just wait until her mentor gets here; there’s no way you’re going to break through. He’ll have the access codes you need.”
    Jenny swiveled in her chair to face Max. “And how long until he gets here?”
    “I don’t know. He’s having trouble contacting her parents, I’m thinking tomorrow sometime.”
   “It could be too late by then.” I said.
    “I know.” He said and for just a second I saw fear cloud his eyes.
    What was I doing giving him a hard time while someone he cared about was missing? A seed of guilt began to grow in the pit of my stomach as I watched him. Damn feelings; now I’m getting guilt complexes because of complete asses like him?
    “Then I keep trying.” Jenny said and turned back to the computer screen.
    Leaving Jenny to her work, I brushed past Max and walked around the island that separated the kitchen from the rest of the room. I grabbed two sodas and walked to the TV area. Sinking into the soft couch, I put one soda on the coffee table and opened mine, taking a sip.
    “You mind?” Max asked as he came into the living room.
    I held the other can out to him. My breath caught as our fingertips touched and I felt the softest brush of his power. While he sat across from me on the smaller love seat, I watched him to see if he had felt any of my power and just like before he seemed perfectly calm. Okay, so this little power sensitivity was totally my problem. Now all I needed to do was make sure he didn’t catch on.
    “You want to talk about what happened?” He asked, interrupting my thoughts.
    “I told you Sylvia didn’t know anything.”
    “Yes, I heard you
both
. As I recall her exact words were ‘snap, snap like a twig you will go."
    At his words I gave a quick look towards Jenny’s work area; the last thing she needed to hear was Simone’s message. Turning back to Max I whispered, “What she said has nothing to do with you or Julie. Just drop it.”
    “It has everything to do with Julie. I need all your attention on finding her, not on some issue of yours.”
    I kept my snide (and extremely hilarious and insightful) comment to myself; I needed to make this conversation go away, not cause it to blow up into another fight.
    “Mateo’s just a Demon who has a bone to pick with me. A few months ago I killed a nest of Demons that was under his protection. He’s a bug, one I’ll squish once this is all done.”
    “Then why are you so scared of his message?”
   I chewed on my lip for a moment and tried to come up with another lie. Nothing I thought of would be believed so for the first time since this conversation began I told the truth.
    “Because he’s a Greed Demon and can give me whatever I want. All I have to do is say the word and my whole world changes.”
    “I didn’t think you were the kind to be lured by greed.”
    “Oh and what did you think I’d be lured by?” I asked, not even sure I wanted to know the answer.
    Max gave me a searching look and said, “I don’t know, but it’s not greed.”
    “I guess that proves how very little you know of me.”
    I stood up and went into the kitchen. Avoidance is something I’ve been trying to work on; there are those who say I’m too confrontational. Searching the cabinet for the chocolate bar I knew Jenny always kept on hand, I rifled her usual hiding places. After coming up empty in the oatmeal box, I stood on my tiptoes and tried to feel around on the top shelf. I felt the warmth of Max’s power a millisecond before his body brushed mine as he reached over me. As he laid the chocolate bar in front of me on the counter I felt his power recede as he took a step back.
    “If Mateo wants you, why doesn’t he have you?” he asked from a few feet behind me.
    My heart skipped at his question and I stood there staring at the gold wrapper of the chocolate bar as I scrambled for an answer I didn’t have.
    “Really, for someone so pretty you’re rather dense. Try not to be a cliché.” Jenny said from the other side of the island.
    Max rolled his eyes at her comment as he turned around to face her, his arm crossed against his chest (it was becoming clear this was his signature move). “Care to elaborate?” he asked.
    Hands on hips, she gave me a dirty look and I immediately put the chocolate bar down.  
    “One candy bar is not going to give me diabetes.” I grumbled as I came to stand next to Max.
    “You really don’t expect me to believe that’s your first piece of chocolate today?” She said and reached into the bowl of fruit sitting in the middle of the island and tossed me an orange. I made a grab for it but Max’s hand snatched it out of mid air. He held it out to me with an irritated look. This time I was more careful and took the orange without touching him.
    “Ladies, can we please get back on topic?”
    Jenny picked up another orange and began peeling it as she spoke. “Mateo hasn’t taken Allie because he doesn’t feel threatened by her. Besides it’s the visiting Demons that are the bigger danger.”
    “How do you mean?” Max asked.
    “They don’t follow the laws.” Jenny answered.
    At his confused look, I took pity on him and explained. “In Vegas, when a Demon swears allegiance to one of the Demon Lords, they agree to follow a set of ‘laws.’ The most important of which is not drawing the attention of the Guardians. To accomplish this they can’t expose their true form in public, leave any mysterious human deaths and most importantly to me, no blatant hunting of yours truly.”
   I hoped he would believe the same lie I had told my friends and continued, “You have to understand, for the Demons, Vegas is an all-you-can-eat buffet. No hiding from Guardians, starving or living in nests. Here they can actually have a life and they love it. No way would they give all that up for a Guardians.”
    Jenny picked up where I left off. “If we start to hunt the resident Demons, it tends to piss off the Demon Lords. We didn’t know this at first and took some pretty serious beatings. Once we figured it out things calmed down and we found a way to do damage without getting trampled on every night.”
    “Why don’t you just take out the Demon Lords?”
    “Ever hear the saying ‘Better the devil you know?’” I asked. “We’ve spent a lot of time learning about the Seven Demon Lords here and can finally anticipate most of their moves. Let’s say just one of them is killed; it would cause an all out-war between the Demons to fill its spot. Think shark feeding frenzy but not as controlled. No good comes from that, especially for the humans.”
    “So to protect the humans from the Demons you let the Demons live?” Max asked.
    “It’s either that or we have another Roanoke and we both know how well that turned out.” Max’s face paled at the mention of the last big Guardian failure and he turned the conversation to something a little less touchy. “What exactly do you do?” He asked Jenny.
     “Oh…a little of this and that, how about I show you my work area and you try to guess.” She said with a coy smile.
    I shook my head as I watched her lead him like a puppy around the bookshelf and back into her work area. There weren’t many people that Jenny could talk to about her real work so when she got the chance she jumped on it. Although completely illegal, she was proud of what she did. To an outsider, forgery was something shameful but to her it was just another form of art. And like she said, original art doesn’t pay the bills, at least not as well as forgeries of the great masters.
    Putting the orange back, I picked up the chocolate bar and went back to the couch. I listened to their hushed voices as I unwrapped the chocolate bar, broke off a piece and popped it in my mouth, closing my eyes in bliss as the chocolate melted on my tongue.

Chapter 15

Tip 433: Hair pulling is a perfectly acceptable form of fighting.

    The loud sound of snoring woke me from a dreamless sleep; my favorite kind. Opening my eyes I saw Pancake’s little black nose just inches from my face. Slowly as to not wake her, I lifted her off my chest and placed her in the warm spot I just left. My mind still covered in the fog of sleep, I absentmindedly looked around the room. Bright sunshine was streaming into the living room through the large arched windows. Other than Pancake’s snoring, all was quiet in the apartment.
    I stood up and stretched my hands over my head and walked into the bathroom that was connected to Jenny’s room. I could just make her out in the other room, bundled up under her favorite yellow blanket. Quietly closing the door, I went to the sink and found the spare toothbrush I kept here. Brushing the fur off my teeth helped but I still felt gross, not having showered since before yesterday. Time to fix that.
    Once clean, I dried off and dressed in a pair of Jenny’s yoga pants and a fitted white T-shirt. I gathered my dirty clothes and went into the laundry room off the kitchen. I threw my clothes in the washer along with the little pile of Jenny’s from the hamper and started the cycle.
    As I headed back into the kitchen I made a promise to myself that I would stop at home sometime today to get more clothes. I made a pot of coffee and while I waited for it to brew I flipped through a textbook Jenny had left on the counter. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the book other than it was a Statistics book. I sent up a silent thanks Mom had decided school was no longer needed after Dad died. Somehow I doubted figuring out graphs or whatever this was would help me kill a Demon.
    The coffee done, I carried my cup over to Jenny’s work area; I still couldn’t figure out why she had a coffee maker when she lived above her own coffee shop. Ace and Shooter were over here enough and could easily be relied on to get coffee if she asked; they were pretty good at fetch, though Jenny and I were still working on “sit” and especially “be good.”
    I sat down at the computer, entering her password and user name and opened the internet. Ugh, there was nothing good in the news; the usual death and destruction of the human variety. Like I didn’t have enough of that in my life? I minimized it.
   When it sunk to her tool bar at the bottom of the screen, I saw she had another link open. I hesitated for almost a whole second before clicking on it. Another testament to my willpower.
    Holy crap, Jenny was bad...really really bad; I loved it. Hacking into the Guardians’ historical files: no biggie, she’d done that last year. But their personnel files? This was so much better and more than a little badass. I didn’t hesitate when I clicked on the search bar. A small red box filled the screen, the cursor flashing in the middle. I typed in Max…well crap, I didn’t even know his last name. How was I supposed to snoop properly with only a first name? Sitting back, I spun around in the chair a few times in frustration.
    I had the whole Guardian database at my fingertips and no idea what to do. I wondered what they had on me. I typed in my name and hit enter.
    Seven boxes appeared on the screen, my name was in the center box and connected to me by dotted lines were the other six. The two grey ones were labeled with my parents’ names. My stomach rolled and I felt queasy as I read the names in the white boxes: Travis “Ace” Rand, Michael “Shooter” McGuire, Jennifer Marie Barton and Father Joseph Henry. This was not good.
    The sound of the front door opening had me minimizing the screen and jumping out of the chair, my guilt complex in full-on ‘hand in the cookie jar’ mode. I walked out into the main room and saw Father Henry unloading a paper shopping bag on the kitchen counter.
    “Oh heavens. You scared me,” He said looking up from what he was doing. “What have you been up too?”
    Cutting to the chase I asked him, “Did you know the Guardian database has records on Ace, Shooter and Jenny?”
    “Of course.” As if it was no big deal.
    “When were you going to tell me?” I asked.
    “Never, if I could help it. Allie, I had to do it for their protection and yours as well. I can’t let it get back to The Council that you’re running around with a group of humans without reporting it. They’d start to question my abilities as your mentor if I did. Besides,” he added, with a hint of a smile, “I had Jenny replace all their information the database. All the Guardians know is their names and we both know how easy it is to change those.”
    He was right; Jenny could change our names and create new identities in a matter of days. So why did I have a such a bad feeling rolling around inside? Then I remembered something Max said last night.
    “So are they my
team
?” I asked, using air quotes around ‘team.’
    At my words Father Henry froze and looked at me in shock.
    “No. Actually there isn’t really a term for you four; believe me, I’ve tried to think of one. I just needed to register them. Besides, I would never ask them to be a Guardian’s team. You know how dangerous that is, especially after all your parents went through.”
    “My parents were scholars.” I said, the confusion apparent in my voice.
    “Yes, but that wasn’t until after you were born. At one time they were members of a team.”
    “Meaning what?” I was getting kind of sick of always being the dumbest person in the room.
    I think he finally understood just how lost I was in all this. His face paled and he put the carton of eggs he’d been holding on the counter.
    “Meaning they provided support to a Guardian team. They carried out exterminations of Demons. Your father was a historian and your mother was a Demonologist. Each had skills that proved especially helpful. Our side had many successful operations because of your parents. They were very good Allie.” He smiled a little sadly, “It’s no wonder you’re their daughter.”
    “I thought they were just teachers. I remember them lecturing at the Academy.”
    “They did that too, but only after they had you. It’s common when Guardians start a family. They did it to keep you safe. I’m so sorry Allie, I always thought you’d known; I didn’t bring it up because you’ve had enough pain. I just assumed you didn’t want to discuss it.”
    I took a deep breath and let it out.
    “It’s okay.” I said and meant it. “It explains how they knew so much about fighting Demons.”
    I wasn’t upset about my parents not telling me, I understood the need to protect family even if it meant lying. I was more worried about my friends.
    “So exactly how bad would it be if Max thought Ace, Shooter and Jenny were my team?” I asked.
    “You didn’t tell him that, did you?” He said, leaning his elbows on the counter.
    My bad feeling seemed to grow to the size of a boulder as Father H cradled his head in his hands. I was very aware of his ‘we’re in a world of trouble’ stance.
    “I didn’t know what to say, in the moment it seemed like the right thing to do.” I explained, unable to keep the worry from my voice. “He said something about a team and I just went with it.”
    Father Henry must have known how freaked I was as he stood up and came to where I was standing. Wrapping his arms around me in a warm hug; he leaned his chin on top of my head saying, “Just do me a favor and don’t mention anything else about this to him. The last thing we need is him looking into their backgrounds. Trust me; those three are the last people The Council would choose to make up a team.”
    “Hey!” I said, pushing away from him, “They may not be a Council-sanctioned team but they’re mine, so how about you just lay off.”
    “And that is exactly why I never requested a team for you.” He said with a pride. Seeing my confused look he explained.
    “Allie, from the first moment I met you I knew you weren’t exactly made for following rules. Do you have any idea how rare that is? Take Max; he’s a very good young man and he is wholly dedicated to this war. And I’m sure he considers himself to be a renegade, playing by his own rules. Look at his hair for goodness sake!”
    I had to laugh at that; sometimes I forget about Father H’s sense of humor.
    “But,” he went on, “how long do you think he would last without the structure and support of the Guardians? To be more specific, how long do you think he would last living your life? Allie, Guardians work within a very regimented, very traditional system; a system, by the way, that I very much respect and believe in. But you, ‘Wonderkid,’ there isn’t anyone like you.”
    I couldn’t help but grin at his use of Ace’s pet name for me; I don’t think I’d ever heard him use it before.
    “And as for them, they love you and you them, any idiot can see that. I may not always approve of how you get your results but there’s no denying it’s effective. The four of you make a difference here and I wouldn’t change that for anything. Despite what anyone may think, the four of you
are
a team and you’re the leader. Do you believe for one second that I would have put you all together if I wasn’t 100% positive they would die for you?  Allie, I would say you are my daughter except I could never have done as good a job raising you as you have for yourself.”
    This time it was I who hugged him. Quietly into his chest I said, “Yes you did.”
    “Now enough with the feelings.” he said, “I’m starving.”