The two girls stood, walking to him, heads down, fingers clasped. “Yes, Daddy?” they chorused in unison, so sweet sugar wouldn’t melt in their mouths.
August fought not to roll his eyes. “Can you please explain why you were…exorcising your friend?”
“He was a demon,” Adi said.
Jasmine nodded hard from the sidelines, like she was prepared to testify in her—and their—defense if compelled by the prosecutor.
“What does that mean?” Lucas asked, voice tense.
“He was aSaja Boy,” Arabella said. “Duh.”
August bit his lip as reality came crashing down on all of them. The Mulvaney children—all children, really—had a new obsession:K-Pop Demon Hunters.
Arabella had dressed as Mira, her pink wig split into two pigtails that fell to her hips. Adelyn was dressed as Zoey, her dark hair twisted into what Lucas had calledspace buns.Jasmine’s participation now made sense as she was dressed as Rumi, her thick hair plaited into a purple braid that fell over one shoulder and rested in her lap.
They were all dressed in theHuntrixgroup’s white and gold costumes. Jagger was dressed as the three-eyed raven, and Jett was dressed as the derpy blue tiger. The level of detail would have impressed a Comic-Con judge, down to the fake runes drawn on their wrists.
They’d chosen to exorcise their classmate who’d had the misfortune of deciding to dress like a Saja Boy. August absently wondered which one, but quickly shook the thought away.
“And he agreed to let you exorcise him?” Atticus asked, sounding genuinely impressed.
“Yeah, it was the only way Jinu and Rumi could be together.” Well that answered that. “We had to return his soul and expel Gwi-ma. We were gonna do Rumi next to sever her demon sideso they could be free,” Ara said, looking deadly serious about the process.
Silence fell again, thick with the kind of collective adult disbelief usually reserved for tax audits and PTA meetings. Even Thomas’s lips twitched, betraying amusement he didn’t bother to hide.
“Don’t y’all just kill demons in the movie?” Ty asked, then snapped his mouth shut like he’d realized he was focusing on the wrong aspect entirely. “I don’t remember there being an exorcism.”
“We’re not allowed to kill people, Mr. Jones,” Ara said in a conspiratorial whisper. “Even if demons technically match the code.”
“That’s a good call,” Ty said, equally amused and conspiratorial.
They all seemed to gloss over hercodestatement. August sent up a silent prayer to a God he didn’t actually believe in.
“Sister Mary Elizabeth said thatK-pop Demon Huntersis just asillymovie—” Adi cut herself off to give the woman in question a look that said just exactly what she thought of her lack of taste. “—and that real demon hunters are priests, and that real exorcisms have to be sanctioned by the Vatican and can sometimes take months or years to approve,” Adi said.
“I don’t have months,” Jasmine said. “I want to get married while I still have my looks.”
All the adults bit back laughs, nodding encouragingly. Thomas pressed a fist to his mouth, shoulders trembling. Even Sister Josephine’s eye twitched like she was fighting a smile.
“We looked up an exorcism during recess,” Jagger added helpfully.
“You looked up an exorcism online?” Atticus asked, sounding genuinely concerned for the first time. He looked at Jericho. “I thought you had the parental controls on.”
“Of course I do,” Jericho said. “Jagger, where did you look this up?”
“YouTube,” he said.
“Can you show me?” Jericho asked, looking a bit constipated.
Jagger nodded solemnly, digging his phone from his bag and thumbing it open, tapping until he pulled up the video and then handing it to Atticus. The adults all gathered around to watch as they hit play and found…a clip of the showSupernatural.
There was a man in special-effects makeup tied to a chair in the center of a chalk symbol. He was spitting and hissing, his skin sizzling each time the water touched him as Sam Winchester began to speak in Latin.
“This is the Latin you used to exorcise the demon?” August asked, lips twitching.
“We looked at Dad’sThe Lesser Key of Solomontext, but that only told us how to summon demons, not expel them. We tried to find the official church doctrine on exorcism, but it’s surprisingly hard to find,” Arabella said like a thirty-year-old defending her dissertation. “Even after Jasmine jailbreaked our phones, this was all we could find.”
“Guess that STEM endowment is really working,” Thomas muttered.
