And then I’d made him leave, because honestly, I liked the sound ofwea little too much. I was relying on him, which would be fine if he was just another administrator. But he was my ex-husband. A man I still loved, and who I knew loved me.
But my current husband was right there, needing me. And though I’d spent the last several months letting Eric prop me up, I couldn’t allow myself to take it a step further and cling to him. I couldn’t use him to make everything feel better, not even for a moment. Not like that.
No matter how much I wanted to.
I shook the memory off, one I’d already forced deep, deep down. And now, down it went again, into the trash pile of Very Bad Cravings.
“Yesterday was my mistake,” I said to Laura, telling myself that I was only talking about the furniture assembly team. “We didn’t properly vet, and we let them in close. That was on me. I should have vetted the team better. I should have realized that the demon population wasn’t going to want a demon fighting academy right herein San Diablo. Of course they were going to send in demons to try to take us out.”
“How do you vet for something like that?”
I shrugged. “Working on it. But I’m thinking we need a holy water basin or something at the entrance. Wash your hands before entering.”
Laura laughed, but the sound was thin. I studied my friend. “Are you thinking about pulling Mindy out? Making her live at home?”
Allie would be devastated if Mindy was no longer her roommate. And even more devastated if Mindy dropped out of the program altogether.
Laura hesitated, then shook her head. “No. No she belongs here. But I thought about it.” She doesn’t meet my eyes, and I wait, giving her time before she continues. “I spent all of last night thinking about it.”
“Allof last night?”
As I’d hoped, she grinned. “Slight exaggeration. And, I thought about it a lot. Keeping her at home. Sending her back to Coronado High. Hell, I even thought about moving. Just getting away from all this.”
She looked at me and I saw guilt in her eyes, and it felt like a stab to the gut.
“Do you think I’d blame you for that?”
She shook her head. “No. I thought I’d blame me.”
I tilted my head, my brow furrowed with an unspoken question.
“It’s just that I can’t unknow it,” Laura said.
I let her words sink in, nodding slowly. “Yeah. I get that. Boy do I get that.”
“I really did think I could simply walk away. I mean, you did, right? But that was different. You’d already lived a lifetime of demon hunting when you retired. You and Eric had earned your way out. Plus, you moved some place where you didn’t think that you would have to fight demons. Because I know both of you. If there were demons, you’d fight, even if you were retired.”
Also true. San Diablo was supposed to be a demon-free zone, and for a while it was. Then things changed, and here we were.
“You and Eric did your part to save the world,” Laura said, “and then you stopped. “But you’re back in now. Not because you have to be, maybe not even because you want to be, but because it’s what you have to do. Because you’ve seen the way the world really is.”
I stayed silent, letting her words flow over me. Her words reflected my journey, but I knew she was talking about hers.
“I didn’t used to see that world,” Laura said. “The dark world that you’ve known since you were little. But I see it now, and I can’t walk away from it. We live in a world with horrible things in it. But there are good things too. And since I see that, since I know it, I have to help.” She let her shoulders rise and fall. “I just wish I could help more.”
“You help tons,” I said, realizing that my lashes were damp with tears. “ And honestly, sometimes I’m sorry I showed it to you. It is horrible, knowing what we know. It changes everything. But at the same time, I’m not sorry at all. I like that you’re beside me. And I can’t tell you what a relief it was to stop keeping secrets from my best friend.”
“Yeah, I’m glad too. But you didn’t exactly show me, remember? I kind of stuck my nose in.”
I laughed. She’d followed me, seen me stab a man through the eye, and pretty much freaked out. Who wouldn’t? I could have made up a story, though I still don’t know exactly what that story would have been, but I didn’t want to.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” she said when I told her all that. “I wouldn’t go back even if I could, and I won’t pull Mindy out even though I’m scared. No from the school or the dorms.”
“And you...?”
She laughed. “I am not selling my house to move in here. At least not yet. And definitely not until you have a full-time cook,” she added with a wink.
I pointed vaguely in the direction of the library downstairs. “Go. Research.”
