“Momma, momma, MOMMA!”
Speaking of being a horrible parent…
I pulled myself away from my thoughts to find Timmy bouncing in front of me. “Do you need to go potty?”
“No, Momma. Wanna be the band!”
Across the room, Eddie groaned.
“You want to have a conversation or not?” I asked. “Because if I don’t let him, he’s just going to whine.”
“And if you do let him, we ain’t gonna be able to hear ourselves think.”
He had a point.
“Band it is,” I said, standing and leading the way to the kitchen. “But this is quiet band.” I took my voice down to a whisper. “It’s for special music. Can you do whisper singing and quiet playing?”
He shook his head. “No, Momma.”
At least the kid was honest.
“I bet you can. And if you let me and Gramps finish talking, you can have a packet of Goldfish crackers.”
His little face lit up the way it often does when he tells me he loves me and gives me big cuddles. Considering that put me on the same par as cheesy crackers, I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that.
Wisely, I chose to table that question, focusing instead on putting together his music studio. A rubber spatula with a wooden handle. Tupperware instead of metal bowls to serve as drums. A plastic spoon still wrapped from ice cream take-out one day.
And, the pièce de la résistance … an empty paper towel tube.
“You’re all set, kiddo,” I whispered. “Remember, it’squiet band.”
“Aye-aye, Momma,” he said, putting Boo Bear on the floor beside him, then saluting me with the tube.
I mentally crossed my fingers that I’d just bought seven to ten minutes of quality adult conversation time, then headed back into the living room.
Eddie snorted. ”You really think that’ll keep the boy occupied?”
“A girl can dream.”
“Fair enough.” He pointed a bony finger at me. “And a girl should quit worrying about things she don’t understand.”
It took me a second to shift gears back to my daughter, but I’d caught up with the conversation by the time he added, “You gotto look at the basics. Allie’s your daughter. You love Allie. Allie’s a good kid. Allie’s the same kid she’s always been. Ergo, unless you know for certain something’s different, not a damn thing’s changed.”
I nodded. He was right. It’s not as if this just happened yesterday. We stayed in Rome after saving the world, and part of that was so that Allie could talk with the priests at Forza and train and learn more about what she was. Nobody saw any hint that there was anything evil inside her.
But even without the possibility of evil forces gathering inside her, I was still worried. Because it seemed to me that forsomereason, the local demon population was looking for my daughter.
“Still might be Eliza,” Eddie said when I voiced as much. “For that matter, could be someone else in town.”
I scowled at the thought. “All that means is that I have more to figure out. We need to know who the demons are after and why. You remember what it was like before. And I’m not keen on having the oldest and most powerful demon in the world come back again.”
He made a snorting noise. “You sent that Lilith bitch and her consort Odayne packing. She’s gone. She’s dead.”
I sighed, then glanced toward the rising noise now coming from the kitchen. I figured we had maybe four minutes left for a real conversation.
”Lilith’s not dead, and you know it,” I said. In addition to being a High Demon, Lilith is also one of the first and most powerful demons. Getting rid of her is like trying to remove a purple Sharpie stain from a white T-shirt. It just never quite seems to work. Ask me how I know. “And how could a demon ever really be dead, anyway?” I continued, because thinking about demons is almost always better than thinking about laundry.
To be brutally honest, I should have known the answer to that—and I sort of did, even though I never really wrapped my head around it. It’s the kind of thing they taught us in the long, boring classes that every Hunter-in-Training had to take. I was always more about kicking ass than learning the details. The book stuff was Eric’s love, not mine. Theory, theology, the whole shebang.
