K Stewart - A Shot in the Dark

“What did he really want?” Out of the darkness, Mira’s voice startled me, and I jumped a little. She sounded smaller somehow, and I held her tighter without really knowing why.

“Who, Cam?”

“No. Him. The… thing, yesterday.”

“Ah.” She wouldn’t say a demon’s name, not even the mocking one I’d assigned to him. But I knew who she meant. Last night, we’d carefully avoided mentioning Axel and his party crashing, but I guess my reprieve was over. “I don’t know. Like I said, he was being weird, even for him.”

“What did he say?”

I frowned a little, though she couldn’t see it. “Not much. He seemed really excited that I was going on vacation. Enthusiastic, even.” Too enthusiastic. Yet another thing that had bothered me ever since.

“How do you feel about that?” Her hand was still stroking up and down my arm, and it finally occurred to me that she was looking for goose bumps. I was and always would be the magic-less wonder, but my earlywarning system was finely tuned.

“I don’t know. My first instinct is to do exactly the opposite of whatever makes him happy. But then I think, maybe that’s what he wants me to do, and I should go after all, and then I get all confused after that.” I nuzzled her ear a little, hoping to distract her. “Ignore him. He’s a douche.”

She turned in my arms, facing me though neither of us could see in the darkened room. “You’d tell me, right? If you thought something was wrong, you’d tell me?” Her fingers stroked through my hair, combing the strands out straight over and over.

I had to think long and seriously about that. Lying by omission had become all too easy for me of late, and I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t do it anymore-not to her. So, was something wrong?

I really thought about it, bringing Axel’s face to the front of my mind, rolling the idea of the vacation trip through my head. There was no twisting of my innards, no painfully cold goose bumps along my arms. Just my natural antidemon revulsion where Axel was concerned.

“I got nothing, baby. No shivers, no nothing. I think we’re okay. Besides, you’ve got like fifty layers of protective spells on me. What could happen?” That seemed to appease her and we both settled down to sleep.

Well, Mira settled down to sleep. I lay awake, watching the streetlight outside cast weird shadows through the blinds and replaying the strange conversation with Axel over and over. My brain kept coming back to one sentence again and again.

“We always come back, Jesse.”

Then the goose bumps came, peppered over my skin like tiny needles of ice. I didn’t know why that one statement triggered my danger-sense, but I was pretty sure I’d get a chance to find out.

Morning comes damn early on two hours’ sleep, especially when “morning” starts at three a.m. But we had a long drive ahead of us, and the early bird gets the… oh screw it. It was freakin’ early.

I kissed Mira’s forehead and slipped out of bed without waking her. Bonus points for me. I’d packed the night before, and left my clothes in the living room so I could dress without waking anyone else.

Walking down the hallway, I poked my head into Annabelle’s room. It took me a moment to locate her head of red curls, pillowed between a giant pink frog and a worn wolf plushie. Even in the darkness, I could see the faintest pink tint to her cheeks, her face flushed with the heat of sleep like kids’ do. Aside from her coloring, strawberry blond hair and blue eyes, she was the image of her mother, right down to the shape of her mouth and her pert little nose. She was the most beautiful thing in the world.

“Sleep well, button. Be good for Mommy,” I whispered, then moved on.

The only other thing I really needed to do would involve waking someone, but considering that someone was living in my house rent free, I figured ten minutes of lost sleep wouldn’t hurt him.

Our spare bedroom had been converted from Mira’s personal sanctuary into Esteban’s room when he came to live with us. Not that the kid had much, but he’d put up a few posters, and some letters from home were taped to the wall above his bed.

Unfortunately, Mira’s computer was still set up in there, mostly for the kid to work on his homework. (Mira was a stickler about grades. Who knew?) But it was also how I kept contact with the other champions, like myself. And since Esteban was nominally one too, he was allowed to peep at my conversations. A little.

Mira’s brand-new, custom-built computer had enough lights and whizzers on it to light up the entire room, so I didn’t bother with flipping the overhead on. I parked myself in front of the green glowing monitor and proceeded to jump through seven kinds of hoops to finally access the Web site I was after in the first place. Our Webmaster was downright paranoid when it came to security.

Just because I could, I left the volume up when the sentry-bot screamed “BOOBIES!” at supersonic decibels.

Esteban said something like “Grnf?” and rolled over, yanking his comforter over his head.

The Webcam window popped up on the screen, and I smirked at Viljo. “Boobies, hmm?”

“I thought you were Esteban.” The hacker-turned-Web-security-expert rattled around on his keyboards without even looking up at his screen. “I do not want him surfing for porn on my baby, and he is surprisingly easy to embarrass.”

Due to unexpected motherboard meltdown a few months ago, we’d been forced to replace Mira’s old computer. Viljo had taken great pride and care in building this new monstrosity before us.

“But enough of that, down to business. Password?” He finally peered at his screen, eyes narrowing suspiciously. The wispy mustache he’d been trying to grow for the better part of a year looked like it might actually have enough hair now to warrant shaving. Or at least a good plucking.

“Viljo, you’re looking right at me. It’s me.” The new computer came with a shiny new Webcam. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, yet. The improved technology did confirm that Viljo really was as pasty as I’d always thought, though, and that his dyed black hair was even stringier.

“Do not care, new protocols. Password?”

“Viljo, I’m going to come through this computer and kick your ass.” Which was, oddly, my password. “And shouldn’t it be pass phrase ?”

“Password accepted. Hold on to your socks.” Viljo hit a few keys, and suddenly my computer screen blossomed into sights and sounds and colors not known to mortal man. Okay, not really, but that’s how he wanted me to feel about it.

I hunt-and-pecked my sign-in ID into the right fields and finally got logged into Grapevine, flipping to the ITINERARY tab. “I’m gonna be out of town for a few days, Vil, and nowhere near a computer.”

“Does Ivan know you’re going?”

“I mentioned it, a long time ago, but I doubt he remembers. That’s why I’m filling out the nice little form, right?” I was almost thirty-three years old. I was fully capable of leaving the house without “daddy’s” permission.

Don’t get me wrong. I have the utmost respect for Ivan Zelenko and the network of champions he has created out of nothing. Without Ivan’s knowledge and training, most of us would have been dead years ago. But I draw the line at letting him govern my “off hours.”

“Business or pleasure?”

“Pleasure, in theory. Camping trip with my buddies.”

The computer geek paused in his furious typing and blinked at me, owl-eyed. “Like… outside?”

“Yes, with the big glowing ball of death in the sky. Y’know, the sun?”

He snorted. “Now you are just making words up.”

I had to chuckle. I highly doubted that Viljo was as blatantly stereotypical as he pretended to be, but he still made me laugh with some of his nerd outrage. “I’m gonna be in your neck of the woods, actually. Just west of Fort Collins.” Viljo was hunkered down somewhere south of my impending vacation, near Pikes Peak last I knew.