Slayer(23)

“I gotta go. I can’t have them come looking for me, not until we figure out what this thing’s deal is.” I pause. “I don’t want to ask you to keep secrets from Rhys, but . . .” But the Council has kept secrets from me. And I feel so out of control right now, like everything is spinning away from me. For once in my life as a Watcher, I want to be in charge.

I know it’s irrational to protect a demon. But it also feels like a rebellion against my Slayer calling, and I’m all about the rebellion lately. I’ll tell Artemis, though. She’ll know what to do. She can handle anything.

“Text me if it wakes up,” I say. “I’ll come back later to secure it with more chains. Until then, stay out of this building. You should sleep in the shop.”

I see Cillian safely there and hurry back to the castle. I run faster but feel slower, weighted by so many unanswered questions.





It took her too long to find them again.

Their mother knew what she was doing. She disappeared. And not only did she disappear from conventional means of tracking, she used magical wards and shields to prevent mystical tracking as well. But the hunter was patient and had plenty of resources. Eventually the mother would make a mistake, and then the hunter could finish the job.

A little more than a year after the vampire’s failure, her opportunity came. Watchers were creatures of habit, and even in hiding, the mother responded when a Council member asked to meet. The hunter knew the date and time of the meeting.

She stood outside a nondescript house in a Phoenix subdivision. Everything here was beige. The landscape. The houses. The auras. It was the least magical place she had ever encountered. It might have been the opposite of a hellmouth—a demonic dead spot. Even hell was preferable to Arizona.

That was probably why the mother had chosen it. With the heat of the day still radiating from the pebble-strewn excuse for a yard, the hunter crouched low and watched the house. The lights were on. She waited until she saw one flash of red curls. Then two. They were inside.

Evening slipped into night. She imagined the mundane tasks that were happening inside. Baths. Were the girls old enough for showers now? Brushing teeth. Perhaps a story, one where monsters were defeated and then the book ends.

But monsters never respected endings in real life. They just kept coming and coming and coming. They never stopped needing to be defeated.

The bedroom light went off. And then, as promised, the mother stepped out of the house. Her movements were furtive, suspicious. She climbed in her car and drove away to her clandestine meeting.

The mother should have known better.

The hunter popped a piece of bubble gum into her mouth. She had the just-released video of ?Titanic at home waiting for her as a reward for finally finishing this task. “I’ll never let go, Jack,” she whispered to herself as she cut her hand and began activating the runes that would end the prophecy once and for all.





7


THE CASTLE LOOMS OVER ME in the night. It’s not a fairy-tale castle, made of spun sugar and happily-ever-after dreams. It’s not even a nightmare castle filled with spikes and creeping darkness. It’s the castle equivalent of an urgent care clinic. Its job is to keep you alive. That’s it.

The windows are mainly narrow slots, left over from the days of arrows and crossbows. To be fair, we still use crossbows a lot. A few of the windows have been expanded in the living quarters, but those were done artlessly, like the wrong eyeglasses for a face shape. The only tower crumbled before my great-grandparents were alive, so the entire building is a squat rectangle. The outer wall is gone, along with matching outbuildings, left behind when Ruth Zabuto and my mom transported the castle here. Instead, we have several cheap sheds. There’s one long garage that was converted from a preexisting abandoned stable. The entire thing is as grouchy as Bradford Smythe and as unpleasant as Wanda Wyndam-Pryce. And as lacking in magic as Ruth Zabuto.

Still, it’s home.

Which means it’s full of people I can’t risk running into right now. I half suspect that if I bumped into someone from the Council, I’d blurt out everything. It’s a huge tenet of Watcher society that you listen to the Council. You obey them. And, less explicit but more of an unspoken tenet, you don’t hide demons in your friends’ sheds without telling them about it.

So instead of going in through the front, I circle around to the back and locate what I’m pretty sure is my window. It’s on the second story. The whole first story of the castle is off-limits. They shut it down when they moved the castle here. There’s a light in my window, like a beacon. If I can get to my room, I’ll be able to tell Artemis what happened, and she’ll know what we should do. She always has a plan.

I mentally calculate. It’s about fifteen feet up. There’s a wide stone ledge; the walls are a foot and a half thick, and the window is set toward the inside.

If I can run super fast now, then maybe . . .

I crouch low and jump. With my arms straight up, I manage to catch the ledge with the tips of my fingers. I expect to fall, but they hold. I pull myself up, laughing, and haul my whole body into the space in front of my window, folded and crammed up against it.

That’s when I remember it’s locked—and it swings out when it opens, not in. I might have Slayer strength, but it didn’t improve my ability to think plans out thoroughly in advance. Maybe that’s why Buffy always reacts instead of planning. When your body can do amazing things, it’s easy to try first, regret later.