Slayer(88)

The prophecy is about me. About us.

My mother knows—and Doug the neon-yellow demon knows. I turn and run for the castle. Maybe her leaving me behind in the fire was about more than me being a Slayer. Maybe the prophecy is so bad, she risked my life to save Artemis. She would have known, as soon as I was identified as a Potential, that I’m the world breaker. I have demonic power in me, after all. And in spite of all her efforts, she couldn’t keep it from coming out.

I finally get why my mother has pushed me to the side all my life. She doesn’t just hate the Slayer in me. She’s afraid of me.

My eyes burning and streaming with tears, I rush through the castle, straight to our room to get the prophecy and bring it to Artemis. We’re two parts of one person, two parts of one foretold doom, and I can’t do this alone.

I almost trip over the body in the hall outside my door.

“It’s me!” Leo says, sitting up. I cover my mouth to muffle the scream that almost escaped. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

I take in a shaky breath. I don’t know where to begin, and I’m afraid that once I do, I’ll lose my grip completely. “I’m okay,” I lie. “Just tired. But what are you doing on the floor outside my room? I thought you were a dead body. And I am all dead-bodied out for the night. I don’t have another dead-body opening in my schedule for at least a week.”

It’s dim, the only light a bulb at the other end of the hall. But I can feel Leo smiling. I can hear it in his voice.

“I’ll do my best to clear your schedule of dead bodies, then. I’m sorry. I thought you were inside, asleep.”

“Weirdo.” I reach past him to open the door. But I’m secretly touched that Leo was worried enough to come guard me.

“Where’s Artemis?” He peers inside as I flip the light on.

“Sleeping in Jade’s room tonight. She’s still pissed at me.”

Leo hovers in the doorway. Seeing his hands jammed into his loose sweatpants pockets and his mouth twisted to the side is kind of adorable. He’s embarrassed and feeling awkward. I’m so fricking glad it’s not me for once that I’m instantly at ease and no longer feeling so desperate to get to Artemis right away. She didn’t want to talk about the prophecy before. I don’t know if that has changed. And I can’t handle another rejection if she refuses.

Doug’s camping and still being hunted. He’s not going anywhere. Neither is my mom. I’ll figure this out on my own. “Oh, come in,” I say. “It’s silly for you to be out on the floor. Besides, I’m a Slayer, remember? I don’t need a bodyguard.”

“And I’m your Watcher. It’s my job to protect you.”

“It’s your job to train and guide me. The protecting is my job.”

“Agree to disagree.” Leo finally steps into my room. His eyes take it all in, and I look at it as though for the first time. Artemis’s side of the room is tidy, weights stacked neatly next to demonic texts she’s been studying. A row of weapons hangs from a shelf above her bed.

My side of the room . . . less tidy. I have a bookshelf double-stacked and crammed with everything imaginable. CPR instruction manuals, anatomy books, first-year medical student texts I begged Cillian to buy me off eBay, my Redheads of Literature shelf. There’s the stack of the demon books I was looking through to find information on Doug. And there’s a huge pile of notebooks.

Ah, there’s the awkwardness I had been missing! I’m sure that Leo is eyeing the notebooks. Or am I just paranoid? “They’re notes. Not poetry! Anatomy. Health stuff. I watch a lot of medical tutorials and write down what I think will be useful. I also keep logs of stuff. So mostly it’s records of the Littles having a fever or a stomach bug. But Imogen takes good care of them, so even that’s not a lot.”

Leo nods. Then he looks up at the ceiling and his eyes widen. “Are those fan blades actual blades?”

I rub the back of my neck. He’s perceptive. “Oh. Right. Um. You know we lost our dad, and then there was the fire. After all that, I started having bad nightmares and was scared to go to sleep at night. So Artemis and I decided to set booby traps. Squirt guns with holy water hidden everywhere. Stakes. Actually, in the kitchen, every wooden stirring spoon still has a sharpened end. Anyway, as we got older, they got more elaborate. The fan was our project when we moved here and both needed a distraction from what happened with the Council going boom and all.” I go to the spot right under the fan. “See here? This board is loose. On a fulcrum. There’s a spring on the other side. The idea is you lure the vampire or whatever to this spot, then stomp on the board. Ta-da! Instant decapitation.”

Leo is still staring up at the fan. “I was always afraid ceiling fans would come loose and kill me. How can you sleep under this thing?”

“We don’t turn it on.” I point to the fireplace. “We never use that, either. Not huge fans of fires. But there’s a pressurized gas canister there.” I point to what looks like a normal gas feed for the fire. “Jade helped us rig it up. If you flip this switch right inside the mantel, it’s a flamethrower. But again, stationary. The vampire would have to be standing right here. We weren’t really big on practicality. It was mostly to keep ourselves busy, to pretend like we had some control.”

“You wanted to feel safe.”