The Accidental Demon Slayer

Chapter Eighteen

This was so not the Oprah-style family reunion I’d dreamed of as a kid. I stood slowly, apprehension prickling my spine. “Are you dead?”
She wiped at her cheeks. “Not that I’m aware,” she said, reaching into her pocket, then thinking the best of it. She withdrew her hand slowly.
I froze, every nerve on high alert. The devil takes on many forms.
“How do I know you’re my mom?”
Her expression softened. “Do you still have that strawberry birthmark on the back of your left thigh?”
Cripes. After all these years—how did she get here? And why? “What do you want?” It came out harsher than I’d intended. Blame it on shock, or pure self-preservation.
“You’re leaving with me. Come on,” she said, heels clickety-clacking as she tried to lead me off the main deck.
Say what? I held my ground. “I don’t think so.” She couldn’t just show up after thirty years, from the dead no less, and expect me to start following orders. And what about I missed you, Lizzie. I love you, Lizzie.
I regret abandoning you, Lizzie.
She turned, her hands thrust on her hips. “You have no idea what kind of danger you’re in,” she said, desperation mixed with annoyance.
And she did? “Why are you in such a rush to save me?” I asked. After Xerxes the demon, imps, werewolves, black souls, Harley witches and a lying…whatever Dimitri was, “Why now?” I asked, reaching for my switch stars. I grasped the cool metal handles with my fingers.
“I thought I’d hidden you from this kind of life. These people. And those terrible switch stars. Please stop spinning that.”
“What?” I glanced absently at the switch star on my finger. “Wait. You knew where I was all these years?” When Hillary put me in a fat camp for being five pounds overweight, when I wasn’t allowed to wear jeans, even in the house, when I had to pose at those stupid society picnics when all I wanted to do was run around like a normal kid.
I’d dreamed about this moment—about meeting my birth mom. And it sucked.
“Lizzie,” she said, and held up her hand. “We have to leave. Now.” She made her way toward the pilot house, beckoning me to follow. What? Was she going to try and launch the ship? I could see us now, sailing down the Yazoo, mother and daughter on a bewitched boat.
I followed, mainly to bag a particularly nasty-looking lose your keys spell. I plunked it in the jar. If only we could rid the world of those things. I’d be willing to bet they reproduced like rabbits.
Oh, who was I kidding? I had a question I’d been wanting to ask for decades.
Mom said a few incantations over the door and the lock clicked open.
Now or never. The question burned in the pit of my stomach. “Why did you leave me?” I asked. Please let it be because you loved me.
She paused, doorknob in hand. “We don’t have time for this.”
“We do,” I told her, my voice sounding steadier than I felt. “Because I’m not going anywhere until I get some answers.” No matter how much it hurt. She owed me a heck of a lot more explanations than this one.
She shifted from one sky-high pump to the other, the thick, humid breeze blowing her overstylized hair up in wings around her head. “Lizzie, you have to understand. I gave you up precisely so I’d never find you again. And so these people wouldn’t either. Do you know what they want you to do? Of course you do. You draw those switch stars like a gunfighter. But it’s not fun and games. You could lose your soul.”
The thought made me shiver despite myself. I didn’t want to think about what I could lose. “They’ve got Grandma.”
“I know,” she said softly. “I felt it when they took her.”
“We have to fix it.” Together, we’d have a better chance at defeating Vald.
“No, Lizzie. We’re getting out of here. End of story,” she said, snagging the hotfoot spell that hovered at her ankle. “Gertie chose her path, and now she’s living with the consequences. You can still have a normal life.”
“Is this because Grandma tried to kill you?” I blurted. Real smooth, Lizzie. “I mean, everyone thinks she murdered you. I know you must have had a falling out, but she’s your mom and—”
“Lizzie,” she barked. Boy, it didn’t take her long to find her “mom” voice. “Your grandma and I have had our issues, but we never came to blows. She helped me escape.” Mom held on to the doorknob of the pilot’s house, as if she didn’t want me to see what lurked inside. “Just like I’m doing for you. You can still have a normal life.”
I couldn’t believe she wanted me to abandon Grandma. “Like you?”
“Yes. I write a small society column for a newspaper in Freeburg.”
Where was a good choking spell when I needed it? “You can’t just barge in here, scare the pants off me and try to get me to abandon the only real family I’ve ever had.” Yeah, I knew it probably hurt her, but I wanted to at the moment.
“Drop the switch stars. Leave this place. Come live with me in my condo in Freeburg. I’ll take you to the Lone Star Café and we’ll talk about how you can have a new life without fifth-level demons, black souls or werewolves.” Poor Fang. “So you saw that too?” I asked, noticing a frozen underwear hovering near her left hip.
“I’m so sorry it ended badly.”
“Me too.” I caught a giggler and sent it to join the mustard-colored smoke drifting skyward.
“I had no idea they’d blame the poisonings on you.”
Say what? If she wasn’t my mother, I think I would have hurled a switch star. “You poisoned the wolves?”
“I had to get you out of there,” she said, as if that was any kind of excuse. “You were too close to completing your training.” She pursed her lips, then said, “Do you know it took your Great-great Aunt Evie a decade to master the Three Truths? Granted, she started at the age of nine, but still! She sat around for the next eleven years, waiting to turn thirty. And you, you zip right through and want to go face a fifth-level demon? For crying out loud, Lizzie, I wouldn’t be surprised to see you go after the devil himself. And for what? You don’t need this. It’s a horrible, horrible life.”
She’d sent me to join Cliff and Hillary in their perfect world, then she’d gone on to create a similar nirvana for herself. I couldn’t have turned out any more different from each and every one of them. But it didn’t matter now. We needed to focus on fixing this thing with Vald. “Help me save Grandma. You don’t want to lose her. I know you don’t.”
A sad smile played across her features. “I’d rather lose her than lose both of you. I’m sure she’d say the same thing, Lizzie. She wouldn’t want you going down there unprepared, and you’ll never be good enough to face a fifth-level demon.”
Okay, that stung. She looked at me like I was the most pitiful thing she’d ever seen.
“But I’m a demon slayer.”
“So was I.”
My brain buzzed as I tried to process that last thought.
“You what?”
“That’s beside the point.”
“Oh no, no, no. Tell me right now what you’re talking about, or I’m going to leave you and this conversation right now.”
“I’m the chosen one,” she said, as if she was about to tell me I needed to have a root canal. “I mean, count it out. Take it from your Great Aunt Evie, who was actually your Great-great, Great Aunt. Then her twin sister, Edna, but we don’t count her because a demon stole her soul right after training. Skip three generations and you have me. And then, well, by accident—you.”
Nobody had ever put it that way before.
“What do you mean I was an accident?”
“I was smarter than they were,” she said, a little too deviously. “I studied everything they gave me, and I did more. I talked to everyone I could—visiting sorcerers, black magicians, warlocks. They thought I was a prodigy. And I learned things all right,” she said with a wicked smile. “I learned how to beat it.”
Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the mule. She foisted her destiny off—on me?
“It’s the only way,” she insisted, daring me to judge her.
I couldn’t believe it.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, rubbing my temples to keep my head from pounding out of my skull. “You were overwhelmed with your enormous powers, powers your loving family had trained you to use. So you dumped them on me, then scuttled me off to an adoptive family while you ran?”
She didn’t even pretend to look guilty. “It was the only way.”
“Bullshit.” I needed to get off this boat. I stormed for the main staircase, nearly tripping over a stubbed toe spell. Mom chased me, setting off three frozen underwears. Served her right.
She ignored them as we clattered down the ornate iron staircase. “Stop being unreasonable, Lizzie. I thought if I hid you, you’d never know what I was or what you are. It didn’t work. I admit that. We can still be a family and figure out a way to end the slayer line for good.”
I came to a halt on a small landing, tears welling in my eyes. For the love of Laconia, I couldn’t let her get to me. As a kid, I’d daydream about what it would be like to meet my real mom. She’d be beautiful and strong and not afraid of anybody. Instead, she was everything I feared I’d become.
I didn’t know if I had the strength or the courage to defeat Vald. But unlike my mom, I knew I had to try.
“Run with me,” she insisted. “We can find a way for you to reject your powers.”
As much as I never wanted this, and as much as I’d always wanted my real mom, I couldn’t have it this way. I needed her and she’d abandoned me. I wasn’t about to leave Grandma in the same position.
“No, Mom,” I said, wiping my runny nose on Dimitri’s T-shirt. “I’m going to face Vald. You want to make a difference? Help me.”
She fiddled around in her purse, her makeup cases clacking together while she rifled through lipsticks and who knew what else. “Here.” She jabbed a lipstick-smeared hankie at me. “Wipe your nose.”
Ew. These germ magnets should have been outlawed as soon as Kleenex was invented. But Mom seemed ready to wipe my nose for me if I let her. I found a clean-looking spot and dabbed to be polite. The hankie smelled like jasmine with a side of pickle relish. Strange. Mom drew a fragile breath as my world went black.