I flopped on the couch, blowing out a miserable sigh.
ChaCha, my ever-faithful companion, was snuggled up in her dog bed. She cracked one dark eye open to witness my misery; then flopped around and went back to snoring. I tried to soothe my jangled nerves with a tall glass of ice water and something on KQED—okay, it was a bottle of Yoo-hoo recovered from the back of the fridge and a Real World marathon—but I was still filled with the overwhelming sense of dread. I had sat and watched, frozen, as Nina’s black hair swished across her back when she walked out of the restaurant to go find Harley—a man who wrote off demons for a living.
In print.
And it made him millions.
My breath caught in my throat and I hiccupped chocolate Yoo-hoo. I fumbled through the highbrow reading material we kept stacked on the coffee table—InStyle, US Weekly, a three-month-old Cosmo—until I found what I was looking for.
Nina’s copy of Harley Cavanaugh’s book Vampires, Werewolves, and Other Things That Don’t Exist was on the bottom of the stack. I ran my fingers over the raised letters and groaned when I read the message Harley had inscribed to Nina in his quick, slanted scrawl: To the beautiful woman standing before me—maybe I should reconsider whether angels exist? Truly, Harley.
I gagged so loudly that ChaCha jumped from her bed, yipping.
“Sorry, Cha,” I mumbled, turning the page and settling in for the read.
I paged through Harley’s introduction, where he established himself as one of the foremost debunkers of so-called spooks, haunts, and legends. I yawned when he opened chapter one with a meant-to-be-humorous anecdote about dressing up for Halloween. I was halfway through his description of a drugstore-purchased Dracula costume when I jumped to the index, looking for trigger words.
Is Harley more than just a bigoted blowhard?
I flipped until I found Underworld, The pg 67.
I found the page and scanned. The Underworld is just that—a world under our own.
I snorted. “Way to use a dictionary, Professor Cavanaugh.”
I continued reading.
There are many differing beliefs about this Underworld. Some will argue that it is a parallel universe that encompasses all manner of human evils. Here on Earth (the “upper” world) exists God (or central protector/creator), light, growth, life, and humanity. The Underworld is looked over by Satan and embraces demons, fire, chaos, and death. It is signified by its absence of light.
I thought of the brightly lit UDA hallways, the orderly lines, and the neat stacks of paperwork that were handed over by my smiling (well, for the ones that had lips) UDA regulars. Then I thought of the fires that I’d experienced—my father’s house, my old job—and the chaos that ensued. Both were in Harley’s “upper world.”
The description continued:
The inhabitants of the Underworld are demons with horrible features, faces, and traits, and those not demonic have been banished to this alternate world for being obstinate in their evil. Some well-intentioned humans have slipped into the Underworld via portals, curses, or mistakes, and those poor souls are tortured and fed upon by the demonic population.
I scanned Harley’s reasoning about the fallacy of the Underworld (Earth-core drilling has not encountered Satan’s underworld bachelor pad, for starters) and started to feel a little better, betting that Harley’s book was nothing more than a scientist on a soapbox, until I got to the chapter titled “Demon Races.” I sucked in a breath and read over Harley’s vampire mathematics (wildly flawed, as vampires do not “turn” or kill every person on whom they feed) and grimaced at his detailed description of loony bin–ready “vampire slayers.” I tossed the book back on the coffee table, but it thunked on the ground, instead. It fell open to a handful of colored pages right in the center. The book fell open on a page entitled simply “Weaponry.” And under that, “A cataloging of actual tools used in the hunt and eradication of demon races.”
There was an ornately carved wooden stake (vampires), a clefted silver knife (Kishi demons), silver bullets (werewolves).
A long, thick club.
Banshees.
My heard thudded in my chest.
Bettina.
I kicked aside Harley’s book and beelined for the kitchen, tearing through our newspaper recycling stack. I found last week’s Chronicle, with a big, torn hole in the “Books” section, and groaned.