A Wolf at the Door

We stopped briefly on the way to mail off my sword and armor. They don’t like it when you try to take stuff like that on an airplane, and it was easier to just ship it ahead. I charged it to Axel’s credit card. S’what he gave it to me for, right? Now I just had to hope that nothing requiring weaponry happened until tomorrow morning.

Hitting the highway toward the airport, Estéban shifted gears smoothly in my old clunker, and I nodded a little. Teaching him to drive this past summer had actually been way easier than I’d expected. I almost felt okay, leaving my baby with him.

“You put a single scratch on this truck while I’m gone, and we’re gonna have problems.”

He gave me a sidelong smirk. “How would you even find a new scratch in all the old ones?”

“Trust me, I know every mark on this truck. A new one will shine like a beacon.” Still, I grinned to myself. I wasn’t worried, not really. Not about the truck at least. About another mile down the road, I asked him, “You can take care of Mira and Anna, right?”

He took his eyes off the road just long enough to give me a quizzical look. “I think Miss Mira can take care of herself.”

“She can’t use magic right now, kid.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s possible that she’s pregnant.” I cringed when the truck gave a little swerve, Estéban glancing with his whole body instead of just his head.

“Really? That’s great!”

“Simmer down. We don’t know for sure yet. But until we do, she absolutely cannot cast any spells, okay? If something happens, you do it yourself, or call Cameron. Got it?”

“Yessir.” The kid was grinning ear to ear, and it was a little contagious. I found myself smiling right along with him. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks, kid.” You know, it did feel kinda good to be congratulated. Maybe this wasn’t going to be such a terrible thing after all. Maybe I could walk away after this. Just be a dad. Get a real job. Join the PTA. Hell, I dunno. Something.

After a few minutes of silence, the kid glanced at me again. “Jesse, are you sure this is a good idea? This trip, I mean. Demons…they lie.”

Yeah, I knew that. Except Axel never had. Not that I could remember. “Pretty sure this is one of the worst ideas I’ve ever had, kid. But I gotta go. I gave my word.”

He frowned, keeping his eyes on the road. “I know that you say honor is the most important thing, but…does it count if the person you gave your word to isn’t honorable themselves?”

“That’s when it matters the most. You can’t control what other people do. All you can do is, at the end of the day, make sure you can still hold your own head up and think ‘Hey, I did right.’”

“Have you ever had to do something bad, because it was right?”

“Not yet. That’s one of those dilemmas you gotta hope you never run up against.”

He mulled that over in silence for the rest of the drive. I think, at the end of my day, I just wanted to be able to think “Hey, I taught the kid well.” I owed his family that much.

I just had the kid dump me out at the airport, checking the suitcase Mira had insisted I pack, and taking my backpack in as a carry-on. (’Cause really, that’s where my important stuff was.) In order to make my trip more cheerful, Annabelle had decorated the pack with a bunch of fluorescent stickers, all of which had a garish logo that read SOLDYOURSOUL.COM! Thanks, Viljo.

Our pet computer geek had started the Web site as a joke, I think, an exercise in Web design. Self-help for the demon-sworn among us. But despite the fact that most of the world viewed it as only amusement, it had found an audience, and was going like gangbusters last I heard, getting however many hits a day they considered a lot. If any of those hits had resulted in an actual soul challenge, no one had told me, mostly because I think Viljo thought I was pissed at him.

He was right. I wasn’t as mad at him as I was at Ivan, because Viljo had just been following the old man’s orders, but still. He’d lied to me too.

And because even on my best days I have a petty streak, I was leaving town without registering with Viljo’s champion database, Grapevine. Yeah, that’s right, I’m a rebel through and through. Wasn’t any of Ivan’s business where the hell I was, anyway.