Servants of the Storm (29 page)

I can’t remember the last time I ate a doughnut, and I can’t remember the last time I went to church. But something else is
bothering me, other than how weird it is to think of Isaac sitting in a pew in his leather jacket, praying. I look up. My car is exactly where I park it every night. And it’s afternoon. And that’s not right.

“Wait,” I say. “Where have I been all day? And how’d you find my house?”

He smiles his most charming smile and says, “You fell asleep, and I couldn’t wake you up, so I took you back to my carriage house and tucked you in on the couch to sleep it off.”

“But how did you know where I live?”

“Because I know everything. And when I have drugged girls bleeding all over my apartment, I Google them so I’ll know where to dump the body.”

But it sounds so . . . convenient. And manufactured. And when he smiles that smile, I’ve learned not to trust him.

“You’re lying,” I say flatly.

His face goes through a bunch of different emotions from guilt to anger to sadness to confusion. Before he can say anything, my front door opens. My mom steps out onto the top step and waves lazily. The sleep leaves my system when Mr. Hathaway appears behind her, his smile huge with what I used to think were false teeth.

I’ve known him all my life, but now I really see him. In the light, as he is. Now I just wonder how he fits all those teeth in one mouth.

“Oh, crap. They know,” Isaac says under his breath.

“Know what?” I say. But I know. Oh, I know.

“It doesn’t matter. The demons know something. Why else would Hathaway be in your house?”

“He’s a neighbor.”

“He’s a lesser demon!”

“My mom doesn’t know that. People come to her all the time with problems or to ask legal questions. Or to borrow a cup of sugar.”

“He doesn’t eat sugar, Dovey.”

My head drops. He’s right, and we both know it. There is no innocent reason Mr. Hathaway should be here. Not now, on a Friday afternoon. Not ever. Yet there he stands, right next to my mother. And he’s been waiting for me, maybe all night. And I’m the one who made it easy for him, leaving my mom alone when she was clearly under the influence of demon drugs. I shiver in shame and anger, and adrenaline pulses down my arms and legs. The rage starts to boil in my chest. I want to run, to scream, to hit something really hard.

Taking over my city and killing my best friend were bad enough. But now the demons are in my house.

“Tell me about him. He’s not like Kitty, right?”

“Lesser demon, like Old Murph. They feed on sadness, depression, hopelessness, mostly. Making their neighbors miserable. Scaring kids.”

“Sounds like him. That’s not too bad.”

“Don’t underestimate lesser demons. Sometimes they . . .
well, they’re kind of like vultures. If something’s already dead or easy to kill, they might eat it. Are there lots of old people in this neighborhood?”

He gives me a meaningful look, and I go cold all over, thinking about my grandmother, who died in her house just a block away. They said it was a stroke. I saw Nana in her coffin. But I saw Carly, too.

“Used to be more old folks. A lot died during Josephine. And after.”

Isaac nods slowly. “And Hathaway’s been here all along.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Do you know how to fight?”

“Sure,” I say with a Jasmine-esque head shake. “Onstage, with a wooden sword. Goddamn, boy. I’m a seventeen-year-old girl!”

“But not a normal one,” he says quietly.

And that’s when I realize that he’s right. I can feel it, inside me. Lurking, coiled. Waiting. Something dark, something not right. Something starting to wake up, fueled by my anger. And I want to turn that power against the demons, use what they’ve given me to destroy them and free us all, free the whole damn city.

“Y’all come on in and sit a spell,” Mr. Hathaway calls from the doorway. “Miz Greenwood cooked up a fine Sunday dinner.”

Isaac gets out and yells, “Yeah, but today’s Friday.”

Mr. Hathaway’s smile widens.

“Food’s still edible, even when it’s old,” he says, and he puts his hand on my mom’s shoulder. I jump out of the car, and it takes
everything I have not to run up the sidewalk and strangle him with all nine and a half fingers.

Isaac comes around to take my hand. I feel his bones crunch in my grip.

“What do we do?” I say.

“Whatever we have to,” he growls, his eyes black and angry.

We walk up the sidewalk like Hansel and Gretel going to the witch’s cabin, and his arm is as tense as a downed power line. At first I’m afraid of what my mom will say; I’ve been gone way longer than I should have, and I’m holding a strange guy’s hand. But when I get up close, I can tell that she’s zonked on pills, or the clear liquid, or maybe even more potent demon magic. Her pupils are wide, and she sways back and forth. And I’m not worried about getting in trouble anymore. I’m just worried for my mom. How long as Mr. Hathaway been here with her? What has he done to her? And where’s my dad?

“Hi, Mom,” I say, swallowing hard.

“That’s nice, sugar,” she says, which is something my hardcore lawyer mom has probably never said, ever.

“Come on inside now. We don’t want the neighbors to talk, do we?” Mr. Hathaway says.

Isaac and I follow them into the foyer, and a low growl rumbles near my feet. Grendel’s got my pillow in his teeth. Or what’s left of it. And what’s left of him, as he’s twice his normal size and covered in slick green scales and wiry gray hair. He doesn’t look anything like a bassett hound anymore.

Mr. Hathaway keeps a hand on my mom, guiding her to the dining room table. Yesterday’s lunch is still set out, untouched since I smoothed the dishes over with my fork. Fat flies buzz overhead, and a long line of sugar ants snakes down the table. The food was going downhill yesterday, and now it’s just as rotten as Savannah itself. This is the first time in my life I haven’t been hungry for my mom’s version of my grandmother’s Sunday dinner spread, a meal nearly identical to the one Carly’s mom was so famous for, although my mom’s macaroni is never quite as good as my grandmother’s was. There are collards, of course. And pie. But not lemon chiffon. No, my mother’s specialty is Mississippi mud pie, and the fluffy mound of Cool Whip is collapsed and leaking onto the tablecloth.

“Where’s my dad?”

“He had to work, sugar,” my mom mumbles, and I can’t tell if I’m glad that he’s far away from Mr. Hathaway or angry that he’s not here to protect us.

“You hungry, Lovey Dovey?” Mr. Hathaway asks.

“Hell, no,” I say.

“ ‘Hell, no,
sir
,’ ” my mom says in a singsong voice.

He just laughs.

“You’d better sit down, girl. We got talkin’ to do.”

I take my regular chair, and Isaac sits between me and Mr. Hathaway. Now I recognize the demon under the old man, that underlying reek of decay. Déjà vu washes over me, and for just a second it’s not my mom sitting across from me. It’s Carly just as I
last saw her at Riverfest, just as she was in my dream. But in this vision, she reaches out with a purplish-brown hand and says one word.

“Best.”

“Dovey?”

Isaac’s hand on my arm draws me back to reality, which isn’t that far off from a nightmare. I don’t know if it was my own imagination or a dream or what, but I need to get away from this table, now. Mr. Hathaway is sitting across from me, grinning his crazy grin with black veins running through his skin like cracks in the sidewalk. I can see what Isaac meant about lesser demons being ugly and twisted, just generally put together wrong. Kitty or the lynx-eared demon might look attractive in the right light when you’re on pills, but Mr. Hathaway is a complete troll. My mom reaches out for a piece of ham, and I touch her gently and say, “No, Mama. Leave it.”

“As I was saying, y’all have been causing quite a stir. Sticking your noses in where they don’t belong. There’s certain folks that don’t like that.”

My mom blinks in confusion and says, “Now, Mr. Hathaway, that’s not very kind of you. My Dovey, she’s a good girl.”

It’s weird, hearing my grandmother’s accent coming out of my lawyer mama’s mouth. My mom once told me that when she got off the bus for college in Athens, the first thing she did was pick up a flat accent. She didn’t want anyone to think she was just a small-town girl from Savannah. And she’s only ever talked like that, with a soft twang, when I was in serious trouble. Or, like
now, when she’s defending me from someone else. She only has an accent when she’s emotional.

Mr. Hathaway sighs deeply, like he’s sorely aggrieved, and runs a hand through his hair. Just for a moment I see what his unruly, curly gray hair has always hidden.

Tiny little horns, like a baby goat.

“Go to sleep, Lou-Ellen,” he says. “This don’t concern you.”

My mom falls face-first onto the table and lets out a rip-roaring snore. Fury blooms and flares in my chest, that this monster would walk into my house and hold my mom in so little regard. I’ve never seen her powerless before, and the rage builds in my heart like a storm brewing.

“Let’s get this over with,” Mr. Hathaway says, sliding a brown bottle of pills in front of me. “Billie Dove. You haven’t been taking your pills, girl. So I’m gonna watch you take half that damn bottle, and then you’re going to perform at the Liberty Theater tonight come hell or high water.” His grin spreads out farther. “And believe me, they’re both comin’.”

“And what about me?” Isaac says, eyes black and jaw tense.

“You do the right thing tonight, all is forgiven,” Mr. Hathaway says with a fake sweet-old-man smile. A roach skitters out from under the pie platter, and he snatches it up and pops it into his mouth and swallows. “Otherwise? Things could get ugly.”

“Is that all?” Isaac asks.

“Not even close.” When the old man smiles, a roach leg twitches between his teeth.

“I need to use the facilities,” I say softly, looking down.

“Go on and take the pills and you can go wherever you want,” Mr. Hathaway says. “It’s your own damn house.” His hand lands on the back of my mom’s bare neck, his nails digging into her skin, and I flinch.

He flicks the bottle of pills with one thick fingernail and moves a slurry glass of sweet tea across the table. My mom must have poured it yesterday. The ice has melted, the sugar is pooled on top like an oil slick, and two dead flies are floating in it. I swallow my breakfast back down and daintily use my spoon to get the flies out onto my napkin. Under the table Isaac’s hand finds my knee and squeezes it, but I barely feel it. I take out ten pills.

“That enough to knock me out, Mr. Hathaway?”

“It’s a start.”

One after the other I swallow the pills. They’re bitter on my tongue.

“Show me,” Mr. Hathaway growls, and I open my empty mouth and then snap it shut.

Combined with the syrupy taste of lukewarm tea and the acid taste of bile, I can’t tell if the pills were from a new bottle or the aspirin I put into the old one. But they’re inside me now, for better or for worse, and Mr. Hathaway’s hand is off my mom’s neck, and that’s all that matters. Little bruises pricked with blood remain where his nails dug in.

My chair screeches as I push back, and I hang my head as I walk down the hall. The Grendel demon scrabbles to his clawed
feet on the wood floors and growls, following so close that I can feel his slobber splatter on the back of my pants. I pass my dad’s study and go into the bathroom that’s considered mine. Grendel starts to rush through behind me, but I slam the door. It’s satisfying, when he howls in frustration. His growl starts to build, and I know that I don’t have long before he breaks down the door.

My half of the friendship necklace is sitting on the counter right where I left it. I inspect it quickly but don’t see anything that stands out, anything that Carly would want me to see. When Grendel’s claws scrape against the door, I start to put the necklace on, then realize that it could easily be taken away from me again; if Crane has one half, maybe there’s something special about it that the demons know but I don’t. I have to hide it. I consider my bra, then think about what it would be like if Mr. Hathaway tried to retrieve it himself. Instead I wrap it a few times around my ponytail and twirl the ponytail up into a poufy bun. I wrap an old scrunchie around it and survey the final product. So long as Mr. Hathaway isn’t up on fashion, I should be okay.

Grendel scratches again, and I think about him snuffling possum blood on my window while I was asleep. I’ve always hated that nasty old dog, even before I knew what he really was. His clawing on the door grates on my nerves, and my resolve grows. I told Isaac and Baker I was going to fight. And I am. I don’t want to get schooled by Mr. Hathaway on how to be a good girl. I don’t want to watch my drugged mom get shoved around. The old man sitting over holiday supper in my dining room isn’t an authority
figure or an elder. He’s a freaking demon. And I don’t have to do what he says.

Hell no, sir.

But I do have to pee, so I sit down and look around the small, old-fashioned bathroom. Grendel’s wet black nose appears under the door, his yellow demon teeth clicking against the tile like he’s going to chew his way into the room. If I’m going to act, I need to do it now, especially since I’m still not sure if Mr. Hathaway gave me aspirin or real pills. If only there were some way to tell Isaac, or make a big noise or something.

I consider starting a fire, since I’ve got candles and matches, but I don’t know if I could get my mom out in time. So I just turn on the bathroom fan and flick the toilet handle in the way that makes it flush continuously. I grab a towel, one of the new, superthick ones my mom bought with the insurance money after Josephine hit. While the toilet is loudest, I sneak up to the door and open it, twisting the old-fashioned lock. The demon hound falls into the bathroom, slobber flying. I wrap the towel around his head and yank him inside, cringing at the slippery but hairy feel of his skin. His claws scrabble and slice the tile floor as I shove him into the linen closet and slam the door, which is hard as hell since he weighs as much as I do.

He howls, and Mr. Hathaway calls, “Dovey, leave ol’ Grendel alone. He’s just a nosy busybody.”