Bree plunged the pot back into the cooling water, and started scrubbing. "But it's complicated. I know people say that all the time, but it really is complicated."
Her mother turned to face her and leaned against the counter. "Is he married? Or divorced?" There was definite censure in her tone. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic, Bree thought wryly.
"No, he's not married, never has been. It's just that...he's a cop. An ex-cop. He has PTSD."
Her mother didn't look at Bree as she took the soup pot back and started to dry it. The not-looking spoke volumes. "As do you," her mother murmured. "I know you didn't actually see Seth die in the fire, but knowing how he died, I know how much that's affected you."
As in, pot calling the kettle black. "That's just it. Being around him, knowing more about what he's been through, it triggers me."
"I'm sure that's difficult." Again, with the not looking.
"You're thinking I need to face this, aren't you? You think I'm just running away."
"Spooky," her mother replied, the family shorthand for Bree's Reader influenced habit of being able to figure out what people were thinking. She put away the soup pot and draped the dishtowel over the oven's door handle to dry. "I don't know if dating this particular man is how you need to face it, sweetheart, but you do need to face it. I'd hate to see you too afraid to love again."
But you don't know that I literally watched Seth die! You don't know I nearly had to watch Daniel die!
Bree wanted to cry to her mother. As she smothered the impulse, she realized that was the core of it. Yes, she was afraid of Daniel's instability. She was afraid of the intensity of her attraction to him. But her biggest fear was that he would die. And it wasn't a crazy fear. She doubted the Keltoi would leave him alone, doubted Franchesca had kept the secret of Daniel's hiding spell. Even if she'd only told that clan chief who had died, she'd probably make another run at him when she'd gathered more allies.
The hell of it was, she was already in love with Daniel. She didn't see a path to resolve that fact with the reality of how dangerous his life was, how dangerous her life would be if she chose to be with him.
She pulled the plug on the dish water, then washed her hands, giving herself some time to work through the storm of reactions her mother's questions had raised. She finally made a stab at working it through out loud. "I guess you're right. I am afraid, and that shouldn't be the deciding factor. But I'm not sure how to separate that out from all the other stuff in the relationship."
Her mother walked over to her and put her arm around Bree's shoulders. She squeezed hard, as she always did, and said, "Maybe you don't need to know the answer right now. Maybe you just need spend some more time with your guy and see what unfolds."
The truth of that hit her right in the chest. "I'll think about it," she managed to get out.
She drove home on the twenty-seventh, in the afternoon. She was about thirty minutes out of Seattle when snow flakes started hitting her windshield. She'd gone back and forth about the idea of calling Daniel during the drive home, and when she pulled over for a bathroom break at the rest area near Arlington, she finally did it. The conversation was brief. She asked him if he might be available to come over to her house that evening or the next, just to talk. He’d said he could come tonight, and they agreed he'd show up after dinner, around seven.
Bree got home and turned up the heat, put on the Christmas tree lights, and made herself a light supper. Then she tidied up nervously, got out things for tea, and put some of the thumbprint cookies Bruce had baked out on a plate. At the last minute, she changed out of her jeans, turtleneck and fleece and put on her long brown skirt with the green flowers and the soft green cashmere sweater her parents had given her for Christmas. She brushed her hair until it was shining, and put on some soft pink lipstick, all the while trying not to analyze what she was doing. The snow was still coming down outside, and she worried about whether Daniel would be okay on the roads. Then she reminded herself he was from Boston and would probably laugh off that amount of snow. Finally, the doorbell rang, and she went down the front hall and opened the door.
Daniel stood on her doorstep in a red down coat. Snowflakes peppered his hair, and her perilous back brain once again said “Yes!” at the mere sight of him. He just looked so damned handsome. She forgot herself for a moment, smiling stupidly, helplessly at him until he said, “Can I come in?”
“Of course!” she replied, flustered by the rush of desire, and backed out of his way. She turned and led the way into the living room. It was cramped with the addition of the Christmas tree, in spite of her wrestling one of the chairs upstairs to her bedroom. She always managed to forget how small her house was and got a tree too big for the space.
He followed her into the living room, and put a hand lightly on her shoulder when she would have sat down. “Wait just a minute, I have something for you. Something that's waking up.”
He had a mischievous smile on his face, and for a moment, Bree forgot all the complications, all the awkwardness between them. “Should I be afraid?” she asked with an answering smile.
“Oh, very afraid,” he replied. He reached into his coat, and pulled out a very small, very striped black and grey kitten and offered it to her.
“You can’t be serious!” she exclaimed, but found herself taking the little beast. It had huge triangle ears, and big blue kitten eyes regarded her as it wriggled a little in her grasp. “And it didn’t occur to you that maybe a puppy might be a good choice for a confirmed dog person?”
“You’re a Cat Master. Learn to deal with it,” he said remorselessly, but with a twinkle in his eye.
The kitten’s needle-like claws got caught in the cuff of her sweater and began pulling out one of the threads. “Hey, stop that!” Bree exclaimed. The kitten ignored her, and pulled harder. She got one hand free, and tried to get the kitten’s claws disengaged before it ruined the sleeve. “If I’m such a Cat Master, isn’t it supposed to listen to me?” she asked in exasperation. The kitten mewed.
“He. It’s a he. And hey, I’m no Animal Master, so I don’t know a lot about how it works. But I’m assuming it’s like any other power. It’s in there, but you have to learn how to befriend it, and how to use it. And with time, and patience, and care, you learn.”
There was a note of challenge in his voice, and Bree had to fight an instinctive reaction to push back against it as all her fears came chattering up.
Just see how it unfolds
, she heard her mother's voice say in her head.
Bree managed to get the kitten free, and she snuggled him up against her neck, where he couldn’t get his claws in her sweater. He put his nose in her ear and purred, his entire little body rumbling with the effort. She looked up at Daniel and said, “I suppose this is meant to be some kind of lesson.”
“No, it’s a kitten,” Daniel insisted, and laughed. Bree found herself laughing as well. And for the first time in almost two months, she felt the stirrings of hope come to life inside her. Hope that she’d get it all figured out, somehow. The Gelsenim thing, possibly being some kind of Demon Master, maybe even get somewhere with the mystery of demons themselves. And maybe, even more improbably, she would get this thing with Daniel figured out.
“I’m going to get you for this, Thorvaldson,” she told him, shaking the kitten a little at him, but not letting go.
“Oh, I’m counting on it,” he replied.
Afterword
Thanks for reading Demonsense. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a review online wherever you purchased the book. Reviews help readers find books and encourage authors to spend even more of their all too fleeting time on planet Earth writing. Otherwise, please invent immortality so I will have forever to write everything I want to write as well as do all the other cool stuff life has to offer. To get information on upcoming books, sign up for the newsletter, or to contact me, check out my website at
saradehaven.com
Look for
Demon Master
, Book 2 of the Demonsense series, coming out May 2015
About the Author
Sara DeHaven has been writing since she was eight years old, starting with the short story, "The Demon of Detroit." That first impulse to write Urban Fantasy never really waned, probably because she's always been convinced magical powers ought to exist in the here and now, starting with teleportation. If she could teleport, she'd be in a small bakery in Colmar, France for breakfast, that place in Istanbul where you can look out the window and watch men get a shave and a haircut for lunch, and the impossible-to-ever-find-again tiny cicchetti place in the maze that is Venice for dinner. In addition to travel, she enjoys reading, gardening, hiking and trolling craigslist while pretending to be a DIY type person. Her day job is terribly serious (and mysterious - if you knew what it was, she'd have to kill you), so writing fantasy is the perfect complement. She lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband and extremely naughty cat.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the North Seattle Sci-Fi/Fantasy Writer’s Group for the encouragement, the feedback and the laughs. All mistakes that persist after your tireless reviewing are, of course, all mine. Thanks also to my very first beta readers, Julia Kay and Ruth Liles.
And thanks to my mother, who made a reader of me. Hopefully, wherever you are, you can see that I finally published that book I kept threatening to write.