Chapter 13

 

Aleda woke up to sunlight streaming in through her window. No alarm clock to scream in her ear this morning. She stretched happily. Saturday! What a lovely day. No school, just relaxation. It had taken far too long to be Saturday this week. She yawned and rolled out of bed. It was a few minutes after nine o’clock. She walked downstairs in her pajamas and found Mom awake already, as usual, sitting at the dining room table and reading the paper.

“Talia’s coming by later,” Mom said between sips of coffee.

Aleda grinned. “Great! When?”

“Noon, she said.”

“Okay,” Aleda said. She found a clean bowl and poured herself some cereal. “Do we have to do anything today?”

“Chores,” Mom said. “Which reminds me—don’t make your bed, if you haven’t already. I need your sheets for the laundry.”

 “No problem.”

“And make sure you get everything done before Talia gets here. If you don’t, you’ll just end up running off to Philadelphia again and leaving me with all the chores.”

“Sorry, Mom.”

“It’s okay. I’m glad you’re spending time with her. I think she’d make a great mentor for you. She’s very talented. You know.”

Aleda winced. “Yeah, Mom. Definitely.”

She finished her cereal and went back upstairs. She had two and a half hours to get the laundry together, clean her room, and dust and vacuum the upstairs. That was mostly just her room and the bathroom. The other room upstairs still had boxes of their stuff that had never gotten unpacked. That left no more than four square feet of floor for her to vacuum.

Well, first things first. She picked out some clothes from her closet. If Talia took her into Philadelphia again she wanted to look halfway decent this time. Maybe then she’d feel more comfortable in the city. Pants, cute top. Leave off the shoes until she was finished with chores. She didn’t want to be vacuuming in her good boots. Her hair went under a kerchief to keep it out of her face.

Dressed, she went to work. Her bed had to be stripped and the laundry gathered together. She threw the clothes that had gotten scattered around her room into the laundry basket with her sheets and dragged it downstairs.

Mom and Papá’s laundry was in their room on the ground floor. Mom had already put her sheets in the laundry basket, so it was easy enough just to drag both baskets into the small laundry nook and leave them there.

The next hour and a half was spent straightening up her room. In the course of two months she had somehow managed to accumulate all sorts of random things. There was no way they would ever be able to unpack everything in this house. There was no more room for it.

Aleda still had a few of her things in boxes in the spare room. If she needed them, she got them out of the box and when she was done she put them back. Papá had suggested renting space in one of those storage facilities, but Mom had told him it was too much money and they could just store everything in the house. She was still annoyed with him for spending the money to hook Aleda’s computer up to the internet.

Aleda eventually got her room straight enough to pass Mom’s inspection. It had involved a bit more stuffing of things into her closet than usual, but it would work for another week. At the very least it got her floor clean enough to vacuum.

She gave the furniture a few token swipes. No real dust to get rid of. How much dust could possibly accumulate in a week, anyway? Although she had forgotten to dust last week, so maybe there was two weeks’ worth of dust in her room.

She didn’t really care.

Chores were chores, and she would just as soon have done with them altogether.

Mom was still using the vacuum cleaner downstairs, so Aleda sat on the steps to wait for her to finish. There wasn’t much to vacuum: living room, hallway, and master bedroom. Mom used a broom in the dining room and kitchen.

Papá, meanwhile, had been put to work scrubbing the two bathrooms. His original job had been to vacuum the house, but after one particular incident had resulted in a cracked bookshelf and the untimely purchase of a new vacuum, Mom had banned him from the task. She finished with the downstairs.

“Here honey,” she said, handing her daughter the vacuum cleaner. “You do the upstairs. I have to get the laundry.”

Mom hurried off to pull a load of dry clothing out of the dryer. Aleda dragged the heavy vacuum upstairs. Had to be careful with the thing; two weeks ago she had fumbled with it coming up the stairs. Fortunately, she had caught it in time and Mom still hadn’t noticed the dent.

She wished the thing didn’t have to be so heavy.

She was in the middle of vacuuming when she heard the doorbell. Downstairs, Mom opened the door to their favorite tiny blonde. She finished vacuuming as quickly as she could. Hopefully she would get an opportunity to talk to Talia. She was the only one who might have some useful advice for her, aside from her parents. They would just be terribly concerned about her. She pulled the kerchief off her head and hurried downstairs.

Mom was chatting with Talia. Papá, apparently finished with the bathrooms, was greeting a strange man in the doorway. Aleda frowned and walked over to them. Who was this? At first she thought it might have been a friend of Papá’s from work, but he seemed to have arrived with Talia. The man finally came in the rest of the way and Papá closed the door behind him. He was very tall, and somewhat dusky. A friend of Talia’s?

“Aleda, come here,” Papá said. “This is Ryan Kavanagh. We fought together for a short while in the war. Ryan, this is my daughter Aleda.”

The man—Ryan—nodded a greeting but made no move to shake her outstretched hand. Aleda dropped her arm, embarrassed.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Kavanagh,” she said. She cocked her head at him. “Kavanagh… are you and Talia…?”

“She’s my sister,” he said. “And my name is Ryan.”

“Sorry. Ryan.”

“Ryan has just moved to Elkton to live with Talia,” Papá told her. “He arrived a month ago.”

Aleda looked at him, surprised. “A month? Then you must have gotten there right after I saw her.”

Ryan shrugged.

“So,” she continued, determined to keep the conversation going, “Where did you live before that?”

He looked at her in silence for a moment, one eyebrow raised. “Everywhere,” he said. “Do you want a list?”

“Oh… no. That’s alright,” Aleda said. She grimaced. She shouldn’t be prying into this man’s life! She had only just met him!

Ryan’s face softened a little. “But if you want to know where I was before Elkton,” he continued as though nothing was wrong, “I just came from Brazil.”

Aleda’s eyes widened. “Brazil? Really?”

He nodded. “There are many villages in the Amazon with far too many demons,” he said. His face darkened. “Most hunters don’t find it… necessary”—he spat the word—“to protect the more isolated areas.”

“So, do you do that a lot?” Aleda asked. “Hunt in isolated areas?”

“As often as I can,” he said. “There are a lot of places, especially in South America, that haven’t been cleared out for centuries.”

“And you cleared them out?”

Ryan shook his head. “I barely made a dent. It was difficult to clear out areas when I was hunting alone. I only emptied a little over twenty nests in the past year.”

“That seems like plenty to me,” Aleda said.

“You’re used to settled areas,” Ryan said, his voice edged with distaste. “The areas around here are incredibly safe. You don’t know what it’s like for demons to be so common that people can’t even leave their homes at nights.”

Aleda looked away. The area around Keeney was dangerous enough. She didn’t care what this guy thought about it. She could think of nothing more to say to him…Suddenly, Brazil didn’t seem nearly as interesting.

Dear, lovely Talia. She could always tell when Aleda was in need of rescue from a conversation. The little blonde chose that moment to walk over and put an arm around the poor girl.

“So, Leda, you’ve met my big brother!” she said. “You’re lucky. This is the first time he’s been in civilization in almost twenty years.”

Aleda watched Papá lead the man away for a tour of the house. “I can believe that,” she remarked. It would explain his disregard for manners.

“Actually… he’s always like that,” Talia said knowingly.

Aleda looked at her, surprised. “Always?”

Talia nodded. “As long as I’ve known him. I tried to bust him out of his shell when we were kids, but it didn’t take. To be honest, I’m surprised he said as much to you as he did.”

“He didn’t seem very interested in talking.”

Mom, who had been listening to the two girls, walked into the other room. Aleda heard the sounds of a washing machine being unloaded. With Talia’s brother here, this might be her only chance to talk to her alone.

“Hey, Talia?”

“What’s up, Little Leda?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah, of course. What is it?”

“Well…” Aleda gnawed on her lower lip for a second. Had to find a way to word this. “Did you ever… Was there ever a time you thought you might not want to be a hunter? I mean before you were called.”

Talia considered this, then shrugged. “Not really. I get to live forever and kick a*s every night. What’s not to want?”

“But you never got worried that you wouldn’t be able to handle it?”

“Nope,” Talia said cheerfully. “I decimated the training dummy Ryan set up for me.”

Aleda’s face fell. “I’ve never even had a training dummy.”

“What? That’s crazy talk! Doesn’t your dad have you practicing at all?”

“I went out with them on a hunt a while ago, but Mom didn’t let me get involved.”

“Okay, we’re seriously going to have to do something about that. If you’re getting called this summer, you’d better be ready to hunt.”

“That’s the thing,” Aleda said quietly. “I’m not sure if I want to hunt.”

Talia opened her mouth, but no words came out. For several seconds she seemed to have forgotten how to speak.

“Not… Not want to hunt? What do you mean? You’re not going to be a hunter?”

“Sh! Be quiet!” Aleda whispered at her. “I haven’t told my parents yet.”

Talia pulled her into the hallway. “Right. Start over. What exactly are you telling me here?”

Aleda took a deep breath. “I ran into a feeder Thursday night. It got a woman from the neighborhood. I… tried to fight it, I don’t know why. Nate had to pull me away and into a nearby house, but my arm was shredded. Mom had to fix it. Talia, I was horrible! Nothing I did made any difference! I’m not cut out for hunting—I couldn’t even handle one stupid feeder.”

After a long pause, Talia said, “Well, if you don’t want to be a hunter, then you don’t want to be a hunter. But before you go mortal for good, would you do one thing for me?”

“What’s that?” Aleda asked sullenly.

“Let me train you. Your parents, wonderful as they are, obviously aren’t going to do anything about it. I’ll tell you what—if you still don’t want to be a hunter by May, I’ll even handle breaking the news to your parents. Until then just act like everything’s fine. Deal?”

Talia truly did have a knack for saying just the right thing, eventually. And Aleda was immensely grateful that she didn’t tell her to change her mind flat out. It would be a bit hard to lie to her parents for seven months, but it wasn’t like she had any other ideas. Better this than tell them now, at any rate.

“Okay. Deal,” Aleda said.

A huge grin spread across Talia’s face. “Just call me sensei!” she exclaimed, and threw her arms around her new protégé. 

Aleda found herself in Talia’s rusty car a few minutes later, and on the way to Philadelphia again. If she didn’t know better, she’d think the girl didn’t know many good restaurants; they ended up at the same bar they’d come to a month ago.

West gave her a big grin when he saw her.

“Howdy, little one! Talia, what took you so long to bring her back here? For shame! I thought we were going to be getting ourselves a new regular.”

“Sorry, West.”

“And Ryan. Good to see you again.”

Ryan nodded at the man and sat at an empty table.

“So what can I get for you today?”

“Give us the usual, West,” Talia requested.

Did Aleda have a ‘usual’?

Apparently she did. West returned a few minutes later with three plates of cheeseburgers and fries. He even brought each of the girls the same concoction that Aleda had tried the last time she had come.

Talia sipped hers with satisfaction.

“So,” she said, “When does my little protégé want to start her lessons?”

Ryan glanced at her with mild interest. Since when did Talia take in strays?

“I…I have to talk to my parents first.”

“Pleash,” Talia protested through a mouth full of fries, “Your parensh…mgh…parents are fine. You’re free on weekends, right?”

“Not this weekend, actually. Our school is putting on a musical.”

“Okay, the weekend after that. I have work on Saturday nights, but I can come by in the afternoon. Get you started.”

Aleda hesitated for a moment, but she was fighting a losing battle. She knew full well that her parents would be ecstatic about the lessons, and she was swiftly learning that Talia was not the type to take ‘no’ for an answer.

She tried to grin at Talia. Heaven help her. “What time on Saturday?”

“Noon, as usual. That should give us enough time. What do you think, Ryan?”

“I never know what to think about your plans,” he replied dryly.

“At least I have plans,” she retorted, and made a face at him. “You don’t work in the afternoons, right?”

“No, only nights.” He thought for a moment about what she had said and narrowed his eyes. “Why?” he asked suspiciously.

Talia grinned widely at him. “Just checking,” she said, and went back to stuffing her face with French fries. Ryan groaned.

Aleda ignored him. There was another football match on the television and Manchester was playing. They were doing pretty good, too. So what if Talia was going to drag her brother to Aleda’s house next Saturday. He could stand in the corner and be cranky the whole time for all she cared.

She still wasn’t sure how she felt about these lessons with Talia. It was fine enough as an excuse not to talk to her parents—the trouble would come with how serious the little blonde really was about the whole thing. Aleda was not looking forward to going through any amount of rigorous physical training.

Well, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. The one time she had accompanied her mother on a hunt, the actual fight had been brief. As far as she could tell, speed and surprise were more important than anything else.

She could do speed and surprise.

So maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

The little blond girl in question, meanwhile, had wandered over to the bar to chat with West. Aleda could only assume that she paid for their meal while she was over there, because she never saw a check.

She noticed that West had an old-fashioned mechanical cash register against the wall. It looked like an antique; it would probably be worth more than an electronic register these days. She wondered how long he’d had it. She didn’t even know how old West was. Hell, she didn’t even know how old Ryan was. Talia was in her fifties but Aleda knew that didn’t mean a thing. He was sitting on the other side of the table, silently watching the football match.

As uncertain as she was about her upcoming training, she was even less sure what to think about him. He was inexplicably rude to her, and yet she sensed a deep camaraderie underneath his sarcasm to his sister. Even now he was smiling a bit at the television, and there was nothing sarcastic about it.

Besides that, she was still trying to figure out how he and Talia fit together. If he was her natural brother, she’d happily eat her kerchief. Nobody west of the Nile came out looking like that, figuratively speaking, and Talia couldn’t get any blonder if she tried.

And she would swear that he had a trace of Irish accent.

Well, who knew. He had lived just about everywhere; he had told her as much at the house. Maybe he had simply lived in Ireland for a while.

Whatever the reason, she had a feeling she wouldn’t have to wonder for very long. If Talia had her way—and she usually did—he would be at her house just about every weekend.

She glanced at him again. He had turned his attention away from the television to his cheeseburger. He glared at it as if it owed him something.

Sweet mercy, what had she gotten herself into?