Evening slipped into night. She imagined the mundane tasks that were happening inside. Baths. Were the girls old enough for showers now? Brushing teeth. Perhaps a story, one where monsters were defeated and then the book ends.
But monsters never respected endings in real life. They just kept coming and coming and coming. They never stopped needing to be defeated.
The bedroom light went off. And then, as promised, the mother stepped out of the house. Her movements were furtive, suspicious. She climbed in her car and drove away to her clandestine meeting.
The mother should have known better.
The hunter popped a piece of bubble gum into her mouth. She had the just-released video of ?Titanic at home waiting for her as a reward for finally finishing this task. “I’ll never let go, Jack,” she whispered to herself as she cut her hand and began activating the runes that would end the prophecy once and for all.
7
THE CASTLE LOOMS OVER ME in the night. It’s not a fairy-tale castle, made of spun sugar and happily-ever-after dreams. It’s not even a nightmare castle filled with spikes and creeping darkness. It’s the castle equivalent of an urgent care clinic. Its job is to keep you alive. That’s it.
The windows are mainly narrow slots, left over from the days of arrows and crossbows. To be fair, we still use crossbows a lot. A few of the windows have been expanded in the living quarters, but those were done artlessly, like the wrong eyeglasses for a face shape. The only tower crumbled before my great-grandparents were alive, so the entire building is a squat rectangle. The outer wall is gone, along with matching outbuildings, left behind when Ruth Zabuto and my mom transported the castle here. Instead, we have several cheap sheds. There’s one long garage that was converted from a preexisting abandoned stable. The entire thing is as grouchy as Bradford Smythe and as unpleasant as Wanda Wyndam-Pryce. And as lacking in magic as Ruth Zabuto.
Still, it’s home.
Which means it’s full of people I can’t risk running into right now. I half suspect that if I bumped into someone from the Council, I’d blurt out everything. It’s a huge tenet of Watcher society that you listen to the Council. You obey them. And, less explicit but more of an unspoken tenet, you don’t hide demons in your friends’ sheds without telling them about it.
So instead of going in through the front, I circle around to the back and locate what I’m pretty sure is my window. It’s on the second story. The whole first story of the castle is off-limits. They shut it down when they moved the castle here. There’s a light in my window, like a beacon. If I can get to my room, I’ll be
able to tell Artemis what happened, and she’ll know what we should do. She always has a plan.
I mentally calculate. It’s about fifteen feet up. There’s a wide stone ledge; the walls are a foot and a half thick, and the window is set toward the inside.
If I can run super fast now, then maybe . . .
I crouch low and jump. With my arms straight up, I manage to catch the ledge with the tips of my fingers. I expect to fall, but they hold. I pull myself up, laughing, and haul my whole body into the space in front of my window, folded and crammed up against it.
That’s when I remember it’s locked—and it swings out when it opens, not in. I might have Slayer strength, but it didn’t improve my ability to think plans out thoroughly in advance. Maybe that’s why Buffy always reacts instead of planning. When your body can do amazing things, it’s easy to try first, regret later.
A face pops into view and I scream, almost falling backward. My scream has a mirror image in Artemis. Then she scrunches up her face and shouts.
“What the hell are you thinking?”
“Obviously I wasn’t!”
She gestures at the window hinges. I’m blocking its ability to swing outward.
“Give me a sec.” I lean out, trying not to think about the empty air below me. The stone above the window cavity is rough enough that I manage to find finger holds. I climb a few feet up the wall, holding myself above the ledge.
“Come on!” Artemis says. Her voice is no longer blocked by the glass.
I swing myself down and through, landing in a crouch on our rug.
“Did you forget we have a door?” she says, unamused. “What’s wrong with you? You could have been hurt!”
“But I wasn’t. I handled it.”
“Because I was here to open the window! What would you have done if I wasn’t here?”
“I would have—”
She waves a hand, cutting me off. “You have no idea what you would have done. Because I’m always here. You can’t act like things are different now. They’re not.”
I match her glare. “They are. Everything’s different.”
“Nothing is different! Nothing is ever different. If you keep pretending like you’re a superhero, you’re going to get hurt. You’re the one who was always talking about how violence isn’t a gift or even a tool—it’s a crutch. How Slayers get so focused on killing that they never think things through, like it’s possible to talk things out with demons or something.”