Carnival of Souls

brief moment she considered asking him questions she had never verbalized, but like every other time she’d considered it, the questions skittered away before she could speak them. She wanted to know why she’d never met daimons, why she couldn’t go to his office, why they couldn’t find a way to live a different life, but her tongue wouldn’t form the words. A band seemed to tighten around her chest.

Good daughters don’t question. They obey.

Her father held her gaze, and when she didn’t speak, he nodded once. “I need you to be prepared.”

Mallory straightened her shoulders and met her father’s gaze. “I won’t let you down.”

He ejected the clip from the 9mm and replaced it with an extended clip. “Notice that it took a moment to reload this. Sometimes a single moment makes a difference. Daimons aren’t like witches or humans, Mallory. You can’t forget that.”

“I won’t,” she promised. The pressure around her chest faded.

He held the 9mm pistol out to her.

Lips pursed, she accepted it. Daimons might be more capable at hand-to-hand, but she wasn’t planning on allowing any of them close enough for that to matter.

“Empty it,” he ordered.

Mallory aimed and emptied half the clip. After fifteen bullets tore through the existing holes in the target, daylight shone through the center of the paper as if it were an open window. She did the same thing to a second target, and then lowered the gun. Maybe if she was good enough, her father would let her take a little time to go out, to at least build a friendship with Kaleb instead of settling for a few moments when they crossed paths. She glanced at Adam.

He nodded. “Again.”

SEVERAL HOURS AND SEVERAL clips later, Adam and Mallory returned to the three-bedroom house they rented in Smithfield, yet another of the interchangeable towns in the middle of the country. Like almost every other house the past few years, this one was nondescript. It was nice, clean, and in good order, but it was anonymous in a way she sometimes hated. The walls were white, and the carpets were beige. There were no houseplants or bric-a-brac that said “this is a home.” Takeout menus were held to the front of the fridge by strips of tape, clips, and magnets. It added to the already generic feel of the house.

It had been five years since they’d had a real home.

Since Mom left.

That was the real difference: Selah had turned whatever rental they’d had into an actual home. She’d bought paint and rollers, and she’d spent days turning a plain house into a real home. Boring white walls became a different color in each house. “Make it an adventure,” she’d said. One house had ceilings painted like a sky, blue with big, fluffy clouds. Another had a tree painted on Mallory’s bedroom wall. Selah had added hooks for her robe and her coat at the ends of two big branches. Beige carpet was covered with rugs, the splashes of color Selah pulled from battered boxes to make boring space into flower-strewn fields or calm ponds. Claiming a house was a game, one they’d played over and over in new towns. Now that it was just Mallory and Adam, the walls of every house were white, and the only color on the carpet was from the stains left by the last residents.

Mallory walked into the dining room and sat down. Mutely, she put both guns on the weathered wooden table, and then she proceeded to wipe down first her.357 and then the 9mm. She’d been handling guns since she was seven, and the process — much like the routine of aiming and discharging her weapons — was reassuring. It was a cue that things were normal, that her life was unchanged even as the houses she slept in year after year changed.

“We have to move again,” Adam said from the doorway to the dining room.

She paused. “When?”

“Now.” His mouth was a grim line.

“Now,” she repeated. “Like tonight, now?”

“No.” He gave her a smile that did little to soften the tension in his expression before saying gently, “I called the company movers. They’ll be here on the fifteenth.”

Childish hurt warred with years of practicality. Adam wouldn’t decide that they needed to go again, especially on such short notice, if he didn’t think it was essential, but she felt betrayed. They’d spent hours together, and he hadn’t mentioned it until now.

“That’s my birthday,” she said with as little inflection as she could manage. She didn’t— couldn’t—mention Kaleb, but the thought of never seeing him again tore at her. Her gaze was carefully fixed on the gun she wiped clean.

“I know.” Adam walked into the room and hugged her. “I’m sorry.”

She closed her eyes like the child she couldn’t be. It was silly to make a big deal over a date on the calendar, but she still clung to the foolish dream that her mother would show up on her birthday. There was no reason to believe she would, but Mallory had held on to the hope that her mother would walk back through the door and into their lives some birthday with as little notice as her departure on Mallory’s twelfth birthday.

Adam swore that Selah had ways to locate them. His employer always knew where they were, and Selah was the only person in the world who had been granted full clearance to be told how to find Adam and Mallory at any time. Mallory hated to doubt her father’s judgment, but her mother had never been accepted by his colleagues. It wouldn’t surprise anyone but Adam if they “forgot” or misled Selah.

“I’m going to be working at the Stoneleigh-Ross main office.” Adam’s expression was perfectly unreadable — which meant he was either hiding something or afraid.

Or both.

Mallory squared her shoulders and stared at him as he walked away. She never succeeded at questioning her father, but the thought of Kaleb made her feel strong. She knew she couldn’t really date him, and she shouldn’t get too close to a regular human. For his safety, she needed to keep a distance, but the possibility of continuing even the small conversations they now shared was a great temptation.

“I want to know why we have to go,” she told her father. Her usually absent temper flared, and her voice rose. “I’m not a child anymore. I deserve to know.”

Her father sat down on the sofa and waited as she reloaded the clips. After a couple of minutes, he said, “I love you more than I thought it possible to love anyone or anything. If I could put you away somewhere safe and take care of the threats on my own, I would.”

“I don’t want to be ‘put away.’” Mallory laid the clip on the table. The soft clatter was in direct contrast to the turmoil she was trying to repress. She crossed the small distance to the living room, but didn’t sit. “I want to know what’s going on. I want to know why we have to move so suddenly. Again. I want to know why they’re after you in the first place.”

Her father gave her a curious look, and she wanted to apologize for raising her voice to him. She wasn’t sorry though. He acted like she was too fragile to know anything, but he taught her how to kill. Maybe she needed to show him that she wasn’t going to back down every time he skewered her with his gaze.

After a moment, Adam said, “A long time ago I took something very valuable.” He leaned forward so that his hands were on either side of his knees, as if he had to hold on to the sofa cushion. “Maybe it was foolish. I knew it was dangerous, but I was angry. They killed my parents and my brother…” He paused, and she thought he’d stop as he always had on the rare occasions when he had mentioned The City, but this time, he continued. “If not for my sister, I’d be dead too. Evelyn saved me. I was so young, too young to fight, but after the wars, I waited. It took a couple of centuries, but then I saw my chance: I took what their ruler most valued, but I couldn’t… I can’t destroy it. Evelyn wants to use it as a weapon, but…” Adam bowed his head as his words dwindled.

This time, he didn’t resume. He sat there with his head down.

Mallory shuddered at the thought of Evelyn Stoneleigh. She was supposed to be family, but family or not, the woman who ran the Witches’ Council was the single most frightening person Mallory had ever met. She looked innocuous, like most witches, but she had stared at Mallory with flat, dark eyes reminiscent of sharks’ eyes: all function, no emotion.

Mallory thought about the few possessions her father carried rather than allow the movers to pack and ship, and she could think of nothing valuable enough to kill for. “Could you give it back so we can stop running?”

Adam lifted his head. “I’d sooner die — and he’d kill me either way. They don’t think like witches, Mals, and