A Wolf at the Door

He hopped up when he saw me coming, and I hit him in the chest with my duffel bag of armor. He threw it over one lanky shoulder, looking like a demented Santa. “C’mon, kid. We gotta go home so Mira can rip my head off.”

“What exactly did you do, by the way?”

I waited until we were outside before I answered him. “I’m heading out to L.A. tomorrow.”

“For what?”

“It’s…complicated.” But if anyone was going to understand my reasoning, it would be Esteban. He was from a family of demon slayers. He’d lost a father and two brothers to it already.

As we drove home, I tried to lay it all out, as I knew it. The actress, the botched deal, the extra souls. The promise I’d made to Axel. His dark brows drew closer together, the more I talked, his frown deepening with each passing mile.

“Can’t you just…tell him no? You are not tattooed, it isn’t a contract.”

Yeah, I probably could have. I hadn’t promised Axel my soul. I’d just promised him a favor. What could really happen, if I said no? I’d cease to be the kind of man I wanted to be, that’s what would happen. I was already straining the limits of what the bushido might call acceptable. I couldn’t ditch my honor too. “No, kid. I owe him a legitimate debt. Cole would be dead without him. You’d have done the same for Miguel.”

Esteban shook his head slowly. “You are either braver than I realized, or crazy as fuck.”

“Language.” I’d had a bad influence on his English since he’d been living with us.

He only snorted at my admonition. “I don’t think there is anything in the world that would compel me to anger Miss Mira. The only thing worse would be angering mi madre.”

He was right. Either woman was likely to take a skillet to my head. “Well, you work on her while I’m gone then, okay? See if you can get her to soften up.”

The teenager snorted again. “Oh, hell no. You are on your own with this one.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

5

The discussion with Mira got put off for a few more hours, even after we got home. There was the Christmas wrapping mess to clean up still, and dinner to get on. There was the promised outing in the snow with my daughter, which somehow turned into an impromptu lesson in hand-to-hand combat for Esteban. I put him down twice, but the third time he managed to sweep my legs out from under me, and I landed in a giant heap of snow. I was so proud.

Anna was in bed and Esteban had retreated to his room before Mira and I found time to actually converse.

I was carrying the trash out through the garage when I caught her standing near my truck, examining my duffel bag of armor. “Hey!” I moved quickly and snatched her hand away from the bag. “Don’t even think about it.”

She looked a bit shamefaced, proving that she had been thinking about it. “I wasn’t going to do anything. I was just checking it. Cam’s work?”

“Yeah. Figured he may as well be useful, right?” Taking a chance, I slipped my arm around her waist. She leaned into me, which was way better than the elbow in the ribs I was expecting. I rested my chin on top of her head. “You doing okay?”

She was quiet for a while, before taking a deep breath. “I’m pissed off, Jesse. I’m scared, and worried, and I desperately do not want you to go to Los Angeles. I think this is a horrible idea, and I wish you’d never asked for that thing’s help.”

“If I’d have had another way, baby…” Standing in the middle of a dark road in Colorado, so many months ago, it had seemed like the only course of action. I hadn’t had time to think of something better.

“I know.” She patted my chest lightly. “I do know, I just…I’m not happy about it. It seems like this whole thing suddenly got way more complicated than we bargained for.”

Boy howdy, did it. “What do you want me to do, baby?”

I wasn’t sure if the sound she made was a laugh or a sob. “Run far, far away? Go hide in a cave somewhere? Just…quit?”

A simple request, one she’d been very careful not to make before. But you know…I could. After this little errand for Axel, all I had to do was never take another contract again. That simple. My own retirement plan. Let it all be someone else’s problem. Hell, as of last fall, I knew there were way more champions under Ivan’s watchful eye than I had ever realized. Surely one of them could take up my slack? “Can we revisit this again when I get back?”

“Yeah.” She straightened herself, squaring her shoulders. “Come on, we need to get you packed up. You’d head out there with a pair of underwear and one clean sock if I let you.”

“Mir?” I caught her hand as she turned to head back inside, and when she stopped, I rested my other hand on her flat stomach. “You call me the second you know something, okay? No matter what time it is.”

She nodded, but her smile was faint at best. “I will. You’ll be the second to know.”

The night passed uneventfully. I even managed about seven hours of actual sleep. My dreams, when they came now, seemed to be ordinary, boring things. Showing up at work in my underwear, running late to take a test I hadn’t studied for, and once this really weird thing involving a penguin and an escalator made of Gummi bears. (I blamed the buffalo chicken pizza for that one.) The Yeti no longer visited me in my sleep, tearing out my heart night after night after night. Guess once you kick a guy’s ass twice, he’s just not as scary.

When dawn came, I kissed Mira and Anna good-bye, patted Chunk on the head, and crawled into the truck to let Esteban drive me to the airport.