and red and shadows, and sat down on the floor with the copybook. The wood was so old, even the splinters seemed to have given up and gone soft, feeling almost fuzzy under Mae’s clenched fist as she opened the book and began to read.
I tried to leave again today. Yesterday was Saturday, the day when Alan’s football team plays. We have been living in this town for a month, and Alan has been playing almost as long. He loves it. Watching him play is one of the things that make me happiest.
Sometimes I wish I could watch him at school. I wish I could see him enjoying himself more often.
A brilliant student, an athlete, the sweetest boy in school. You must be so proud, his teachers say, and I am proud of him. I am ashamed of myself.
Sometimes all his promise seems like a reproach to me. What is going to happen to my son in this world?
Even at his games we are not quite free. Alan insists that I bring the demon with me to watch him play football.
We got the whole row of seats to ourselves. Alan insisted that it start preschool this year too. It turns my stomach to think of its presence in a room full of real children. They can’t possibly be comfortable around it.
Nobody has been hurt. Nobody is ever hurt. If I just knew what the demon was planning, if it is planning anything at all, then I could bear this better. As things are, dread keeps me awake for hours, keeps me listening for the sound of a demon stirring in my home.
Demons have influence over the minds of humans, Olivia says. Sometimes I think my son is simply the demon’s puppet. That I have to kill the demon to set him free.
The other football team was bigger, older, and a little rough. Parents around me were muttering and concerned, but I’m used to my son being in far more danger than could be posed to him by other children. I only noticed when Alan went down hard and was lost in a pile of seething bodies; when I heard him cry out.
I leaped to my feet then. And I felt a cold presence at my elbow. The creature was on its feet too, black eyes scanning the field.
All the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I felt as if Olivia’s voice was whispering in my ear, laughing, at her most mad. Demons crave strong emotions. They love tasting things like fear, like pain.
When Alan came off the field laughing, proud of his trophy and his loose tooth, he put an arm around it and tried to show it the trophy.
The demon turned around and touched Alan’s mouth. Its hand came away stained.
Demons want blood.
Alan laughed and hugged it closer. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m okay. It doesn’t hurt.”
That was yesterday. Today in the early morning I carried Alan downstairs, as if we had to move. I murmured to him that it was all right, that I had everything taken care of, that I had Nick.
I was driving as fast as I could. I was almost out of town when Alan woke up properly. I saw him yawn and stretch, rub his eyes and almost knock off his glasses. Then his eyes traveled from my head to Olivia’s.
“Where’s Nick?”
This time I was not going to be stopped by seeing fear on his face. This time I wasn’t thinking about slaying a monster. I was simply taking the coward’s way out. I was running away. Let the magicians have it. Let someone else deal with it.
I met Alan’s eyes in the mirror head-on, so desperate that I was almost calm.
Reflected in the glass, my son’s eyes narrowed.
Then he threw himself out of the speeding car. I stopped with a screech of brakes, far too late
Alan had already picked himself up off the road and was running fast, becoming a speck in the distance. My Alan, the athlete. If I’d leaped from the car and chased him, I doubt I would have caught him.
“Poor thing,” Olivia remarked as we drove back. “Alan,” she said after a moment, as if she had trouble recalling his name. “He seems like a nice child.”
I don’t know what else I expected. Alan doesn’t think of her as his mother. It would break my heart if he did.
She’s not fit to be anybody’s mother.
It’s not her fault. But the way she is now breaks my heart too.
Alan was not back in the house as I had expected. He was at the top of our road instead, he and the demon. There were blood and tears streaming down Alan’s face, making a grisly mask for my child as he shook and held the demon in his arms. It looked the same as it always does.
Alan looked at me, defiant. “He was coming to look for me,” he said, based on no evidence at all. Then he returned to whispering comfort in the demon’s ear.
“All right, Alan,” I said loudly, trying to drown out that soft sound. “You win.”
He looked at me for a moment and then resumed his years-long one-way conversation with the demon: telling it that everything was fine now, that it was safe, that above all else it was loved.
I sat with the car door open, hearing the small sounds of the engine cooling, and looking straight ahead. The wind blew the long locks of Olivia’s hair across to the open door, obscuring my view like streamers of shadow, like the bars of a prison window between me and the world.
