Demons are Forever

Book 3: Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom

by J. Kenner

Genres: Superheroes; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

From New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Julie Kenner (aka J. Kenner) comes the third installment in the fun-tastic demon-hunting soccer mom series that began with Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom

Once again, Kate Connor has a problem. Several, actually.

For one thing, her daughter has figured out that mom is a demon-hunter—and wants to be just like her when she grows up.

And there’s that nagging suspicion that her dead husband has come back to life in the body of another man. Plus, her living husband still doesn’t know her secrets.

Not to mention the fact that she’s acquired a mystical item that the entire demon community seems hell-bent on reclaiming.

It’s all in a day’s work for this stay-at-home mom. But one thing is for certain: sometimes life in the suburbs really can be hell.

All titles in the Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom series

Carpe Demon: A Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom Adventure
California Demon: The Secret Life of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom
Demons Are Forever: Confessions of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom
Deja Demon: The Days and Nights of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom
Demon Ex Machina: Tales of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom
Pax Demonica: Trials of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom

RAVES FOR THE DEMON-HUNTING SOCCER MOM SERIES

Carpe Demon:

"I LOVED CARPE DEMON. ... It was great fun, wonderfully clever."—Jayne Ann Krentz, New York Times bestselling author

"This book, as crammed with events as any suburban mom's calendar, shows you what would happen if Buffy got married and kept her past a secret. It's a hoot."—Charlaine Harris, New York Times bestselling author

"I welcome the novels that decide to be utterly over-the-top and imagine paranormal and superhero lives for their chick- lit heroines. Take Carpe Demon ..." —Detroit Free Press

"Sprightly, fast-paced . . . readers will find spunky Kate hard not to root for in spheres both domestic and demonic."—Publishers Weekly

"Smart, fast-paced, unique ... a blend of sophistication and wit that has you laughing out loud."—Christine Feehan, New York Times bestselling author

"Ms. Kenner has a style and delivery all her own . . . fun and innovative . . . [Carpe Demon] shouldn't be missed."—Fallen Angel Reviews

"A+ ... I am very ready for the next installment in Kate Connor's life."—The Romance Reader's Connection

"Kenner scores a direct hit with this offbeat and humorous adventure ... Car pools and holy water make an unforgettable mix."—Romantic Times

California Demon:

“Kenner continues to put her fun, fresh twist on mommy-lit with another devilishly clever book.”—Booklist

“Plenty of action and humor. Kenner is at her irreverent best . . . delightfully amusing.” —The Best Reviews

“More witty, funny, and poignant adventures from the marvelous Kenner.” —Romantic Times

Demons Are Forever:

“[A] wonderful author…a fun premise…excellent characterization, intriguing stories, and snappy dialogue.” —Fresh Fiction

“Kenner’s trademark cliffhanger finale promises further demonic escapades to come.” —Publishers Weekly

“This is the third in Kenner’s splendidly creative series featuring Kate, whose wickedly amusing adventures in demon hunting are a pure paranormal delight.” —Booklist

“This chapter in Kenner’s first-person, kick-butt adventures takes a darker turn, and a more serious tone, as Demon Hunter Kate Connor faces long odds and emotional turmoil. The terrific Kenner grabs you and doesn’t let go!” —Romantic Times

Deja Demon:

“A delightfully different take on the paranormal romance theme that will leave fans thirsting for more.” —Monsters and Critics

Demon Ex Machina

Pax Demonica

Release date: June 26, 2013

Publisher: Julie Kenner

Print pages: 308

Sample

Chapter 1

 

 

I killed my first demon at the ripe old age of fourteen. Stabbed it through the eye with an ivory-handled stiletto that had been a birthday gift from my caretaker and mentor, Father Lorenzo Corletti.

 

I had spent two days tracking the demon, living on the filthy backstreets of a poverty-riddled Italian village, eating nothing but the scraps I’d tucked away in a threadbare knapsack. I had one companion—a boy I adored and whom, in fact, I later married. But teenage lust was the furthest thing from my mind during those long days. Demon-hunting is serious business, and I was a serious girl.

 

Even now, over two decades later, I can still remember the intensity of emotions. The drive of the chase despite bone-numbing exhaustion. And the certain knowledge that this was Important Stuff. From an overall life perspective, after all, very little ranks above thwarting the minions of Hell.

 

As far as my duties as a Demon Hunter went, my youth was an issue only to the extent that my strength and training gave me a fighting chance to stay alive. By age fourteen, I was physically ready. As for mentally? Well, there was never any question. I knew what had to be done, and I was expected to do it. My age never factored into the equation.

 

With all that in my personal history, you might think that I would understand better than anyone that fourteen-year-old girls are both strong and resilient.

 

You might think that, but you would be wrong. Because when it came time to actually have the talk with my fourteen-year-old daughter, I was a tongue-tied mess.

 

And, just so we’re on the same page, when I say the talk, I’m not talking about the sex one. That one I managed to muddle through. I’m talking about the other conversation: The one where I sat her down and confessed my deep, dark, secret life.

 

My name is Kate Connor, and I’m a Level Four Demon Hunter with Forza Scura, a super-secret arm of the Vatican charged with keeping the forces of darkness at bay. That particular piece of familial history, however, had been withheld from my daughter her entire life despite the fact that her father and I had hunted demons all over the globe until just a few years before Allie was born.

 

I’d always planned to tell her the truth someday. But somehow “someday” kept getting pushed further and further back. Allie was my baby, after all. For fourteen years, my job had been to nurture and protect her. Skewing her entire worldview with insider information about how evil truly walks among us wasn’t something I’d been looking forward to. I knew I had to tell her, though; demon-hunting is part of her family history, even though I often wish it weren’t.

 

It was one thing knowing that I someday had to come clean with my daughter. Having the conversation forced on me was something entirely different. But after a High Demon kidnapped her, I knew without a doubt that the demon-related mother-daughter lines of communication needed to be opened.

 

And so there we were, sitting on the steps in front of San Diablo’s most well-funded museum. Despite the bright sun beating down, we were huddled together under an EMS-issued blanket, waiting to make sure the police and medical folks clustered in the parking lot didn’t have any more questions for us, and also waiting for Stuart to come pick us up. My second husband doesn’t have a clue about my demon-hunting past. And although this might be the day that Allie learned most of my secrets, Stuart was going to remain blissfully clueless.

 

“Mom?” she prodded. “So, like, you said you were going to tell me what’s going on.”

 

“Right,” I said, still not ready, but figuring I never would be. I looked around, ostensibly making sure no one was paying attention to us, but half hoping that some police official was signaling for me to come over and answer questions.

 

No such luck. I was stuck in this conversation, whether I wanted to be or not. And since there’s not really an easy way to ease into the whole demon thing, I decided to just cut to the chase. “What you saw in there,” I began, a little hesitantly. “Those creatures, I mean. They’re demons, Allie. Honest-to-goodness, from the bowels of hell, evil-incarnate demons.”

 

I wasn’t sure what I expected her initial reaction to be, but I balled my hands into fists, readying myself for anything.

 

“Oh,” she said after a moment’s pause. “That makes sense. And?”

 

And? My hands relaxed and I stumbled a bit, because I really wasn’t expecting and. Not yet, anyway. I figured we had a good half-hour of working through the whole demon thing before we got to and. Tossing and into the mix now threw off my whole equilibrium.

 

“‘And?’” I repeated. “I’m talking demons, kiddo. Isn’t that enough?”

 

As if to prove to me that some things never change, my teenage daughter rolled her eyes. “Mo-ther,” she said, as if she were talking to an idiot. “I mean, duh. Monsters, demons, boogymen from Hell. I was there, you know. I kinda grasp the concept.”

 

Under the circumstances, the kid had a point. After all, there are only so many things that a sulfur-scented creature with paws and claws climbing its way out of a portal to Hell can be. And none of them are good.

 

“But what about you?” she continued, before I could say anything else. “I mean, you were like Wonder Woman in there. It was pretty cool, Mom. But it was also pretty weird, too. And you said you were going to tell me.”

 

That I had. I’d rushed to her rescue, just like any mom would. But by doing that, I’d shown her a side of me I’d carefully kept hidden. So when she’d asked me point-blank if I had a few secrets, I’d had no choice but to admit that I did.

 

I’d hoped to ease a bit more slowly into my revelation. Allie, though, wanted answers now.

 

“Let’s walk,” I said, standing up.

 

“But what about Stuart?”

 

I glanced down the road and didn’t see any cars coming. Within the cluster of people still in the parking lot, I saw David Long talking with a uniformed officer. He noticed me and turned, a question in his eyes. I indicated Allie and made a walking motion with my fingers. He nodded, and I knew he understood. If Stuart came while we were walking the museum grounds, David would let my husband know.

 

The irony of the situation didn’t escape me. Because I was pretty sure that David was my husband, or that he had been at one time. Which sounds a bit weird when you say it that way, but it was true: I was reasonably certain that the soul of my first husband had taken up residence in the body of Coronado High chemistry teacher David Long. I wasn’t positive, though, and today wasn’t the day to find out for sure. Someday, maybe. But not today.

 

Allie didn’t miss our exchange. “Something’s up with Mr. Long, too,” she said. “If you were Wonder Woman, then he was totally Superman.”

 

I had to laugh at the image, but the truth is that she was right. Telling my secrets meant giving some of his away, too.

 

“Come on,” I said, taking her hand as I led us down the stairs and over to the gravel walking path that twisted through the museum’s landscaped grounds. She didn’t try to pull away, which left me feeling both surprised and nostalgic for the long-ago years when I could reach out and expect her little hand to close around mine immediately.

 

“You know I grew up in Italy,” I began, looking sideways at her. “In an orphanage?”

 

She nodded, because that part of my past had never been a secret. She didn’t know how I ended up in an orphanage, or who my parents were, or why an obviously American kid ended up wandering the streets, lost and abandoned, in Rome. But I didn’t know those answers either. And for years, I’d told myself that I didn’t care. To my mind, my life started the day I met Father Corletti. Everything before that was white noise.

 

“Well, I wasn’t raised in a Church-sponsored orphanage,” I said. “I was raised by the Church itself. By a small group within the Church, actually.”

 

“Daddy, too, right?”

 

“Daddy, too,” I said. Allie had more than once heard the story about how I had a crush on my first husband, Eric, when I was barely thirteen. But he—much more wise and mature at almost fifteen—hadn’t been the least bit interested in a kid like me. Not at first, anyway.

 

What Allie didn’t know was that Eric had finally come around during our training sessions. He’d been assigned to help me with my pathetic knife-throwing skills, and after a few months of one-on-one time, Eric was just as much in love with me as I was with him. Plus, I could hit the target dead-on every time.

 

“Okay,” she said. “And?”

 

“You’re getting an awful lot of mileage out of that word today,” I countered.

 

To which my drama queen daughter responded by stopping on the path, tapping her foot, and asking me if she was going to have to repeat the word another time.

 

“Once was fine,” I said, managing not to laugh. “But remind me when you grew up?”

 

“About an hour ago,” she said, then turned and pointed back toward the museum. “In there.”

 

Point taken.

 

“Forza Scura,” I said. “It’s Latin. Translates roughly to the Dark Force. And,” I continued, before she could toss the word at me one more time, “it’s the name of the organization within the Church that your father and I were trained to work for.”

 

“Trained,” she repeated. I nodded, then watched as she processed that new bit of information. “Okay,” she finally said. “But trained to do what?”

 

Now it was my turn to point back toward the museum. “Take a guess.”

 

“Whoa,” she said. “No shit?” And then, “Sorry, Mom.”

 

I smiled and gave her hand a squeeze. “No shit,” I said. “Forza trained us to hunt demons. And that’s what we did for years, and then we retired about a year before you were born.”

 

“Oh, okay.” She nodded slowly, as if she was still trying to process our discussion.

 

“Anything else you want to ask?” There’s a lot I could tell her at this point. I could describe traveling Europe with Eric and chasing down the types of creatures she’d met in the museum. I could talk about living in the Forza dorms, staying up all night and sharing the kinds of scary stories that all kids tell. Only the stories we told were true. I could tell her about Wilson Endicott, my first alimentatore, who helped Eric and me by doing the research even as we went out armed to the teeth.

 

I could tell her all of that, but I wasn’t going to. Not unless she asked. Because this was Big Stuff. And I knew she had to take it in at her own pace.

 

At least that was what I told myself. And I really think that I was mostly being honest. But even so, I have to admit that a small part of me hoped that she wouldn’t be too curious. Because once you truly know about evil, it’s hard to be a kid anymore. And I didn’t want to be the mother who’d ripped what was left of childhood out from under her daughter.

 

She took a look around the grounds, taking in the wooden gazebo and the crushed stone paths. Birds-of-paradise and other tropical flowers that thrive in California lined the walkways, marking the way back to the museum in one direction and the San Diablo City Park in the other. Except for us, there was no one to be seen, and after a few moments of silence, I guess Allie decided we had time to hit a few more of the high points.

 

“So Gramps and Mr. Long,” she began. “How come they were with you? Are they with that Forza thing?”

 

“Gramps was,” I said, referring to Eddie Lohmann, an eighty-something retired demon hunter who had taken up temporary residence in our guest bedroom and permanent residence in our life. Allie was under the impression that Eddie was her long-lost great-grandfather, and that wasn’t an illusion I felt compelled to dispel. “He’s been retired for quite a while.”

 

“And Mr. Long?”

 

Wasn’t that a loaded question? But I fielded it the best I could, explaining that David Long was not just a mild-mannered high school teacher, but also a rogue demon hunter. In other words, a hunter not affiliated with Forza. He was also, I added, a friend of Allie’s father. Which, for all I knew, was the God’s honest truth. Because as much as I might suspect that Eric was somehow hiding in David’s body, at the same time, I might simply be grasping at straws, desperate to believe that my first love hadn’t really perished that foggy night in San Francisco. That somehow the man who’d been my lover and my partner for so many years could still be alive.

 

It was almost too much to hope for, and at the same time, if David was Eric, what would that mean for me? For my kids? For my marriage?

 

I didn’t know, and every time I tried to think about it, I got lost in a quagmire of emotion so thick that I was certain I could drown in it if I wasn’t careful.

 

Allie started walking again, and I shoved the melancholy aside and moved into step beside her, forcing my thoughts back to my daughter and away from Eric.

 

“Al?” She was hugging herself, her gaze directed back toward the museum. As I watched, she shivered, her back and shoulders spasming as if the cold finger of Death himself had traced its way up her spine. “Al!” I repeated, this time more urgently, and with my hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

 

She turned to look at me, her eyes haunted. “You aren’t still . . . I mean, that thing could have killed you, Mom.”

 

“But it didn’t,” I said gently, trying desperately not to cry. My daughter had lost a father only too recently; the idea that she now feared losing her mother about broke my heart.

 

“You’re retired now, right?” she asked with an unfamiliar urgency in her voice. “Like you said. You and Daddy retired before I was born.”

 

I hesitated, knowing that I should tell her the truth. That I’d come out of retirement a few months ago and that lately I’d been neck-deep in demons. My head told me to say the words, but my heart wouldn’t cooperate.