but go weak in the knees.
Which was so not penciled into her knees’ daily schedule.
Standing up straight, eyes shooting open, Riona ground out the words through clenched teeth. “Will you please stop doing that?”
Marc pulled back his hand and his warmth. “Doing what?”
“Making me feel like goo,” she hissed. “I get it, you don’t like me, but you don’t have to toy around with my emotions just to be an ass. God, you’re like… Antarctica one second, then Brazil the next. Could you maybe shoot for that subtle indifference bordering on contempt you had pinned down for so long?”
“I make you feel like goo?” It was as though he’d been accused of some heinous crime or fault, like being a fan of strip bocce ball. An obvious response eluded him.
Riona clicked her tongue. “The gooiest of goo. Could we please focus? Downer Demon? Yeah, I think I found the darkness at St. Cecilia’s, and I think it’s a Downer Demon, and I think he’s in my classroom right this very second.”
Marc scoffed. “Whoa there, hex! Slow down your horses. Yeah, Downer Demons exist, but they’re rare and they don’t tend to manifest as teenagers. Teens are too volatile for them to spend so much energy on, and you know the treaty between the Big Bad and the Big Boss specified that seventeen is the minimum appearance of age for demons to manifest themselves as mortals, so I don’t really think…”
“His name is Damien.”
“Damien?”
Riona nodded.
Marc’s brow became stern and his gaze fell on the adjacent classroom door. “Shit! Yeah, definitely a demon. Okay then, Keystone, let’s go kick some parochial poser patutti.”
Chapter 11
“Come on, kids! Only a half-mile to go, then you can hit the showers.”
Of all the members of the teaching staff who happened to wander into St. Cecilia’s while Riona was casting her sickness hex, one of them was Brother Krieger, the PE teacher. Dee couldn’t believe his luck. Now, leading the gaggle of teens in an invigorating run along the bank of the Charles River, he knew he’d been missing out. People got paid to work out while simultaneously making sure the teens didn’t spend all their muscle mass working PS3 controllers? No. Freaking. Way.
He had to hand it to the lot of them: except for a few stragglers at the back whose bodies were already weakened by cigarettes and whisky, the class was keeping up pretty well, despite the crisp autumn air. No matter the general negative reputation, he found these kids… charming. Dee couldn’t help but imagine for a moment what it would be like to take his own son out for a run like this. Assuming he could ever find another girl who’d go along with that whole when you look seventy, I’ll still only look forty-five thing, and oh, by the way, I’ll also outlive you by about another fifty years and my dad will probably try to bang you the first time he meets you, ‘cause that’s just what Zeus does thing. Then, once she bought that, he’d have to convince her to father his child, with the understanding that with the extra caveat of being a Pure Soul’s progeny, he or she would stand a greater chance of being folded into the calling someday. Maybe not as a Pure Soul himself, per se, but perhaps as a demon tracker or angel chronicler or worse, a certified public accountant.
Rounding out the last block, the school’s graffiti-covered edifice coming into view, he grimaced. The clock on the school’s tower read six after the hour. Damn, he kept them out too long. Hopefully that didn’t make the principal decide not to call him back for another sub job…
Wait, what? He wasn’t a sub. That was just his cover while they checked out St. Cecilia’s. Why was he here again though, if not to sub? Oh, yeah, Ramiel said there was a demon problem in the school. Well, weren’t no demons in the third period gym class. And maybe if they managed to make it the whole day without destroying a classroom or something, even with the lack of an actual teaching degree, he could talk with …
“Principal Hermosa!”
The father who also served as the school’s headmaster blanched as he stood gawking on the front steps, his eyes narrowed and fierce. His tone vibrated as much as the tip of his finger, which he wagged around in Dee’s general direction, as though with each twist of his wrist he was conducting a musical masterpiece composed on