Slayer (Slayer #1)

Is that already my role? Stabby-stabby-kill girl?

Or breaky-breaky-neck girl, really, since I don’t have any weapons. I’ll need weapons if demons are going to start popping up everywhere. I usually have a stake on me—like a comfort blanket that can kill things—but stakes aren’t a one-size-fits-all demon-slaying tool.

Cillian shakes his head. “No, that’s not why. I mean, maybe a little. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. But we don’t know anything about it.”

“We know it’s a demon.”

“Right, but it’s wearing a fecking Coldplay shirt. How evil can something wearing a Coldplay shirt be?”

He has a point. “So why did you ask me?”

“Because you fix people. You’re always watching those horrible first aid tutorials. And all the medical supplies you have me order? You know how to help people. I thought—” Cillian shrugs, suddenly sheepish as we both look at the radioactively yellow demon. “I thought it might need help.”

Relief and gratitude wash over me. Cillian didn’t ask me here to kill something. He asked me here to help something. I want to hug him for being my friend, for thinking of me the way I think of myself: as a healer. I’m the girl who patches things up. Not the one who breaks them.

My initial instinct to attack nags at me, filling me with guilt. I want to at least give Coldplay there a chance. Being a Slayer doesn’t mean I have to kill everything that moves.

Actually, I have no idea what being a Slayer means. And I don’t care. I’m a Watcher, so I’ll deal with the demon our way. Study first, reach an informed conclusion, and then decide on a course of action. True Watcher procedure at its best, like I’ve tried telling Artemis for years. Our role was never supposed to be the violent one.

I nod toward the shed. “Got anything in there we can use to restrain it?”

Cillian squinches up his face, then snaps his fingers. “Yeah, actually. Could you help me get it in?” While he unlocks the shed door, I cross the yard and grab the demon’s arms.

“Eew!” I shriek, pulling back my hands as though burned. Cillian whips around, terrified. “It’s sticky. Oh, gross, it’s sticky.” Shuddering, I try to touch only the clothed parts of its body. I start to lift the demon, and I nearly toss it up into the air. It’s so much easier than I expected it to be. But I don’t feel elated over this surging new strength. It’s another reminder of how my body is something other than what I’ve always known.

“How? How are you doing that? Is the demon bloke filled with helium or something?”

The grossness of what I’m holding comes over me again. “Open the shed—oh gods, the stickiness is seeping through my shirt. It’s my favorite shirt. I’m going to have to burn it. And also my skin. And everything. Just—hurry!”

As soon as Cillian opens the door, I push past him and drop the demon unceremoniously on the floor.

Cillian is possibly more freaked out by me than by the demon. “You carried that—that thing like it’s a bag of . . . things that don’t weigh much. And that’s after you went Terminator on the hellhound. You’ve never been like this. Did something happen when you killed that dog thing?”

“By thing, you mean demon. Just like this discolored horny thing.”

“Could we say ‘horned,’ not ‘horny’? Because I am already creeped out enough.”

Cillian pulls a chain hanging down from a bare bulb, which throws everything into yellow-tinged relief. His mother’s shed is as cluttered as Rhys’s bookshelves, holding what appears to be the detritus of at least a dozen different lives. Dream catchers, Buddhas, crystals and incense, a stack of Bibles along with what looks like a Book of Mormon and a whole pile of L. Ron Hubbard novels, several statues of gods and goddesses of various traditions and religions, and an entire bin of ghost-hunting and medium shows.

“Welcome to the shed of cultural appropriation.” Cillian sweeps his arms around with a bleak expression. “At least now my mum’s with ascetic monks, so she won’t bring back souvenirs. We’re already jammers with junk.”

In the middle of the chaos, the only item that is clean and dust free is a framed photo of Cillian’s dad. I’ve never seen him before. I pick it up to take a closer look.

“Twelve years he’s been gone,” Cillian says. “And she’s still trying to find some way to reconnect with him. With magic off-line, she’s desperate for anything else.”

“I can’t blame her. He’s handsome. He looks a little like Orlando Bloom.”

“Dammit, Nina! Orlando Bloom?” Cillian snatches the photo away from me. “I can’t unsee that! My feelings about my dead dad were already complicated; now I have to worry that I’m oedipal, or whatever the guy-crushing-on-his-own-dad equivalent is. I swear to God if you so much as breathe about more handsome men in connection to anyone I’m related to, I will never speak to you again.”

“You’re not messed up! I’m sorry. He looks nothing like Orlando Bloom. Or any other person you’ve ever had a crush on.”

“Just shut it and let me find the handcuffs.”

I turn away from Cillian’s definitely Orlando Bloom–look-alike father and wait, keeping a wary eye on the demon.

“Here they are!” Cillian holds up a pair of handcuffs triumphantly. He’s been rooting through a box labeled with his father’s name. There’s a stack of photos, what I guess is a 3-D metal puzzle made up of interlocking triangles, a heavy ring, and some loose photos. I wonder how many times Cillian has gone through the box that he knew the handcuffs were in there.

Artemis and I don’t have anything of our father’s. That’s part of why I love the library so much. At least I know he studied those same books, looked at those same pages.