Demons are Forever: Confessions of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom by Julie Kenner Read Free Book Online

sweet patootie.”
    “My sweet pa— what?”
    “You heard me. You’re getting all your girl parts in a tizzy, wondering is he or isn’t he? Like some damned farmer’s daughter picking daisies in a field. Humph. Woulda thought you’d been trained better, but with Forza in such a mess these days, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
    “David isn’t Eric,” I said, giving both him and Laura a hard look. “I already told you.”
    Eddie gave a sad little shake of his head. “Damn women are just too damn gullible,” he muttered under his breath.
    I cursed under mine, reining in my temper, which was about to explode. “You know what?” I finally said. “It doesn’t even matter. All that matters right now is that we’ve got demons again. It’s like the whole town’s been infested and we haven’t managed to find the nest to wipe them out. Whether or not David is Eric is completely moot.”
    He aimed a hard stare at me. “I hope so, girlie. Because I may not know everything, but I know one thing for sure.”
    “All right,” I said, still battling my temper back down after the gullible comment. “What?”
    “Bad news,” Eddie said. “That boy is bad, bad news.”
    I didn’t get to grill Eddie about the bad news statement, because Stuart chose that particular moment to rush down the stairs into the living room. Not that I needed to interrogate Eddie; he’d been certain that David was Eric from early on, and even David’s denial wasn’t going to change his mind.
    As Stuart came into the kitchen, a tie in each hand, Laura took the opportunity to head home. “Mindy left at the crack of dawn to go paint set pieces for the school musical,” she said. “And since I have the house to myself for a few more hours, I might as well get started on that... um ... little project.”
    Her coyness was lost on Stuart, however, who was too absorbed in his fashion dilemma to pay attention to our good-byes. “Which one?” he said, laying them out on the table in front of me, and forcing my mind to shift from contemplating the mysteries of the universe to the more mundane mystery of men’s fashion.
    I took the blue one with little gray stripes out of his hand and held it under his chin. Then I switched it out for a gray one with little blue stripes. “This one,” I said, handing him the gray one. “Definitely this one.”
    “Thanks, babe,” he said, then proceeded to slip the blue one around his neck. He caught my exasperated expression and grinned. “What can I say? After so many years of marriage, I’ve learned.”
    “Just for that,” I said, “you get to handle all potty-training emergencies this week.”
    “You’re brutal, sweetheart.”
    I blew him a kiss as I headed out of the kitchen and aimed myself for the stairs. If he only knew ...
    My retreat was for more than just getting the last word. I was also intending to light a fire under my daughter. We needed to be out the door in fifteen minutes, or else we’d be skulking into the back of the bishop’s hall ten minutes into Mass. That’s awkward enough at any church. When the priest is your alimentatore, those little faux pas become all the more embarrassing.
    Allie’s door is at the top of the stairs, and—as usual since she’s hit the wondrous teenage years—it was shut. I tapped lightly, got no answer, then tapped a bit harder.
    Still nothing.
    I briefly debated whether or not I should go in. She’s almost fifteen (although how that happened, I’ll never know) and privacy is a Big Issue. Our rule is that after one knock, I can go in. But even with that tacit permission, I still like to wait for her to give me the okay.
    Today, though, she was giving me nothing.
    I frowned. The odds were good that she hadn’t even heard my knock. She’d downloaded a whole slew of new songs to her iPod over the holiday, so she was probably plugged in and completely oblivious to the fact that in about ten minutes, we were going to be officially running