My Stepbrother Is a Demon novel · Chapter 22 of 32

Chapter 22: Sunday Roast

"In surety," Mom said. "What does that mean?"

Augustin didn't take his hand off her wrist.

"It means he's named you as his backup," he said. "If Ramona walks free, the paper turns to you."

"Can he do that?"

"The deal says one soul of his household. You were his wife that night." His voice was very flat. "It's in his terms. I'd have written it the same way."

Mom looked at the mark for a long time.

Then she pulled her wrist out from under his hand.

"Okay," she said. "Then we'd better win."

"Roxanne."

"I'm not crying about it, Augustin. I did that already, in a motel." She tied her robe tighter. "I'm going to go make coffee. Then somebody's going to tell me the plan."

On Sunday, Augustin made a roast.

He said a family that's going to war should eat properly first.

Mom made him set a fifth place.

"Sit," she said to the housekeeper. "You fixed a demon gate with a frying pan in your slippers. You're eating with us."

The housekeeper looked at Augustin.

He pulled out her chair himself.

She sat.

She put her napkin in her lap and said, "The beef's overdone," and Augustin laughed so hard he had to put his knife down.

Ivo ate three helpings.

He was still pale, and he moved a little carefully, but his hand on my knee under the table was hot as ever.

"So," Mom said, and laid her marked wrist flat on the tablecloth where everybody could see it. "Tell me how we make eighteen thousand people stop loving that man."

I told them what the first client had said.

Mom stopped chewing, and I saw her decide to believe it.

"The pests are the love," I said. "They feed him. If people see what's on their necks, they'll feel it go."

"Almost a minute," Augustin said.

"In front of him. All of them at once."

"In an arena," Ivo said. "Eighteen thousand necks."

"Arenas have air handlers. Huge ones. They push air through every vent in the building."

I'd been drawing it on a napkin since breakfast.

"If I load the fog into the air system, it comes out of every vent at once. Every seat. Every neck."

Nobody said anything.

Then Augustin picked up the napkin and turned it toward the light.

"How much solution?"

"Fifty gallons. Maybe sixty."

"Thirty drops a batch," he said slowly. "Sixty gallons."

He looked at the gauze still on his forearm.

Then at my mother.

"Every drop," Mom said, "without complaining. You agreed."

"I'm not complaining."

"Your eyebrow is complaining."

He put his eyebrow down.

"How do you get into the air system?" the housekeeper asked.

It was the first question I'd ever heard her ask.

I'd been waiting for somebody to ask it.

"I bid on the arena's pest contract the day after Pinecrest," I said. "Pre-show treatment. They signed it Thursday. I go in the night before the show, alone, with every key to every mechanical room."

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