Demon Bound

old, ready for a little excitement before I hit college. And he was the type of guy . . . well, the type of older man who’d always speed up when he was changing lanes, even if no one was letting him in, instead of tapping the brakes and waiting until it was safe to merge. No surprise, he had an accident; I had Brandon. So it was just me and him for a long time, and I get weepy really fast when I realize he’s not a baby anymore.”
    “Ah,” Jake said. “Now I feel guilty for not being here. I think my granddad had a shotgun made especially for older men like that.”
    She snorted out another laugh, and pushed a new picture in front of him. “There’s Mom and Dad, on their wedding day. And Dad probably would have taken his shotgun out if he’d known.”
    Barbara in white, a young Grace in pink, and—“Billy?”
    “Yes. Bill, by then.”
    “Hot damn.” Jake grimaced, looked up. “ Darn .”
    She shrugged, but he shook his head.
    “No, I knew I’d be running into you sooner or later, so I’ve been trying to watch my language. I haven’t been doing so well.”
    Her smile was soft and pretty. “Don’t worry about me. Lindsey, though, is another story. She picks up everything.”
    “Okay.” Still, he’d do better. And he hoped that meant he would be seeing Lindsey again. He looked down at the picture. “So, Billy Hopewell. He’s good people. How old were you, though—ten? He waited long enough.”
    “That’s your fault,” Grace said, still smiling as she took a sip from her mug. “He’d been coming around Great-Grandma’s since I was a baby, but Mom thought he only came out of obligation, because he’d been your friend—and Dad thought she was still hung up on you. So it took them a while to figure it out.”
    Jake could only shake his head and grin stupidly.
    “You aren’t hung up on her.” There might have been relief in her voice.
    “No.” He met her gaze. “I did love her. But not the way a man does when he wants to spend his life with a woman.”
    Her eyes sparkled with sudden interest. “There is someone.”
    “Yes.” And he’d happily spend a hundred lives with her. “Did Lindsey say anything about the Wicked Witch?”
    “She did. Then she said you both disappeared.”
    “We did.” Jake thought about giving a demonstration, decided it might be too much right now. “Why aren’t you freaking out? That chair isn’t really enough of a reason.”
    Grace opened the flat box, pulled out a yellowing envelope, and paused. “Do you want this stuff?”
    A folded flag and a medal lay inside. Jake shook his head. “Those are meant for family, not for me.”
    She dug beneath the flag, pulled out a small flint arrowhead. “What about this? Great-Granddad said it meant something to you.” She stopped. “He . . . I was about eight. Great-Grandma was the year after. Both went easy.”
    “Good.” Jake fought the stinging at the backs of his eyes, reached for the arrowhead. Yeah, it meant something. He’d come across it in one of their fields when he was ten, and within two years had read every book on archaeology that the local library owned. Then reread them, because there hadn’t been any other option.
    He closed his hand around it. “Thank you.”
    “I’m glad I had it.” She pushed the box aside. “So. When I was fifteen, this guy shows up here with a letter for me. Only, he didn’t have my name—just Mom’s maiden name—so it took a while for him to track us down. Because Mom had taken on your last name after you died. You know, to make it easier, even if it wasn’t really legal.”
    “Yeah, I know,” he said quietly. In a town like this, at a time like that—it was better to be seen as a widow than an unwed mother.
    “And because she said when you told her you’d marry her, she considered that as good as a ring.”
    “As far as I’m concerned it was. I’m just sorry I couldn’t give her a real one.”
    “She knew that. And it wasn’t so bad. Hard, sometimes, but Dad was always there.” She took a deep breath. “So, this man comes, and he has this letter you wrote me.”
    “Pinter?” Jake laughed to himself, shaking his head. The fucking new guy had made it out.
    “Yes. And then he says he’s got this story about how you ended up writing it.”
    “Oh, no.” Nosferatu, a slaughtered village, and tortured soldiers. “He did not tell that to a fifteen-year-old girl.”
    “He did.” Her face paled a little, and she licked her lips. “And,