Demon Night

wasn’t very good at blocking when I hit him. But now I’m fast and strong, too—and maybe I’ll run into him someday.”
    Ethan’s gaze was hard and assessing, and he nodded. “All right. I’ll see that you get some training in, so that your weapons include more than your fists. And I’ll hold him down, if you like.”
    “That wouldn’t be fair,” she said, smiling.
    “You don’t worry about fighting fair with vampires and demons, Charlie. If something ever comes up, you hit as low and as mean as you can.”
    His tone was serious; her smile faded, and she nodded. “Okay.” She absently pushed a rock aside with her bare toe, and startled when a huge spider scurried out from beneath. After a few running steps, she looked up to find Ethan grinning at her.
    “We’ll be training a long time, Charlie, toughening you up.”
    “Fuck you. It was hairy .”
    Laughing, Ethan took her hand, and they walked toward the mound of rocks she’d seen the bat flying over. Hard, bare earth appeared in patches, as if the wind had swept the sand from it.
    She took a deep breath; the air was still now, and crisp—but not uncomfortable. “What happened when the deputy was accused?”
    “Danvers wouldn’t believe it, and he had us to lay the blame on—although the times didn’t add up, and the townspeople knew it. So I reckon his lie just broke them.”
    “Broke them? How?”
    “Well, it seems he’d been running the town real tight for several years. Dictating behavior and morals, using his deputies to scare those who didn’t fall in line or who disagreed with anything he did. And I don’t think he saw anything wrong in the way he went about it, because, to all appearances, it was working. But I figure the townspeople were just seething—and when they boiled over, his little piece of Heaven started falling apart. A few deputies killed, the whores wearing their unmentionables on the stoop, people drinking in the saloon when it wasn’t the appointed times, not showing up for church services. Are you laughing, Charlie?”
    He tugged her against his chest, turned around and stepped backward in time with her. His grin was broad.
    “Yes.” It shook from her. “Sorry. It was the last part.”
    “Ah, well—his deputies kept on bringing reports to him, and he’d rant on and on about disorder being the downfall of man. Caleb and I thought it was plenty ridiculous. Even more so, that he was certain we’d been some corruptive force that brought this all down on him. But we weren’t laughing by then.”
    Neither was Charlie. Ethan continued moving backward, his hands low on her back. Walking, but their only scenery was each other, and Ethan’s face was slowly becoming overcast.
    “He’d closed up the shutters, and during the day we just baked in there. Sweating, and then after a while nothing left to sweat. And once the girl was found, the sheriff didn’t bring us any water—because a demon can’t kill a man, but his deputies were the ones who physically locked us in, so letting us slowly die wasn’t actively killing us. And though we had no inkling of what he truly was, we figured by then that he wasn’t…wasn’t normal .” His fingers moved against her waist, drawing small circles over the cotton shirt. “Of course, now I know that Caleb and I might have gotten out at any time.”
    Charlie blinked. “What?”
    “He couldn’t deny our free will. If I had gotten up, picked that lock open, he couldn’t have prevented me. Or prevented either of us from walking on out of there. But I didn’t know that, and he was always watching us, so I didn’t even attempt it until the end. We were going to die anyway, so I reckoned I might as well get up and try it.”
    “What’d he do?” she whispered.
    “He took out his gun, but its threat wasn’t going to stop me, Charlie. So he crushed it in his hand.”
    “And that stopped you?”
    “Scared the piss out of me. Then he pulled out the key, and he said that we looked awful thirsty. And all we had to do was drink what he had in two special cups, and he’d give us that key instead of crushing the lock.”
    Charlie was trembling, and her steps felt as heavy as a zombie’s. “He had two cups?”
    Ethan nodded. “But he just said that they both had to be drunk, not that we each had to drink one, and I held him to that. Then I beat the hell out of Caleb until he agreed to give me his cup, and made the best bargain with Danvers as I knew how—because