Free Dead on Delivery by Eileen Rendahl Page B

“He’s not a dog, either. Careful, don’t look him in the eyes.”
    “Got it. Any idea what it is?” He glanced over his shoulder at me.
    “I think it’s a cadejo.”
    He snorted. “I don’t think name-calling is going to help at this moment.”
    “Not pendejo . Cadejo. It’s a demon that takes the form of a dog. This one isn’t quite right though.” I looked at it hard, something that wasn’t all that difficult to do since I was not going to take my eyes off it at the moment. “Sometimes the cadejos mate with regular dogs. This might be the offspring of one of those hook-ups.”
    “You can tell just by looking?” The dog circled and we circled with it.
    “Yeah, I’m getting a supernatural vibe off it, but it doesn’t have goat hooves or chains that glow in the dark.”
    “Is that good news or bad?”
    “Good. It means we can probably kill it.”
    He made a funny noise in the back of his throat.
    “What?”
    “I don’t know. I’ve always hated killing animals.”
    “It’s not an animal. It’s a demon.”
    “It’s a hybrid. You just said so.” His tone was way too reasonable for someone being stalked by the son of a demon dog.
    I felt myself starting to growl again. “Fine. It’s still going to come down to us or it.”
    “Got it,” he said. “Give me your jacket.”
    I took it off and handed it over my shoulder to him. He wrapped it around his arm on top of his own jacket. As the cadejo lunged at him again, Ted lunged forward with his left forearm braced in front of him like a battering ram. He practically shoved his arm into the thing’s mouth as it lunged toward him. Then he braced his other arm on the back of its neck and, with a quick jerk, snapped the dog’s head up.
    I heard the crack as its neck broke and it fell slack to the ground before him. Smoke started to rise from the body. Then the body began to disintegrate, as if it were on fire from within. Within seconds, all that was left was a black oily stain on the sidewalk, with a horrible smell like rotten eggs.
    I turned to Ted. “Are you all right?”
    He nodded, breathing hard. “I’m okay.”
    I unraveled the jackets and looked at his arm. The red stain on his sleeve grew. “No, you’re not okay.”
    He looked down, looking almost confused as the blood began to drip from his hand. “Hmm. Guess you’re right.” And then his knees began to buckle underneath him.
     
     
    TED LET ME DRIVE HIM BACK TO SACRAMENTO IN GRANDMA Rosie’s Buick. Officially, the Buick has been mine for three years now. Unofficially, it will never fully be mine. I like to think it’s inhabited with a bit of my grandmother’s feisty and tenacious spirit. Ted, on the other hand, views it as past its prime and prone to break down. I’ll grant the past its prime , but it has never failed me when I needed it. Regardless, it was a testament to how he was feeling that he allowed me to drive him at all, much less in my old-lady car.
    “How will we get my truck back?” he asked.
    “I’ll have Ben help me. Or Sophie. They both have their licenses now.” Ben was my downstairs neighbor’s kid. He and Sophie had a bit of an on-again/off-again teenage romance thing going, which I wasn’t entirely thrilled about. On the other hand, he’d gone from total screwup to a pretty responsible young man and I had to grant him that. Plus, it was handy to have someone around who knew a little about what was going on. I hadn’t approved of Sophie telling him who and what she was, and who and what I was by extension, but it had ended up being more helpful than not. Still, it was another blurring of the neat compartments in which I’d kept my life up to this point. I didn’t much like it most of the time.
    “I don’t want either of them driving my truck.” Ted had started to shake a little.
    I touched his forehead. “You’re burning up.”
    “I don’t feel great.” He slumped against the window.
    I glanced over at him. His face was pale and shone with