Free Pax Demonica by Julie Kenner

around and try to learn as much as they could about our elite little force.
    Those, at least, were the commonly accepted explanations for Rome’s rather hefty demon population. Personally, I thought the real reason was something deeper. I hadn’t delved too far into the psychology of demons, but I’d been around long enough to pick up on some truisms. And the biggie? Demons wanted what they couldn’t have—they wanted to experience humanity. What’s more human than faith? We could go our whole lives without ever truly knowing that something greater waits for us beyond the curtain of death, and yet we still believed. We still had faith .
    I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t know that there were unseen things that shared the world with us. Dark and scary things that lived in the ether and sought a toe-hold on this life. I knew because I saw. And because I’d seen the darkness, my faith in the light was strong, and I’d clung to it with desperate determination.
    But I’d often wondered if my faith would have been so strong if I’d lived a different life. If I’d been another Kate growing up in the Midwest, going to church, playing on a farm. If I’d never seen a real demon and my fears about what might be hiding in the closet never came true. I liked to think that I would believe just the same, but I didn’t know if that that was true. And whenever I met a person with true, deep faith, I knew that I’d encountered the heart of what made us all truly human.
    “Kate?” Stuart thrust his arm out, stopping me before I walked into traffic. “Where are you?”
    “Sorry. I was just—memories. It’s great to be back, but a little weird, too.”
    “I’m glad we came. I want to share this with you. Timmy, too, even though he won’t remember the trip.”
    “No,” I laughed. “He won’t. Allie refuses to believe that she ever had a crush on Captain Hook. But then I whip out those pictures from when she was three, and suddenly I have a whole cache of prom night bribery photos. It’s awesome.”
    “Pictures!” Allie blurted from behind us. “I forgot my camera!”
    “I thought that was one of the reasons we bought you an iPhone,” I said. “It has a camera built in.”
    “Mo- om . Hello? Rome. I want the real camera. I want to be able to zoom and do effects and all that stuff. I mean, I schlepped it all the way here and I promised Daddy I’d take a bunch of awesome photos, so. . .”
    She trailed off, and I sucked in a breath. Her father had bought her the camera—a fancy Nikon—as a present for the trip that, I was certain, was also supposed to assuage his guilt for leaving San Diablo. I wasn’t sure how his guilt was doing, but I did know that Allie loved the camera.
    “Fine,” I said because what else could I say? I pointed down the street to the subway station. “We’ll meet you guys right there,” I said. “We should be back in less than ten minutes.”
    “So?” Allie said as we hurried back to the B&B. “You haven’t changed your mind about telling me, right?”
    “I haven’t,” I said, then brought her up to date.
    “But what is ‘it’?” she asked. “A key, right? Because she mentioned a lock?”
    “That’s what I’m thinking.”
    “So it was probably stolen from the cathedral, don’t you think?”
    I did think, actually, and I was impressed that my daughter made the jump. “What makes you think so?”
    “Duvall was on the plane,” she said. “I mean, he came from California all the way here, right?”
    “So you think Duvall had our mystery key?”
    “I dunno. What I really think is that he assumed you had it. Like that’s why he was on the plane. To follow you.”
    “You might be right.” I glanced at my watch. Not yet one. “Laura’s probably still asleep, but once she checks out Duvall’s background, maybe we’ll know more.”
    “What’s that going to tell us? I mean, by the time we saw him, he was already a demon. Does it really matter what his