Apocalypse Happens by Lori Handeland Page B

reach Summer. I wasn’t shocked when she didn’t pick up for me, but she ignored Jimmy’s summons too. Of course if she was flying without wings it might be a little hard to answer a cell phone while avoiding low-cruising planes.
    The Navigator had blown a tire outside of Gary, and Thane didn’t appear to believe in spares—or perhaps he’d had to toss it out in order to fit in all the ammunition beneath the rear panel.
    Though both Jimmy and I were extremely strong and equally fast, we weren’t magic and we couldn’t manufacture a new tire from thin air like some people who weren’t really people. At any rate, the tire fiasco slowed us down, and we didn’t pull up outside of Murphy’s until long after closing.
    Located on the East Side of Milwaukee, Murphy’s was a throwback to the time when every neighborhood had its own personal pub. Thus, houses surrounded Murphy’s. One of those was Megan’s—an aluminum-sided two-story where she lived with her three children: Anna, Aaron and Ben. I’d come to the house a thousand times before—but only one other time in the middle of the night. A night I never wanted to revisit—the night Max had died. I swallowed thickly as the memory loomed large.
    She’d been waiting on the steps. She’d already known—and they called me psychic. But I guess when Max didn’t arrive home on time, when it was all over the news that there’d been a shooting in the city and an officer had died, she really hadn’t needed to be psychic, she hadn’t needed to look at my face or wait for me to open my mouth, to know her world had just changed.
    I got out of the car and hurried the short distance to the house with Jimmy right behind me. He’d never been here before, never met Megan or Max, though I’m sure he’d heard about them from Ruthie.
    Jimmy had been out of my life so completely for the past seven years that having him in it now still felt like a dream. Hell, my whole damn life felt like a dream these days—and not a very good one.
    I paused on the porch steps. The night was clear and warm—exactly like the night Max had died. But the moon was different. Then it had been just a sliver; tonight it was headed toward full.
    I glanced at Jimmy. When it became full, his demon would break free of its bond. I wasn’t sure what we were going to do about that. Jimmy reached for the doorbell.
    “No,” I said quietly. “The kids.”
    I didn’t want to scare them, and a doorbell in the middle of the night would. Hell, it would probably scare Megan. If she was still alive.
    I reached for the knob, planning to break the lock. There wasn’t a door made by human hands that could keep me out any longer. But Jimmy hissed his disapproval and pulled a pair of lock picks from his pocket. Part demon, part Boy Scout. What a combo.
    He motioned for us to head around back. Wouldn’t do for anyone to come along walking a dog and find us messing with the front door of Max Murphy’s house. Local police trolled this street more often than any other. Cops took care of their own, especially when one of their own went down in the line of duty.
    Jimmy fiddled with the locks on the back door—no alarm. Too expensive. No dog. No time. But at least Megan had invested in a dead bolt, and that would take a little concentration to bypass—I stared out at the yard.
    The house was large for a city house, with a lot of shrubs and some decent-sized trees, the grass littered with toys. The Murphy kids were five, six and eight, and they owned a lot of crap. Since I wasn’t all that familiar with kids, I wasn’t sure if they had more than the usual number or less.
    In the far corner, a garden lay fallow. Megan always made big plans to grow vegetables, maybe even a flower or two, but since she had a hard enough time getting in a shower each day, gardening wasn’t really on the menu.
    Something long and sleek and dark curved around the outer edge of the weedy plot. I moved closer, frowning at the statue of a