California Demon by Julie Kenner

been a triangle.
    Well, hell.
    As a rule, I don’t go around opening books that the demon population is scrambling for. You just never know what you might find.
    But in this case, I wanted to know. No, it was more than that. I needed to know. Sinclair had said that I was too late. That the wheels were already in motion. He’d raced to the school—a place I’d always believed was safe. Willful blindness on my part, maybe, but it made the mornings easier when I sent my daughter out into what I knew, better than any mom, was a dangerous world.
    The demons had a plan, and this book was part of it. I needed to know how. I needed to make sure nothing was going to happen now. That hordes of demons weren’t about to descend on the school.
    In other words, I needed to know that my kid was safe.
    And so, with a holy water-drenched baby wipe held tight as a defense against any evil that might spew forth, I plunked the book on a worktable and then slowly lifted the cover.
    The spine creaked in protest, but no evil emerged, and the flames of Hell didn’t leap forth to engulf me. Thus encouraged, I opened the cover a bit more, then bent low and peered into the dark space between cover and flyleaf. I saw nothing, and so I continued until the cover was flipped entirely open.
    Nothing.
    And I mean that literally.
    Not demons. Not incantations. Not even a copyright page with the Library of Congress information.
    Just blank paper, brittle and slightly stained.
    Frowning, I carefully flipped through the rest of the volume. Nothing.
    Every page was completely blank. The book told me nothing. Absolutely nothing.
    I turned to look at the grotesque form of Sinclair, the vertical beam protruding from the back of his skull.
    “What’s going on, Sinclair?” I asked.
    The demon, however, stayed stubbornly silent.

Four
    Disposing Of A dead demon is a lot harder than it sounds, and if Marissa found me keeping company with a dead body, you can be damn sure Coastal Mists wouldn’t be inviting me to the annual Volunteer Appreciation Dinner.
    In the past, I simply would have called the kill in, and Forza would send a dispatch team to do the dirty work. But in the last decade or so, Forza has suffered staffing problems, and that simply wasn’t an option. (I’d been a little surprised when I’d learned of the dwindling ranks within Forza, actually. But after I thought about it, I began to understand. It’s a hard life. And what sounds like fun on a Nintendo GameCube loses a lot of its appeal in the harsh light of reality.)
    I could try to hide the body myself—getting my new alimentatore to give me a hand with the heavy lifting—but that plan involved schlepping the body out of the high school, and that was too risky for my taste. I’ve wanted a lot of things in my life, but a future in prison was not one of them.
    No, my best bet was to simply clean up any evidence of the fight, wipe off my fingerprints, and leave. The body was just a body now, so whoever discovered it would most likely believe that Sinclair had fallen victim to an unfortunate accident. I just needed to head up to the gym, find my kids, do my Mommy-At-Family-Day routine, and try my damnedest not to look distracted.
    When it was time to head back to Coastal Mists, I’d feign concern and start a search. I could come back then and discover the tragedy. I probably still wouldn’t win volunteer of the year (I mean, I had been in charge of the man), but I doubted anyone would suspect I’d killed him. I was on the PTA, after all.
    On that note, I got busy cleaning up, wiping off fingerprints and picking up the junk that had scattered from my purse. I took the screwdriver, too, for good measure.
    My forensic concerns allayed as much as possible, I gathered my things. The book was too tall to fit neatly in my purse, so I took off my cardigan and tossed it between the shoulder straps so it lay over the top of my bag, hiding the section of leather than peeked out from the Dooney &