If I can deal with the devil, I thought, I can deal with anything. And if you are listening, Tammy, and I know you are, then hear this: I will fight for you until my last dying breath, whether you hate me or not, I will not lose you.
I stood there in the hallway, just outside her door, trying to decide what to do next. Ultimately, I glanced at another door. My son's door.
***
"Knock, knock," I said, slowly easing the door open. One thing I knew about teen boys: they could be doing homework one moment, and something else entirely the next. That something else is why moms everywhere knock, pause, then open the door slowly. Real slowly. Of course, I took even further precautions...
"You can open your eyes, Mom. Sheesh, I'm just doing homework."
I prayed like hell Danny was giving our son privacy, too, if that were even possible.
"Hi," I said, stepping in and shutting the door behind me, although a shut door was a moot point with Tammy's eavesdropping.
And you should really mind your own business, I thought.
"You okay, Mom?"
"Yes, I'm okay. I was just telling Tammy that she really needed to mind her own business."
"Does she ever talk back? You know, like in your mind? The way I can hear Daddy?"
I frowned at his enthusiasm. "No, I don't think she can do that. She just listens."
"Yeah, I didn't think so. I've never, you know, heard her. But I can kind of feel her in there sometimes. When I catch her snooping around I just think of Miss Penelope."
I knew the name. "Your English teacher?"
"My pretty English teacher. Trust me, all I have to do is think of Miss Penelope and Tammy shoots right out of there, ha ha. Then I can usually hear her gagging in her bedroom. That's what she gets for spying on me."
I giggled, despite what I was hearing. Pretty clever way to get rid of his snooping sister. No teenage girl really wanted to know what's going on in the mind of their teenage brother.
"Well, don't you think Miss Penelope is a little old for you?" I asked.
"It's just a fantasy, Mom. Sheesh, that's what Dad said, too, but then he told me all about a crush he'd had on his math teacher. You should hear the nickname they had for her."
"I'd rather not," I said. I blinked and gathered myself, slightly taken aback by my son's candidness.
Unlike me and other immortals, my son hadn't been possessed by a highly evolved dark master. Now, thanks to Danny, my son presently sported his own dark master in training, as I understood it. Although the thought of Danny being a dark master at anything nearly made me pee myself.
Highly Evolved Douchebag, I thought, and immediately heard the burst of laughter from down the hallway. From Tammy's room.
"Hey, what's so funny?" asked Anthony. "Why's Tammy laughing?"
"It's nothing," I said.
"Are you two making fun of me?"
"No, sweetie. Never."
He looked at me from over crossed arms, his muscular chest pushed up nearly to his chin. His forearms rippled, pulsed. I think he might have grown an inch since the last time I saw him, but that was probably my imagination. Each and every day, he looked more and more like the man he would become, and less like the boy he had just been.
"I want to talk about you, Anthony. Is that okay?"
He shrugged. "If you want."
I sat down on the floor in front of him. I said, "You saw the dog again today."
He nodded. My son was many things, but one of them wasn't telepathic, although his actual hearing seemed to be stronger than most.
"Are you okay?" I asked. "You weren't hurt?"
Anthony shook his head.
"This was the second time you turned into the fire man, right?"
"Fire warrior, Mom. And yes."
"Do you... do you have any questions?"
"Where does he come from? Is he always waiting for me?"
I thought about how to answer that, fully aware that Danny was also looking through my son's own eyes, fully aware that I was talking to two people at once, and not liking any of it. Then again, that's how Allison felt, too, wasn't it? Allison felt that she was talking to two people: myself and Elizabeth. No matter how deep I stamped down the demon bitch within my mind, she was always there, listening. Which was why Allison had cut me off from her thoughts. And I didn't blame her one bit, although it annoyed me to no end.
It was the same with Kingsley, Fang, Dracula, Franklin... we all had entities within us. We all had entities listening and conspiring later, while we slept. One thing I had learned in the past few years was that all immortals, or partial immortals like Kingsley, slept like the dead, whether during the day or night. Either way, we were dead to the world-and during that time the entities within us were free to leave, and free to return from whence they came. And from whence they came was a place beyond time and space, apparently, a space safe from the devil himself. Where this place was, I didn't know. But I suspected it was created from the ether and given life, somehow, similar to how Charlie Reed had created his own fantasy world.