Page 4 of Chaos Demons

“Yeah right, Mom.” She shook her head. “Look, I’m just home for a while. I’m sure I’ll find another guy soon, then I’ll be out of your hair and you can go back to your butler and whatever else you’re doing these days.”

She spun away from me, picked up her two cat carriers, and hurried up to her room.

Crap. I’d forgotten she had the two cats. What were their names again…? She’d named them after Egyptian goddesses: Sekhmet and Bast.

I guess we’d see how well they got along with Kerberos.

God, I hoped they didn’t cause too much trouble.

Eva stormed up the stairs past Grey who was on his way back down.

“Trouble?” he asked as he grabbed more of her things.

I sighed. “With her… always.”

“I heard that!” Eva shouted from upstairs.

Fuck.

I needed to be… somewhere else for a moment.

I grabbed my tea and went through the kitchen and back room out onto the small terrace that overlooked our small garden plot. This late into October almost everything was dead, but the colorful leaves that had fallen from the neighbor’s trees created a patchwork blanket of reds, yellows, and oranges on the ground.

“Oh… Eva.” I sighed heavily.

I tried to recall this Trent guy she’d been seeing. I’d only met him once or twice, briefly. He was older than Eva. She’d only just turned seventeen when she’d left with him, and he’d been in his mid-twenties. He was a biker… or something. His loud motorcycle had roared up outside whenever he’d come to pick her up and he had bad boy written all over him. Their age difference alone had made me cringe. She hadn’t even met thehalf-your-age-plus-sevencriteria for him. Though… I couldn’t really use that anymore since my guys were all thousands of years older than me.

I sighed. Had I been wrong about Trent?

Although, from what Eva said, it didn’t sound like it, and I was curious about what he’d done to piss her off.

Eva had a hair-trigger temper and was easy to set off, but I got the impression that whatever had happened hadn’t been her fault. There were any number of things a guy could do to piss off his girl. Most of them were things I didn’t want to think about in relation to my daughter. Then, I panicked for just a moment, wondering if Eva was pregnant.

I’d had my first child at seventeen, and I recalled being particularly pissy to my one remaining adoptive parent around that time.

When I’d finally told my father I was pregnant… he’d had a heart attack and died.

My mom had passed a year earlier, and I still believed it had been my horrible behavior that had driven my adoptive parents into an early grave.

But I was fairly certain Eva was on the pill. That much at least I’d been able to instill in her before she’d left home. Though, if she was like me, the pill wasnota guaranteed countermeasure. I’d had two kids while on the pill. Now I insisted on condoms. That was especially true of my daemon lovers. Daemon men, it seemed, were particularly potent. Though that had meant getting special-order condoms for Ramsey because his cock was particularly… extraordinary.

If Evawaspregnant…

I sighed. If she was, she wouldn’t tell me. I wouldn’t find out until she was showing, assuming she was even living here by then.

I might never know if she found some other guy and left before her baby bump showed up. And I couldn’t ask her. That would only start another fight.

I just had to hope that wasn’t the reason — or part of the reason — she was home now.

Maybe I’d see if Reia had any thoughts on how to talk to Eva. My youngest child had always been more of an adult than I’d been. Perhaps she knew how to reach her sister. Though… to be fair, Reia and Eva had never really hit it off as sisters, so Reia might be as in-the-dark as I was.

“Fuck me,” I whispered, leaning on the railing of the small terrace.

Then I stood up suddenly and turned to go inside. Eva may not want to hear much from me, but there was one thing Ineededto tell her: that I was a daemon now and that she may be one too.

I left my tea — mostly untouched — in the kitchen and raced upstairs to her room, barging in… which in hindsight was a big mistake.

Eva lay curled up on her bed, clutching a pillow and sobbing. I stopped dead. Whatever this Trent guy had done, it had really hurt her. My heart broke. My poor baby! I—

---