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“Why?” Jack asked.
Math snorted. “I told you that already. I was bored. Kinney wanted his brother’s wife, so I set them up but made sure she’d resent him. Mallory wanted a child and her husband was infertile, so I told her to fuck her brother-in-law. Only when Tracy was born, it was obvious she wasn’t either brother’s. Everyone got exactly what they wanted, and it made them miserable.”
Sometimes Jack forgot what Math was. Not today.
“Why couldn’t you go to Hell? Get her back yourself?”
Math shrugged. “Until she’s old enough to harvest her own souls, I have to feed her from my power. Usually it doesn’t matter. She’s part of me, after all. However, once she passed out of my control, out of Dale’s custody, that power went with her. I was weak, and if I’d gone into Hell, they’d have known that. Oh and, technically, I should never have made her. Not here. Not yet.”
A chill ran down Jack’s back, but he had grown used to it. He leaned back against Math and watched as Tracy crouched down in front of her dad’s grave. She dug a little hole and dropped something into it that flashed silver.
“Could Zachary have done it?” Jack asked. “Used her power to cross the mirror, to become a demon?”
Math bit his lower lip. It was rare he didn’t have an answer, right or wrong, on the tip of his tongue.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “For a while, maybe.”
“What are you going to do with her?” Jack asked.
Math shrugged. “She’s my child, not my pet,” he said dismissively. “She’ll be fine. You just need to keep her alive until she rips the soul from someone and leaves forever.”
Jack spluttered. “What?”
Math leaned in and kissed him roughly. “You promised,” he said as he sat back. “Remember?”
He pushed himself off the angel and walked away. His feet left dead patches in the grass. Just before he turned the corner, he stopped and looked back.
“Tell her I… am fond of her,” he said stiffly.
“First time I’ve seen you lie,” Jack said. “You love her. In your own way.”
Math tilted his head to consider. Whatever he decided surprised him. “I suppose I… might. Not the way I love you, but… more than I should.”
Then he shrugged, rounded the corner, and was gone. Jack leaned against the broken grave and stared after Math. Demons weren’t meant to love. He didn’t know what it meant if one could, if one even wanted to enough to pretend it did.
A cold hand tucked into his. “Can we go see Mommy?” Tracy asked.
Jack breathed out. His breath was colder than it should be from Math’s lips. He supposed it made no difference to him. He’d never been meant to love Math, and he always had anyway, even when he hated him as well.
“Sure,” he said.
They walked through the cemetery together, the dead man and the demon child.
It started there.
TA MOORE genuinely believed that she was a Cabbage Patch Kid when she was a small child. This was the start of a lifelong attachment to the weird and fantastic. These days she lives in a market town on the Northern Irish coast and her friends have a rule that she can only send them three weird and disturbing links a month (although she still holds that a DIY penis bifurcation guide is interesting, not disturbing). She believes that adding “in space!” to anything makes it at least 40 percent cooler, will try to pet pretty much any animal she meets (this includes snakes, excludes bugs), and once lied to her friend that she had climbed all the way up to Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, when actually she’d only gotten to the beach, realized it was really high, and chickened out.
She aspires to being a cynical misanthrope, but is unfortunately held back by a sunny disposition and an inability to be mean to strangers. If TA Moore is mean to you, that means you’re friends now.
Website: www.nevertobetold.co.uk
Facebook: www.facebook.com/TA.Moores
Twitter: @tammy_moore
By TA Moore
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Published by DSP PUBLICATIONS
www.dsppublications.com
Published by
DSP PUBLICATIONS
5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886 USA
www.dsppublications.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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© 2020 TA Moore
Cover Art
© 2020 TA Moore
Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.
All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact DSP Publications, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or www.dsppublications.com.
Digital ISBN: 978-1-64405-717-9
Digital eBook published April 2020
v. 1.0
Previously published in the Devil Take Me Anthology, January 2019.
Printed in the United States of America