Page 54 of When I Accidentally Summoned a Demon

He went completely crazy during “Sympathy for the Devil,” and I didn’t get him to calm down until I played “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” Lucifer’s defeat apparently bringing him a great deal of comfort.

And now, in the car, it’s a refreshing change from all of Bethie’s children’s music. He cried. Genuine, authentic tears at Bring Me to Life by Evanescence. I love his opinions. And how he prefers anything with “real instruments and genuine human suffering.”

I switch to KPop Demon Hunters to break him out of it.

The first time, he hated the premise—until he discovered Rumi was half demon and watched her ultimately embrace that part of herself. Then he was hooked. Bethie’s obsessive movie phases mean he’s probably seen it a thousand times by now, though he still considers the ending “emotionally insufficient.” Oh, he was thrilled at the idea of a sequel. But learning it would take three years had him accusing the studio of mortal torture.

Valefar also asks questions about everything outside the window. The logging trucks. The roadside fruit stand we pass. The way the trees change as we get closer to the coast.

He asks about my childhood—what did you love, Vesper, specifically, before anyone told you what to love—and I find myself telling him things I haven’t said out loud in years. By now, I’ve shared so much with him, but there always seems to be more.

I tell him about the summer I spent at the library. The way I used to draw maps of imaginary places in the margins of my school notebooks. Or how I collected pretty rocks and made witch soups in the woods behind my house. How I wrote spells in my notebooks. And spent a summer at the library researching goddesses like Hecate and Lilith. Something good little Catholic girls certainly should not do.

He listens intently, like nothing else exists but me.

He already learned about Bethie’s first smile, her first laugh, and how she learned to take her first steps. But I share how she once handed a stranger’s dog an entire granola bar she’d been saving for herself and then cried for twenty minutes about it because she hadn’t meant to give it all.

His tail is in my hair again by the time I finish the story. He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “She is extraordinary.”

“She really is,” I agree.

“Just like her mother.”

A quick sigh leaves my throat, but I focus on the road, or I’ll risk the tears.

The coast opens up ahead of us—grey-green water visible now between the trees, the sky a flat silver that makes everything look like the inside of an oyster shell. But the terror creeps in my blood. And it’s not about the demons or the stone or the crypt waiting for us.

I’m terrified because losing him would be the hardest thing I have ever survived. Harder than rebuilding myself. I spent years building walls strong enough to make sure loss could never destroy me again.

And Bethie comes first—past, present, and future—but the thought of losing Valefar is one my mind cannot follow to the end. It just stops. Like a word I can’t force myself to say.

But he said them.

Last night, when he thought I was sleeping, I heard his whisper, and it echoed through me like a cathedral bell. After everything with my ex, I swore off dating. A thirty-one-year-old single mom and business owner doesn’t have much time for dating, regardless. So I’ve focused solely on the shop and Bethie. It’s always been enough, but I never could have imagined what would be more than enough.

The words are there, on the tip of my tongue. They’re simply waiting for the moment I’m brave enough to let them out. And I have the strangest feeling they won’t stay contained forever.

The GPS chimes. In four hundred feet, turn left.

St. Brendan’s Catholic Cemetery appears through the passenger window first—old iron fencing gone soft with rust, rows of pale headstones disappearing into a low coastal fog, a stand of cedar trees along the far edge older than anything I could put a number to. The church beside it is small and white, so still, it seems as if it’s been praying for a very long time.

I pull in through the main gate and cut the engine. We sit for a moment in the quiet.

“The crypt,” I say.

“It will be below the church, most likely,” Valefar says. He scans the building, his head slightly tilted, and something in him shifts—alert, focused, the same quality he had in the kitchen with the pan in his hand. “Or beneath the oldest section of the grounds.” He opens the door. “Shall we?”

I get out. The air hits me, cold and salt-sharp and smells of fog and old stone. I love the scent. Maybe we’ll take a little drive and bring Bethie this way sometime.

Valefar comes around the front of the car and falls into step beside me, close enough that his arm brushes mine. At least the ground doesn’t seem to hurt him. The gravel crunches under our shoes.

He catches me staring and squeezes my hand. “It is like a faint ache, Ves. But closer to you, it’s like breathing the air of Eden.”

I shake my head with an airy laugh before leaning into him. I’m so whipped for this Big Guy. He’s a demon. He’s immortal. And he’s being hunted. Everything is against us. I know I should be more prudent.

But when you’ve spent years forging yourself into a blade just to survive, and someone comes along who doesn’t try to dull you—he simply becomes the shield—you fight like hell to keep that shield.

Along the eastern wall of the church, almost hidden behind an overgrowth of lichen-covered stone, a door is set directly into the ground—iron handle, stone frame, inconspicuous.