“Sounds good, have a go—” But the line went dead before I could finish. “So rude,” I mumbled to myself. Maybe dating the younger Butler was preferable after all. He didn’t grunt.

14

The next day, I stopped by Father Carrow’s on my way to work. He was in his front yard watering plants. He glanced up to watch me step out of the car and smiled as I approached.

“Good afternoon, Father.”

“Cadybell, what a nice surprise. On your way to work?” He rested the garden hose trigger on the porch steps and took a red bandana out his back pocket to wipe his brow. He was wearing a large floppy straw hat and dark blue pants.

“Yep. Watering your special shrub? What’s it called? Yesterday …”

“Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. See, it still has all three flower colors on the side. The dark purple are the youngest, lilac middle-aged, and white are the oldest.”

I leaned forward to breathe it in. The shrub stood the same height as me. “It smells so good. I can’t believe it’s still blooming.”

“Lots of fertilizer and love, my dear. How’s it going with Lon?” If I didn’t know better, I would’ve said there was a little mischievous sparkle in his eye when he asked. I ignored it and answered casually, “Not bad. I was going to give you the latest update on the demon.”

“Has he found it already? I told you he was good.”

“He’s been working tirelessly, but no luck yet.”

Father Carrow picked up his hose and continued spraying around the base of the flower bed. “Oh, I’m sorry. What’s the update?”

“Well, I found out that the description of the talons was wrong. Remember how I told you that it had two sets of arms?”

“Yes, and long talons on all of them.”

“Turns out the talons might be glass.”

“Glass?” He raised his floppy hat and scrunched up his face at me.

“Or a glasslike substance.”

“That’s a new one for me, dear. I’ve never come across anything like that before in my studies.”

Rats. He finished working on the flowering shrub, then moved up a couple of steps to water three hanging baskets on his porch. They were in a precarious position, and he was having trouble reaching them. “Here, let me do it,” I offered, setting my purse down. He relented and perched on the steps while I watered. I began telling him how one of the talons might be missing.

“Extracted like a tooth, supposedly. What Lon and I have been puzzling over is why. I mean, if the demon was just injured, then the talon would be broken, right? It seems like if someone or something pulled it out from the root, then they might have wanted it for some reason.”

What I refrained from saying was that Lon and I really couldn’t figure out why someone would remove the talon and use it to kill when they could just command the demon to kill for them. The good Father hadn’t yet asked exactly why I needed to find the albino demon, so it was probably best that I omit any gory details regarding murder.

He thought about my question while he removed his hat and fanned it to cool his face. “I’ve never heard of a demon talon being a sought-after object. Still, it does remind me of the old fairy tales in children’s books. Have you ever heard of Struwwelpeter? It’s a famous German children’s book.”

“No. What’s it about?”

“It’s a group of nasty stories with descriptive pictures meant to frighten children into behaving. Kids who play with matches burn and die, kids who suck their thumbs get them cut off by a wicked tailor.”

“Yikes.”

“It was a Victorian-era book, and there were several copy-cat versions that followed once it gained popularity. One of those had several stories about demons. I had a rare copy of it as a child—it was my grandfather’s. I’ve told you my mother’s family was German.”

“Oh, yes, that’s right.” I finished watering the last of the hanging baskets and began winding up the hose to put it away.

“Anyway, the book was written in German, so I couldn’t read it, but the pictures were very descriptive. In one of the stories, a wicked witch gets angry at a girl who goes traipsing through her flowers on her way home from school every day. So the witch summons a demon to attack a little girl in her bed every night, biting off one finger before he disappears. On the fifth night, she only has her thumb remaining on her left hand. To stop the demon from taking it, she cuts off one of his horns and hides it in the woods. The next night, the demon doesn’t come, because he can only be summoned by the person possessing the horn.”

I turned the squeaky faucet handle to shut off the water, then sat down next to Father Carrow on the steps.

“Do you think that could be true? That my demon can’t be summoned, even if we find the name and classification, because we need the talon to complete the summoning?”

“I really don’t know, but it’s an interesting notion, don’t you think? Fairy tales sometimes contain small gems of truth, no matter how outlandish they might seem. Remember that children’s book about the Lost Colony of Roanoke that was published in the early 1900s? It said that all the colonists who disappeared were really elves who moved west along with the Indians.”

I gathered up my purse and car keys. “Pretty crazy that something as silly as a kids’ book would be so on the nose.”

“Exactly. If people only knew that it was really Earthbound demons and not elves …”