Prophecy Girl (Angel Academy) by Cecily White Page B

good cook, or if she liked rainbow sprinkles with her ice cream, or if she minded when I played dress-up in her evening gown collection. I would have killed for a few memories, even the bad ones. The night she died, for example. All I knew was what other people had told me: that there’d been a demon attack, and I had blacked out somewhere in the middle of it. Dr. Evans, the school shrink, used to promise me those memories would return when I was ready. But after a decade of silence, I wasn’t so sure.
    “Hey, Daddy,” I called as the back door opened and closed with a familiar click .
    “Hey, yourself.” He sniffed the air, tossing his briefcase and jacket over the granite-topped island. “Dinner smells great. Extra garlic?”
    “Keeps the vampires out.”
    Bud grimaced. “That’s funny, sweetheart. Did you think that up while fleeing a graveyard?”
    I decided not to explain about the vampire still parked across the street. Since my dad is such a liberal about human causes, I figured he’d probably support the Paranormal Convergence movement, in theory at least, if not vamp-snuggling reality. (Think supernatural ACLU with an interspecies truce thrown in.) Unfortunately, I’d never know. The Peace Tenets weren’t proposed until after Bud left the Guardians, which meant I wasn’t officially allowed to discuss them with him.
    The premise was simple. Turns out the Crossworlders (excuse me, Inferni ) we’d been hunting all these millennia—vampires, werewolves, etc.—weren’t as evil as we’d thought. Sure, they might have some demon blood from whatever infection they’d caught in the Crossworld but their origins were human. So were their souls, if you believed they had souls. The folks at Convergence did, which meant Guardians were now technically responsible for protecting them. Weird, right?
    It wasn’t so bad. Werecreatures can be friendly when it’s not a full moon, and all the vamps really want is a little blood and a safe place to snack. Once the Peace Tenets recognized those needs, the random violence pretty much ended.
    Still, I couldn’t get used to it. Vamps creep me out. If Bud found out we had one parked down the street, he’d probably impale himself trying to make a stake out of the kitchen table. Lisa once said Bud reminded her of a young George Clooney with a little extra paunch around the middle. Frankly, if I had to go up against a vampire, I’d rather have George Clooney.
    I settled into the chair across from him, plopping my elbows on the antique table we’d salvaged after Katrina. My bare toes slid idly along one of the warped legs carved to resemble a lion’s paw, of course, with huge cat knuckles and claws as the feet.
    “So, how was your first day at school?” Bud asked. “Any excitement?”
    “Not a bit,” I lied. That was part of our agreement, by the way. He asked. I lied. “How’d your deposition go?”
    “Eh.” He shrugged. “I have to deliver another appeal in Baton Rouge tomorrow. You have no idea what kind of monsters show up in the legal system.”
    “Do any of them have claw-tipped wings and cloven feet?”
    “No.”
    I smiled. “Then I win.”
    Incidentally, Professor Meeks claims that greater demons take government office all the time, especially here in Louisiana. So Dad might have been wrong about the cloven feet thing. Somehow, it seemed a bad time to point that out.
    “Carol Anselmo called this morning,” he said after a minute of silence. “Lisa told her to remind me that the commencement formal is coming up. She says I should encourage you to go with someone named Lyle.”
    “Good to know. Thanks for the vote.” Note to self: Kill Lisa.
    “So, are you going?”
    “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve got a report to write and that Druidic spellbook isn’t going to translate itself.” I gulped down some water and stuffed another bite of pasta into my mouth. I could tell from the twitch above his left eyelid that he had comments. He set