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The summer Mary Campbell was fourteen, her father was gone almost all the time, one hunt leading into another. He'd call, of course, check in from motels and safe houses all over the midwest, let them know which drop-box to use for mail. She could hear when he'd come home; the late-night clatter of bags and weapons hitting the floor in the foyer and her parents' muted voices. She caught them kissing one time, her mother's hands all the way up inside her father's shirt, and she hurried back to her own bedroom, wishing she'd never left."Your father should try it sometime," Mary's mother muttered one evening as she pulled a bubbling casserole dish out of the oven. "He should try staying here while I go out on the road for weeks at a time. He should try running the store and the house. You would think he's forgotten how we met." She shook her head and sighed then grabbed three plates out of the cabinet and handed them to Mary. "Set the table and go get Nana, please."Mary had heard the story of how her parents met more times than she could bear. The two of them tracking down the same malevolent spirit, and when they ran into each other at the local records office he asked her out. She turned him down cold. He was insolent, her mother said, and her father always admitted that she caught him looking at her legs. That night, when they both turned up at the old, abandoned house, she saved him, wriggling through the narrow basement window to torch the bones before the spirit suffocated him under the weight of an old farmhouse table. He wasn't so insolent with bruised ribs, and she accepted when he asked her out again.They'd hunted together until Mary came along, and sometimes Mary felt like a weight, an anchor holding her mother in Lawrence. But she wasn't the only weight.Mary set the plates out on the table and then went to let Nana Szabo know that dinner was ready. Nana and Papa Szabo had come across the ocean from Europe hoping to escape the familiar spirits, the darkness of the old world and settled in some little town back east. A necromancer stole the life of their first baby, and they chased him halfway across the country before they finally killed him. Nana refused to go back, so they settled in Kansas and returned to the farming life they thought they'd left behind. Mary could just barely remember her mother's father, a tall man with thick black hair and intense eyes. Nobody would tell her how he died, but she remembered her mother crying, her hand outstretched to keep Mary away. After that, Nana Szabo moved in with them, taking up residence in the spare bedroom on the first floor.When Mary was in a quiet mood, she liked to sit in Nana Szabo's room and watch her. She was a still woman, her back bent, but there was something fascinating about the way she would pray a rosary, the way her lips formed silent words, her fingers working over the beads. Her fingers were good with a needle, too. She stitched colorful designs onto blouses for Mary--flowers and animals and symbols Mary didn't understand. Part of Mary wanted to resist wearing them--not normal, not the same as all the other girls in school--but after all peasant blouses were in style, and they were pretty. Nana tsked at the dungarees Mary wore with the blouses but smiled all the same, her eyes bright, her fingers pressing together as though she was already holding another needle between them.Grandma Campbell lived in her own small home not a mile from the house where Mary grew up, and she kept a garden with protective herbs, kept most of Grandpa's old weapons in the seat of a carved wooden deacon's bench in her parlor. Every six months she cleaned the weapons and then cleaned her silver, and Mary's mother always sent her down to help. She'd sit on the floor and put her elbow grease to work along with the gun oil and silver polish. Grandma liked to tell stories: how Grandpa Campbell had learned to hunt ghosts and monsters from his own father, the hills back east full of old, angry spirits. He'd drowned before Mary was even born, hunting a water spirit in the Missouri River.Mary's father owned a hardware store in downtown Lawrence. Everybody in town called it Sam Campbell's store, but anybody who came to work there learned fast enough that Mrs. Deanna was in charge more often than not. She could remember when she was very little, her father was home for dinner almost all the time, gone away on trips only sometimes on the weekends. But then she started first grade and he started being gone more and more, her mother spending days keeping the store running. Mary missed him, missed the way his voice sounded when he talked on the phone, missed the way he frowned if she told him the boys at school were giving her a hard time, but she was never alone. If her mother had to go open the store up early for a special order, Mary would eat breakfast under the watchful eye of Nana Szabo before she got on the school bus. After school, she'd get off the bus a few blocks earlier and wait at Grandma Campbell's for her mother to pick her up. Grandma Campbell made peanut butter and banana sandwiches for snack and let Mary practice shooting the BB gun into the bales of hay back behind her shed.Now Mary could handle real weapons, and her mother still made her practice hand-to-hand. In the basement, they had thick gym mats, thick enough to protect them from the cold concrete floor. Mary was taller than her mother now, but she got plenty of reminders that height wasn't everything, size wasn't everything. Mary even took her father down once. He was distracted, a little tired, but he hit the mats with a smack that was more satisfying than anything, and he looked at her with a kind of pride she'd never seen him direct at her report cards.Her father practiced down there with other people, sometimes. Other hunters, and they were always men. The outside world of hunting--the world beyond her family--seemed awfully masculine to Mary. If a hunter came by the house, it was almost always an older man in a rattling old pickup with Ford molded in big letters on the back or a younger man in a long, growling muscle car. Her father never let them in the house through the front door, only the outside doors that led straight down to the basement, only when the heavy locks between the basement and kitchen were secured.He never let Mary talk to them, but if she'd had the chance when she was young enough to ask personal questions without being embarrassed she would've asked them where the women were. She liked to watch the hunters from her bedroom window and wonder about who they'd left at home, if they had a home. She never got to hear those men's stories, only her own family's stories. Again and again.The only other man Mary knew in her family was her Uncle Paul, her father's younger brother. He didn't live far away, only in Kansas City, but he didn't come visit very often, not even for Christmas. Mary didn't understand why until the year when he came for Thanksgiving. She woke up to the sound of yelling and crept out into the hallway to listen. Uncle Paul was shouting about how it wasn't right, the things they did. Wasn't right doing it in front of the girl, and it made Mary feel weird inside when she realized that the girl had to be her.~~~The night a man walked on the moon for the first time, Mary watched it alone on the color television in her living room. Nana Szabo was asleep in her bedroom just down the hall and Mom was doing inventory at the store. Dad was out on a hunt and Mom just shook her head when Mary asked her to stay home. Moon landing or no moon landing, they had to keep food on the table and ammo in the lockbox. Mary thought she should've offered to help, but she didn't want to run into the boy from her school who worked there sometimes. He was a year ahead of her and weird and skinny and quiet, but he looked at her sometimes like he wanted to be more than the boy who worked for her dad. He had the name of a rifle, and when he looked at her like that Mary just wanted to shoot him.Later, when the moon wasn't on TV anymore, just a bunch of men talking, Mary wandered out into the yard and laid down on the grass, her knees bent, her fingers and toes playing through the soft-rough surface of the grass underneath her. The yard was as protected as the house, sigils laid deep in the ground, lines of salt in the landscaping timbers, and she could protect herself just fine, even at fifteen. She looked up at the moon and thought about how there couldn't be any ghosts there since nobody had died there yet, unless there really were aliens. And all the other bad things seemed to be some kind of animal or something that used to be a person, so the moon should be empty, safe. Maybe, when they let people start moving there, Mary thought she would go. It was farther than Nana and Papa Szabo had come, farther than just across the ocean, but rockets went so much faster, and anyway it would be worth it.It would be worth it to never have to go on a hunt when she wanted to go to a concert, worth it to have her kids--if she ever had kids--grow up with ghosts and monsters being nothing but scary stories told to make the night go by. On the moon, there wouldn't be so many people, and she could be the best flautist on the whole planet, with nobody telling her to spend her free time studying Latin rather than practicing Mozart.Mary knew there were places a lot closer than the moon that could be that way, places where training was only for exercise. She closed her eyes and felt the earth under her; she imagined that the sun was shining and she was one of those girls on the covers of the college catalogs in the guidance counselor's office, lounging on the grass next to a handsome boy with no shadows in his eyes. She fell asleep there under the moon and dreamed that her whole body turned into a spaceship. Inside her smooth metal body, she carried the water of the Atlantic and the dirt of the eastern mountains, the wide open sky of Kansas.But all around her edges, trying to swallow her as she pushed through the atmosphere, was fire.