Chapter 9
Quinn
Icouldn’t sit still in the back of the limo parked on the tarmac. Rollick had insisted on going to collect my parents on his own, since he could travel through the rifts to reach Jacksonville in a matter of minutes, faster than even the private jet he’d be taking Mom and Dad on to return to the area near his bunker. But I could only imagine how confused and terrified they’d be once some stranger had forced them to leave their home, no matter what he said to them.
Crag had commandeered the seat next to me, peering out the car windows watchfully and rubbing my shoulders with his solid hand when I shifted in my seat for the hundredth time. Lance had gotten restless himself and gone out to prowl along the edges of the airfield, even though we were well away from L.A. and anywhere the leviathan was likely to send his minions searching for us now.
Torrent’s voice carried from the front passenger seat, speaking into a cellphone in his usual low, even tone but getting a bit louder here and there as he added emphasis to his message. “Yes, I know the data you’re seeing might not show any reason for concern yet, but our experimental systems have been accurate in the past. I’m only asking that you keep a closer eye on the situation than usual. I thought it was important to convey a warning, given how serious the potential consequences are.”
When he hung up, I leaned forward in the expansive back area of the limo. “Are they listening to you?”
Torrent glanced back with a grimace. “So far, all of the monitoring stations I’ve spoken to have been skeptical, but at least we’re putting the possibility into their heads. They’ll be primed to notice any concerning changes in the weather patterns or tidal behavior.”
I blew out my breath in a huff, but that outcome might be the best I could have hoped for. We couldn’t whisk everyone across the entire coastline away from the threat of a tidal wave, but there was more chance of saving lives if the people watching for problems had advance warning and could spot the signs of trouble sooner.
A distant rumble reached my ears. A jet appeared against the stark blue of the sky. As it soared toward us, dipping lower, I tensed in my seat.
It was right on time. I guessed Rollick hadn’t had that much trouble getting my parents on board. I wasn’t sure if that boded well for the methods he’d needed to resort to or not. I had a flash of an image of him working some demonic magic on them to knock them out, slinging them over his monstrous shoulders, and hauling them back to the plane like that.
Well, he couldn’t have gone quite that far. I was at least sure that he wouldn’t have walked around downtown Jacksonville in full demon form.
I still didn’t know how I was going to explain any of this situation to them: my absence, my new companions, why they were in danger. The truth sounded totally insane, but there were no alternate explanations that sounded more normal. My general plan was to start out as vague as I could get away with and only get into details where Mom and Dad pushed for them.
They trusted me. They knew I’d never gotten into any significant trouble or made up wild stories before. But who knew how far that trust would get me, especially after I’d vanished on them for weeks on end?
The roar expanded until it filled my ears. Crag lowered his hand to wrap his fingers around mine. “Do you want us to stay with you for this or would you rather they didn’t see us?”
I looked at him, nearly human but huge and with that jaw of literal stone, and at Torrent, with his tentacles braced on either side of his waist. Torrent could probably have sat reasonably comfortably without his extra appendages out for a short time, since he didn’t need to put any significant weight on his lower legs in his current position, but I didn’t like asking him to.
Anyway, even if they’d been totally human, I couldn’t imagine my parents being super comfortable with even more strange men taking part in the conversation beyond the one who’d essentially kidnapped them.
“I think it’ll be better if I talk to them on my own first,” I said. “But I might need backup at some point… if I need to prove the supernatural side of the story to them. So, I guess stick around in the shadows and follow along with the conversation, if you don’t mind? If I need you, I’ll make that clear.”
“That’s no problem,” Torrent said without hesitation, shooting me a tight smile that seemed to say, Good luck. Crag nodded. As the private jet touched down on the runway with a faint bump of its wheels, both men slipped away into the patches of darkness within the limo. I knew Lance would rejoin us shortly too, heading our way from the moment he noticed the plane’s arrival.
Not for the first time, I wished I could still sense them in the shadows the way they could track each other’s presence. Even with all this supernatural power of my own, I was still nearly as unaware as any other human being.
The plane slowed to a stop only about twenty feet from where the limo was parked. The door swung open with a soft hiss, lowering into a short flight of stairs. Rollick appeared first, the sunlight gleaming off his tawny hair. He drew himself a little taller and beckoned behind him, and two other figures stepped hesitantly into view.
My chest constricted at the sight of my parents. It’d been more than a month since I’d last set eyes on them. Which wasn’t that long in the grand scheme of things—I’d gone longer without visiting them in person while I was at college, although we’d usually video chatted once a week then. But so much had happened in the past several weeks that it might as well have been years.
And they had no idea about any of what I’d experienced yet.
The confusion was clear on both of their faces as they followed Rollick down the stairs and across the pavement to the car. I wavered for a second and then gave in to the impulse to push open the door and meet them outside. Let them see me sooner rather than later.
The moment I stepped out, Mom’s eyes widened. “Quinn!” She rushed forward to meet me and flung her arms around me, hugging me against her compact frame.
Dad hurried after her on his longer legs, his pale hair unusually rumpled as if Rollick had pulled them out of bed for the trip. The second Mom had released me, he hugged me next, with a tight squeeze that had a bit of a tremor to it.
“We’ve been so worried,” he said roughly. “Where have you been?”
“We tried texting and calling,” Mom put in. “I don’t like to interfere with your life on campus, but after a while with no response, I checked in with the college and found out you hadn’t participated in any of your classes since last month. After that we filed a missing persons report, but they won’t do much for adults. No one had seen you.”
She sounded so relieved and frantic at the same time that my heart ached. I gripped her arm and Dad’s and guided them toward the back of the limo. “I’m so sorry. There’s been so much going on—I know Rollick will have told you a little about it—and I was afraid if I got in touch with you, I might send the wrong kind of attention your way. Put you in danger. Unfortunately, now you’re in danger anyway. But we’re going to get you someplace safe, and I’ll explain everything as well as I can.”
Mom balked a little at the car, peering over at Rollick, who’d stopped by the driver’s side door with a mild expression. She turned back to me, lowering her voice to a murmur. “I don’t understand. He said you’ve been helping against some group that wants to attack the country? Who even is he? How did you meet him? He isn’t forcing you into some kind of cult situation or… or I don’t even know what, is he?”
I swallowed hard and nudged them toward the car. “No. And that’s a pretty good basic explanation. I want us to get going, but I’ll try to give you the whole story while we’re in the car.”
My parents both hesitated for a few seconds longer, but then they climbed into the back of the limo with me following. They sat on the seat facing backwards, and I took the one across from them where I’d been sitting before. As Rollick started the engine and the car rolled forward, I could tell they were taking in the luxurious trappings of the vehicle with even more bewilderment.
“Rollick has a lot of resources,” I said. “He set up this safe house for you too.” I didn’t have to mention it’d originally been for me. “But—let me start at the beginning.”
It wasn’t that simple, of course. At a halting pace, I laid out how I’d first been attacked back home in the park near their house, the way the group of men I was now with had come to my rescue, the discovery that my heart gave me unexpected powers, and a summarized version of the enemies we’d realized we were up against. With each additional piece of the tale, my parents’ expressions shifted from confused to utterly bewildered.
“I know it sounds crazy,” I said for what might have been the tenth time as I wrapped up the truncated version of events. “I’d think it was crazy too. But I’ve been living in this craziness for weeks now. I know the shadowkind are real. I know how much destruction the really monstrous ones can cause. Maybe you’ve even seen reports of the strange stuff that’s been going on in L.A.”
Mom and Dad exchanged a glance. “They said there’ve been attacks by wild animals,” Mom said. “Not monsters.”
“That’s the best way they can explain it. No one would believe anything else, right?”
Dad was frowning. “You’ve always had a good head on your shoulders, Quinn. You have to be able to see that none of this fits with what you know about the real world.”
“Yeah,” I said with a humorless chuckle. “That’s because there’s too much of the real world that we weren’t aware of. I… Let’s wait until we get to the safe house, and then I can really show you.” Somehow I didn’t think they’d handle an encounter with my shadowkind men in the confines of the car all that well. Better not to freak them out too much while Rollick needed to concentrate on driving.
Mom leaned forward to grasp my hand. “Whatever’s going on, we’ll get through it together. I’m just glad you’re here with us again.”
I smiled back at her and was about to say something intended to be reassuring when a hitch in my chest stole my breath. The increasingly familiar pressure clamped around my heart, tight enough that my head momentarily spun.
I fought to keep my expression blank, but Dad’s eyes flickered with concern. “Are you all right, kiddo?”
“Yeah,” I lied, speaking slowly so that I could get out the words without my voice turning ragged. I pushed my posture a little straighter despite the urge to hunch in on myself, unable to stop my jaw from clenching briefly at the pain. A deeper discomfort wound around my gut.
I wasn’t going to let them know that my heart was giving out on me on top of everything else going on. They didn’t need worries about my shortened lifespan hanging over their heads when there was a much more pressing problem threatening all of us. If I still could spare them one little bit of anguish, I was going to do everything in my power to do so.
Mom’s brow had knit. I forced my smile back into place, willing it to stay relaxed, taking careful breaths through my nose. The worst of the pressure eased off, but a prickling sensation remained, spreading farther through my chest and across my back and shoulders.
I was lucky all three of my other men hadn’t sprung out of the shadows to make sure I was okay. They’d no doubt been able to tell my heart had acted up again. But it wasn’t as if they could have done anything to help regardless.
“I’m really glad to see you again too,” I went on, easier now that the vise in my chest had released. “It was really hard not being able to talk to you, knowing you’d be worried. I was just even more scared that the monsters that want to hurt me would realize they could use you to get to me. I didn’t want to totally upend your lives the way we’re having to now.”
“Don’t you worry about us,” Mom said firmly. “Whatever you need, we’ll figure out how to make it work. That’s our job, sweetheart, not yours.”
Sudden tears pricked at the back of my eyes. They had no idea how much I’d worked at keeping our family time happy and worry-free all through the past several years. How much responsibility I’d felt not to drag them down any more than my childhood illness already had.
When we reached the bunker, my parents climbed out of the car and peered around across the desolate desert. I led them over to the door in the small shack-like structure that was the only part of the building above ground. When Rollick unlocked the door, they halted, looking down at the stairs that would take them under the earth.
“This is all a little much,” Dad said. “What exactly is going to happen to us here?”
“Nothing,” I promised. “It’s just a little apartment, basically, with everything you could need to stay comfortable. We’ve set it up with a TV and a computer so you can follow the news, and Rollick made sure there’s a cell signal if you’re near the top of the stairs so I’ll be able to call you and touch base while we’re… trying to deal with the rest of the problem. Hopefully you won’t need to stay for too long. There’s no way any of the creatures after us should be able to find you down here.”
Honestly, the setup was a bit overkill since the silver and iron protections around the place were mainly there to prevent shadowkind from sensing my sorcery magic. Mom and Dad didn’t have any of that. But the protections would also repel any shadowkind that ventured near here, and being under the ground would keep my parents completely out of view. I couldn’t complain about them being too safe.
But I could see from the tightening of their faces that this was one step too far without further evidence. Sucking in a breath, I glanced at Rollick. He raised his eyebrows in question.
No. I didn’t think a massive naked demon would be the best example of the shadowkind to present them with first.
“Lance,” I said, knowing all three of the other men would be nearby. “Could you come out so my parents can see that shadowkind beings like you are actually real?”
Lance wavered into view a few feet away from us without hesitation, in his human-like form but with his hands held up, clawed fingers splayed to show them off. He gave my parents his usual jaunty, crooked grin. “Quinn is working very hard to protect you. And because you’re important to her, we are too.”
My mom blinked, taking in his talons, and Dad gripped her shoulder. Before they could make some excuse about makeup or prosthetics, I tipped my head toward Lance. “Show them your dragon form.”
He bobbed his head and stretched forward, shifting effortlessly with a rippling of his jewel-toned scales over his now-reptilian body. He twined around on the dry earth and flashed a fanged grin at my parents.
Mom let out a little shriek and clapped her hand over her mouth. Dad was simply gaping. I walked over to Lance and rested my hand on his smoothly scaled neck, giving him a gentle stroke with my fingers. He turned his head to nuzzle my hip.
“I—I don’t understand,” Mom mumbled.
“I know,” I said. “It’s crazy. But it’s also real. Wait until you meet the other friends I’ve made.”
Both of my parents stared at me, momentarily lost for words. But I could see the change in their eyes as disbelief gave way to horrified acceptance.