Chapter 6
Chapter Six
CONNOR
“Thanks, Uncle Norval. You’re a champion cockblocker. Could you sit down and shut up for a while?”
“No! I’m going to take over. You’re a good hunter, boy, but your interpersonal skills are terrible.”
“I come by it naturally. An inherited trait,” I say dryly.
“Sorry to interrupt, Mr.… Norval,” Kieran says calmly, “but did Joe happen to mention the amount of energy needed to maintain a corporeal form? You can only do it for limited stretches of time, and it will exhaust you. I’m sure we’re going to need your expertise later, when the time comes to actually deal with the gateway—or if anything else comes through it—so maybe Connor could handle this bit…
with you advising him in your ghost form. ”
I could just kiss him. And not just because Uncle Norval is right and I do have a thing for redheads with freckles.
“Oh ho,” Uncle Norval says. “Is this true, Joe?”
Joe, scowling fiercely as usual, nods. “It took us a while to work it out. On a good day, if you’re well-rested, you’ll get about two hours of corporeal time. All up, that is. You can break it into shorter segments.”
As I watch, Uncle Norval seems to fade. There’s nothing actually different about how he looks, but to my psychic eye, he’s less defined.
“Don’t just stand there with your mouth open,” he demands. “Get on with it!”
Sure. Of course.
Trying to block him out as he goes back to muttering with Joe about the incompetence of the current generation, I slump back in my seat.
“Uh… Connor, do you think I should close the estate until the gateway has been dealt with?” Kieran ventures. His face is flushed bright red, probably because of what Uncle Norval said, and he doesn’t quite meet my gaze.
“Not unless you want to close permanently,” I tell him. “The gateway can’t be closed. We can take steps to make it safer, which I will, but it’s going to be open unless it closes itself.”
“It can do that?” He forgets to avoid me and looks right into my eyes.
“Yes. Some gateways close naturally over time. But it usually takes a few hundred years.”
He deflates, his obvious disappointment causing a pang in my chest. “There goes that idea.” He sighs. “Okay. You were telling us about containment circles.”
“I was? Oh yeah. So the first circles that were developed were containment circles. They would hold the demons in place while hunters or mediums banished them. The number of hunters and mediums being killed by demons decreased by a lot, so they started looking at other ways they could use circles. One enterprising person came up with the idea of a circle that would drag a demon into it, so instead of having to either lure a demon into a pre-drawn circle or somehow draw the circle around the demon while trying not to be killed by it, they could step back, draw the circle, and suck the demon in.”
Josh squints. “Was the person who came up with this idea drunk at the time?”
“Possibly.” I shrug. “Most of what we know has been passed down by oral tradition, and there does seem to be a lot of mention of taverns and wine and mead. But they actually made it work, and that was the first summoning circle.”
“Whoa, whoa, you mean like to summon a demon?” Kieran runs a hand through his hair. “It was invented by the good guys?”
“Exactly. It started out good but got twisted. They discovered that the circle didn’t just summon the demon when it was nearby but could summon it from anywhere on Earth.
Which was great news, because there weren’t that many hunters, and travel back then was hard and took a long time.
So a group of them decided they’d just take turns creating circles, summoning demons, and if they turned up, banishing them.
They figured eventually they’d have summoned all the demons on Earth and none would appear in the circle.
It took them a while to realize the power of the circle was pulling demons through gateways. ”
“This is what you meant before? About demons needing to come through gateways, but not needing to open them every time?” Daniel’s brow is furrowed and he’s still fidgeting with his hands.
“Yes. Because there are already open gateways, when a demon is summoned—like when Emma summoned your soul-eater—they’re kinda sucked through the nearest open gateway and into the circle that summoned them.
In Emma’s case, the circle she used was purely for summoning, with no containment element, so the demon was completely free, and it killed her. ”
“But soul-eater can’t directly kill,” Skye points out. “You said that, and it was what the ghosts noticed too.”
I shake my head. “They can’t, except for the person who summoned them.
There’s a direct link from a summoner to a demon; a soul link.
To power a circle, you need to use a tiny bit of your soul energy, and that connects the demon to you.
People who know what they’re doing have shields and safeguards.
Not to mention, they make sure they’ve used a containment circle.
Emma, from what you’ve said, was just an ordinary human dabbling in things she knew little about, and so the demon she summoned was able to suck her soul from her body without having to kill her first.”
“Is that what killed her? Losing her soul?” Kieran whispers, and I can’t help reaching out to squeeze his hand.
“It’s not like TV. A body can’t survive without a soul. If it helps, she wouldn’t have felt any pain. She may not even have known she was successful in summoning the demon before it killed her.” I look around at their shell-shocked faces and decide to speed up the explanation.
“So the point I’m making is, Emma didn’t open the gateway.
She summoned the demon, and it came through wherever the nearest gateway was at the time—I’d need to check—and was sucked into her circle.
That circle couldn’t contain it, so it took her soul and—” I take a deep breath.
This is going to be a slap in the face. “—it opened the gateway.”
There’s a moment of dead silence while they all try to understand what I’m saying.
“The demon opened the vortex?” Josh demands. “The one in the Garden Suite right now? The demon opened that?”
I nod. “I could see it immediately. That’s part of the reason why it can’t be closed. Demons know we try to close gateways, so they’re as rough and vicious as possible when they open them, do as much damage as they can.”
“Why did the demon open it?” Kieran asks. “And if they can open gateways, why aren’t they just opening them to come to Earth? Why do they need to use the existing ones?”
“He asks good questions,” Uncle Norval says. “Beginner questions, but good ones.”
“He’s done right by us,” Joe adds. “They all have. Sometimes they’re difficult, but they’re young still.”
I ignore them, and from the way Josh winces, I’m guessing he’s trying to do the same.
“Gateways can’t be opened from the otherworld,” I explain.
“We don’t know why, but they can only be opened from this side.
As for why the demons like to open gateways when they’re here, we guard all the known open gateways.
If they want to get here without being summoned, they need to find or create unguarded gateways.
The first thing any demon tries to do when it gets to Earth is open a new gateway—more than one, if it has the strength. ”
Kieran stands and paces. There’s not a lot of room, especially considering how many of us are here, but he gives it a good shot anyway. “So Emma summoned the demon, the demon took her soul, instantly killing her, and then it opened a gateway so it and its friends could come and go as they pleased?”
“In a nutshell.” I watch his ass as he paces away. The suit pants he’s wearing aren’t as well-tailored as I’d like, but it’s still a great view.
Someone clears their throat, and I glance over to see Skye giving me an “are you kidding?” look. I shrug. Things might seem terrible to them, but this is really nothing. I haven’t even had to use my kit yet.
“Why didn’t we get more demons, then?” Kieran asks, and I turn my attention back to him. “In fifty years, there was only that first soul-eater and then the body-hopper.”
“Body-hoppers aren’t demons,” I correct. “And I don’t know. If I was going to guess, I’d say that wall thing your ghosts put up saved your bacon. But I wouldn’t want to rely solely on that, since it’s clearly not solid enough to stop anything from coming through.”
With a sigh, he sinks back into his chair. “Okay. Okay, what are our options? Not that I’m not grateful for the history lesson and all the demon info, but I can’t see how it can help us.”
As if on cue, my phone chimes in my pocket. I hold up a finger to Kieran and fish it out.
Gabe:
Yep. Hey, look who’s home for the weekend.
The screen fills with a selfie of three grinning men.
Well, one man and two boys, though they’d whine if they heard me call them that.
My baby brother and Gabe’s are both juniors at Franklin U this year and think they’re hot shit.
The fact is, it’s only a few weeks into the semester and they’ve already come home for the weekend.
They’re going to need a lot of toughening up if they want to be hunters.
We probably shouldn’t have coddled them so much.
Another message appears on the screen.
Gabe:
The boys want to Facetime you. Okay?
“Not to nag or anything, but we’re kind of on tenterhooks here,” Skye says politely. When I glance over, there’s a big dose of “fuck you” in his expression. I really think I’m going to like him.
“Sorry, just give me a sec. This is relevant to you all.”
Not right now. Give me an hour? I’ll call you. Also, I have an open, unguarded gateway. Consider yourself assigned.
I rest the phone on my knee, knowing it’s not going to take him long to message back. “To sum up everything I’ve said so far about gateways: demons come through them, demons can be summoned through them, and some can’t be closed. We guard those ones carefully—”
My phone chimes, and I glance down.
Gabe:
Where? Denver?