Chapter 4
Chapter Four
FIFTEEN MINUTES EARLIER
“What the actual fucking fuck?” Connor hisses as we move away from the library doors. I steer him quickly into the music room. It’s close enough that we’ll hear the others if they raise their voices but should give us some privacy.
“I know.”
“No, seriously, what the fuck?” Con runs his hands through his hair and paces back and forth agitatedly. “I can’t even process this.”
“You have to. Fast. I can’t do this alone, Con.” I look toward the hand that’s still clutching his phone. “Did you text anyone? Anything?”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t want to seem obvious, and you know I’m shit at texting without looking. I thought about making a call, but in the end I just recorded us all.”
Ten minutes ago, I wouldn’t have been this grateful for that. “Good. Okay. Fuck.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Do you think it’s possible?”
“That someone in the Collective is working with a higher demon to enslave and destroy humanity?” He swallows hard. “I really want to say no.”
Surprise is a slap in the face. “I thought… I was sure you’d say ‘fuck, no,’ then demand I help you banish Marc.” I was positive I’d need to be the voice of reason and talk him into considering that it might be true.
“That’s my first instinct,” he admits. “Jesus, Gabe, he nearly killed me. He could have killed Ian. He’s a higher demon. Our whole lives we’ve been taught not to trust them. This could be part of their plan… or he might just be a sadistic bastard who wants to play with us before killing us.”
“That’s all true.” I wait for the “but.”
“But I’ve been trained to assess things logically too. And…” He hesitates.
“It makes sense.” I finish the thought for him, and it almost hurts to say it.
“Yeah. These last couple months, we’ve been scrambling for information.
Begging the Collective for help. And they’ve been…
less than helpful. How could Cato have been planning this for decades—maybe centuries—and the Collective know nothing?
Not a clue. Not even some little details that made no sense before but suddenly all fit together.
We have thousands of conduits around the world, and Cato’s torturing and exterminating spirits and planning to wipe out whole species, but not one spirit said anything to any of our conduits?
” He shakes his head. “It didn’t add up. ”
I agree, but this is too important for me not to play devil’s advocate. “Why would the spirits tell our conduits?” I counter. “It’s not like any of us could go to the otherworld. Even if we could, there’s no way we could stand against a higher demon. Telling a conduit would be useless.”
“I want to believe that, but every conduit I ever met has said how chatty spirits can be. I just can’t believe that none ever mentioned how bad things were in the otherworld.
Even that spirit Skye met mentioned Cato, and they’d been on Earth for years.
” Connor shrugs. “The Collective has been training hunters, gatekeepers, and conduits for a thousand years, Gabe. Ferreting out information, building databases, sharing knowledge. It’s never been easier to do that than it is now, with high-speed internet and international travel, but somehow, an organization dedicated to protecting humanity from demons has spent the past, I don’t know, hundred years missing the fact that the demons are preparing to invade en masse. How does that happen?”
I sigh. “When someone is complicit. Fuck.” I sink onto the piano bench. “How bad do you think it is?” Is there anyone there we can trust?
“I don’t know. I… It’s not just us anymore.
” He glances toward the door, and I know he’s thinking of Kieran.
Probably the others too, but mostly Kieran.
They’ve been dragged into this through the weirdest set of coincidences I’ve ever seen, and unlike us, they weren’t trained from childhood to deal with demons and spirits and gateways to the otherworld.
But even without training, they’ve stood up and stood strong.
And they’re prepared to play their part in whatever happens.
“We can trust our Mannix family,” I say, feeling a little embarrassed about it.
“So that’s a start. It’s not just you and me doing this.
We have support.” And while they might not be trained to fight demons, they have other strengths.
Let’s face it, if it came down to a fight, the demons would win.
It takes a team of trained hunters to deal with even one higher demon.
Marc was right: if he wanted us all dead, we wouldn’t have stood a chance.
“Kieran will be at least as good at organizing us as the entire Collective would be. Probably better.”
Connor huffs a laugh and stops pacing. “Dragging them into this world wasn’t what I wanted.”
“Me either. But they were in before we ever met them, Con. It’s better that we’re here and can help them.
” I shudder at the thought of what could have happened to them all if demons had come through the gateway in the Garden Suite.
“So that’s the five humans—Kier, Josh, Daniel, Skye, and Ewan. There’s some good brains there.”
“The ghosts will step up too,” Connor admits… a little reluctantly. “They’re dedicated to this place. Joe loves it enough that he inadvertently turned it into a spiritual haven. They’re excellent spies and lookouts.” He stops and takes a deep breath. “On the subject of ghostly spies…”
It takes me a second to catch up with his train of thought, and when I do, it feels like the air’s been squeezed out of my chest. “You want Norval to spy on the Collective?”
“We still need information. That hasn’t changed.
We also need resources, which the Collective has, but we don’t know who we can trust. Is it the whole council?
Just a few of them? Nobody on the actual council, but some key people in administration?
Is it one person or fifty? Or five thousand?
Is it just at the California compound, or has it spread?
The answers to those questions are going to have a big impact on what we do next and whether Cato wins.
” His voice is rising toward the end, and he stops.
“I’m just saying, we can trust Uncle Norval.
We know we can. The thought of traitors in the Collective is probably ripping his heart to pieces.
People are used to him popping up everywhere at random and sticking his nose in.
This time, he’ll just be looking for specific information. ”
It makes sense. Norval was one of the founders of the Collective, literally a thousand years ago, and he’s so dedicated to it and his siblings’ descendants that he’s spent the past millennium as a ghost instead of moving on and being reincarnated.
He has an annoying habit of appearing no matter where you are or what you’re doing, and he loves to lecture in his blunt way.
“He’d need to be able to keep his temper.
The last thing we need is him getting so riled up about this that he blurts it out. ”
“He will. What about Tom?” Con asks, and I’m thrown by the sudden change in direction.
“What about Tom?” I’m still a little freaked by the fact that he was sitting beside a higher demon in a car for twenty minutes. Those moments between when we realized what was happening and me being able to pull him out of the car seemed to stretch for eternity.
“Well… he knows a lot now. Can we really just send him home with a pat on the head?”
I stare. “What other option is there?” He can’t be suggesting we kill Tom.
“We keep him here and add him to the team. Why, what did you think?” There’s a quirk at the corner of his mouth that gives him away. He knows exactly what I thought.
“You’re such a dickhead. But I don’t think that will work, anyway. Tom’s got a job and a family in town. We can’t just keep him here. Plus, he might not want to join the team.” Not to mention it would be hard for me to ignore how pretty he is if he’s under my nose all the time.
Connor’s smirk is a dead giveaway that he might suspect how pretty I find Tom.
Dammit. Being best friends with someone you’ve known since you were in diapers sounds great, but the reality is that you can’t keep anything a secret from them.
They know you too well. “We’ll ask him,” he suggests reasonably—far too reasonably for Connor.
“First let’s find out what Marc knows. Maybe he did identify the traitors back then.
Maybe he can tell us exactly who it is, and we can work out a way to get around them.
Once we have that information, we can go from there. ”
“Fair enough. We see what Marc knows and what exactly he wants from us. If necessary, we ask Norval to spy. And we ask Tom if he’s planning to run back to town and send his priest out here with a barrel of holy water.” Not that it would do any good.
“That’s a good start,” Con agrees.
I stand from the piano bench. I can’t believe this is happening. “No matter what, we have each other’s backs.”
Connor looks me dead in the eye. “Always.”
With the emotional stuff out of the way, we leave the music room and go back to the library. I can hear voices as we get closer.
“…you’re not talking to the professional demon hunters at the Collective because you think one of them is in cahoots with Cato?” It’s Tom. I haven’t heard him talk all that much, but enough to recognize his voice.
We stop in the doorway. “That’s what I want to know,” I announce.
Heads turn toward us. We must look pretty grim, because Kieran starts to get up.
Connor waves him back, and together, we walk forward to face down Marc.
Who doesn’t even bother to get up from the Chesterfield, damn his arrogant demon ass. “What do you know?”
Sighing, he studies his nails for a moment, then looks from me to Connor and back again.
I’m nearly ready to lunge at him, uselessly suicidal or not, when he finally speaks.
“Some time back, Cato spent a great deal of time here on Earth. He’d built a connection he was very fond of, and that connection wielded a lot of power.
Cato helped with that, of course. I wasn’t paying much attention at the time, but he was back and forth for about thirty years before his connection ended, and my understanding is that they caused a lot of mayhem. ”
I have a sneaking suspicion I might know who the “connection” was, but it’s not important right now. “Go on.”
“I believe he’d already begun implementing his plan then, using the connection and the chaos that was occurring here as a cover.
An acquaintance of mine who is in a position to know has said that if the connection hadn’t died so abruptly, this plan likely would have been carried out perhaps sixty or so years ago. ”
That pretty much confirms what I was thinking, but I keep it to myself. It won’t make anyone feel better.
“Once the connection ended, he was forced to regroup. He needed a new connection to help him implement his plans from this side of the barrier. I didn’t know it at the time, but we’ve since learned he already had his hidden gateway in place.”
“Where is it?” I ask. “Could you show us?”
Marc shrugs. “Not from this side. The magic he uses to hide it is very specifically coded. I could walk past it and not know it’s there.”
Fuck. There goes that hope.