Chapter 6
Chapter Six
GABE
Any other time, the hurt expression on Tom’s face—or anyone’s face—would have me racing to offer reassurance. Not this time. It’s too important, and honestly, I don’t have the energy to care right now. I’m still reeling over the fact that Connor’s parents are likely in league with demons.
Although… since we’re here chatting to Marc, does that mean we’re in league with demons too?
But our demon—and ugh, thinking of any demon as “our” makes my skin crawl—is trying to prevent the enslavement of humanity, not cause it. That’s gotta count for something.
Tom’s initial reaction morphs into uncertainty. He glances across the room at his grandmother’s ghost, then at Skye, who as usual is wearing his thoughts all over his face.
“I… My family. If I’m in, will they be… I don’t know, targeted?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him honestly. “We can ask Marc when he gets back, though I’m still not sure how trustworthy he is.” I’m trying to be as open and honest with him as I can. This whole situation is fucked-up, and I have no idea what’s going to happen next.
“But if things go badly, they’re going to end up as snacks for a demon, aren’t they?”
I hesitate. “It’s not for sure,” I say slowly. “But probably a safe bet. Definitely things will change for the worse.”
He nods slowly. “And you think I can help? I don’t have any special demon-fighting skills.”
“Of course you do,” Skye declares loyally. We look at him, and he shrugs. “What?”
“You know they exist and you don’t want them to win,” Daniel interjects. “That counts. Plus you have your uncle’s mincer,” he adds wryly. I’ve got no idea what he means by that, but it’s pretty clear that Skye and Daniel, at least, want Tom on the team.
He huffs a laugh and then nods. “Okay. Yeah, I think I can help. I’m pretty good with a spreadsheet and I do all the ordering for the restaurant. I can help organize things. And I can use a knife, and shoot.”
“And you took fifth dan in kendo last year,” Skye adds.
That gets my attention. Kendo, unlike a lot of other martial arts, is weapon-based, and rankings require years of practice to achieve.
If he’s the same age as Skye and he’s already fifth dan, that means he’s been passing tests pretty much as soon as he’s eligible to take them.
It would be helpful to have someone else capable of wielding a sword on our side.
“You’re sure?” I ask him, wanting him to be completely certain, but there’s no doubt in his expression.
“I’d never be able to live with myself if I walked away.
” He brushes a wayward curl from his forehead, and my eyes track the movement involuntarily, even as some of the stress tightening my chest loosens.
It’s a welcome relief to have him on our team, but now that I know he’s a dedicated athlete and competent fighter with a strong sense of ethics as well as being cute…
I’m never going to get over the thing I have for him.
All my tension returns as Marc pops back into the room.
I hate that he can just come and go like that.
It underlines just how unsafe we all are when it comes to higher demons.
“We’ll talk later,” I tell Tom. Connor’s the better swordsman of us, and he’s going to want to put Tom through his paces and see how much we can rely on him if it comes to that.
“Go,” he says, nodding to where Connor is already striding toward Marc, an anxious Kieran at his side.
Marc holds out a worn piece of paper, then pulls it back when Connor reaches for it. “Don’t damage it. You can take a picture, but I need to take it back.” He studies Connor’s face. “Maybe we should let someone else hold it.”
“I’ll take it.” I extend my hand, trying to channel calm. Just because names are on this list doesn’t mean they’re actually conspiring with demons. Marc could have made the whole thing up. He could be trying to sow discord in the Collective.
I take the paper, feeling the softness of it between my fingers. It’s been around for a while, that’s for sure. Which makes sense, if it was found before Marc searched Connor’s house ten years ago.
One glance is all it takes for my vision to blur and my knees to buckle. Arms come around me as Connor exclaims in my ear. I don’t know if his parents’ names are on that list. I didn’t get that far. All I saw was the stationery I bought my dad for Christmas the year I turned twelve.
I spent weeks trying to choose it. Connor sat patiently with me, examining stationers’ websites, for hours at a time.
My dad’s always liked to write things down by hand, and he’s always preferred loose paper to notebooks or pads.
Mom always buys him stationery for his birthday, and that year, I decided I was going to start giving him some too.
He loved it and started using it right away.
I just didn’t know it was for this.
Sucking in air, I blink a few times to clear my vision and look properly at the paper.
It’s definitely the same—it was so hard to choose that finally I decided to design something custom.
It meant buying him less, but I figured it would be extra special that way.
The header is a clumsily twined-together rendering of all our initials—Dad’s, Mom’s, mine, and Matt’s.
By the time the following Christmas rolled around, I’d already decided it was childish and silly, and bought one of the professional designs instead, but for a few months the year I was twelve, Dad used this.
Bracing myself, I read the list. Dad’s familiar handwriting sprawls across each line. The first name is Marnie. Just Marnie, no surname. That’s mom.
The next line reads Edward & Brianne Massey.
I guess that settles that.
My gaze skims down the page, taking in the names of two members of the council in the California compound, an archivist from the York one, a senior administrator in New Delhi.
There are others, too, but I don’t have the emotional strength to process them all, so I pull out my phone to snap a picture.
It takes a couple of tries, since my hands are shaking.
Kieran hovers close, and Connor’s arm is still around me, but neither tries to help. I wouldn’t have let them if they did.
Holding the paper out to Marc, I ask, “Why are you here?”
He takes it, folds it up, and slides it into his pocket. “I told you. We can’t go to the Collective—”
“No, I mean here here. There are hunters all around the world. Gatekeepers. Conduits. Some of them have hardly any contact with the Collective, just check in every year or so. Why are you here, with us? How did you even know we were here?”
“You’ve been making a lot of noise,” he says.
“Openly hunting for Cato’s hidden gate. Talking to spirits.
We knew we’d need someone on this side, and we knew we couldn’t rely on the Collective.
When we were searching homes for more details about Cato’s plan, we were also hoping to find…
something. Signs of a rivalry, perhaps. We were looking for an incorruptible, dull hunter or two. ”
“And that’s us?” Connor asks.
“Meh.” He shrugs. “Not you specifically. But when we started poking around, you seemed to be… reputable. And you’re far enough away from any of the compounds that we didn’t think we’d have the Collective breathing down our necks.
” He pauses and makes a face. “If I’d known ahead of time that you were connected to the traitors, I probably would have recommended we keep looking. ”
Bile burns a path up my esophagus, and I swallow hard.
Connected to traitors. Because they’re our parents.
What the fuck? I mean… what the fuck? How could they have raised us in the Collective, in the tradition of hundreds of generations before us, and done this?
Although it does explain why they became so distant when we reached our teens.
We thought it was because they knew we were almost adults.
I guess it was actually because they were busy betraying everything we've ever stood for and didn’t want to risk that we might guess.
Fuck me, I never would have guessed.
“You’re free to walk away,” Connor snaps, but Marc shakes his head.
“No.” He looks around. “The group you’ve gathered here has an unusual synergy. Looking elsewhere would be a mistake.”
Yay. The higher demon thinks we have a fun group and wants to stick around. Whoopee for us.
“In all the fun of storytelling before, you never said what you need from us.” I shake myself loose from Con and straighten.
“Cato’s plan is to rip away the barrier between worlds by opening so many gateways at once that it just dissolves.”
“Yeah, you said that,” Connor agrees. “Then you started the whole backstory about him finding humans to help him.” His voice is surprisingly steady, given two of those humans are his parents.
“He plans to bring down the barrier by having his pet hunters open gateways at an agreed time. His demon legions will be waiting, and immediately travel through and begin ripping open gateways of their own, until there are too many to withstand.”
As soon as he said there were hunters helping Cato, I figured it had to be something like that.
Before, that was the one thing I couldn’t quite figure.
Gateways can’t be opened from the otherworld, and even with his hidden gateway, it would take too long to bring enough demons over to get it done.
Not without hunters noticing and stepping in.
It was the element of Cato’s plan that didn’t make sense.
I wish it still didn’t.
“And what’s the plan to stop them?” My question hangs in the air for long moments.
He shrugs. “The simplest way would be to kill his pet hunters.”
Even knowing what they’ve done and what they plan to do, my gut rebels at the thought of murdering my parents.
I mean… they’re going to die. There’s no way to avoid that now.
Even if Cato doesn’t kill them—which, let’s be real, he doesn’t seem like the type to deal fairly with people—the Collective will.
They’ll be executed for treason. At the very least, they’ll be hunted by our people until the day they die of natural causes.
But I don’t think I can be the one to kill them.
“Sadly, that’s not an option right now,” he continues, to my relief. “As far as we know, he isn’t aware that we’ve found him out, and we don’t want him catching on because his little humans are dying. Not until we know for sure if he has a backup plan.”
“Okay, so simple is out,” Kieran says. “Yay. What’s the better option?”
“Build a new barrier, of course.”
It takes me a moment to get over the shock. Is he fucking with us? “Because it’s just that easy?”
He looks down his nose at me, which is a neat trick, since we’re the same height. “Nobody said any of this is easy. If you want easy, go play with children’s toys.”
My fists clench. Why does he have to go out of his way to antagonize us? He knows how fucking hard it is for us to even talk to a demon like this. Why make it worse, when he wants our help?
“Our people have been doing some fairly esoteric research for the past few decades,” he continues.
“They’ve come up with a theory that the barrier is a construct of the same energy that exists on both our worlds.
There are differences, but enough similarities that mean most species can exist on both worlds.
Those similarities are what make up the barrier. ”
“Which will be ripped to shreds by Cato’s plan.” I’m waiting for him to explain how we can just make a new one.
“Demons, hunters, and gatekeepers regularly manipulate the barrier.” He raises an eyebrow. “Every time a gateway is opened, closed, or guarded, the barrier is being manipulated. And the barrier is made up of the energy that exists on both worlds. So, theoretically—”
“We should be able to manipulate that energy,” Connor interrupts. “You’re talking about fairy-tale magic.”
I think I’m going to throw up. “No, he’s talking about guarding gateways.”
Con looks at me like I’m crazy. “What?”
“When I guard a gateway…” I shake my head.
“We talk about it like it’s a screen door, but what if it’s actually a patch?
Like when you patch a wall, you take plaster, which the wall is made of, and cover the hole.
It’s never a perfect repair because the edges were ragged and one’s older than the other… but it closes the hole.”
He nods, then realizes what I’m saying and shakes his head. “You’re saying when you guard a gateway, you’re manipulating that energy? Taking random loose energy from somewhere and using it to patch the barrier, since it’s the same thing?”
“Finally, they get it,” Marc mutters. I ignore him.
“Yeah. That’s what it is.”
“So… theoretically, you could create a brand-new barrier between worlds.”
I swallow. This isn’t how I thought today would go.