Keeper Chronicles: Awakening (10 page)

The cerberus was an awkward weight, its heads rattling into each other and bumping him in the back with each step. He dumped the creature at the base of the tower and went to the small, white storage shed that pretended to hold souvenirs for tourists, but really was a front for an underground bunker deep enough and strong enough to withstand a nuclear blast. Behind the shelf of lighthouse-shaped key chains was a lever. Gabe tugged on it and the secret panel in the floor slid open. Lights flickered to life as he hurried down the stairs.

The north and south walls were lined with weapons and ammunition; the east had row upon row of canned vegetables, preserves, and dried everything—including cobwebs. There was barely room in the center for a futon and work desk. This windowless, concrete box had become his new home over the past few days, and the small surveillance cameras he’d installed around the tower, bed-n-breakfast, and beach areas allowed him to keep watch without arousing much suspicion. All he needed was for Rebekah to see him out here one night.

Thinking of her twisted something dark inside him, so he pushed her to the back of his mind. The metal basin was on one of the top shelves. He took it in one hand, one of the ten-gallon containers of holy water in the other, and marched back upstairs. He filled the basin half way and began his gruesome chore.

The morning faded into the early afternoon, and his stomach growled, despite the bloody mess in front of him. Nothing remained of the cerberus save a chunk of torso. With a sigh, he threw the whole thing in the water at once, hoping he’d dismembered it enough that they’d get the barrier restored before it could reform in the demon realm and try again. As he washed the blood from his arms and hands with the remaining holy water, he thought back to that poor girl slaughtered in her bedroom. First-order demons had been responsible for some of the greater atrocities: Genghis Khan’s relentless push westward, the Aztec sacrifices to Quetzalcoatl, and the Heaven’s Gate suicides were all the direct result of a first-order’s influence and hunger. Although no further murders matching the signature of a first-order had been reported, that didn’t mean it hadn’t eaten again. It could already look human.

That would make it almost impossible to kill.

She may hate him for it, but Gabe would give Rebekah the kind of normal life he always wished for. Seeing her stand in the ocean like that, so helpless and lost, had cracked his defenses momentarily. It couldn’t happen again—for her sake. She needed someone stable if she was ever going to experience know the peace her father had wanted her to have. Gabe’s life was demons and killing and dismembering bodies; he wouldn’t wish this life on his worst enemy.

By the time he dumped the demon-infused holy water over the flowerbeds spread out around the lighthouse and returned the basin to the bunker, the time for lunch had come and gone. Grabbing a pack of crackers and a can of little wieners from the supply shelf, he put his feet up on the crude metal desk and watched the monitors. He used his dagger to crack open the lid of the can and impale a wiener. Watching twelve different cameras wasn’t exactly his idea of fun, but then neither had been being surprised by that cerberus earlier. A few minutes later, a lone figure walked up the road to the bed-n-breakfast. It was Dylan Hurley.

Gabe studied the man as he walked up the drive, onto the porch, and into the house with a duffel bag in his hand. It looked like he was moving in. Although the musician had passed every check they’d done at the station, and then some, there was something Gabe didn’t like about the man. Maybe jealousy was the culprit, he admitted, but maybe not. Still, the first-order hadn’t formed fully at the time of the last attack, so of all the things Dylan could be, demon wasn’t one of them. Logic, however, couldn’t stop him feeling like there was something off about the man.

A patrol car flashed on his monitors, heading toward the light. Gabe jumped up and shoved the last of his lunch in his mouth. He hadn’t been expecting anyone today, though if a call had come in during the last half hour or so, he might not have heard it. Lorek had kept his radio up in the watch room, which left the bunker a little isolated. Until that moment, Gabe hadn’t thought it a problem.

Taking a swig of energy drink to wash down his food, he took the stairs to the supply shed two at a time and closed the basement latch behind himself. Just in case whoever was in the car wasn’t a Keeper—not everyone in the Parks Services was, after all—he tucked in his shirt and settled his hat on his head as the vehicle rolled to a stop.

Stepping out of the car was the last person he expected to see right then: his mother. Getting out of the other side were two people he’d never seen before. Both in their thirties, they seemed like the oddest couple. The man wore a tweed jacket with patches over the elbows, a plaid shirt, and corduroy pants. His thick-rimmed glasses only accentuated the nutty professor look he had going for him. There was nothing nutty about the woman, however. Legs a mile long were shown to excellent effect by a pair of tights and fuzzy, calf-length boots. The peach sweater hugged her hips. Her blonde hair was straight as a board and fell dramatically around her face and darkened eyes. She looked like she should be stepping off a runway instead of stepping out of a patrol car.

“So this is the place.” She spun around; her French accent was barely noticeable. “Quaint. Rustic. But what a view!”

“I’m sorry. Who are you?” Gabe asked.

“Professor Nicholas Stockholm, demonologist from the Parisian Society for the Study of Non-Human Entities and Their Impact on History.” He offered his hand and Gabe shook it. The professor’s grip was surprisingly strong. “This is my wife, Colette.”

The woman didn’t offer her hand.

“Mom...”

His mother smiled. “They’re the Hunters.”

“Excuse me for a moment,” he said to the Europeans and grabbed his mother by the elbow, leading her a few feet away. “What are they doing here?”

She smiled. You’re the one who insisted they be called. “They’re going to stay with you. We offered them a room with us or a hotel, but the professor insisted on being as close to the open gate as possible. Said he needed to take the flavor of the demon that had opened it or some such nonsense.”

“You can’t seriously mean them to stay here,” he said, thinking of how cramped the bunker already was. There was hardly room for him to move around, much less adding two people to the mix.

“I can try to convince them to room at the bed-n-breakfast, if you want.”

And put Rebekah in even more danger? He shook his head. “No. That’s even worse. Beks should stay out of this. I’ll find room for them somewhere. It’s not like I need sleep.”

“That’s the spirit.” She looked past him for a moment, and then squeezed his hand. Though almost delicate, he knew her hands could snap a grown man’s neck if she were so inclined. “Thank you for taking this post; it means a lot to your father.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t do it for him.”

Her smile was sad. “I know. But you did it, and in the end, that’s what matters.” She hesitated. “It’s not too late, you know. If you still love her.”

“When has my love ever helped anyone?” Gabe crossed his arms. “Tell me, did loving Juliet serve her well in the end? Beks deserves a normal life.”

His mother grabbed his arm. “No. What she needs is a chance to fulfill her destiny. To honor her birthright. It’s a waste to let her bloodline go untrained.”

“You sound like father,” he hissed.

Her dark eyes hardened as she crossed her arms. “Good. At least one of us does.”

“If anyone tells her...”

She slapped him. While the blow hadn’t been a hard one, it stung nonetheless.

“I’d better never hear you threaten another Keeper again, do you understand me? This life is hard enough as it is without us fighting amongst ourselves. Now, I’m going back to headquarters. Take care of them. Anything they need.”

He saluted mockingly but let her hear a hint of respect in his voice. “Yes, Ma’am.”

“That’s the spirit.” Flashing a grin, she jogged back over to where the Hunters stood looking out over the ocean and talked to them briefly before unloading a half dozen pieces of luggage from the trunk and driving off.

Gabe took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and walked back over to the Hunters.

****

Moving two more people into the bunker wasn’t easy, especially with all their luggage. It took the rest of the afternoon and into the evening to get things settled enough so that there was room to set up their equipment. For a professor, Nicholas sure had a lot of gadgets: beeping and twirling and flashing devices filled the work desk and spilled out onto the floor like an automaton had vomited parts. When Gabe had carried the bags down the stairs, he’d thought them full of books or makeup.

“Sorry for the meal,” he said, passing out bowls of warmed pork-n-beans. “I don’t usually get company.”

“We’ve had worse, haven’t we,
mon petit chou
?” the professor asked, taking a bite.

Colette grinned. “There was that week in Laos where we lived off bugs and boiled grass hunting that second-order who’d slaughtered a village.” She hugged one lithe leg to her chest as she smiled softly at her husband.

“Good times.” Her husband nodded, and then cocked his head to the side. “Nope. False alarm.”

Gabe was confused. “What were you listening for?”

“Discordant frequencies,” he explained, as if Gabe should have somehow known that already. “Sound is just vibration interpreted by the eardrums. Everything emits a sound at all times; we just can’t always hear everything. Humans, plants, and animals vibrate in a certain spectrum of frequencies. Demons aren’t from this world, so their vibrations are along a higher range of the spectrum.”

“And you can hear that?”

The professor chuckled, taking off his glasses and massaging the bridge of his nose. “Of course not. No one can. This machine, however, is tuned specifically to demonic frequencies. It amplifies them to something audible to human ears.”

Putting down his bowl, Gabe stood from the floor and went over to check the monitors. Just in case.

“You don’t need to do that,” Colette said with a musical lilt to her voice. “If there’s a demon nearby, this will let us know first.”

Handy thing to have. Unfortunately, they probably didn’t sell them on eBay. “What about first-orders like the one we’re tracing?”

“Ah, now that is a good question. Are there any more of those beans?” Nicholas held up his bowl.

Gabe took it and stepped over to the hot plate on the table where the rest of the pathetic pot of beans waited. Tilting the pot, he scraped the sides and gave the professor the last of the food, even though his own stomach growled.

“Ah, thank you,” Nicholas said, taking the bowl and smelling it as if it were the best food in the world. Maybe he’d eaten too many cockroaches in Laos? “Now, to your excellent question: do you want the short or long version?”

“Short.”

Nicholas took a bite and chewed before answering. “Yes and no. If the first-order has fully manifested into a human form, it’s almost impossible to detect. The vibrations will be almost human, or close enough to fool the machine, and it’ll have enough memories and knowledge to perfectly imitate the humans it’s consumed. That’s why timing is so important. Once a breach has been discovered, especially the lower-orders, we have a small window to find and destroy the demon. After that, it’s more of a guessing game.”

“And the price of failure is incalculable,” Colette answered, the song flat in her voice.

A look passed between the couple, just a glance, but it was bloated with meaning. Juliet had looked at him like that once. All Keepers understood loss, but these two seemed more acquainted than most. Something had happened to them because of an escaped demon: maybe they were the ones to let it get past to kill others or they lost someone close to them. Regardless, they had suffered. Gabe understood better than most the dark things that drove people to become Hunters. After Juliet died, he’d tried to go to Europe and offer himself up for Hunter training; his father had handcuffed him to the bed for a week.

Hunters had a short life expectancy, even among Keepers.

That these two had survived so long, and together, meant they were either very lucky or very good. Gabe bet the latter. “Well, as of two days ago, it had begun to manifest human features but hadn’t fully assumed human form. It could only have been a couple of kills away, however. You won’t have much time.”

Nicholas chewed thoughtfully. “What can you tell me about its victims?”

“Didn’t my mom fill you in on the drive over?”

“It helps to hear multiple versions. Even the smallest detail could help narrow the search.”

Gabe glanced at the monitors before he answered. For a second, his heart jumped up in his throat as a shadowy person crossed in front of the house. Was this the demon? Did it want Beks? He started to get up when the man turned to face the camera for a second. Gabe sighed. It was just Dylan Hurley. He struggled to bury the impulse to run to the house and chase the man away. She was safe. Beks wasn’t his anymore, no matter how much he wanted her to be. He’d promised her father to stay away.

Clearing his throat, the professor handed his bowl to his wife. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” he answered, forcing himself to look away. “Thought I saw something is all.”

“Speaking of...” Colette said, standing gracefully in the small space. “I’m going to go set up the wards. Darkness falls, and the demon may already be stalking its next kill.”

She was right. He needed to stop wasting time. “We’re not certain who the demon’s first kill was; however, we suspect that it killed the Keeper living here. When I found the body of Keeper Lorek, it was being devoured by a fifth-order which I dispatched. But between that death and the murder of the teenage girl, there had been no more suspicious deaths in the region. The marks I saw in the girl’s room clearly suggested that the demon’s begun manifestation, as due to the fact that it waited, stalking its prey.”

“We’re going to go through some recall exercises to bring out all the details of both deaths.” The professor nodded absently. “Let’s start with the Keeper. I want you to close your eyes and put yourself back there. You entered the lighthouse and started up the stairs. What did you see?”