by Krista Walsh
Her throat bobbed with a hard swallow, then she nodded. “It shouldn’t take too much effort. Watch me, though.”
Zach kept a close eye on her as she gathered all the water and dirt she’d cast around and streamed it into the office after the corpses. Her hands shook, but she appeared to remain in control of herself.
After what felt like far too long, the corridor was cleared, and they were in.
“It can only get easier from here, right?” Daphne quipped, even as the lines of her face hardened with determination.
Zach turned his attention to the door ahead of them that would take them into the heart of the prison. Daphne was right: the hard part was over. They were inside. From here, they could only succeed or die.
Not seeing any point in putting off either result, Zach headed for the door.
Don’t worry, Molly. I’m coming for you.
25
Fire and numbness circled each other under Gabe’s skin as first anger then shock rippled through him. Memories flashed across his mind of the eyes of the man in front of him crinkling with laughter at a joke over family dinner.
The eyes Gabe had missed ever since they had disappeared over twenty years ago.
From the eyes, he moved to the shape of his father’s jaw, so familiar from all the years he’d stared into the mirror at his own.
Other than the structure of his face, Frank Mulligan was nothing like Gabe remembered him. His brown hair was now mostly gray, and the lines around his eyes and mouth were so deep his features were nearly lost in them. Not the lines of a man satisfied with life, but of one who had endured hardships.
Good, Gabe thought. Considering how his father had walked out on him and his mother, he deserved whatever troubles had come to him.
And yet, beneath his anger lurked an emotion that bothered him even more — an unmistakable pinch of joy. He tried to crush it under his rage, not wanting to feel happy about finding the man who had betrayed his own family, here of all places, but it refused to disappear.
“Gabriel?” Frank asked, his eyes growing wide as recognition sank in, followed by fear. “What are you doing here? You need to get away.”
He grabbed Gabe’s shoulders and tugged him back the way they’d come, but Gabe grabbed him in return and slammed him against the wall.
“What am I doing here?” he demanded. “The better question is, what in the seven hells are you doing here? How are you involved in this?”
Frank’s gaze shifted over Gabe’s shoulder to Vera, so Gabe stepped to the left, blocking his view. He didn’t want his father anywhere near Vera. Not until he got some answers.
As Gabe watched, Frank seemed to collapse on himself, sagging free as Gabe released him. He bowed his head and shoved the fingers of one hand through his hair, gliding them back to cup his neck. The gesture was so familiar that Gabe found his own hand moving to mirror him. He dropped it quickly to his side.
“I had no choice.”
The tone of Frank’s voice, so broken, so…pathetic, pushed Gabe’s rage over its limit. Blood rushed in his ears, and he squeezed his hands into fists.
“No choice?” The only thing keeping him from bellowing from the depths of his lungs was his desire not to be heard by anyone else who might be lurking in the tunnel. Instead the words oozed with venom that dripped down the back of his throat and burned his insides. “You left us without a word. Mom was grieving, I was barely coping. You spent all your time in that goddamned workshop, and then one day you up and left, and you had no choice?”
Vera stepped closer to his side, but said nothing. Her presence worked to clear some of the fog that had filled his head, but he refused to back down.
“Tell me what else I was supposed to do, Gabe,” Frank said, and gone was the demure man of a moment ago, replaced by someone who was capable of just as much anger as his son. “They came to me in the middle of the night. Just barged into my workshop and told me that if I didn’t go with them right then, they’d kill you and Lara. We’d just lost Rick. How could I stand back and lose the rest of my family when I could do something to protect them?”
Gabe’s stomach dropped and his mind went blank. All possibility of reply was wiped away as his tongue seemingly swelled to fill his mouth.
Frank dropped his hand on Gabe’s shoulder. “Not a day passed when I didn’t think of you. The thought that I might one day see you again was all that kept me going.” His gaze drifted once more to Vera, and he nodded to her. “Maybe it would have been better if I’d been as brave as your mother.”
Gabe stiffened and turned to stare at Vera, who had gone pale in the dim light of the gas lantern.
“My mother?” she asked, the words eking out between her lips as a whisper.
“You’re Susan Goodall’s daughter, aren’t you?” he asked. Dumbly, she nodded, and he smiled. “You look just like her. I only had the pleasure of meeting her twice. I was there when they presented her with the option to join them. I watched her turn them down, regardless of the personal risk to herself.” He cast his gaze downward. “She was a stronger person than I was. They wanted her to lend her vengeance skills to the cause, taking out the people who stood against Mayes’s plans. She wouldn’t help create a world she couldn’t raise her daughter in. She threatened to take word of their plan to people who could step in and stop us, but they killed her before she had the chance. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only one they went after. They’ve been recruiting powerful people across so many species. Some of us were coerced, but others were all too eager to get involved.”
He pressed his fingers into his eyes and released a breath. Vera wobbled beside Gabe, and he snaked his arm around her waist to hold her steady.
Frank’s eyes were red when he looked to his son again. “How is your mother?”
Gabe tensed. “Dead.”
He said it without flinching, keeping his tone as brusque as he could. But when his father cringed and collapsed further into himself, a flash of pity passed through him.
“Cancer,” he explained. “She didn’t realize anything was wrong until it was too late to help her. I don’t think it would have changed anything if you’d been home or not.”
Why was he trying to console this man? They were wasting time.
But then, how could he walk away, when the person who had raised him for the first fourteen years of his life was sinking to the ground, his back against the wall?
Vera nudged Gabe’s shoulder, but he just didn’t know what to do.
His body decided for him, dropping to the ground in front of Frank. As he drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, Vera lowered herself beside him.
“I should have been there,” Frank said. “You shouldn’t have had to go through that on your own.” He buried his head in his hands. “All this time, I thought I was doing this for you, but you’ve been alone. How long?”
“Ten years,” Gabe said.
“Shit.” Frank rolled his gaze upward and blinked his tears clear. He wiped his eyes and rested his elbows on his knees. “I was just about to walk out and go home, too. I’d reached my limit. They have a human girl in there. Seven hells, she can’t be more than sixteen years old — barely older than you were when I left. They made me torture her. She’s blind, and they made me put illusions in her head, forcing her to witness all these horrible disasters. Even the destruction of her own family. Can you imagine? She might spend the rest of her life stuck with those images. She’ll be lucky if they don’t drive her mad. Gods, I feel so ashamed.”
“What else have they done to her? Is Molly all right?” Vera asked, her voice taut with a sharp urgency. “Is she injured?”
Frank dropped his hands to his sides. “You know her?”
Gabe glared at him. “It’s one of the reasons we’re here. She’s a friend of ours. We plan to get her out.”
He considered telling Frank that Vera had made a psychic connection with the girl to guide them here, but too much doubt lingered in his mind a
s to his father’s loyalties. If he hadn’t been able to grab Frank to slam him against the wall, he might have believed he was an illusion sent by someone in the prison who’d caught them in the tunnels. It was still so hard to believe he was really here.
Frank shook his head. “I’m sorry, but you can’t. There are magical shields that prevent anyone from getting inside that hasn’t supplied their DNA to the project. Even if you did manage to get in, there are guards posted at every door. Molly’s locked in the basement dungeons, another three levels down from where we are now. You’d never make it and get her out alive.”
“That doesn’t mean we’re not going to try,” Gabe growled.
Frank rubbed his brow. “Maybe you won’t need to. The last time I was there, I knew it would be my last visit. I put a shield on her mind, blocking her energy if anyone tries to find her telepathically. Then I left her the key to the cell. If she found it and decided to use it, she could be anywhere in the prison at this point.”
Anger rose in Gabe’s chest and threatened to cut off his air. “So you just left her to fend for herself? She could walk right into one of those bastards who cut her.”
He realized he’d given away their inside information the moment the words were out of his mouth, but Frank didn’t seem to notice. “I couldn’t take her with me. Believe me, I thought about it. The chances of someone noticing would have been too high. At least this way she has the chance to hide. This place is full of dark corners. Rooms even Mayes doesn’t know exists. She’s strong and quick. I had to have faith that she would find her own way out.”
At least Frank’s actions explained why Vera hadn’t been able to make contact with Molly. And she was still alive. For now.
“So what is Mayes’s plan?” Vera asked. “We know he has the Book of Universes, and that he stole software that can detect otherworldly energy.”
“We know he wanted this.” Gabe pulled the cookie tin out of his pocket and raised the lid to expose the orb within.
Frank’s eyes widened, and he pressed his back harder against the wall. “If they find out you have that…”
Gabe slid it back in his pocket. “I don’t intend to let them know. What do they want it for?”
Frank glanced up and down the tunnel and sighed. “I don’t want to tell you. I hate the fact that you’re here. There’s nothing you can do to stop them now, Gabe. They’ve won. The best you can do is run as fast as you can and try to stay out of their way.”
“That’s not an option.”
Frank paused, and the first hint of a smile touched his lips. “I didn’t think so. I know that expression you’re wearing all too well. And your friend here has the same look her mother wore when she refused to help them.” He extended one leg out, his knee popping with the movement. “They think they’re saving the otherworld. After the demon wars, they tried to move forward without the guardians looking over their shoulders, and it took them a decade to figure out they couldn’t. The human numbers, the mundane military, are too strong. If the demons had tried to rise up, they would have been crushed. So although they’d achieved what they wanted from the war, they were still trapped. They went back into hiding, but didn’t stop planning. Forty years ago, they started making moves. They heard a rumor that the guardians hadn’t been a natural species, but one created by the mythical Gnosis Collegiate. A ludicrous story that has so little bearing on reality I can’t believe they thought it was true.”
Gabe refrained from glancing at Vera. His father’s beliefs didn’t matter.
“How do you know all this?” he asked. He wanted to trust, but the sentiment refused to come easily.
“I’ve been here for twenty years, Gabe. For twenty years, they’ve held you and your mother over my head, forcing me to help. They needed me, you see. A full Fae to help them rift from place to place, someone who could manipulate minds to get them whatever they needed. And you have no idea how much they needed.”
He ran his thumb under his eye, and as he worked through what else he wanted to say, Gabe’s thoughts veered to Molly’s room. He’d picked up the traces of the rift they’d taken her through. How many other people had his father helped kidnap over the last twenty years? How many other lives had he ruined?
“They believed that if creating a species had been done before, they could do it again. So they began recruiting the best minds and the strongest species of the otherworld to try their hand at playing gods. This was before my time, but you only need to be alive today to see that they failed. They created a prototype, mixing the blood of two different species. Nothing came of it, and they destroyed the infant. Or they thought they had. Now they’ve learned he’s still alive and that their experiment might have actually worked.” Frank rolled his shoulders and rotated his neck until it popped. “After their apparent failure, Mayes, who had risen up the ranks to take command over the demons, decided that if he wanted to make a real difference in this world, he’d need the help of other dimensions, just as they’d done during the demon wars. He created a scheme to turn Earth into a—a marketplace. A commercial hub. A factory. He wants to open the doors between dimensions and have a place where demons can come to trade — slaves, weapons, food sources. Whatever brings in the bucks. The demons would have full control over everything. He’s called it Project Oracle.” Even saying the name seemed to cause Frank to wither.
Ice shards scraped against the insides of Gabe’s veins, making his skin tingle.
Vera edged closer to him. “Now that they have the book and know Zach actually worked,” she said to Gabe, “they can try again to make their army. And it sounds like they’ll have an easy way to supply them.”
Frank narrowed his eyes. “Zach? That’s the name of the daemelus. You know him, too?”
“My life has changed a lot since you left, Dad,” Gabe said, not answering the question. “So they’ll create this new army and put down the humans. They’ll use their business knowledge and the Mayzell reputation Mayes has built on all these years to help transform the world. What’s with the orb and the software then?”
Frank snorted. “You think all the otherworldly in this dimension are just going to stand aside and let Mayes have his way? They’ll be stubborn like you. They’ll try to stop him. He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want anyone siding with the mundane and potentially helping them fight back. He’s had his magical scientists working on a spell that will force any unprotected supernatural to bow to him and his cause. The original plan was to use the orb to shield the people he didn’t want affected so he could cast a blanket version of the spell over the entire planet. When he lost the orb, he had his minions scour the internet and the history books to find an alternative. That’s when he stumbled across a random mention on a forum that this guy had created software to detect otherworldly energy. The creator had described it as a ghost-hunting technique, but Mayes’s scientists recognized it for what it was. It might take a little longer because the software only has so much range, but they can work in sections and bend the otherworld to their will, one city, one state, at a time.”
Vera made a noise of disgust, and Gabe breathed through the red haze filling his vision. He reached into his pocket and ran his fingers over the tin box. Zach really had helped them dodge a bullet by stealing the orb away.
“We need to make sure he doesn’t cast that spell,” he said.
“Not possible,” said Frank. “The game is already in motion. One of the warlocks began the casting soon before I left. Destroying the software might prevent other regions from being taken in, but the east coast is a lost cause.”
Gabe eased to his feet, Vera rising at his side. “Then I guess we’d better stop gabbing and get moving. Where do we find this guy?”
He wished he could pass the information along to Percy so they could work with the others to stop the warlock, but all he was getting in his ear was static. How long had the spell been going? Was Daphne’s circle in place to hold it back? He cursed the tunnels closing in on them, keeping th
em from learning what was going on overhead.
Frank used the wall to help himself up. “I’m telling you, Gabe, you won’t get through. Blood has been taken from every employee and specimen. On top of using it to create their new demon, it also stands as their security measure.”
“Why were the specimens included in the security barrier?” Vera asked.
“They had to,” said Frank. “If their DNA wasn’t included, then whatever demon was injected with the specimen DNA wouldn’t be able to move through the prison. It wasn’t seen as a security risk. Anyone Mayes’s two scientists managed to test before they died is likely also dead.”
“Before they died?” Vera asked, and the stunned tone of her voice made Gabe turn to look at her. “Who died?”
“Some warlock. Jermaine, and his incubus partner, Antony. We still don’t know what happened to either of them, though we have our theories. According to that friend of yours, Molly, it was Antony who killed Jermaine. Both of them had gone rogue, trying to build their own side project to turn themselves into gods.”
Shock rocked the floor under Gabe’s feet, and he wished the wall were a few inches closer so he could lean against it.
What is going on?
“After they died, Mayes took their idea — instead of trying to create new warriors from scratch, why not try to convert some of his existing lackeys into stronger versions of themselves? They’re testing it on one demon for now, but he’s gaining strength and ability faster than they can register it. Soon, he’ll be unstoppable.”
Gabe barely heard him, still wrapped up in what his father had said.
Jermaine had worked for Mayes. His attempts to get hold of Zach, to get Gabe’s eyes and his blood… When Jermaine had told Gabe that he was working for a secret organization, he’d been telling the truth. He’d planned to betray them, sure, but that part had been real.
The warlock had brought them all together, and now they were working to bring down the project that had led Jermaine to them in the first place.
