Going from northwest Indiana to Millennium Station in downtown Chicago took an hour and ten minutes with all the stops. I had the entire train car to myself. It was silent aside from the clacking of the wheels on the tracks. I got lost in my agony over worst-case scenarios, only to be yanked back by the blaring of the horn at every railway intersection.
By the time we reached the end of the line, my nerves were fried and my hands were shaking. I was even more clueless about what to expect than when I set out. But none of these fears or doubts mattered. All that mattered was that I avenge Danny’s death. I knew it wouldn’t bring him back, but it would give me peace of mind, which I desperately craved.
I took a cab from Millennium over to Union Station. With all the traffic it took over twenty minutes. I probably could have walked there in the same time. I reluctantly paid the driver with what little cash I had on me in crumpled fives and ones.
When I got out, I craned my neck upward to look at the towering building. Dozens of people were coming and going through the row of glass doors. Nobody glanced my way as I pushed through the revolving door and stepped onto the escalator. I was invisible to all of them—just the way I liked it.
Since I wasn’t sure what train we were taking or where we would be going, I bought a donut and a coffee from the food court Dunkin Donuts and ate it at a table for two. I reached into my bag and blindly searched for the book I packed. It was Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I had already read it, but I thought it was an appropriate story for the situation. I, too, felt like I didn’t know which way was up anymore, like I had fallen down the rabbit hole into a world that differed slightly from the one I lived in before.
My mind wandered into the twisted story. The words pulled me away from my worry and took me somewhere unreal and distracting. Ten pages in, a large hand came down hard on my shoulder and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Don,” I said with heaving breaths. “You scared me.”
“Sorry ‘bout that.” He walked over to the chair across from mine and sat down.
I waited for him to say something, but he simply folded his arms and looked around at the bustling food court. My eyes went back to my book, but kept wandering over the pages to glance at the strange middle-aged man in front of me. He was a weird contrast of youthfulness and aging.
His body was long and muscular. Whatever training I was about to endure, it must consist of exhausting physical workouts. Even though I was thin, my muscles were still small and soft. The only hardness could be found in my calves from the occasional run around the neighborhood.
His clothes were not age discriminate. He neither dressed young nor old. He simply dressed like a man clad in a thick blue flannel shirt, dirty old jeans, and work boots. It was his face that made me question how old he really was. Deep wrinkles set in on his tanned forehead, I assumed from scowling. His eyebrows were dark, thick, and unkempt, just like his hair. The graying around the ears and in the short hairs of his beard stubble made me place him somewhere in his mid-forties, maybe early fifties. I couldn’t be sure.
Before I knew what happened, our eyes locked onto each other’s and my face burned a bright red. He cocked his head and pulled his brows together as if to question why I was staring at him. I hadn’t realized I was.
“We better get going,” he said roughly.
I stood up, put my book in my bag, slung my bag over my shoulder, and followed three paces behind him. There were so many questions I wanted to ask, but I still didn’t know where we stood—were we friends in the fight against evil together? Were we teacher and student where a certain level of respect should be shown at all times? Were we nothing at all but the transporter and the cargo? I decided it was best to keep my mouth shut until I figured it out.
We didn’t stop at the window to purchase tickets. Don walked right past to the platform and boarded an Amtrak train headed for Denver, Colorado. I followed close on his heels. He handed the conductor two tickets.
“You didn’t have to buy my ticket for me,” I said. Really, he did. The money my parents had left me when they died was all but gone and I still hadn’t found a job to support myself.
“This ride’s on the Chamber,” he said in short.
Don didn’t stop walking until we were near the back of the train. It was the observation car. Windows reached floor to ceiling in long rows and another set curved with the ceiling above those. Individual plush swivel seats lined each side of the train with an aisle down the middle for walking. Almost every seat was taken except for two together in the back on the left. Don took the seat next to the wall and I sat in the one next to his.
We both had checked our bags except for the small messenger bag Don kept across his chest, even as he sat down. He crossed one leg over the other at the ankle and situated the bag to rest in his lap. His hands rested on top.
We must have just made the train, because within minutes it started to move forward away from the station and pick up speed once it was out in the clear, wide open. The city faded away behind us as we headed further into the countryside. Every time we passed a farm with horses grazing in the green pastures, a soft murmur from the other riders rose and carried through the car.
It wasn’t until we crossed the state line into Iowa that Don spoke. By then, everyone had gotten over the thrill of being in a glass train car and had settled into their routine of boredom. Some read, some slumped in their chairs and stared out at the sparse Iowa scenery, others deeply discussed plans with their traveling companions, but all were oblivious to what anyone else did around them.
“I suppose you have some questions,” Don said in a low voice.
He caught me off guard. An open discussion was the last thing I expected from him on this trip. From what I could tell in the few days I had known him, he was a man of very few words. Even if I got one-word answers to the dozens of questions I had, it would be better than nothing. I racked my brain to order them from most important to least important.
“Where are we going?”
“Denver,” he said flatly.
I cocked my head and furrowed my brow. “I gathered that much. I mean once we’re in Denver, where are we going?”
“Headquarters is outside a small mountain town. That’s all you need to know right now about that.”
Maybe getting my questions answered wasn’t better than not knowing. I felt even more confused by the mysterious location and the use of the word “headquarters”.
“From what I know so far, there’s an organization of some sort, apparently at this headquarters in the mountains of Colorado, that train people to find evil beings and kill them. Am I right?”
Don chuckled to himself and rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “You could say that.”
“Is that what you would say, though?”
His hand roamed his face and ended up on the back of his neck while he contemplated. “Well, as you already know, it’s called the Chamber of Darkness, the one you’ll be going to. There’s a Chamber of Light, but you don’t need to be concerned with that. All you need to worry about is your training.”
I leaned forward in my chair. “Right, about that. Am I going to be learning how to—what—exorcize demons? Kill demons? Or am I going to be learning to fight other things as well?”
Don sighed and looked up at the curved ceiling windows. White fluffy clouds flew by in a blur as we sped along the track. “You’ll learn many things, I promise.”
I stared at him while I processed. I was going to count that as a question answered. “How does this Chamber work? Who pays for all this? Do they pay us to hunt? Where does the money come from? And how is it organized? Are there other jobs besides hunting? Who runs it?” Once I got a few out, there was no turning off the water spout of questions. I wanted to know everything.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down!” Don raised one hand and laughed. The other stayed firmly on the bag in his lap. “Let me see,” he sighed. “The money is donated
, mostly by the people we help, also by retired Chamber members. That money keeps everything operational. We do get paid. It’s set up like the military. Each year you do well in your job, you earn a little more share from the pot. There are other jobs, but none that would be suited for you, so you don’t have to worry about those. And as far as organization goes, your ranking system starts with the Head of the Chamber, the Vice-Head, the Department Head of Enforcement, the Divisional Head of Huntsmen, and then your instructors. Not a whole lot to remember. You’re a smart girl. You’ll be just fine.”
He relaxed back into his chair and leaned his head against the headrest. His eyes trained on the passing field. I continued to stare at him with my mouth slightly agape. How was I supposed to remember all that? I desperately wanted to reach into my bag and take out the notebook and pen I packed, but I had foolishly checked it when we got on and only carried my book with me.
Out of the corner of his eye, Don looked at me with a small smile tugging at the corners of his thin lips. “Don’t worry so much. You’ll give yourself a heart attack. Just sit back, relax, enjoy the ride, and you’ll learn everything you need to know when we get there.”
He was right. I didn’t know why I was in such a rush to abandon normality. Those eighteen hours on the train were my last in the world recognized by everyone else. I should have tuned everything out and watched it go by. I wasn’t that easily satisfied, though.
“Can I ask you about your family? They’re the reason you started hunting, aren’t they?”
He said nothing at first. His dull eyes looked down and he picked at a loose thread on his bag. There was a deep sigh. “I had left for the weekend to go fishing with my buddy up in Michigan, but the entire ride I had a strange feeling. I kept calling my wife, but she wasn’t answering the phone. I couldn’t ignore it, so I turned around and drove back.
“When I got home, my wife was already dead in our room, face down on the floor. I tried, but I couldn’t revive her,” his voice was deep and slow. “That’s when I heard my daughter scream from her room. I ran in and saw the thing just before it leapt from her window,” he sighed and looked down at his hands. “It was too late. She was already gone.
“After that, I left home and searched for the thing that killed my family on my own. That’s when the Chamber picked me up. I had caused a stir apparently when one of their Huntsmen started tracking something I was also after.”
“Is that how they pick up a lot of new hunters? By chance like that?”
He adjusted himself in his chair to rest his face in the palm of his hand, supported by his elbow on the arm rest. “Not at all. All Huntsmen are descendants sponsored by their parents or grandparents. You will be the first non-descendant to set foot inside the headquarters in over a decade. Before that it’d been almost a century.”
Air caught in my lungs. I covered my mouth with the crook of my arm as I coughed. My throat was dry and I couldn’t swallow. “That’s a lot of pressure,” I recovered with a weak smile. “If they don’t normally recruit non-descendants, then why are they letting you bring me there now?
“Our world is changing,” he said as if it was common knowledge. “The creatures of Darkness are organizing for the first time, it seems, and the Chamber wants to make sure it has enough Huntsmen to deal with the problem when it gets worse.”
Gets worse? I couldn’t imagine things getting any worse than they already were. But on a whole, the majority of the world didn’t seem to know about the things that lurked in the shadows, or they just chose not to believe in them. If the truth came out it could be bad for humanity as a whole.
“What do you mean organizing? Who’s leading them?” I asked with genuine concern. After all, it was a big part of my future job.
“That, we don’t know. But it’s our job as Huntsmen to keep our eyes and ears open to find out.”
I brushed my hair behind my shoulders and out of my face. To hide the tensing of my facial muscles, I turned my head away and rubbed my mouth with my hand. I hoped he thought I was deep in thought. In a way I was. So much was changing in such a short amount of time. It was difficult for me to process it all so quickly.
Why would the creatures of Darkness, as he put it, want to organize? What were they planning to do? Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. My hand roamed down to the necklace Cara gave me the night before. I twisted the wings around and poked the sharp ends into my fingertip.
“Is that silver?” Don asked to my surprise. It was the first question he had asked me all day.
“Yeah. Sorry. Are we not allowed to wear jewelry? I wasn’t sure,” I babbled as I reached around and fiddled with the clasp to take it off.
“No, it’s fine,” he said quickly. He reached over and lifted the pendent off my neck and held it loosely in his fingers. “You should keep it with you.”
This relieved my worries. Cara had been dead right about it being a bittersweet reminder of not only the miracle Danny was, but also of the amazing bond we shared in those five years. Every time I touched it, it was like I could feel him with me, smiling at me.
“Can I ask you one more question?” I leaned in close again.
Don’s head lolled to the side as I tested his patience. His face urged me to get on with it so he could rest.
“What’s in the bag?” My eyes motioned to his lap.
Any hint of amusement toward me disappeared in an instant. Every muscle tightened as he straightened himself up and clutched at the bag. “It’s nothing.”
My eyes widened, pleading him to tell me, begging him to trust me.
His tired, dull, gray eyes lingered on my curious face and finally he gave in, at least as far as he could. “Fine. It’s just something another Huntsman found that I’m turning in to the Dark Artifacts Department.”
I didn’t think my eyes could expand any wider, but they did. He had piqued my interest. “Dark Artifacts Department? What’s that? Sounds mysterious, and a little scary.”
“That’s exactly what it is. Full of objects so evil they shouldn’t exist. When we find something like that we need to turn it in so no one else can use it.” He paused and moved the bag to his side furthest from me. “That’s all I can tell you about it, so don’t ask.”
I raised my hands in surrender. “No more questions, then.”
“Good. Now, get some rest. You’ll need it.”
Just to please him, I angled my chair away from his and opened my book. My eyes scanned the pages, read the words, but I couldn’t retain a single bit of it. My mind was on the Chamber and what my role was going to be in the elaborate underground organization that no one had ever heard of. I was going to see the world and change people’s lives. I was going to be a part of something big, like I had always wanted. But as I sat on the train, with the open fields passing by, I had no idea just how big it would be.
After a while, the scenery all looked the same, like a background on a mechanical runner constantly replaying. I kicked my feet up and tried to fall asleep. The rocking of the train relaxed me, but it wasn’t enough for me to drift off into a pleasant, dreamless sleep. My nerves kept me awake.
Since the awful night of my son’s death, I awoke in the most violent ways—sometimes screaming at the top of my lungs, flailing my arms, striking at the air, and sometimes I just gasped in panic. I didn’t want to scare the people on the train. So, my eyes remained closed for the entire rest of the way, but I didn’t sleep for a single minute.
HEADQUARTERS
Broken Angel (Book 1 in the Chronicles of a Supernatural Huntsman series) Page 8
