Gate Maker turned to us now that we were decent. His violet eyes, devoid of pupils, regarded us calmly. “Yes. I believe you two have a true desire to close the tear for the good of many, but… I’ve already heard enough of your meetings that you were a part of. I distrust all organizations.” He paused, eyes narrowing. “If you brought me here to study or cage me, I will disappear into the Mortal Plane forever. I trust you two for now, but…”
My throat tightened with dread. “We didn’t, I swear. We have no desire to study or imprison you.”
Gate Maker marched on with his speech. “Well, if it happens, you will suffer the consequences of breaking our contract. The magical fallout would be fatal for you.” The last sentence came out with stomach-churning gravity. Fatal? What a thing to disclose. This was never part of the deal, especially with so much on the line.
Dorian exhaled tightly. “Are you saying you insisted we make a pact with you, but you didn’t tell us that breaking it could kill us? We have no intention of doing so, but life is chaotic right now. We swore our lives to this cause, and we might have to put that loyalty ahead of our agreement with you.”
Anger rose up inside me. “He’s right, Gate Maker. We’ve been honest with you every step of the way, and you put us in danger.”
Gate Maker’s thoughts were inscrutable behind a perfect veil of composure. “You agreed to our pact. This is simply how binding magic works. If it brings you any level of satisfaction, breaking it will also harm me.”
So if we were screwed, all three of us were in it together. I decided to swallow my anger, though it rankled. We had Gate Maker as an ally for now, and it would be foolish to say anything to jeopardize this rocky connection.
“We’re not monsters,” I promised. “We won’t let anyone put you in a cage and torment you. That kind of thing is a major part of what our group is fighting against.”
He fixed me with a distrustful gaze.
“You must swear to keep my existence secret. I may believe the two of you, but I know how situations can change as more people are added. I will stay out of sight until I can return home.”
Dorian crossed his arms, not entirely comfortable with the proposal. “You still have a unique aura. It can be tracked.”
“You’re smart. You’ll figure out how to keep me invisible.” Gate Maker gave him a deliberately challenging stare. Dorian glanced at me, but I shrugged irritably. We weren’t in the position to make demands of Gate Maker, and he knew it.
Granted, Gate Maker’s behavior was understandable for somebody who was a prisoner for the better part of a millennium. But what he was asking for might be impossible. I sank onto the edge of the bed, trying to assemble a list of everyone who knew about his existence besides Inkarri.
“Laini will ask about you,” I pointed out. “She’s a vampire friend of ours. We have two other comrades who will wonder the same thing when our group reunites. Lying to our friends won’t work, especially about such a vital thing.”
Dorian nodded in agreement. “You’re the key to ending this entire conflict.”
“You’re a big deal.” I dropped my voice into a gentler tone. “Your trust is important to us. I understand your request, but—”
“But?” Gate Maker asked coolly. “There is no compromise here. Keep my loyalty and my presence a secret.”
And lie to our friends and hold a secret that might compromise our mission? We needed to save the world. It wasn’t just about the three of us in this room. Our lie could have unimaginable effects… if Gate Maker pulled something wily down the line in our mission, it might risk everything.
Fighting the urge to snap, I settled on taking a deep breath and turned to Dorian. We had one object that might serve as a good excuse.
“Look, maybe we can explain away his aura by claiming it’s the stone. You’ve always been able to pick up on its frequency in the Mortal Plane, so we can just say that it’s been changed by the amount of magical energy it absorbed.”
Dorian hesitated. “When the others get back to this plane, they’re going to have plenty of questions about him. Even if we explain away the aura, I don’t know how we can account for getting back to the Mortal Plane without him. There are no stone circles near where we were picked up. The only one I know of is miles away. The story would fall apart almost immediately.”
“If I could make a suggestion?” Gate Maker piped up. “Tell them that I made a gate to the Mortal Plane to hide. You followed me through, but I escaped.”
I looked to Dorian. Our bargain with Gate Maker was our only solid lead in closing the tear and maintaining the barrier between the planes. We needed to save the world, and that meant we needed Gate Maker. He set the demands at the moment. It was time to comply or say goodbye to healing the tear.
“Fine,” Dorian said. “It’s a deal.”
I swallowed grit in the back of my throat, ashamed that we were going to lie to our own team. But we would do whatever it took to save the planes. Later, after Gate Maker learned to trust us more, we might be able to renegotiate.
“If you need time to rest and recover, we can make sure you get that,” I said. “We will help you return home, and not only because you agreed to help us mend the tear. Everyone deserves a home.” If the events of the past few months had taught me one thing, it was that.
Dorian cocked his head, sizing up our goblinoid friend. “You never mentioned where home actually is for you. You just said that you were from another place.”
That reminded me. I’d formed a strange impression of Gate Maker during our escape but hadn’t had time to follow up on it.
“From what little you said,” I added, “it doesn’t sound like you think of either the Immortal or Mortal Plane as home.”
Gate Maker clasped his stubby claws together and shifted uncomfortably. “My home is not like your worlds. It’s more of a… streamlined form of the universe, I suppose. Truly, I would struggle to describe it to you. I haven’t been back in well over a thousand years.”
“That’s certainly a while,” Dorian noted in a friendly manner, but his sharp eyes drilled into Gate Maker. “I’ve never heard of such a place.”
“No one is supposed to know,” Gate Maker fired back. His pain simmered beneath longing, but I also sensed that he was stalling.
An urgent knock sounded at the door. In a flash, Gate Maker shifted into a tiny lizard and scuttled beneath the bed. Dorian strode to the door as I finished threading my belt through my pant loops.
“I’m Captain Gomez. I’m helping Ruiz run the LA Bureau office at the moment.” A man spoke. “There’s a situation outside HQ. Your presence is requested in the comms center.” Captain Ruiz herself had been temporarily granted leadership while the investigation into the Bureau was ongoing. The Bureau must’ve recruited other captains for her office.
I exited the bedroom. “We’ll be right with you, Captain.”
Gate Maker declined to come along, and so a few minutes later Dorian and I exited the barracks alone. We were met by a soldier holding two cups of takeaway coffee and a paper bag. “Captain Ruiz instructed us to send breakfast.”
Dorian politely took his cup, though I knew he wouldn’t be eating or drinking anything. More for me.
The soldier escorted us through the maze of the LA campus. Twenty minutes after we were summoned, we arrived at the comms center to a packed house. An array of soldiers of various ranks stood gathered around a bunch of screens.
The first screen showed a crudely armed mob breaking through a chain-link security fence. I glanced out the window, recognizing the same fence.
“We’ve got a riot,” a tired-eyed soldier told us.
A mob had formed outside, but the second screen showed an even worse sight. It appeared the mob had successfully taken the lobby.
“Someone managed to take down the security system for a minute and let them in. There’s not much to break in there,” Captain Gomez said, pointing to the screen. He was a tall, blond man of around thirty-five, with
deep brown eyes and a slightly stiff manner. “The governor is on us right now because he’s tight with the new board. He’ll murder us if one of them gets hurt. They’re tearing up furniture and walls, but I’m more worried about the baseball bats and crowbars. They won’t touch a hair on our soldiers with their firearms, but the rioters might hurt each other.”
Stepping closer to the screen, I studied the security system. Solid metal safety gates shut off access to the rest of the building. The rioters hammered against the heavy barriers. Guards sat on the walls with guns aimed at them, but the crowd still surged.
Gomez watched with disgust. “The public shouldn’t know that this is a Bureau headquarters. We only moved recently, to an industrial park just outside Los Angeles. The new location has been kept off all public files.”
One of the soldiers turned the volume up.
“Bring out the vampires!” the rioters chanted. Their twisted, screaming faces were captured in detail by the security cameras.
I went numb with disappointment. We had done so much to show vampires in a positive light, but the revenants had wrecked all the positive press. They attacked towns and left before anyone could stop them. News reports showed montages of shadowy images from far away, just clear enough to make out the figure of a vampire.
Dorian’s face dropped with a disappointed frown. “It didn’t take much for them to re-embrace their hate for us, did it?”
Civilians were unlikely to stumble across Bureau locations by themselves. The recently escaped board members from VAMPS camp did have that information, though. Although I remembered Sempre dismissing the board as useless, the fugitive members might not feel that way.
I mentioned this to Gomez and added, “The other possibility is that a vampire-hating civilian managed to hack our systems and leak the information.”
Gomez pointed to two nearby soldiers. “Go and tell the IT unit to double their efforts searching for cyber security attacks. I want knowledge of any data breaches or hacking attempts.” He turned back to the screens, contemplative. “There’s currently no supernatural signatures in this crowd, or even the surrounding area. Maybe this is unrelated to the revenants. Could this just be a group of anti-vampire humans raising hell?”
A woman in a black suit, her ID pegging her as part of the tech team, hurried up to us. A local news report was streaming on her open laptop.
“We’ve got trouble, Captain. There are protests at other HQs, and a sharp rise in violent crimes where victims are claiming that vampires instigated the issues. We cross-checked all incident zones, and there’s been supernatural activity around each crime scene within the past forty-eight hours. The weird thing is, the presences are always long gone by the time the crime is reported to start. Sir, the humans are only fighting one another.”
Captain Gomez roughly dragged a hand down his face. “I can’t make heads or tails of that. The vampires pop up somewhere, leave, and then hours later people attack each other? Are you sure the vampires aren’t somehow sticking around?”
I felt a creeping suspicion that I knew what was happening.
The tech shook her head. “The police only find humans, sir. They’re committing violence against one another, rather than against vampires or revenants. Although, authorities managed to kill two revenants last night who went on rampages to destroy an entire train system’s navigation system. It caused a massive crash that killed twenty people. Those revenants weren’t hard to catch, because that kind of chaos is easy to track. Otherwise, the Bureau is currently playing hide-and-seek with the supernatural.”
In other words, there was a strategy to stay out of sight, with the ability to easily escape.
Captain Ruiz walked into the control room, a phone glued to her ear. “Yes, Governor Shaun, we’re handling it. Try to keep the media off our asses.” She pocketed the phone and gave us a weary look.
“What do we do about the mob?” Gomez asked. Ruiz joined him at the screens.
“Squad cars are on their way, but it could take a while. Governor Shaun is afraid about backlash and citywide riots if the Bureau responds with violence. Nearly all police officers have been called to various incidents across the city. The mob isn’t posing any real danger yet, so if possible, I’d rather let the police handle it. We’ll send more security down to stand by out of sight in case things get worse. The governor is demanding answers.”
Furious shouts from the mob blared through the room until someone lowered the volume. My tongue sat like a stone in my mouth as the form of Irrikus’s plan began to draw into focus.
Ruiz looked at me. Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “Does this have something to do with you, Sloane?”
Chapter Seven
Ruiz, Gomez, and the soldiers stared intently at us.
“We mentioned to you in the briefing that the revenants can disappear incredibly quickly,” Dorian said. “They can phase between the Mortal Plane and the Immortal Plane without needing one of the gates vampires have to use. The revenants can only do it, likely at a great cost, because of their dangerously high levels of dark energy. It’s incredibly risky, but they clearly don’t care.” He nodded toward the screens.
I cleared my throat. “While in the sanitarium, I overheard part of a conversation where Sempre was discussing his plans to cause chaos in the Mortal Plane.” Everyone’s gazes weighed on me. “From what I heard, I thought their main goal was to turn humanity against the vampires by having revenants commit atrocities, destroying the reputation we’ve been building for vampires. Which appears to be working.” I pointed to the screen showing the milling mob. “But they also want to increase darkness in the Mortal Plane overall. I think they must somehow be provoking humans to commit atrocities upon each other, something the old board members are probably taking advantage of by leaking HQ locations. We should focus on finding the board members. If they’re not already in the Immortal Plane, I would be surprised if they’re not planning to escape there soon to avoid the coming destruction. Of course, they’d have to go through the tear, which is heavily guarded.”
At that, Ruiz snapped her fingers at two soldiers. “Someone get the records of all flight radars in this area. I want to see if there have been any rogue planes or choppers reported.”
The two rushed off. She glanced at Dorian. “And what are your thoughts, given your familiarity with the Immortal Plane?”
I savored my flutter of satisfaction as Dorian stepped forward. Even if the revenants were trying to destroy our hope of vampires coexisting with humans, Ruiz and her team still trusted Dorian.
“Finding the old board is important, definitely, but the revenants are more dangerous. Since they can avoid capture here by returning to the Immortal Plane at will, we need to remove the threat at the source. We have to go back to the Immortal Plane and take out the leaders who control their actions, then track down any remaining revenants across both planes. What we must remember is that they aren’t doing these acts of their own free will. They’ve been tortured to the point of insanity.”
His grim words sucked the air from the room. We hadn’t discussed returning to the Immortal Plane, but I knew it was our best option.
A small beep sounded, and the tech from earlier called out to Ruiz. “Captain, someone just contacted us from Canada. They picked up on an emergency beacon and staged a rescue. They have a vampire identifying herself as one of Sloane’s team. She’s requesting a pickup.”
My hopes lifted as I hurried to peer over the tech’s shoulder, Dorian close behind. Laini. So she’d made it to the Mortal Plane…
“Where is she?” I asked, struggling to orient myself as I scanned the map.
The tech scanned her screen. “Canada, in the mountains near Calgary, Alberta.”
“Clear the nearest Bureau office to send her our way,” Ruiz ordered. “If everything goes well, we can have her in LA by tonight.”
* * *
By the next morning, the Bureau soldiers and police had cleared the rioters out from the main HQ
building. Constant patrols walked the boundary. On this final day of August, the chaos continued as we prepared to greet Laini and Kreya.
Dorian crossed his arms as we stood on the baking airstrip under another bleeding sunset. I studied the guards carefully as they marched toward the incoming chopper set to land on the strip. Would Laini be safe, or carried out on a stretcher?
The helicopter had barely touched the ground when a familiar figure leapt out and darted around the sea of Bureau personnel.
“Dorian!” Laini cried. She leapt into his arms, finally reunited.
When Dorian put her down, Laini immediately grabbed me in a tight hold, dragging Dorian down with her free arm. It was a wonderful, unrestrained celebration in front of a ton of strangers.
“Watch Lyra’s ribs,” Dorian muttered. Laini pulled back apologetically, but I shook my head.
“They feel much better,” I said, when Dorian lifted an inquisitive brow. “Don’t worry.”
Laini nodded but looked distracted. She searched our faces. “Is the entire world overrun?”
Dorian laughed bitterly. “Not yet, but there have been developments.”
Looking back to the chopper, I saw Bureau soldiers lower a stretcher into waiting hands. My mind raced wildly as I spotted Kreya’s hand hanging limply from a restraint.
“She’s breathing,” Laini reassured me hurriedly. “They’ve strapped her down to keep her from fighting, but I don’t think that’s a problem right now.”
The medics had strapped Kreya to the stretcher with regular restraints and several improvised ones. I jogged over, keeping pace with Dorian and Laini. Kreya groaned mindlessly as her eyelids fluttered. They’d covered her forehead with a dressing that was now stained with dried blood. Her skin was no longer the frightening, unnatural black; it had faded to the color of ashes.
Dorian wrapped a reassuring arm around Laini as we hurried beside the grim parade.
“I siphoned off as much dark energy from Kreya as possible,” Laini said, wiping at her dirty face. Indeed, the shadows beneath Laini’s skin were rich and stable. “She’s been like this the whole time. She has rare moments when she’s lucid, but then she just passes out.”
Darklight 5: Darktide Page 5
