All Souls: A Gatehouse Thriller

by Karin Kaufman

  He looked at me with such sadness—as though he carried an incalculable weight on his shoulders—that it almost took my breath away. “Do you think I’ve done nothing I regret?”

  I wondered, but didn’t dare ask, what choices he’d been forced to make over the years. “Then I’m glad you left Gatehouse,” I finally said. And to take at least a portion of that weight from his shoulders, I promised I’d never buzz again. And I mostly meant it. He was right, of course. Waffle with a Resolute or higher-level Sack and it could cost you your life. I’d been lulled into a false confidence by dealing only with Desires.

  Nathan asked me to wait while he made a phone call from his SUV. He dialed, listened, then smiled broadly. It must be Lydia, I thought. She’d made it to her safe house. They talked for only a minute before he hung up. He started up his car, looked my way, and gave me a thumbs-up as he mouthed the word “Lydia.” I gave him a fist pump in return, started my Forester, and followed him back out to the interstate.

  We hit the exit for Highway 24 just ten minutes later and traveled west into the foothills outside of the Springs. I hadn’t thought to ask Nathan if he knew the way to Connor Doyle’s house, but he drove straight through, without once stopping to consult a map. He probably knew the addresses, and how to get there, for every single hunter he’d ever sent on a kill.

  A few miles after that, several blocks north of downtown Manitou Springs, we turned west and drove deeper into the foothills. When Nathan made a right onto a narrow paved road atop a ridge, I knew I was lost again on winding roads. I’d only been to Connor’s house twice, and both times in daylight.

  Looking to my left, into the canyon below the ridge, I spotted a row of houses, the moonlight glinting off their metal roofs, vents, and solar panels. The sun and dry air, as usual in the Colorado high country, had melted and evaporated the snow on surfaces not shielded by pines or the foothills themselves, though that left a few unpleasantly icy spots on the road.

  Nathan pulled his Explorer to the curb then nosed it up the street a little, making room for me behind him. Connor lived in the sort of place I wanted to live one day. A few acres on a low hill, his neighbors’ houses five times the distance from his house that my neighbors in Loveland were from mine. It wasn’t as isolated as the Tennants’ house, but nearly so. As we trotted up Connor’s long front steps, I was glad Nathan had thought to get him out of here until Gatehouse could figure out why the Sack world was going rampant.

  It was just past six-thirty, still dark out, and I was about to ask how we’d wake Connor without scaring the stuffings out of him when Nathan hit the doorbell. I realized it was the only sensible thing to do. We couldn’t sneak around the back and tap on his deck door. Connor might answer a scare like that with his 9mm.

  The carriage light went on, a shadow passed over the front door’s peephole, and Connor flung the door wide. “What are you two doing here?” he said, stepping back from the door and inviting us in.

  His brown hair stuck out in stiff clumps about his head—the result of excessively gelled hair meeting pillow—and the skin beneath his eyes was puffy from either a late night or a general lack of sleep. He swept us into his living room then excused himself to exchange his robe for some clothes. “Tea?” I called to him as he trudged up the stairs.

  “Help yourself,” he replied. I heard a door shut on the second floor and wound my way to the kitchen. Connor’s was an old house—not very large, but a rabbit warren of rooms and narrow halls. Putting aside my distaste for tea dust, I took a box of tea bags from a cabinet, filled a kettle with water, and set it on the stove.

  “Want some tea?” I asked as Nathan took a seat at the kitchen table. At least I’d been able to shut my eyes and not think about Sacks for forty-five minutes. He looked like he could fall asleep sitting up in thirty seconds tops.

  “Yes, thanks.”

  Connor thudded down the stairs and wandered through the kitchen doorway, scratching his head then halfheartedly smoothing his hair. He’d decided to put on a pair of hiking boots too, I saw, aware that Nathan and I hadn’t knocked on his door in the wee hours for tea and an idle chat.

  “What’s going on, Nathan?” he asked, settling into a chair. “I thought we were going to meet day after tomorrow.”

  “Things have changed. Jane and I are driving to the safe house and you need to come with us. A New Mexico hunter, Kath Norwocki, is coming with us.”

  “What for?” He looked from Nathan to me.

  After telling Connor that details could wait, Nathan covered the high points—the increased Sack activity, the Sack attack at his house, Brent Vogel’s murder, and the appearance of my name on a kill list. Connor sat open-mouthed, unable to make sense of what he was hearing. At thirty-seven, he had been a hunter for four years, and I knew he’d never heard of the sort of activity Nathan had just described. I knew from studying them the past two years that Sacks never acted that way. They were vicious bastards, but there were lines they didn’t cross purely out of self-interest.

  I handed Nathan and Connor their cups of tea and sat with my own cup at the table, scowling at the bag floating unappetizingly on the water. Connor caught me staring at it and chuckled.

  “Do you have your pack?” Nathan asked him.

  “Yeah, when do we go?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Damn.”

  “Leave your cell phone here.”

  “What about breakfast?”

  “Bring something for the road. Ten minutes.”

  Nathan wrapped his arms around his chest and shut his eyes, and Connor marched upstairs again. I lifted my cup and drained it, then started to dig through the refrigerator for something we could eat while driving. I cut up a wheel of cheddar cheese and some red apples and separated the lot into three plastic grocery bags, one for each of us.

  “Tomorrow’s Halloween,” Connor announced, shouldering his pack as he made his way back to the kitchen. Nathan opened his eyes and grabbed hold of his tea cup.

  “Do you have trick-or-treaters up here?” I asked.

  “Three kids from down the road,” Connor said. “That’s one thing I miss about living in the Springs.”

  Connor, like most hunters, was single. A few older hunters were married—and I’d always suspected that in many such cases both husband and wife were hunters—but none of them had children. Gatehouse didn’t recruit hunters with kids, and if you got pregnant, you were out. So was your husband. Parents didn’t make good hunters, and young children were notoriously bad secret keepers.

  Nathan had married late in life, just a year before he left Gatehouse, and he too had never had children. He’d started as a hunter, like Connor and me. From hunter to Gatehouse member to porter. Not a lot of room for children in there. And though I didn’t know how Nathan and Connor felt about the childless life, I was fine with it. I’d freely chosen my path, and most of the time I believed I’d chosen wisely.

  “You don’t have an excuse to buy Halloween candy,” I said, handing Connor his grocery bag. “Where I live, I can tell the cashier those bags of mini chocolate bars in my cart are for the kids.”

  Nathan, who had been staring at the bottom of his cup, suddenly stood, took his phone out of his suit jacket, and dialed a number before walking from the kitchen.

  Connor eyed me. “Tell me he’s using a burner.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then how does he remember phone numbers?”

  “He just does. He remembered how to get to your house, too.”

  “Weird.”

  “It’s a skill, like your skill with computers and math and how I can see patterns and connections.”

  “My skill’s normal. Anything you can teach in school is normal.” He peered into his grocery bag. “Cheese and fruit. Thanks, abnormally skilled one.”

  Nathan was pacing in the front hall, talking quietly on his phone, but a few words filtered through and made their way past Connor’s incessant foot tapping.

  “I don’t
like the way he’s talking,” Connor said. He’d been listening too, his tapping a nervous response to what he was hearing. “And I can’t believe that other hunter almost shot you.”

  “She’s my friend.” Looking down at his feet, I added, “Stop that, please.”

  “I just talked to Anita, Chester Avila’s wife,” Nathan said as he returned to the kitchen. He took his seat at the table, his shoulders sagging as he leaned against the chair back. “Two hours ago, a Festal broke into their home and shot Chester five times.”

  My hand flew to my mouth.

  “My God,” Connor said. “Not Chester.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Chester was the best—and at forty-eight, the oldest—hunter I knew, and his home in Durango, Colorado, was like a fortress. “The Sack got into his house?”

  “I was calling to warn him,” Nathan said. “Anita saw it all.”

  “Is she hurt?” I asked.

  Nathan shook his head. “Not physically. The Festal, a woman named Capitolina, wanted to make sure she saw everything.”

  “Typical Sack bastards,” Connor said. He stood abruptly, the legs of his chair screeching as they scraped the wood floor. He grabbed a dirty wineglass from his kitchen counter, filled it with water, and emptied it in a succession of gulps.

  “I know about Capitolina,” I said. “Durango’s out of her territory. She’s never killed that far west.”

  “No, she hasn’t.”

  “Some Sack could be sitting outside my door right now,” Connor said, slamming the wineglass to the counter. I thought he’d break the stem in two.

  “I think we’d know that,” Nathan said. “They’re not good at waiting.”

  A spidery tingle played at the back of my neck. Chester was a hunter. Sacks sometimes discovered the identities of porters and Gatehouse members, but Chester shouldn’t have been on any Sack’s radar. Hunters almost never killed Sacks in public, and if they had to, they killed by deftly, invisibly wielding an umbrella. Chester was anything but sloppy. There shouldn’t have been any witness to his kills, any way to track him. “How did Capitolina know Chester was a hunter?”

  “That’s a very good question,” Nathan said. “We don’t know yet.”

  “So do we get out of here?” Connor asked, leaning back on the counter.

  “Change of plans,” Nathan said. “I called Kath after talking to Anita. She’s an hour away and meeting us here. I gave her your address, Connor, I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Any hunter’s OK with me. Anyway, Chester knew where I lived.”

  “It seems to me we have a traitor somewhere,” I said. “Maybe not at Gatehouse, though. It could be another hunter.”

  “Sit down, Connor,” Nathan said, tipping his head at the table. “I have something to tell you both.”

  We waited for Nathan to speak. He avoided our eyes as he mulled over what he was going to say—or if he should say it at all. He was a decisive man who said what he meant and said it straight out, but twice in the past two days I’d watched him struggle for words.

  “We’re going to a different safe house,” he said, “one only porters and Gatehouse know about. It’s north of Denver. All three of you will drive in your own cars and follow me. Connor, I wish I had fresh plates for you, but I don’t. You drive directly behind me and in front of Kath.”

  Connor nodded, his expression solemn.

  “Jane, I need you to bring up the rear.”

  I nodded too. Vogel dead, Avila dead, Sacks breaking into Nathan’s house, Kath putting a gun to my head—the magnitude of all that had happened in the past ten hours had stilled our voices.

  “Another thing. There’s been a major development at Gatehouse, and it may have bearing on what’s happening now. I think you should be informed.”

  I knew he’d been holding back. His poker face was no match for my intuition.

  He leaned forward, crossing his arms on the table. “A woman named Elizabeth Hall was admitted to Gatehouse a month ago. She defected, for lack of a better word, and now, as a member of Gatehouse, she’s a target. She’s a restored Elation.”

  Connor flopped back in his chair. “Bloody hell.”

  I stared hard at Nathan. So the stories I’d heard about restored Sacks were real—whispered truth that reached hunters’ ears as nothing more than rumor and fantasy. “Then it’s true. Sacks can be restored.”

  “Bullshit they can,” Connor said. He pushed out of his chair, giving it a backward kick with his boot and knocking it against the wall. “I need to take a leak.”

  Chapter 8

  Kath had time to close her eyes for ten minutes before we were all out Connor’s door and into our cars. Nathan led the way out of the foothills and back to I-25, with Connor’s Honda behind him and Kath’s car behind Connor’s. I didn’t like bringing up the rear—it meant watching my rearview mirror almost as much as the road ahead—but I understood why Nathan had asked me to do it. Kath was a good hunter, but her observation skills needed sharpening.

  Besides, both Kath and Conner were driving cars with known plates. A few months ago that wouldn’t have been a concern since Gatehouse kept hunters’ identities secret. But now Chester Avila, another hunter, had been targeted. Sacks knew he hunted, and they knew where he lived. Anonymity, for some of us at least, was a thing of the past.

  But how did Sacks find out about Chester? Or was it just the one Sack, Capitolina, who knew about him and chose to act on her own? I dismissed the thought. With all the activity lately, that was too much of a coincidence. There was a traitor somewhere, leaking names—and adding names that didn’t belong there to kill lists.

  Odd that the surge in Sack activity should coincide with the defection of Elizabeth Hall. A restored Elation—until now I hardly believed that such a thing existed—was a coup for Gatehouse, a fount of information. No wonder she was a target. Though until now, as far as I knew, only hunters and porters had been targeted in the Sack killing spree—no one at Gatehouse. Why was that? How would killing more hunters and porters help Sacks get to Elizabeth Hall?

  Kath had reacted much the same as Connor had when Nathan told her about Hall. Her hatred of Sacks ran even deeper than mine. It wasn’t just that she didn’t believe a Sack could be restored—she didn’t want to believe it. She drew pleasure, in a way I’d never seen with any other hunter, from making a kill. Her suspicion of Hall was immediate and profound, and when she learned of Chester’s death, her suspicion became unshakeable.

  The sun had been up for more than an hour, helping me stay awake at the wheel, but heading into the south Denver suburbs at the tail end of the morning rush hour, we had a hard time keeping our cars end to end. Now and then another car would squeeze its way between Kath and Connor or Kath and me, or a car would ride my bumper and I’d wonder if a Sack was preparing to strike. Traffic didn’t ease until we’d passed the Boulder exit.

  Just north of Fort Collins, Nathan led us off the interstate and took us west down a county road. I almost didn’t care where we were going. I wanted off the highway. There comes a point when lack of sleep meets end of adrenaline, and I was there.

  Nathan swung onto the frontage road then made a left into the parking lot of a two-pump gas station. He pulled right, and Connor split from our little convoy, driving toward the pump. He must have signaled Nathan to stop while we were driving. I hadn’t noticed. Kath slid behind Nathan’s Explorer, I parked behind her, and the three of us got out to walk the knots out of our legs.

  “How far to go?” I asked. Nathan twisted this way and that as he walked, hands in his pants pockets, searching the distance, keeping watch on the frontage road.

  “Less than an hour,” he said. He had tugged at the knot in his tie, loosening it, and he was overdue for a shave—hardly disheveled by my standards, but it was outside Nathan’s immaculate standards.

  “North?”

  “North and west.”

  “Into the foothills?” Kath said.

  “Yes.”

  “Who e
lse knows about this place?” I asked.

  “Just a few people.”

  Chilled by the cold morning air, I jammed my hands into my jacket pockets and leaned back on Kath’s car. “That means you don’t trust Gatehouse.”

  Kath’s head gave a slight jerk.

  “I’m being cautious,” Nathan said.

  “Gatehouse isn’t,” Kath said, tucking a windblown strand of hair behind one ear. “Letting this Hall Sack in.”

  “Former Sack,” Nathan said. “She’s been invaluable to Gatehouse.” He continued to pivot, checking out the gas station and surrounding roads.

  “Invaluable doing what?” Kath asked. “Putting Jane’s name on a kill list?”

  Nathan spun back. “She doesn’t have access to any list.”

  “Then who did it?” Kath asked. “I have a right to know, and we obviously can’t blame Brent.” She made fists and shoved them into her coat pockets. She hadn’t recovered from our near-fatal meeting at the condo any more than I had.

  “I don’t know who.”

  “Then you don’t know it’s not someone in Gatehouse.” She turned her face to the frontage road, worry creasing her brow. “I can’t believe they could be so stupid. They don’t give a damn about what happens in the field, especially to hunters.”

  Nathan stopped pivoting. “That’s not true. They care. They give up everything—family, personal lives.”

  We heard Connor’s wheels on the asphalt and turned as he drove slowly our way.

  “Then they go and let a Sack into Gatehouse,” Kath continued. “Fat lot of good their caring did Brent Vogel and Chester Avila.”

  Nathan gave a weary sigh. “I don’t think she had anything to do with their deaths. I think she’s trying to make amends.”

  Kath snorted, her eyes on Connor as he joined us. I should have told her to knock it off, but truthfully, I saw her point more clearly than I saw Nathan’s.