But that didn’t explain why a demon had shown up, wanting a piece of her. Amber moved past that traumatic memory to the next. She’d been robbed at gunpoint in Dallas outside a pub. She’d handed the guy in a ski mask her clutch. Then he wanted her necklace—the one her father had given her two days before the crash. She’d told him no, so he clocked her with the butt of the gun and ripped it off her neck anyway. It had taken two surgeries to fix her orbital socket and two years to get her necklace back. She’d hired a PI. It was worth every penny.
But, again, nothing to explain the demon. Unfortunately, the third event didn’t explain much either. Dora was a bus driver and had been taking her last and youngest student home—a first-grader named Madeline. She lived in a compound off the grid with a few families several miles outside of Madrid. The mobile homes were ancient, the campers dilapidated and lopsided.
Dora had pulled down the dusty road and found that the cattle guard had collapsed. She couldn’t cross it, but the houses were barely a quarter of a mile up the road. So, she’d dropped off the girl and watched to make sure she walked all the way into the compound—not that she had anywhere else to go.
That night, the cops came to Dora’s house. Madeline had never made it home.
It was her worst nightmare. The entire town spent days trying to find the girl. They scoured the desert countryside, searched every structure in the compound, put bulletins all over the town, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque. The local police, state police, and the FBI questioned Dora repeatedly. She’d watched Madeline walk over the hill to the commons area of the compound. Something had to have happened afterward, but nobody saw anything. They didn’t even see her go into the home she shared with her mother, which was little more than a camper shell. The girl was never seen again. And while utterly heartbreaking, it still didn’t explain the demon.
Maybe she could get back to that someday. Help Dora get closure. But for now, they had to focus on the danger at hand.
Disappointment spread through Amber like acid. She didn’t know what she’d expected to find. A clue. A hint of something supernatural happening to Dora that might link back to this. But there was simply nothing.
She could see Quentin watching her through her periphery. His head tilted to one side. His eyes shimmered. His hand rested on the table, one finger tapping as though in slow motion. She didn’t even try to see into Dora’s future. She didn’t know if she could with Dora being in the afterworld. So, she decided to take advantage of the situation in front of her.
She took another coaster and timed its flip perfectly. She shifted her gaze to Quentin’s, flipped the card, and laid it in front of him a millisecond before he realized what she was doing. He started to get up, to stop her, but it was too late. She dove inside him.
Or more like fell.
Shapes hit her first. Lots of movement and shadows, like a colony of bugs in the dark. An entire dimension, scurrying and smoky and blue. And then the eyes came into focus. The black eyes. Hundreds of them. Thousands.
“Rune,” she whispered. Quentin didn’t have a demon inside him. He had hundreds of thousands. He had an entire dimension. A dimension named Rune.
Chapter Eight
I try to act nonchalant,
but underneath, I’m chalant as fuck.
—T-shirt
“You shouldn’t be here, Traveler.”
One of them spoke to her—or maybe all of them—and the surprise that shot through Amber almost knocked her out of the dive, but she had fallen inside and didn’t know how to get out. She searched frantically but couldn’t find an exit, so she faced them. Hordes. As far as the eye could see.
“What did you do to him?” she asked, her voice a mere hiss. And yet, she hadn’t spoken. Not out loud.
“We sought refuge, Traveler. The one named Quinn gave it.”
“That’s not his name.”
“It is, and you know it.”
She did. That was his birth name. But how did they know that when even Quentin didn’t? She’d researched for years and found his birth parents.
“You do not know what he did for us.”
She raised her chin. Metaphorically. “Then tell me.”
“How about I show you?”
Before she could agree or disagree, the smoke and shadows parted, and memories rushed past her so fast, she could hardly keep up. Running. Fighting. Inhuman screaming. And then everything went silent. They had jumped into another dimension. One they called the House of the Founding Fathers. Washington DC. They lived there for centuries, but they were starving. Buildings rose and fell around them. Humans lived and died.
And then his face. He was different. Born of this world but from another. Quentin, only not. He absorbed them, not the other way around. He took them into his breast. Sheltered them. But it’d almost killed him. He ended up in the hospital. Rune remembered Amber being there, but those early days were disorienting. They could not see clearly. But they were nourished. For the first time in centuries, they were no longer starving.
Once Quentin was better, they returned to his school with him, but he started suspecting that they were there. He felt them. A twitch. A rustle. Until one day, he was out with his friends and heard one of them speak. He could talk better than the others, and Quentin heard him. He’d thought he was going crazy. Why could he suddenly hear?
“He’s hearing through you,” Amber said to them, astonished.
“Yes. But there is more, Traveler. Pay attention.”
She started to chastise them—she did not like being told what to do—but they showed her the nightmares that would leave him sweating and disoriented until he saw her face and calmed. He only wanted to get back to her. To finish out the semester and go home.
He’d already decided not to return to Gallaudet. He would go wherever she was. He would get a job. Take classes at night with an interpreter. Whatever it took to be with her. But, somehow, they found out about him. La Guardia Segreta. They came like thieves in the night.
Amber gasped as Rune showed her what they did to him. They knew he was possessed. They just had no clue that there was more than one entity inside him. Even Quentin didn’t know it at the time. They flew him halfway across the world and took him to an underground lab. It looked like a basement with both ancient and modern forms of technology. They tried to get the demon out. They wanted it alive. They wanted to study it.
A doctor named Tinari headed the project, and he was willing to kill Quentin to get to the demon. But then he discovered Quentin’s healing ability, and Tinari decided he wanted to study that, too. He and his team pushed Quentin to his physical and mental limits. How much pain could he take? How fast could he heal from a bullet wound?
Amber closed her eyes, but she could still see. The beatings. The starvation. The constant torture. All in the name of science.
After several weeks, they finally extracted a demon. Quentin and Rune were both dying and, in their weakened states, the men working on them were able to extract one of the entities with a compass similar to the one Quentin carried. But something went wrong. The extraction killed the massive beast. It died almost instantly and crumbled to dust.
That was when Quentin had had enough. He broke the metal cuffs securing him to a stainless surgical chair and killed every person in the room in a matter of seconds—five total. He saved the doctor for last. The one who’d tried to run but was so scared that he couldn’t get the code right on the keypad.