A Despair of Demons (Travelers, Book 1) (2 page)

“Stay back,” he
said in a low voice.

Immediately,
she took two steps backward and stopped.

“Drop your
weapon,” he said.

Her fingers
opened without her authority and her gun clattered to the floor.

She felt
strange, but she stubbornly tried to stick to protocol. Maybe he would come
with her voluntarily. “Come over here. I won’t hurt you,” she promised. “Where
do you live?”

“My Home World
is called Paradise.”

A Traveler? She
stared, nonplussed. “If you’re a Traveler, why don’t you leave?”

“I am hiding.”

“From my team?”

“No. From
demons.”

Liv nearly
laughed. “Demons don’t exist. They’re a myth, perpetuated by teenagers trying
to scare younger kids out on their first trips.”

“Demons took my
family, ruined my home. I was forced to flee to draw them out of my world.”

“Come on. Everybody’s
heard the stories about a friend’s brother’s girlfriend’s neighbor who
accidentally Traveled to Hell and saw a demon. But nobody’s ever met anybody
who’s been to Hell themselves, or seen a demon firsthand.”

“You have.”

“I have what?”

“You have met
someone who has seen one himself. You have met someone who has been to Hell.”

What utter
garbage! Liv laced her words with scorn. “You’ve been to Hell. The actual
world. And seen demons.”

“Yes.”

“How do you
know they were demons?”

He glared, all
but snarling. “Because they looked like demons. They spoke like demons. They
smelled like demons. And they killed. Like demons. The demons took my family,
and I have been unable to rescue them. I barely escaped myself, and I am still
attempting to elude pursuit.”

Maybe he was
telling the truth. He certainly seemed sincere. If he was, she pitied him and
his unknown family. The stories were beyond horrible, and if even some of them
were true…

But why would
demons kidnap his family? “Who are you?”

“I am Elachai.”

“No, I meant,
why would they hunt you? Why did they kidnap your family? I thought demons just
killed and raided.”

“They are
hunting me because I am Singular.”

Her skin
prickled with a chill completely unrelated to the damp and creepy surroundings.
It was impossible. No one was Singular. They all had Mirrors, thousands or
millions of them. In an infinity of possible parallel worlds, there would be an
infinity of alternate versions—Mirrors—of each person. How could he
be Singular? She’d never even considered the possibility since it wasn’t
possible.

A footstep
sounded from behind her. Elachai said, “I must go now. Forget me. Let me
leave.”

What a weird
thing to say. Her head suddenly felt floaty. What had she been about to do?

Elachai burst
into a whirlwind of swirling color and silently vanished as Connor ran into the
room.

Liv turned
toward him and the room revolved with extreme slowness. She blinked blearily.
What had she been doing? She hated that feeling of walking into a room and not
remembering why she’d come into it.

Connor walked
to Liv’s side. “Who was that Traveler?”

Everything
around her lurched from frozen slow motion back into normal time. She rubbed
her temple where it suddenly pounded with pain and stared at Connor. She felt
like she’d just crashed into herself, which was saying something since every
time she Traveled she dealt with the extreme disorientation of crossing the
unmeasurable distance between parallel worlds and popping into a new reality in
a blink.

She realized
Connor had said something. “What?”

Now Connor was
staring at her as if she’d grown a second head. “What the hell is going on
here, Dr. Greenwood?”

“What are you
talking about?”

“There was a
Traveler here and you just let him leave. Liv, what is wrong with you?”

She rubbed her temple
again, and then Connor’s meaning penetrated. “Nobody was here. My head really
hurts.”

Connor’s eyes
bored into hers. “There was someone here. What happened to you?”

“I feel like I
just fell off a roof. In the world above this one.” Liv shook her head to clear
it and immediately regretted it. The bolt of pain did clear things a little
though. Connor wanted to know what happened. Come to think of it, so did she.

She
concentrated. “I was walking here.” She looked around to help set the scene in
her head and saw in her memory as clearly as if she was doing it again. “I saw
a shadow dart behind those crates. I walked forward to check it out, and then
you walked in.”

But that wasn’t
right, was it?

“No, wait. I
was about to faint when you walked in.” There was something on the edge of her
mind, like a word on the tip of her tongue that she couldn’t quite remember.
And her head was floating away again. She fought to see, to remember, while
struggling against passing out. She finally dredged up a blur of color that
looked like a Traveler phasing out. “I remember the Travel blur.”

Connor opened
his mouth to say something and Liv held up a hand. “Give me a second.”

Connor closed
his mouth, crossed his arms, and assumed a sarcastic attitude of infinite
patience.

Liv ignored
him, closing her eyes to see her memories better. “There was…a shadow…and I
brought up my sidearm…and I said ‘freeze’.” She fought, but the next image was
the Traveler, blurring out. “The next thing I see is the blur. And then…you
walked in.”

She opened her
eyes. Connor’s expression was blank. That was never a good sign with Connor,
who was an expert at hiding his feelings. It meant he was worried.

He said, “You
hit the radio. I heard the guy’s voice, saying ‘stop.’ He talked about demons
taking his family and hunting him because he was Singular. His name was Elachai.
I got over here as fast as I could, but he must have heard me. He said, ‘I must
go now. Forget me. Let me leave.’ I ran in and he Traveled. And you, my
By-the-Book friend, did nothing to stop him.”

“What did he
look like?”

Connor
described him, but Liv couldn’t picture him herself. “I can’t see him at all. I
can’t remember anything except that floaty light-years-away feeling.”

“But you have a
photographic memory.”

“I know.”

His eyes
narrowed. “And you didn’t follow regulations, which I’ve never known you to do
before.”

Her brain was finally
grinding back into gear. “You think he made me forget.”

Connor didn’t
bother to answer.

“I need to get
back to base. Now.”

“How do you
feel?”

The headache
was already fading. “I’m fine. We need to go. I want to know what that bastard
did to me.”

Connor’s
expression gave away nothing, but he nodded. “We’re leaving.”

Jordan’s voice
crackled on the radio. “Guys, I think you should get back here.”

“We’re leaving.
Meet at the arrival point.”

“Why? Are you
and Liv okay?”

“We’re fine.
Now, Jordan. Out.”

“Before you
‘out’ me, Con, I figured out what happened to this city. It might have been a
contagion.”

Liv’s stomach
lurched. The DEPOT hadn’t encountered a contagious disease in a Traveler yet,
but the fear was always at the back of everyone’s mind. Diseases in parallel
worlds with recognizably human inhabitants could theoretically infect Home
World humans. It hadn’t happened yet, and Liv had no idea why.

Connor’s face
went grim. He shot a questioning glance at Liv. “I checked everything when we
got here, Connor. As I said, no contagious organisms detected.”

Connor clicked
the radio. “Right. We were clean, but we’re still leaving.”

Ben’s voice
came from the radio. “Commander, we’re closer to the library than the arrival
point. If I’m not mistaken, so are you.”

“Good. Meet at
the library. Jordan?”

“Yeah, we
heard. We’ll park it here.”

Ben’s voice
said, “We’ll be there in five.”

Connor turned
to Liv. “Can you run?”

“Yes, I’m
fine.” She glared to prove it.

“Let’s go.”

Liv led Connor
out of the warehouse and then fought to keep up with his longer strides when
they hit the road; he had seven inches on her. Maybe she shouldn’t have
insisted she was entirely fine; some small mean creature tried to ram its way
out of her skull with every step.

At least the
run kept her from worrying about what had been done to her brain. Kind of.

When they got
to the library, Ben and Gin were already there, waiting with Trent and Jordan
in the sitting room.

Liv bent to
catch her breath, willing the mean little rat in her head to stop sloshing.
Jordan asked, “What’s going on, Con?”

“Liv
encountered…someone. She can’t remember. She needs to get to Medical. The rest
of us will get checked out too, just to be safe. One, two, three, mark.”

Liv focused on
Connor, who always stayed a second longer than the others to make sure no one
was left behind.

She
exhaled—nothing from another world, even the oxygen in their lungs, would
Travel with them. If they exhaled, their lungs were filled with mostly carbon
dioxide, which the Travel Authority apparently dictated belonged to their
bodies and could come along to Home World. If they didn’t exhale first, their
lungs partially collapsed, which hurt.

Liv let go of
solidity, reached for the space between worlds, and blinked Home. She inhaled
reflexively and smelled the metallic tang of burning desert sand, creosote, and
sagebrush. She followed the first rule of Travel: an immediate scan of the Traveler’s
surroundings to ascertain situation and risk was mandatory upon arrival. They’d
returned on a hilly piece of desert scrub with no signs of human habitation.

Connor appeared
as a colorful whirlwind that coalesced into his solid form, now free of gray
Necropolis dust. He took two seconds to perform his own environment scan and
turned to Trent. “Where are we?”

“East of King
City.”

Connor pulled
his sat-com out of a vest pocket. “T36, reporting in. We need a pickup.” There
was the garbled noise of someone talking on the other end.

Trent clicked
the locator beacon he carried.

Connor said,
“We’re clear. The beacon is activated. Let General Mace know the world was a
contagion risk.”

More garble
from the phone.

“Acknowledged.
Out.”

He snapped his
phone shut and returned it to a vest pocket. “It’ll be here in ten minutes.
We’re to report immediately to Medical.”

For once, Liv
couldn’t wait to get to Medical. Now that her brain was feeling a little more
normal, she could barely contain her impatience. How could a person affect
another person’s brain? What chemical or physical process could erase a memory
so neatly? Because she still remembered nothing more than what she’d told
Connor. She had hoped the effect might be temporary, but it was starting to
look as if it would be permanent.

Where was that
damn jet?

Liv suddenly
realized her whole team was staring at her.

Jordan asked,
“So what happened to you?”

She sighed and
flopped to the sand. “Fine, since y’all are so nosy.”

The others sat
in a loose circle and waited expectantly. “Apparently, I met some guy named
Elachai in a warehouse. He said demons were after him and had kidnapped his
family, and then he Traveled away. We were too far away to follow. Oh, and I
don’t remember any of it.” She glanced at Connor. “Did I leave anything out?”

“He said he was
Singular.”

Liv said
automatically, “That’s impossible.”

Connor
shrugged. “That’s what he said.”

Ben laughed.
“Demons? You’re joking, right?” She knew he was concerned about
her—they’d grown up together and he was basically her brother—but
he found humor in almost everything. If she wasn’t about to die, he wasn’t
taking it seriously. Even his two tours as a US Air Force test pilot hadn’t
given him that ability.

Jordan ignored
Ben. “What do you mean, you don’t remember? You have a photographic memory.”

“Yes,” she
growled, ignoring Ben too. “I know.”

Jordan turned
to Connor. “You saw this guy?”

Connor nodded.
“Six feet, black hair with blue streaks, pale skin, dark eyes, thin.”

“And he
mentioned demons.”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because in the
library, I found the private journal of a scientist. He might have owned the
house or maintained the library, or donated the journal, or maybe it was his
private collection.”

Connor waved
his hand in a get-to-the-point gesture.

Jordan sighed.
“His journal said they’d released a contagion to fight invaders.”

Connor said,
“You already told us about the contagion.”

“Yes, but the
contagion was released against invaders from another dimension. The invaders
were demons.”

Silence fell.
Liv and Connor exchanged a surprised look, while Ben and Gin exchanged a
skeptical one. Trent’s expression was unreadable, his black eyes fixed on a
rock.

Liv turned to
Jordan. “How sure are you that you read it correctly?”

“It was
perfectly legible once I deciphered their characters. The language was actually
based on an old
Ingvaeonic
dialect, meaning pre-Old-English. It was the grammar that gave it away.
I didn’t really need the words to understand what they meant though.” He pulled
out his camera and flipped to the picture he wanted. He handed it to Liv.

It was a
drawing of a pig-dog-man with bat wings, exactly as Travelers claiming to have
seen demons had described them. Liv passed it to Trent, and it went around the
circle.

“I’m sure,”
Jordan said.

When the camera
got to Ben, he laughed. “Come on, guys. That could be a picture out of some
kid’s coloring book for all we know.”

Ben passed the
camera to Gin. She glanced at the picture and raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Or a
book by Stephen King’s Mirror.”

Liv wasn’t
surprised that Gin didn’t buy into Jordan’s idea. She’d been a con artist and
computer hacker since she was a kid. Liv had no idea how that had come about,
because Gin wouldn’t talk about it, but she knew Gin’s skepticism ran deep.

Jordan shook
his head. “Except it’s not. There was a description with it.” He pulled his
tablet computer from another pocket. “I quote, ‘the invaders appeared in a
swirl of color that solidified into the most heinous creatures we had ever
seen. They immediately began to destroy and kill all those around them. No
weapon would harm them.’”

“So they fought
them with biological weapons,” Connor said.

“And killed
themselves instead.”

“Where did all
the bodies go?” Liv asked.

Trent said
gravely, “Maybe the demons did something with them.”

Liv met
Jordan’s eyes. “Do you think anyone survived?”

Jordan shook
his head. “There’s no way to know. If they did, they probably went far from the
cities, away from where the disease would have spread the fastest.”

“Did it work?”
Trent asked.

Jordan turned a
blank gaze on him.

“Did it kill
the demons?”

“Somebody took
all the bodies away,” Connor pointed out.

Jordan frowned.
“But not necessarily the demons. I assume society broke down before people
could chronicle the results.”

“But some of
them might have survived,” Liv finished.

Jordan glanced
at Liv. “If we could get to the place where they developed the disease…”

“Yeah. I could
see the research notes, find out how they developed it, tested it, and what the
effects were in the lab.”

Gin said, “And
maybe there’s proof of demons there too. And the Easter Bunny, and Santa
Claus…”

Ben cut her
off. “What do we do?”

Connor looked
around their circle. “I assume if any of you had heard of Paradise, you’d have
said so by now.”

Liv nodded
along with the rest of the team. If it really was a paradise, it was surprising
none of them had heard of it. Travelers liked nothing more than to compare
notes about places they’d been.

Connor
continued, “Then I don’t think there’s anything we can do. We don’t know this
guy’s Home World. We don’t have proof demons exist. We’ll report it and wait.”

“That’s not
what I meant.” Ben cut his eyes meaningfully to Liv.

Aww. He
is
worried about me
.

Connor followed
Ben’s gaze. “I know. We’ll report to Medical.”

A sound intruded.
It could have been a faraway piece of machinery or a distant gunshot, but Liv
knew it was actually a faint sonic boom. Seconds later, she heard the jet’s
engine above them—a whisper of sound that could have been mistaken for a
wind in the trees, if there had been any nearby.

Liv glanced at
her watch. “About time.”

The team jumped
to their feet as the jet landed. They couldn’t see it, but they could hear its
whisper as it dropped straight down. As it landed, it became visible: a small,
dull-gray plane shaped like a moth, with an engine beneath each wing rotated
ninety degrees to point straight at the ground. Its only marking was its
identification number: a black ‘SM-7’ on the tail fin.

The cargo door
in the belly opened, falling to the sand with a thud, and the team strode up
the ramp. Liv muttered, “Thank God we’ve got an isolated pickup.”

Liv hated when
they were forced to take pickups in inhabited areas, where the plane couldn’t
disengage invisibility. The SMs were invisible to instruments as well as the
naked eye. She always tripped up the invisible ramp, and it was disconcerting
to say the least to walk into a plane that suddenly popped into existence
around her.

The copilot
pulled the door shut and returned to his chair as Liv took a seat on one of the
benches lining the walls and strapped in. The jet rose straight up, then shot
across the sky.

She closed her
eyes, trying to convince her stomach that it was truly still in her body and
not hovering in the air over California. The SM’s top speed was just over Mach
16, although inertial dampeners made Mach 10 feel like Mach 1, allowing it to
avoid actually wrenching people’s organs from their bodies. It still always
took her a few minutes to adjust.

Ten minutes
later, they flew through the concealed hangar entrance to the top-secret DEPOT
base, located near Groom Lake in Area 51. They touched down in the underground
hangar, trundling to the end of a line of identical jets. Since they were used
to ferry Travelers to drop-off and pickup points, the crews jokingly called
them ‘Soccer Moms,’ or SMs.

As the team
clomped down the ramp and onto the concrete floor of the hangar, Ben nudged
her. “I can’t believe you’re still scared of these things.”

“I wasn’t
scared, just nauseous.”

“You always say
that.”

“Because it’s
always true.”

“Are you
feeling okay?” Gin asked.

“I’m fine. Would
y’all just stop worrying? Let’s just get to Medical and get it over with.”

Despite her
words, Liv walked as fast as she could through the giant cave. When she finally
reached the base’s doors, she swiped her key card and pressed her hand to the
palm reader. The four-foot-thick blast doors opened instantly, revealing four
armed guards standing like statues just inside.

The elevator
also required a key card. On level ten of the base’s Research and Development
section, they navigated a maze of corridors to get to the Travelers’ section.
They passed steel doors marked “Biohazard No Admittance,” “Level 5 Safety
Precautions Must Be Met,” and “Psychotranslocation Theory and Testing—Absolute
Silence Within.” They crossed through another set of four-foot-thick blast
doors into the Travelers’ section and took an elevator down to twenty-five.

Liv’s
impatience to get to Medical died when she walked into the lobby, and her usual
reluctance reasserted itself. With its white walls, white chairs, white
countertops, white floors, white curtains, and white beds, Medical seemed to
imply that humans could never be clean enough. Instead of feeling like it was
safe and sterile, she felt contaminated by all that white.

A petite woman
with shoulder-length brown hair and warm brown eyes met her in the lobby.

“Hi, Dr. Brown.
I need full bloodwork, neurotransmitters, enzymes, tox screen, an EEG, and a
PET scan as fast as we can.”

“Everything’s
set up.” Dr. Brown led the way to a cubicle separated from others by a sliding
white sheet hanging from the ceiling.

Liv sighed and
tried not to touch anything white.

She sat
impatiently as Dr. Brown injected her with the markers for the PET scan and a
medical drew blood from her arm.

Dr. Brown left
as another medical wheeled the EEG in on a cart. Liv sat still on the bed while
the technician ran all the leads, but she could see in the first moments that
it was normal. She sighed with relief. The technician finished, pulled all the
leads off Liv’s head, and wheeled the cart out. Too bad everyone wasn’t that
professional.

Another medical
came in and began a physical and neurologic exam.

“I’m a
neurologist,” she said. “I can tell you, all of these exams will be normal. It’s
the bloodwork I need.”

The medical
smiled at her condescendingly. “Well, let’s just make sure, shall we?” He
finished and chirped, “All normal.”

She resisted
the urge to snarl. How long had it been since she’d been injected with the PET
markers? It would take an hour before the chemical became concentrated in her
brain so that the PET scan could see the active areas and map them. If only she
had her new scanner! It could read within minutes, but it was on special order
from a military medical engineering lab and hadn’t arrived yet.

“I’ll just let
you relax,” the medical said, and left.

“Wait,” Liv
said. “I need a CT scan too. Might as well do it while we’re waiting.”

“Dr. Brown has
ordered it. We’ll be in to get you when it’s ready.”

She took a deep
breath, unclenched her teeth, and lay back on the white sheet covering the
white bed. Fear stabbed her stomach. Words like
permanent brain damage
, and
irreversible
welled into her mind. What if she was unfit for duty?

You’re fine, like always
, she told
herself.
Shut up or they’ll flag you for
high blood pressure.

Finally, the
medical returned and held out a paper gown. It was white. Of course. “Put this
on.”

Liv groaned.
“Come on. Really? We’re just looking at my head.”

The medical
silently held out the garment until Liv took it, then stepped outside the
curtain. Liv could still see his stupid shadow, hovering out there to make sure
she changed like a good girl. She hated Medical.

When she pushed
through the curtain wearing her new gown, the medical said, “Follow me.”

“I know where
CT is.”

“Then let’s
go.”

She followed
him down the hall to the CT room, laid down on the table, and tried to hold
still as it slid her slowly into the machine.

Then she was
led to the PET scanner, as if she didn’t work with it on a regular basis, and
laid on another table.

She fought to
keep her mind on the Travel research project she was running next week, instead
of the thought which refused to completely leave her mind: maybe research would
be all she’d be doing for the DEPOT next week. She’d been a researcher before
joining T36, but she loved field work, and she was damn good at it. She wasn’t
going back to a lab.

“You can get up
now, Liv,” the technician’s voice said through the intercom. When she sat up,
she saw her whole team standing in the viewing room, hovering over the
technician’s shoulder.

The technician
pointed to a privacy screen in the corner, and Liv went over to check it out.
Someone had thoughtfully dumped her uniform there. She scowled, shaking out the
wrinkles, and dressed quickly.

She took
special pleasure in buckling on her knives and handguns. It was better to be
armored.

She walked into
the viewing room. “Didn’t know I’d have an audience.”

Jordan gave her
a guilty grin as Ben threw his arm around her shoulders. “We had to come and
see if you were ok, sis.”

“And?”

The technician
said, “The radiologist needs to read these, but you had a normal neurologic
exam and I see nothing alarming here, in either your CT or your PET scan.”

She hid her
wave of relief, focusing on the new problem. What had Elachai done to her?
“Damn. We had to wait too long for the markers to concentrate. Whatever he did
disappeared by the time I got scanned.”

Jordan’s smile
was warm. “At least you’re okay.”

She allowed
herself a quick grin. “Yeah, there’s that.”