A Despair of Demons (Travelers, Book 1) Read online

  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?

  Chapter 2

  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 st
raight 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.