She didn’t mean me in particular, or even her, but the collective us. The abnormals he’d helped them hunt down.
Peter didn’t lift his head. “I thought they were going to be like the mob bosses. I figured I was throwing my lot in with the strongest kid on the block.” Slowly he raised his head. “But I was wrong. As soon as they were done with me, they tossed me in the basement and left me to rot.”
I could have shot him right there and been done with it but there was something he had that we needed. “You have information about them then?”
He swallowed hard. “Some. They didn’t give me much, but I’ll tell you everything I know.”
Everything he knew turned out to be far more than he’d been letting on.
12
“We have time,” Anita said as the four of us sat at the dining room table. “Our abilities will keep us hidden until morning. Even with our address, they won’t be able to find the house.”
“That seems awfully generous,” I said. They might be Hiders, adept at slipping through the cracks, but I’d been on the run before, and twelve hours was a long time to sit in one place. My dog dropped her head onto my lap, her one eye locked on me. As if she knew I was on the verge of bolting.
Carlos ran his hands over his head. “We have run into similar problems before. We have a good amount of time.”
I wasn’t sure I bought that. “We’ll count on six hours, tops.”
Which meant we had maybe two left before they came knocking. Peter tapped on the table.
“Here’s the deal. They hired me to identify any abnormals they brought in. Type, abilities, strength, that sort of stuff. I can tell from the tiniest drop of blood. They were supposed to repay me with my freedom.”
Of course, they’d drawn blood from all of us. And fed it to a fucking Magelore.
“Did they have another Magelore for the other facilities?” I asked, ignoring the look of hope on Anita’s face. I wasn’t asking because I was going to do this. I was asking because it was smart to know what your enemy was up to.
“Far as I know, yes. Though who is anyone’s guess. I do know there are at least two other facilities.” He looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes. “Eligor—I knew him as Ernest—was kind of the boss of the little handlers. The ones who got in your heads. The big boss back at the facility is Gardreel. He is . . . something else, but I couldn’t tell—”
“Demon,” I said, thinking about my one look at Gardreel and the way the wind moved his long red coat when there was no wind. “They are demons.”
Only Peter was already shaking his head. “No. I’ve run into demons before. They are not those.”
“Eligor is a demon name,” I said. “And I’d bet anything Gardreel is a demonic name too.”
Peter frowned. “I didn’t taste them, so I could be wrong, but they don’t act like demons, Nix.”
“What do they act like?” Dinah asked.
The Magelore drummed his fingers across the table. “Like they were doing something good? Like they had a higher calling? They kept me in the dark for the most part, so a lot of this is conjecture. But the word ‘cleanse’ came up more than once. They want all the abnormals gone. Humanity restored.”
Anita and Carlos shared a look that spoke volumes.
“What?”
“Our daughter, she said something about the people running these places. She managed to speak to one of them here, at the Clearview Rehabilitation Center with her partner. She said that they weren’t like anything she’d tangled with before. They acted like they were better than everyone else,” Carlos said. “Could this be a new kind of abnormal? One we haven’t seen before?”
Cleansed. Higher calling. New abnormals. Demonic names.
Had they taken the names of demons out of a sense of irony? I didn’t think so.
“Do you have a VPN on your computer?” I asked. “I need to look something up.”
“Yes, our daughter did that for us, another way to keep our tracks clear.” Anita stood and motioned for me to follow her. I tucked Dinah into the waistband of my pants and she mumbled something about being cocky and putting her away before I knew it was safe.
Anita led me to a room with a tiny window and a nice shiny new computer all set up. She logged in and I sat.
Working off a search engine, I put in Eligor’s name first. It came up under a list of demon names, just like I’d thought it would. I scrolled down, seeing more names I recognized from my previous research on demons.
“Something isn’t adding up,” I said. I typed in “demons” and “higher calling” on a whim. A whim that paid off.
What came up under the search made me sit back, and Anita gasped. “Madre de dios. Is that possible?”
Yeah, pretty much my question too.
I did a few more searches, refining the wording until I knew I was on the right track.
Finally, I sat back in the chair. Fewer than fifteen minutes had passed, but I had my answer. I didn’t like it, not one bit.
Suddenly I wasn’t so sure that I could just walk away from this mess. I leaned over the small computer table, gripping the edges. A hand settled gently on my back. “Breathe.”
Normally I’d have thrown off the hand and the suggestion, but fear and anger were strangling me. Fear for my son. Rage that I was going to . . . deal with this when all I wanted was to see him. Hold him. Breathe him in. This was not the life I’d chosen. I’d walked away from it—twice now.
And yet . . .
“Zee . . . he was a good man, and the best Hider I ever met.” The warmth of her hand sank into
