Rise of the Demon, page 41
“Sure do. And you want to know if I’m drawn to any other places?”
Damn he was making this easy for me. “Basically, yes.”
“The short answer is ‘kind of.’ Ever since I unpodded, I’ve been able to dial my talent down or off, which means I don’t get those mega-powerful pulls anymore. I only turn it up when I want to or feel the need. But I gotta tell you, ever since the twelfth vanished from my awareness, I’ve been dialed up more often.”
“And? Do you sense anything?”
“I sense plenty of things, but why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for?”
I gave him a quick rundown of the whole business with the Earthgates and our dire need to find the Earth locations before Jesral could. “You sensed Kadir’s gate before it emerged, and I’m hoping you can do so again with the others.”
“I’m pretty sure I feel something like what I felt before. But it’s far away and hard to pinpoint where it’s coming from. Like there’s more than one signal, which I suppose makes sense as there are multiple gates.”
I did a little victory dance. “It definitely makes sense!” Of course, I was assuming that whatever he felt was actually a gate and not something else entirely. Still, this was all we had to go on at the moment. And, considering the gates were part of a network, maybe finding another part of a related network could make it easier for him to “see” the rest. “Are you busy right now?”
He let out a laugh. “What you want me to do?”
I grinned. “Put your entire life on hold for me. Duh.”
“Please. That’s a given.”
I couldn’t remember any time I’d simply bantered with him. He sounded happy, and I sent a silent thank you to the universe for giving him this gift. “Let’s figure out the best way to go about this. Zakaar, would it be possible for him to use a node to get a better sense of where these signals are coming from?”
Zakaar nodded. “It’s worth a try. The gates and the valve system are sister networks. Not fully connected, but there are enough points of overlap that it might be possible for Makonite to sense these signals or echoes at a node.”
Idris tapped the table. “And if he can indeed sense the direction of the signals, we could map those data points via triangulation. That might narrow down the locations enough to where Paul can either match up the gate location with an image search, or get Makonite close enough to find it directly.”
“Yeah,” Makonite said. “That could work.”
“The plantation node is the most powerful one nearby,” Idris said. “Let’s start there.”
I did a fist pump. “Makonite, can you meet us at the Farouche Plantation at some point today?”
“Give me an hour.”
“Deal. See you then.” I hung up, then grinned at the others. “Holy shit. I think we have an actual Plan. How crazy is that?”
“I didn’t think that was allowed,” Szerain said with a snort.
I smiled sweetly at Zakaar. “Wanna teleport Idris and me to the Farouche Plantation in an hour?”
“Not a problem. There are a few things I want to check out there anyway.”
“We need supplies,” Idris said. “If we’re going to be triangulating, then we need a GPS, and compasses, notebook and pens, maps—”
“And snacks!” I added.
“As if we could ever forget snacks.”
“Sonny will know where all that stuff is hidden,” I said, even as I thumbed in a quick text to him.
Szerain’s mouth twitched. “And by ‘hidden,’ you mean ‘put away in an organized fashion.’”
“That’s the same thing in my world.” My phone buzzed with Sonny’s reply. “He says he’ll pack bags for us. I’m not sure how I ever got anything done before he came along.”
“We should bring the sketches,” Idris said. “Easier than trying to look at pics on our phones when trying to verify locations.”
“Good point.”
Zakaar cleared his throat. “Before we go anywhere, you and Szerain need to design this rakkuhr brick that will keep the demahnk and Jesral from raising the gates.”
“Should we go out to the nexus?” I asked.
“Best not,” Szerain said. “We don’t want the nexus potency to throw anything off.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “Basement should work, right?”
“Yep. Plenty of room as well. This brick seal will need to be large enough to span the entire footprint of the gate, just to be sure.”
I did some quick mental calculations. “Oof. About thirty feet in diameter?”
“That should do it.” He pushed up and headed for the basement, and Idris and I followed. Zakaar remained upstairs since rakkuhr caused him a great deal of discomfort.
For the next twenty minutes, Szerain and I experimented with a variety of ways to brick a gate with rakkuhr, then had Idris test our efforts. To our frustration, making an arcane seal as large as we needed meant there were more potential weak spots. And, even though Idris had no skill with rakkuhr, he was consistently able to poke holes in it.
“Would it be possible to interweave normal potency with the rakkuhr?” Idris finally asked. “Like making a polymer. That could provide the strength you need to block the channel and cover the large area, and still have more than enough rakkuhr ‘influence’ to keep the demahnk or Jesral from being able to get through.”
Szerain laughed. “I’m an idiot. I’ve used combinations for a variety of purposes but never considered using it to increase tensile strength, so to speak.”
It took another thirty minutes of experimenting and tweaking to perfect a polymer uberbrick that defied Idris’s best attempts to defeat it. Even better, Idris and I could work together to create them, which would hopefully save us time and energy.
I dismantled the prototype. “All right. Let’s gear up and get going.”
“Y’all have fun,” Szerain said. “I’ll hold down the fort.”
Chapter 41
Idris and I dressed in ordinary, comfortable civilian clothing that wouldn’t draw attention, but we also armed ourselves with considerable concealed weaponry, since who knew what we might encounter. Sonny had, of course, come through for us and filled two backpacks with the requested supplies and snacks, as well as a few survival necessities such as first aid kit, water purifying tablets, rain gear, flashlights, hand warmers, phone chargers, and chocolate.
Right before we were about to leave, my phone rang with Elinor’s number.
Her worried face popped up on the screen when I answered. “Paul said you had something to tell me? And that Gio should be here with me.” He leaned in briefly and waved, looking just as concerned.
“Yes, but I promise it’s not bad news.” I smiled. “I just thought you should know I have it on unshakable authority that you were absolutely one hundred percent NOT responsible for the cataclysm.”
“Wh-what? But I . . . are you sure? Was it indeed Xharbek?”
“Nope. It was the aspect of Vsuhl trapped within the blade.” I quickly summarized my conversation with the gimkrah aspect of the Jontari elder Xhan.
By the time I finished, Elinor was all-out bawling, and Giovanni had pulled her into his arms, tears of his own streaming.
“Thank you, Kara,” he said as he stroked her back. “This has long haunted her.”
I nodded, throat tight as I fought the urge to cry right along with them. Unsuccessfully. “Okay, well, I need to get going. Good luck with everything on your end.” I quickly cut the connection and sniffled mightily.
Idris handed me a tissue. I took it, relieved to see his eyes were damp as well. “We’re all a bunch of damn softies,” I said with a laugh.
He smiled. “The world needs softies.”
• • •
Zakaar teleported us to the front of the Farouche Plantation, then murmured something about taking care of a few things and vanished again, leaving Idris and me to meander toward the node on our own.
The plantation house hadn’t changed much since I’d been out here a few months ago. Still half-burned. Crumbling a bit more, with vines and other vegetation encroaching with mindless determination.
The grounds had undergone a bit of revival since the showdown with the Mraztur. The pond had water in it again, and the charred grass had regrown at some point and was now a normal winter-dead brown.
Idris nodded toward the partially destroyed plantation house. “Not gonna lie, it’s pretty nice seeing how much this place has deteriorated.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t need to say anything else. Plantations tended to suck overall due to their horrific association with slavery, but Idris had plenty reason of his own to despise this place. He’d been a captive here, along with his adoptive mother and sister—the latter of whom had been murdered in a brutal ritual. “Feels like a century ago that all the shit went down. Hard to believe it’s only been, what, six months? Seven?”
He snorted. “Don’t ask me. Time has lost all meaning.”
Beyond the ruined house stood the remains of a once lovely gazebo—a raised stone platform that now held eleven broken columns, with a pillar of potency in the center. Nearby, Makonite leaned against his car. I grinned, amused and unsurprised that he’d managed to pass right through the wards and aversions that kept everyone else away from the property.
He pushed off the car. “I think your hunch about using the node might be spot on. I already have a stronger signal, so to speak.”
“Is it the same kind of feel you had at Ruthie’s Smoothies?”
“Dunno. My perception has shifted since I podded. Like seeing color after only knowing black and white.”
We approached the node together. Idris and I stopped at the edge of the platform, but Makonite walked right up and thrust his hand into the column of potency, as if testing the temperature of a swimming pool.
Hand still immersed in the node, he closed his eyes and shifted position around the node, then stopped. “There’s something in this direction,” he said. I lined my compass up with the direction Makonite faced, and Idris jotted down the reading.
Makonite did this twice more around the node, then withdrew his hand and stepped back. “This might take longer than we thought. I can sense more via the node, but that’s the problem.”
I made a face. “You mean, now you’re picking up signals from farther away as well.”
“Exactly. Which is good because it means we should be able to find all the gates. But we’ll need to check quite a few nodes to get the best triangulation. And, since there are so many signals—and I’m not really able to judge distance—it’s going to be impossible to map out the triangulation on your basic printed map.”
Idris muttered a curse. “Because the earth is a sphere, and maps are flat.”
“Maybe Paul has an app for that,” I said and shot off a quick text explaining the nature of the predicament.
His reply came quickly.
I shared the text with the others, who all agreed with the last line.
“There’s a node at an industrial park not far from here,” Idris said as he sent the readings to Paul.
“Too close to effectively triangulate,” Makonite said. “What about other parts of the world?”
“There’s one in Oregon,” Idris said. “Two in Texas, and another in Colorado.”
“And there are fifteen outside of the U.S.,” I added, “but I don’t know where.”
Zakaar had yet to return, so I gave up and called him. “I know you can’t tell us where the gates will emerge, but what about nodes?”
“What about them?”
I rolled my eyes. “Their locations. Makonite needs to check nodes that are some distance from each other. He says the warehouse node is too close to this one. That leaves twenty-two other options. You know where they all are, right?”
“Yes, that’s not a problem.”
“Excellent, how soon—shit!” I startled as Zakaar appeared in front of me.
Makonite grinned—an expression I couldn’t remember ever seeing on him.
“Sorry,” Zakaar said, clearly not sorry one bit. “I was cleaning up some arcane remnants in the main house that I couldn’t take care of before. For best triangulation, we probably want to start with nodes about a quarter or third of the way around the world, then work from there.”
“Which are where?”
“There’s one in Nepal, another near Ust Ilimsk, Russia—”
“Hey, I’ve been there!” I said. “Not Nepal but the Russia one. Ust Ilimsk is about two hundred miles south of where the 1908 Tunguska Event happened. Of course there’d be a node there.”
“All right, then—”
“WAIT,” I yelped. “Ust Ilimsk is in Siberia, and it’s the dead of winter, and we are one hundred percent not dressed for that.” To be honest, I didn’t think it was possible to ever be dressed for Siberia in the middle of winter. “I can hardly be expected to save the world if I freeze to death. And Nepal probably isn’t much better.”
Idris shrugged. “I have to agree with her about the freezing to death thing.”
Zakaar laughed. “Okay, how about Samoa?”
“Ooooh, Southern Hemisphere.” I grinned. “Now you’re talking!”
A heartbeat later, Zakaar, Makonite, Idris, and I stood on a white sand beach with a view so gorgeous I could only stare in awe for several heartbeats. Morning sun blazed above an azure blue ocean. Dark boulders of volcanic rock extended out in natural jetties, and graceful palms draped over the beach.
I’d been all over the world in the past six months, but never anywhere this beautiful. And it wasn’t even the view. There were loads of places on Earth and in the demon realm that were just as gorgeous, if not more so. But somehow this place felt as if it had been created to leech the cares and stress from your very essence.
No question about it: when all this was over, I would absolutely come back to this place, and splash in the ocean, and bake on the sand, and worry about nothing.
I pulled my focus back to the matter at hand. “Where’s the node?”
“A short distance up this trail,” Zakaar said and led the way into the South Pacific jungle. It had clearly once been a well-tended path, but several months of being left to its own devices during the Demon Wars had taken a toll. Vegetation encroached heavily in several spots, and we were forced to clamber over a few fallen trees, but we managed to push through and eventually came to a gorgeous little pool bounded by more of the same volcanic rock as on the beach. A waterfall tumbled into the side opposite us from at least thirty feet above.
Even Idris heaved a sigh of bliss at the idyllic scene.
“Let me guess,” I said. “The node is behind the waterfall.”
Zakaar smiled. “I promise it’s not quite as cliché as that.” He led us around the edge of the pool, then into the woods again, finally arriving at an unassuming cairn about three feet high.
Unassuming, except for the potency that rippled around and through the stones. “That’s a node all right,” I said.
Makonite placed both hands on the topmost stone. After a moment he shifted around it, just as he had with the plantation node. As he commented on what he sensed, I took readings, Idris took notes, and we forwarded the data to Paul.
Zakaar pondered a moment. “We’ll do Australia next. South of Birdsville.”
In the next breath, the four of us stood in the middle of nowhere. At least it seemed that way. Flat as far as the eye could see. Red-brown dirt. Scattered, scraggly, sun-dried vegetation. And about thirty feet away, in the midst of that middle-of-nowhere, an ordinary patch of earth shimmered with potency.
This time, Makonite simply stood right on top of it, closed his eyes and pivoted, stopping three times to relay what he sensed. Idris read off the GPS coordinates and compass readings, and I texted them directly to Paul.
Zakaar nodded as if expecting that response. “Madagascar.”
The instant shift from bright morning sun to pitch dark night meant it took my eyes several seconds to adjust enough to see we were in a tidy little village of lush vegetable gardens and corrugated tin houses. A slightly larger structure appeared to be some sort of administrative building. All the windows were dark, with no people in sight. A dog emerged from behind a house and let out a sharp bark, but Zakaar glanced in its direction, and the dog quieted and lay down.
A weathered, wooden post in front of the admin building glowed with the arcane. Makonite began the now-familiar process of slowly rotating his way around the node while we texted the readings to Paul. Halfway through, he stopped and pulled his hand back.
“Something wrong?” I whispered.
“Just confusing. I’ll see what Zsu thinks.”
“What? Who’s Zsu?”
Makonite didn’t seem to hear me, but Zakaar murmured, “The ilius he merged with during podding.”
I took a moment to let that sink in. “I assumed they’d assimilated to make a single entity.”
“You’re not wrong. Symbiosis, each with their own consciousness, but shared experience and unified mind as well.” At my dubious look, he added, “All consensual. Not like being submerged or even like when I was merged within Szerain.”
Makonite moved another quarter way around the pole. “Strong sense this way.”
Idris texted the readings, then we waited, silent and breathless. Even the dog seemed to be waiting with us.
I clamped down on the urge to let out a whoop of victory and settled for giving the dog an excited thumbs up.
Night vanished, and mid-morning light bathed us as we took in the view from the small plateau.
We stood atop a mountain surrounded by even more mountains. Flowering plants and lush vegetation of all colors covered the slopes, and to the north a glittering lake sprawled in a valley. I took a deep breath of crisp air untainted by smoke or destruction, then let it out in a happy sigh.
