by Kailin Gow
Ida and Dr. Good exchanged glances.
“What?” Lux said. “I hope you’re not protecting me because I’m a girl… a woman.”
Ida laughed. “Don’t be silly.”
“That’s the last thing we would do,” Dr. Good added.
“Then why am I still here while so many have been sent to slay?”
Ida set down her fork and pushed her plate away. “So far, Vegas, Los Angeles and Miami are relatively small outbreaks. The teams we’ve sent out, as inexperienced as many slayers are, have been able to contain these outbreaks. If anything, they’ve proven to be perfect training grounds.”
“Are you saying that Vegas is clean? And Los Angeles?”
“Yes,” Dr. Good said. “The demons have been slayed and the portals sealed once more.”
“Miami, too?”
“They’re working on Miami, but they should have it under control by tomorrow.”
Sullen, Lux took a bite of her hamburger. The truth was she was worried about the slayers, all of them, but her men in particular. She’d not heard a word from Lucas or Sully since they’d left, and even their mother, Dr. Good, had not received any news about them.
“Did we suffer any casualties?” Lux finally said.
Ida and Dr. Good looked at one another again.
“That, we don’t know yet,” Ida admitted.
Lux looked up at them, hoping to find a more satisfying answer in their eyes, but all she saw was her own worries and concerns reflected in their eyes.
In the distance, she heard a commotion; a door open and close loudly; the voices of men; the cheers of victory.
Lux and Dr. Good both shot out of their chairs at the same time and headed to the front foyer.
“Lucas! Sully!” Lux shouted. She ran to hug them both, quickly leaving room for Dr. Good to then hug and kiss her sons, the relief plain on her face.
“How’d things go in Vegas?” Ida said, coming up behind them.
“Great,” Sully said with a proud grin. “Piece of cake.”
“Great training ground,” Lucas added.
Lux turned to Ida.
“What did I tell you?” Ida said with a grin.
“I’m starving,” Sully said, rubbing his belly. “The fighting was good, but the food out there was a little scarce.”
“Come on, boys,” Dr. Good said, leading her boys back to the kitchen. “We’ve got hamburgers on the grill and a fryer full of French fries.”
Smiling, Lux headed back to the kitchen with them, feeling somewhat more lighthearted than before. While she was still concerned about the welfare of Brax, Asher, John and Hector, she found some comfort in knowing the Good boys were okay.
They all sat at the large kitchen table, while the cook brought the guys burgers and fries.
“You weren’t joking when you said you were starving,” Ida said as the guys wolfed down their second hamburger.
“We were fighting non-stop,” Sully said. “I’ll admit, it got rough for a while. They seemed to be coming out faster, and stronger.”
“But after a little while, we had the upper hand,” Lucas said.
“How did your team do?” Ida said.
“A few of the younger slayers were a bit nervous at first,” Sully said. “One of the girls even cried.”
Lux glared at him.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Sully whined.
“Why did you specify that it was a girl who cried?”
“It wasn’t a sexist remark, Lux,” Sully griped. “One of the slayers cried, and it just so happened to be a girl.”
“That’s enough, Sully,” Dr. Good said.
Sully glared at Lux. “You know me better than that. For crying out loud, look who my mom is. Look how I admire you. And, by the way, I’ve seen guys cry before, too.”
Lux smiled. “Okay. Sorry.” She thought back to the dream she’d had. “I think I’m just feeling a little inadequate at the moment. You guys are all heading out to battle, while I’m sitting here training and waiting.”
With dinner out of the way, the guys sat back to finish their sodas.
“I have something for you guys,” Dr. Good said after a long moment of silence. She pulled out her phone. “You guys have your phones on you?”
“Yeah,” Lucas said.
“You, too, Lux?”
Frowning, Lux nodded as she pulled it out. “What is this all about?”
Dr. Good tapped on her phone for a moment then their phones all sounded the reception of a message.
“I’ve sent you the link to a new app. We’ve been working on this for quite a while, but we’ve always had issues. But, since being here, I’ve started working with a technical engineer by the name of Isaac, who is a wiz with this sort of thing.”
“What does it do?” Sully said, opening the app.
Lux opened the app and a map of the area appeared. She counted three sets of black devilish horns in various parts of the map.
“What is this?” Lux said. “What do the horns represent?”
“Portals,” Dr. Good said. “For a long time, Lucas and I have talked about creating an app that would give us quick and easy access to all existing portals…”
“And whether they were on the verge of opening or not,” Lucas added.
“It’s been difficult to perfect,” Dr. Good said, looking to Lucas, “and with you gone, I knew I had to find someone who could help finish it.”
“I’m glad you did,” Lucas said with a smile. “It’ll free me up to work on other tools.”
“I’m happy to hear that,” Dr. Good said. “I was afraid you’d be upset that I’d finished it without you.”
“The important thing is that it’s completed,” Lucas said with a warm smile. “And that it works.”
For the next few minutes, they each scrolled around on the map, looking at the various cities and their respective portals.
“I didn’t realize there were so many,” Lux said as she went from California, to Montana, to Kansas, to Maine. “Are there portals in every state?”
“Almost,” Dr. Good said.
Lux brought the map back to California and zoomed in on Los Angeles. “What does it mean when the devil’s horns are yellow?”
“It means that the portal is closed, but not completely sealed.”
“And when it’s green?”
“Fully sealed and secure.”
Lux scrolled the map over to Florida and zoomed in on Miami. The horns were flashing bright red. Her breath caught in her throat. Even before asking, she knew what the flashing red horns meant. “What about red?” she said softly.
“The portal has opened.”
“And when it’s flashing red?”
Dr. Good hesitated. “It means the battle is on. The portal is wide open and the fighting is fierce.”
Her eyes wet with tears, Lux looked at everyone at the table. “Asher and Brax are out there.”
“Don’t worry about them,” Sully said confidently. “If anyone can deal with this, it’s Asher and Brax.”
Lux held the phone up to show Dr. Good. “This is great,” she said, her voice showing more emotion than intended. “Good work.” She stood. “I think I need to go for a walk. I’ll see you all later.”
She left the kitchen and headed to her bedroom. Stripping off her clothes, she headed to the shower, hoping to wash off the worries and headache of the day.
While she was thrilled with the app Dr. Good and Lucas had created, she knew it wasn’t enough. As she poured some shampoo into the palm of her hand and washed her hair, she thought of all the portals that had appeared on the map.
“And that’s just here in the United States,” she said aloud in the steamy shower.
It’s one thing knowing where they are, and when they open, but how are we going to destroy them all? she wondered.
Dr. Good said she would keep a constant eye on the app on all the portals. She said she would send out teams at the first sign of a seal cracking, opening. H
ow long before all the slayers, novice and experienced, are overwhelmed by the never-ending stream of demons?
After rinsing off her hair, she turned off the water, dried off and slipped into a comfy pair of grey sweats and a black crop top with the word “fierce” printed on the back. She pulled her hair back into a high ponytail, put on her sneakers and headed out.
She didn’t know where she was going or what she hoped to accomplish, but she needed to be outside, needed to move. She walked the immense grounds of Brax’s estate, then went into a slow, lazy jog.
Soon, she was sweating and knew she’d have to take another shower.
Her mind was a jumble of ideas and thoughts, worries and concerns, fears and doubt.
“I have to get my act together,” she muttered to herself.
As she slowed her jog and resumed walking, she noticed a light on in the large garden shed by the stone wall. Then she saw movement inside.
Curious, she made her way to the window and looked inside. Lucas, with a headlamp clamped around his forehead, was sitting at a worktable, looking at a small object in his hand.
Lux walked to the door and quietly pushed it open and watched Lucas work for a moment.
“What are you working on?” Lux finally said softly, afraid to startle him.
He calmly turned to her, as if expecting to see her there. “I was hoping you’d stop by. Come over and see.”
She came to his side and looked at the small silver marble in his hand, then up to his eyes. “What is it?”
“Well,” he said, “I hope that it will ultimate be a weapon that will make slaying dozens of demons at one time easier and more efficient.”
“With a marble?” Lux said. “With all the wild weapons Ida showed us, you want us to fight with marbles?”
He smiled. “It’s not a marble.” He pinched the silver sphere between his thumb and index finger and the marble opened up to reveal hundreds of smaller silver particles. “I’ve been working on this for a long time… secretly. Even my mother doesn’t know about it.”
“What is all that?”
“A long time ago, while I was in the midst of a fierce battle, I’d fallen to the ground and had lost my sword. A demon jumped me and I reached for the only thing that I could; a jagged metallic rock with razor sharp edges. I grabbed it and stabbed the demon with it.”
Lux looked at him, waiting for more.
“It was a superficial stab wound, in its shoulder. It shouldn’t have killed him. At best, I was just hoping to get him off me. But he cried out in agony, clutching his arm. Then it simply ignited into a hot blue flame and was gone. Poof! Just like that.”
Intrigued, Lux pulled a stool over and sat beside him, fully enthralled with his project.
“I decided to keep that rock and to look into what it was made of.” He reached over to his far left where a glistening, almost translucent red-black rock the size of a tennis ball was set on a towel. “I chipped a few pieces off and analyzed them,” he said as he brought the rock to her. “I can’t figure out what it is. Something along the line of carnelian, I thought. Or maybe some sort of jasper. A chalcedony of some sort. Then I noticed it’s translucence and thought it might be an agate.”
“I’m afraid I was never very good at geology,” Lux admitted.
“Well, very quickly. You take silicon and oxygen and you have quartz. When you have quartz that is in very small crystals, you have microcrystalline quartz. When they come together you have agate, but when you get more of it coming together…”
“You’ve already lost me.”
He smiled. “Well, it doesn’t really matter since, I simply wasn’t able to determine what it was.”
Lux nodded as she took the rock that was surprisingly heavy for its size. “But you think that whatever it is, it’s fatal to demons?”
“I wasn’t sure at first. I thought, maybe I’d stabbed a demon who was already weakened by other wounds. Maybe I just got lucky. I don’t know. It took a long time before I had the chance to test it again. Then, at the battle in Vegas, I was cornered by three demons. I had some of this rock crushed into a fine powder in my pocket. I took out a small handful and blew it into their faces. Of course, that made them laugh, but not for long. Within ten seconds they were all engulfed in a fast burning blue flame… and then… gone.”
“Wow, Lucas,” Lux said, looking down at the heavy stone. “This is phenomenal. This could change the whole game.”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” he said.
“So why are you putting these smaller particles into that larger marble?”
“Since that second test that confirmed my suspicions about the elements of that rock, I’ve been trying to find a convenient and efficient way of getting it from a slayer to the demon. I mean, we can’t just have slayers going up to demons and blowing powder into their faces.”
Lux chuckled. “I see what you mean.”
“These pellets,” he went on, “when encased tightly, under pressure in these casings, or what you call a marble, they will explode and send hundreds of pellets out in a radius of about ten feet.”
“Impressive,” Lux said. She looked up at him, marveling at how ingenious he was. First the app, and now this. She kissed Lucas. “You constantly amaze me, Lucas.”
“Actually,” Lucas said, suddenly shy, but kissing her back. Ten feet is nothing. You might kill four of five demons in that small a space. No. I want these things to explode and send the pellets out over one hundred feet. Think of it. If we can shoot these casings at a group of demons and every one of them within a hundred-foot radius is destroyed…”
“Battles wouldn’t have to go on for days,” Lux said. She picked up one of the closed casings. “But what about us. What effect do these things have on slayers?”
“Nothing.” He looked at the stone in her hand. “You can touch it. You can lick it. You can even stab yourself with it and it won’t do a thing. That first time with that jagged piece, I had cuts all over my hand just from grabbing it, but nothing else. No burns. No rash. Nothing.”
Lux handed him the rock. “How much of this stuff do you have?”
Lucas stood up and went around the table, picked up a heavy bucket and brought it around to her. “And there’s a lot more of this where I found it.”
“And where’s that?”
“Remember that canyon that we drove through once when we were heading back from Vegas to home?”
Lux shook her head. “Not really.”
“Okay,” Lucas said, looking to the ceiling for another reference point. “It’s about a quarter mile from the portal Romeo brought you into.”
Lux nodded. “Okay. Yeah. I remember. There was a deep, narrow canyon with strange carvings on the wall.”
“Exactly. I found it there.”
Lux closed her eyes, trying to envision the canyon and the strange carvings. There was something else. There was something more, and she felt it was important, but couldn’t remember. Then she opened her eyes and looked at him.
“Did you know that there is an ancient burial ground around there?”
He nodded. “Not only that, but there was also once a chapel.”
Frowning, Lux looked more closely at the stone. It had an unusual iridescence when held to the light in a particular angle.
“What are you thinking?”
Lux shrugged. “I don’t know. If there had once been a church there, could the soil have been drenched in Holy Water?”
“Lucas!”
They both turned to the sound of Dr. Good’s voice.
“Over here, Mom,” Lucas called out.
“More portals have opened,” she said with urgency as she came up to them. “John just sent a team to Chicago and another one to Seattle.”
“How many slayers are left here?” Lucas said, his brow creased with worry.
“Only one more team consisting of experienced slayers. After that, it’s all novice. Virgin slayers.”
“Damn it,” Lucas said. “I h
ad hoped we’d have more time.”
“Looks like you’re working on something interesting,” Dr. Good said, glancing at the silver casing in his hand.
“As it stands now these things can kill a few demons at a time. I’m working on improving that number and, if all goes well, I should be able to have hundreds of these ready by tomorrow.”
“I can help you,” Lux offered.
Lucas smiled and nodded. “That’d be great.”
“I’ll leave you two to it,” Dr. Good said as she headed to the door.
“First thing tomorrow morning, I’ll ship off everything that I have ready,” Lucas called after her.
“So,” Lux said. “What do you want me to do?”
“I need you to take these rocks,” he said, picking up a football sized rock. He walked over to another table. The smooth iron surface had a sharp raised ridge running up the center. “You put the rock on this ridge. Place a cloth over the rock; that is to prevent shards from flying everywhere. Then you smash it with that hammer. It takes a few strikes, but they break apart relatively easy. It’ll break in two, then you break those into two, and so on until you have pieces this size.” He showed her pellets the size of coarse salt.
“Great,” Lux said, taking the heavy rock from him.
“And, here,” Lucas said, handing her a pair of protective glasses. “You’ll need these to keep your pretty eyes safe.”
She smiled and took the glasses. “I’ll get right to it.”
As he’d told her, she set the rock on the ridge in the middle of the table and covered it with a thin cloth, then smashed the heavy hammer over it.
Nothing.
Shit, she thought. This is going to be harder than I thought.
She hit it again, and on the third strike, the rock split in two. She pulled the cloth back and was surprised to see the shiny, semi-translucent center of the rock. She moved half of it aside, then split the other one in two. On and on, she smashed the rocks with her hammer.
The work soon became cathartic as the physical activity released much of the tension that had been building up. But the thought that each speck of the rock could kill so many demons was what really kept her going.
Soon, she brought Lucas a tray filled with the shattered rock.