Surrender to Dawn

by J. Kenner

  "Where?" I said, practically pouncing in my eagerness. "Where is it?"

  But he didn't answer. He just shook his head in a manner that suggested everything was lost. "Gone," he said. "Probably got it when they got her. Killed her, you know. I'm certain of it."

  "But you said blood. What did you mean by blood?"

  "She was afraid, so very afraid that the line wouldn't survive."

  "I don't understand. Her line?"

  "Her bloodline. It was her daughter. Her daughter who she believed would wield the blade and shut the gate."

  I could feel myself grow pale. "How long ago was this?"

  I watched as he mentally calculated. "Must have been ten, twelve years ago."

  "And the woman's name?"

  "Margaret," he said. "Margaret Purdue."

  12

  “She knew," I said, pacing in front of the couch in Rachel's new apartment. "Your mom knew."

  "But what did she know?" Rachel asked. Deacon and I had returned to the pub after my meeting with the monsignor, only to find that both Rose and Rachel were asleep. I'd let them stay that way for a while, figuring that with everything that was soon going to be facing us, they would need the rest. But by four in the morning, I couldn't stand it anymore. We were technically on day three now, and counting down fast. I'd shaken both of them awake, and after coffee and Diet Coke, they were both semiconscious and blinking at me, their faces still soft with sleep.

  "Everything. Don't you see? He said the key was a knife, and he learned that from Margaret."

  "So my mom actually had the key?"

  "I don't know," I said, frowning. "The monsignor seems to think she did, because he said they took it." I closed my eyes, trying to remember exactly what he'd said. "He said that they must have taken it when they killed her."

  "I think he's wrong," Deacon said. He was standing by the window, still wearing the jacket, and the streetlight floating in from outside cast him in an eerie glow. “I would have heard. There would have been much rumbling in the demonic community if one of the gate keys had been found and destroyed."

  "So that means she didn't have it," Rose said.

  "Or it means she hid it," Rachel put in.

  "That's exactly what I'm thinking." I reached up to the neck of the clean tank top I'd grabbed from the top of Rachel's laundry basket I pulled it down, exposing the edge of my bra, and the small tattoo of a knife. "A message, maybe? To let Alice know."

  "Alice was only a kid when Mom made her get that tattoo."

  "I think your mom was covering her bases. Leaving Alice a clue in case something happened to her. Because she knew it was Alice who would close the gate." At that I glanced toward Deacon, but his attention was elsewhere. "Or she knew it looked like Alice, anyway."

  "But that explains it, then," Rose said. "Why they killed her, I mean. We've always wondered about why Alice, and that's it, right? Because they couldn't risk her finding the knife and shutting the gate."

  "Yeah," I said, sitting on the coffee table. "I think you're right. But we still don't know why me."

  "Does it matter?" Deacon asked. “The reasons don't change the reality. It is you. And there's nothing you can do now to change that."

  “I know. I just—" I cut myself off, noticing the way Rachel was eyeing Rose. It was a big-sister look that I was more than familiar with, and I wondered why it was being issued by Rachel instead of by me. "Got something you two want to share with the class?"

  Rose tensed up immediately, shifting around so that she was facing forward, hands on her knees. "No. Nothing. I'm good."

  Rachel reached over and took her hand. “Tell her."

  "It's not import—"

  "You told me," Rachel said. "But she's the one who should know."

  "Whatever it is," I said. "Tell me." And why, I wondered, did Rachel know and not me? Rose was my sister, after all.

  "It's just that I know. Why you, I mean. I know why the demons used you."

  "Oh." I don't know what I'd expected her to say, but it wasn't that. "How?" As I asked, Deacon moved away from the window, crossing like a cat through shadows to stand beside me. His presence should have calmed me. Instead, it made me more wary.

  "From before," Rose said, pulling her feet up and hugging her knees. She still wore what she'd slept in, an oversized T-shirt and loose leggings, and she looked small, fragile, and absolutely miserable. "From when he was inside me."

  "Oh." The he she referred to was Lucas Johnson, of course. The he who had screwed up both our lives. "So what exactly did you learn?" I asked, not at all certain I really wanted to know.

  Once again, Rose's eyes darted to Rachel. "Go ahead, honey," Rachel said. "She has a right to know."

  Rose licked her lips, then nodded. "I was in there, you know, with him. And most of the time I didn't know what was going on. I was just, I don't know, floating or something. Like when you're half-asleep and things are happening around you and you don't understand what's going on."

  "Okay," I said, not the least bit sure what this had to do with me.

  "But sometimes he dropped his guard, and I could get a peek inside him." She closed her eyes and breathed in hard through her nose. "I didn't really want to. It was—gross. And scary. And—"

  "But you saw something?"

  She nodded. "I didn't see so much as knew. Like all of a sudden what was in his head was in mine, too."

  "What?"

  "He made you. Not just as Alice, but as Lily, too." She reached over and squeezed Rachel's hand. "He made you, and then when he and Kokbiel saw the chance to make you the girl in the prophecy, they jumped all over it. I was only a way to get to you. So you'd go after him. So you'd die and all this . . . stuff would happen."

  "Back up," I said, suddenly very afraid. "What are you talking about? What do you mean, he made me?"

  "Mom," she whispered, as a tear trickled from her eye. "He slept with Mom."

  "No," I said, shaking my head and backing away. Deacon's arm went tight around me. "No. He's not. He can't be—"

  "He is," she said. "Lucas Johnson's your father."

  13

  “No," I said, nausea rising in me. "No way. He's not my father. That son of a bitch doesn't have a thing to do with me."

  "It doesn't matter," Rachel said, leaning toward me. "I know a little bit about having a family that touches up against the dark. And it doesn't matter. You make yourself, Lily. It's not about who your father or your mother or your asshole uncle is."

  But I wasn't listening. I was pacing. My mind whirling, my body hot with the fear that comes with having your entire sense of self shifted. I know a little about that—what with getting dumped into a new body and all—but this was different. Then, at least, I knew who I was at the core, even if the package had changed. Now I wasn't even sure about that.

  "I'm not a demon," I said. "I can't be part demon."

  "You're not," Deacon said firmly, moving to my side. "He took human form to be with your mother. You're human, Lily, and you always have been."

  We both knew that wasn't really true. The prophecy had changed me, and with every demon I killed, I lost a little bit of that humanity. But I'd always believed I'd started from a clean slate.

  Okay, that wasn't true either. The old Lily had been far from a saint. I'd do whatever it took to make a buck—steal or deal—but it was always so that I could take care of my little sister. And I'd never really felt a sense of wrong until Johnson had touched her. Before that, it had always been about what was easiest. I'd learned better, of course, yet I was still shying away from the hard choices.

  "Does it matter?" Deacon said. "Does it matter where you came from?" He looked hard at me, and I knew what he was thinking. If it mattered that I was demon spawn, then he was screwed, too. Because he'd come from the depths of hell and wanted desperately to have the doors of heaven thrown open for him. So far, he hadn't earned his way in. And I had to wonder—was that because of what he'd done or because of what he was?

 
If the latter, then I was screwed, too.

  "It matters," I said. I moved to the window and pressed my hands against the glass, looking down at the street, now starting to come to life with the approaching dawn. "The creature I hate most in all the world is part of me. His blackness. His vileness. And there's nothing I can do. No way I can make that not be so."

  I felt someone step up beside me, and turned to see that it was Rose. She reached out and took my hand. "I know," she said simply. And the soft cadence of her voice shamed me. I might have been born of him, but she'd suffered under him. He'd been in her, too. Physically. Spiritually. He'd raped her, body and soul, and between the two of us, I had to acknowledge that she'd gotten the bitter end of Lucas Johnson.

  I looked at her, standing taller and more confident than I'd seen her in a year. She'd survived Johnson's mark, and I couldn't be more proud.

  She'd survived, and so could I.

  I squeezed her hand, then let go, turning to face the room. “I've been their damn puppet," I said. "The demons. Kokbiel." I shivered. So far, Kokbiel had done all his dirty work through Johnson, and although I'd seen a hefty chunk of Penemue, I had yet to view his enemy, Kokbiel. I can't say that I was looking forward to making his acquaintance.

  I breathed in through clenched teeth, thinking about what Kokbiel and Lucas had been doing. "They've been pulling strings since before I was born."

  "Lily—" I held up a hand to stop Deacon.

  "No. It's okay. I'm just making a point. I've been their puppet," I started again. "But they never expected me to turn, right? To figure out I was being used and start fighting to close the gate? So I got in a solid punch. And they never expected us to get Johnson out of Rose. Another solid punch to the jaw. Now I'm going to kick them in the nuts, and hard."

  "Good girl," Rachel said, the corner of her mouth twitching. "How?"

  "By finding the thing they don't want us to find." I looked at each of them in turn. Deacon, dark and silent, as he watched me. Rose, moving to settle again beside Rachel, her expression open and curious, her sleep-tousled pink hair standing on end. Rachel, leaning forward, eager to hear and to help.

  "The knife," Rose said.

  "Right. They killed Alice because they believed she could close the gate. But she couldn't do that unless she had the key to lock it with." I looked at Rose, my prize pupil. "The knife. And that means that the monsignor was wrong. The demons didn't destroy the knife when they had Egan kill Margaret because if they had, then Alice would have been no danger to them, right?"

  I looked to Deacon, and he nodded in agreement.

  "So it still exists," Rachel said.

  "The problem is where," I admitted. "The world's a big place."

  "But it's not in the world," Rose said. "Right? Because you tried to find it using your arm, and you couldn't."

  I had to agree. I was still new to the whole magical, mystery-arm-tour thing, but I'd at least managed to harness how it works. I'd cast out to find the key to lock the gates and discovered nothing. That didn't mean the thing didn't exist; instead, it meant that the thing didn't exist in the earthly dimension.

  "So we have to find it," Rachel said. "We have to figure out how to bring it back from whatever dimension it's hidden in."

  "How?" Rose asked.

  "A Caller," Deacon said, his expression dark. "We need to find a Caller demon."

  I'd had brief experience with a Caller demon not too long after I'd become Alice. Father Carlton had found a repentant demon and used him to pull the key for the Ninth Gate from a nether dimension into our world. My rat fink of a handler, Clarence, had told me that the key would open the gate, and I'd naively set out to kill the Caller and recover the key, all with the intent of preventing the gate from opening and the hordes from crossing over.

  Yeah, right.

  But that was over and done. The relevant point was that I knew what a Caller was. After all, I'd killed one, and—

  Wait a second. Wait just one single second.

  My head snapped up, and I stared at Deacon. "I killed him. Maecruth. The Caller demon. I killed him, and that means I absorbed his essence. Holy crap, don't you see? I'm a Caller now."

  Rose squealed, obviously thrilled with this revelation, but neither Rachel nor Deacon reacted with the level of joy I'd anticipated.

  "Hello?" I said. "Remember me? Sponge girl? I killed a Caller. So I can do the calling now."

  "It's not that simple," Rachel said. She lifted a shoulder. "Sorry, but I know a little bit about this stuff."

  "What do you—"

  "Do you know how many Callers there are in the world?" Deacon asked.

  "No. I've never bothered to examine the census figures."

  Deacon ignored my sarcasm. "Calling is not an uncommon gift," he said. "But in most it lies dormant, because without the training, the gift is useless."

  "Oh."

  "Callers train for centuries," he said. “It's a grueling process. Painful, even, or so I've been told. And when they graduate, they have a unique skill to augment their gift. But skill is not the same as essence, and I don't think that you absorbed Maecruth's skill when you took his essence."

  I was afraid he was right, but I wasn't about to give in so easily. "I could try, though, right? Maybe I did. Maybe—"

  “Try," he said. "It can't hurt, and if it works, we're that much further along."

  I could tell, though, that he didn't expect it to work and, score one for Deacon, he was right. I spent a good ten minutes trying to get my head around the calling thing, and I got nothing. Maybe I did have the skill, and maybe I didn't. But just then it didn't matter, because have or not I sure as hell didn't know how to access it.

  Damn.

  "So what do we do?"

  "Exactly what we said," Rachel said. "We need to find a Caller."

  "Great. Here I am trying to battle the demons back into the hell dimension, and now I have to go up and ask one for help? They're going to whack my head off, and that's not a look I want for the rest of eternity."

  "Maecruth sought redemption," Deacon said. "Surely there are other Callers who share that desire."

  "I thought you said Callers were rare," Rachel pointed out. "Sounds to me like the odds are seriously against it."

  I sighed. "So we find one, any one. And if he's up for helping us, then great. If not, we'll just have to force his cooperation." The thought of doing exactly that gave me a nice little buzz, actually. A buzz for which I wanted to hate myself, but I couldn't. I was too busy reveling in the black-hearted delight that came with the thought of tormenting a demon into submissiveness. How much pain? I wondered. How much pain would it take to hurt a being who thrived on pain and dark?

  I realized with a desperate shame that I wanted to find out.

  "How?" I said, hoping my emotions didn't show on my face. "How do we find one?"

  "I can ask—" Rachel began, but Rose cut her off.

  "We don't need one," she said. "We can find the knife ourselves."

  We all turned to stare at her, and she shrank back, apparently appalled by the attention.

  "What are you talking about?" I asked.

  She licked her lips, her expression unsure. "I was just . . . you know. Just thinking."

  "Go on," Rachel said, giving her an encouraging pat on the thigh.

  "It's just that Alice had to find it, too, right? And her mom wouldn't want her cavorting with demons, would she?" For that, she turned to Rachel.

  "No," Rachel admitted. "That would be the last thing Mom would have wanted."

  "Right. So that means that your mom was the one who hid the knife. She created a portal, she put it in, and she left Alice a clue. So that Alice could figure it out on her own and wouldn't need to cozy up to a Caller demon."

  "But why not just tell Alice? Or tell me?"

  "You were on the wrong side," I reminded Rachel, who grimaced in acknowledgment. "And maybe she was afraid Alice would go wrong, too. Either that, or she was afraid that a demon would get
the thoughts from Alice's head before it was time to use the knife." I knew damn good and well that demons existed who could read your thoughts as easily as people read the balloons over cartoon characters' heads.

  "So she left a clue," I said. "And the clue was my tattoo."

  "It fits," Rachel said. "But where do we go from there?"

  "I haven't the foggiest."

  "Let's see it," Rose said, and I complied, once again tugging down the neckline to reveal the dangerous-looking dagger that I'd always thought seemed so out of place on such a polished and perfumed body.

  "Maybe if you put your hand over it," Rose suggested. "The way you do when the symbols on your arm turn into a portal."

  I was dubious, but so far Rose was ahead of the pack with ideas, so I figured trying this one out was worth a shot. I drew in a breath, focused, and pressed my palm over the mark on my breast.

  Nothing happened.

  I sucked in air, closed my eyes, and pressed harder.

  Still nothing.

  I opened my eyes and looked at Rose and Rachel, both of whom were staring at me with disappointment. Deacon was back in the shadows, his face dark, his expression grave. "What?" I demanded. He might be fighting to keep his inner demon under control, but right then he was the one who knew the most about this stuff, and I needed him to help, not to be the gorgeous guy who held up the damn wall.

  "It won't be your body," he said. "An enchantment. She would have enchanted something. Something she could pass on to Alice if she died before she could share the secret herself."

  Okay, I forgave him the moodiness because he was absolutely right.

  "So Alice's apartment, then," I said, then glanced up at the clock. It was only six in the morning. Plenty of time to go rip Alice's place apart, then get back to open the pub.

  "And we are opening," Rachel said, when I commented that we could simply keep the closed sign up all day. "We had a deal. I point them out; you kill them. Better, stronger, faster, remember?"

  I remembered. And since we'd already fought this battle—and I'd lost, as little sisters so often do—I wasn't inclined to revisit the issue.