by Alison Levy
16
GATEKEEPER
Leda prodded her bandaged, splinted knee and winced. Patellar dislocation, according to the doctor. In other words, a dislocated kneecap. Tests showed no muscular or nerve damage—something of a miracle, considering the level of trauma she had suffered. Treatment: immobilization, crutches, and maybe surgery to repair ligament and arterial damage. Long-term outlook: rehabilitation would probably give her full or close to full mobility, but a lifetime of chronic pain and recurring dislocations were a distinct possibility.
Leda puffed a breath through a frown. Just a week ago she had paid for another year at the gym and signed up for a charity 5K at her church. The damage to her knee made the two broken bones in her left hand, the stitched-up gash on her cheek, and her chipped front tooth seem pretty trifling by comparison. She caught herself wallowing in self-pity and shook it off. She was alive; that was all that mattered. Next Sunday, she would take her name off the charity run sign-up, bow her head, and thank God that her mother wasn’t identifying her remains at the morgue. That was worth the price of an unusable gym membership.
The doctor was talking to Rachel in a language Leda was sure she had never heard before. Exhausted and traumatized though she was, her years of language study kicked in, compelling her to listen to the talk and try to parse out the grammatical structure of the alien sentences. Rachel was also listening attentively, but her eyes looked heavy and her shoulders were bowed as if the full weight of the day was trying to drag her to the floor. Like Leda, she had undergone extensive doctor-mandated testing that night. Her torso was bandaged under her shirt, thanks to several cracked ribs, and both of her hands were wrapped to cover up the split knuckles she’d earned from repeatedly punching their kidnapper. The doctor had diagnosed her with a mild concussion, for which she’d ordered Rachel to take a week’s rest and report back in two days for a follow-up visit.
Leda understood none of what the doctor said, but Rachel’s friend—the tall, thin man with the goofy smile who’d saved them—had very kindly interpreted for her after introducing himself as Wu Daud len Wu. Even after four hours in the small hospital (which they’d entered by ducking behind a dumpster in an alley), he was still patiently translating every word.
The doctor’s cell phone began to buzz and she excused herself for a moment. As she stepped into the hall, Wu said something to Rachel and then ducked out. As his footsteps faded away, Rachel walked stiffly to Leda’s side and took a seat next to her on the hospital bed.
“How are you doing with all this?” she asked, her voice heavy and drawn.
“I’m alive,” Leda said. “The rest of it I haven’t thought about much.”
“That’s fair.”
“Will I be able to go home soon?”
“I hope so.”
Leda craned her neck to try to see into the hallway. “Where’d your friend run off to?”
“Wu? He’s gone to check on Suarez.”
Leda nodded. She had met Suarez—or, as he’d introduced himself, Suarez Viotto len Halla—only briefly before leaving the psychopath’s house. Her first thought upon seeing him was that he was a soldier: he was fit, had sharp eyes, and walked with an air of command. Immediately upon arriving, he took charge of the scene and neither Rachel nor Wu questioned his right to do so. He used the unconscious kidnapper’s own rope to tie him up and started making phone calls as the other three made their exit—Rachel shuffling slowly, Leda hopping on one leg and relying on Wu to hold her upright.
Something on the floor stirred, drawing Leda’s attention. It was the old brown coat. As she looked on, it dragged itself to the far side of the room, where it settled down in a heap and became still once again.
Leda pointed her chin at it. “That’s the daemon I saw before?”
“Yeah,” Rachel said.
“Is it like a pet or something?”
“No,” Rachel snorted. “It’s defective. It was part of my work assignment for the week, but because the department is so busy, they told me to watch the thing until they free up some resources to deal with it.”
“Part of your work assignment,” Leda repeated. During their hours at the hospital, in between tests and doctor conversations, Rachel had explained the daemon monitoring system. As she silently absorbed the information, Leda reflected how dramatically her life had changed in one day that she could accept Rachel’s words as truth rather than the ramblings of a lunatic. “Like arresting that man was part of your work?”
“Yeah. And finding you, although I didn’t know it until that freak called you a gatekeeper. Even hearing that, I wouldn’t have believed him if the daemon hadn’t said that it saw something unusual in you.”
Leda sifted through her jumbled memories of the kidnapping and recalled hearing the word gatekeeper, but only now, with the danger past, did she wonder what it meant. “What is a gatekeeper?” she asked. “What does it have to do with me?”
“A gatekeeper,” Rachel said, “is like a placeholder for a daemon.”
“Placeholder?”
“Yeah. See”—Rachel rubbed her bandaged ribs—“a long time ago, a daemon called Apep became defective in a dangerous way and my people, for whatever reason, were unable to repair it.”
“So it went to the wastes.” Leda remembered the winking black eyes in the orange bog with a shudder. “That place you mentioned before.”
“Yes. But there’s a problem: daemons move freely through dimensional barriers.”
“And walls,” Leda added, eyes darting to the old coat.
“The only way to keep Apep and others like it from drifting back into this world is to remove its ability to pass through borders. We have a technology that allows us to remove the part of a daemon that gives it interdimensional access, but we can’t just take that piece and throw it away, because it might find its way back to the daemon. Historical records show that we tried a lot of different methods of keeping the daemons and their transdimensional abilities apart, but in the end the only effective way was to put the severed abilities in human beings.”
“Put the pieces into people?” Leda asked, eyebrows raised. “How?”
“I don’t know how it works,” Rachel admitted. “Above my pay grade. But it’s effective because a human body is incapable of moving through dimensions without a passage. Humans can carry the daemon’s ability their whole lives without ever being able to use it, so that piece of the daemon stays safely separated from its former owner. It’s a pretty neat little system.”
Leda sat quietly a moment, digesting what she’d just learned. She knew it should be an overwhelming thing to hear, but after everything she had been through and everything she had learned tonight, this seemed small by comparison. However, it did beg one question.
“So,” she asked with some slight hesitation, “I’ve got some daemon in me?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘in you,’ exactly, but yes, more or less,” Rachel said. “It doesn’t affect your life in any material way, though. You’re just carrying around a piece of the daemon Apep like most people carry around a birthmark or a scar.”
A birthmark. A scar. A piece of a daemon. Leda’s eyes drifted to the empty coat. A memory of the basement intruded into her thoughts, showing her an image of the coat with blood splatter down its front and long strips of human skin hanging from its collar. She winced. There’s a piece of that in me?
“But who the hell gave this thing to me?” she snapped. “I didn’t sign on for it!”
“One of your ancestors did.”
“My ancestors?”
“An Egyptian aristocrat’s daughter, according to our records.” Rachel shifted her weight, grimaced, and gently held her sides. “Her father performed yearly rituals at a temple to banish Apep from the kingdom, so I guess she seemed like a good fit. She accepted the duty, and, when she had children, the piece of Apep duplicated and passed on to her daughters and granddaughters. Every girl born into that family who was a descendant of the first woman inherited a co
py of it. In that way, the original ability divided and spread over the world, meaning that as long as there was one living female descendant of the first woman, it would stay safely separated from the daemon.” She drew a ragged breath and held her ribs as she shifted position again. “Unfortunately, the direct female lines have dwindled over the millennia. Most of the lines either died out or had only male children. Then, just recently, the last recorded female descendants died. If they had been the last anchors holding pieces of the daemon in this world, the transdimensional ability would have returned to its source. Since that didn’t happen, we knew there must be another female descendant somewhere. My job was to track her down.”
“And that’s me?”
“Looks that way.”
“‘Looks like way’? So you don’t actually know,” Leda said skeptically. A glimmer of hope that maybe she could go back to living a normal life flashed in her core. “I might not be this gatekeeper person.”
“Well, actually . . .” Flinching from the pain of the movement, Rachel fished her cell phone out of her pocket, activated it, and showed Leda a screen full of foreign words.
“This,” she explained, “is a message from a guy I know in our records department. He told me a few days ago that we had a record of one of the direct female lines going dead in West Africa several hundred years ago, but there was one girl who was unaccounted for. He wrote me today to say he managed to dig up records of a slave auction in Virginia less than six months after that girl disappeared. An African girl was sold at that auction who was about the same age as the missing child. He followed up on the sale and found only one other mention of the girl, made almost twenty years later in a ledger kept on the plantation to which she was sold. It mentions her by the name ‘Sarah’ and lists her as having three children: two sons and a daughter. The daughter’s name was”—she checked the screen of her phone again—“Ruthrose. Hmm. Unusual name.”
A bolt of frost rippled through Leda as if a ghost had just whispered in her ear. “Oh my God,” she said in a hushed whisper. “My grandmother told us about Ruthrose when we were little. She told us what her mother had told her, and her grandmother before that, and . . .” She licked her lips. She felt unsettled, like a still pool rippling from a tossed pebble. “She told us what Ruthrose told her daughters, what her mama had told her—that our family was important. She said . . . our daughters were important.”
Overwhelming emotion broke open inside Leda’s chest at the thought that her abduction was linked to an ancestral abduction that had taken place hundreds of years earlier. The immensity of it all overloaded her, and she slumped under its weight. “God,” she said, “I don’t know what to think. I just . . . don’t.”
Rachel watched Leda silently, allowing her the space to process the overwhelming knowledge she’d just been given.
Wu reappeared in the doorway and said something to Rachel in their incomprehensible language. Then he stepped aside to let Suarez and another man Leda did not recognize into the room.
The moment Rachel saw the second man’s face, she sat up straight, her expression both tense and relieved. Suarez handed Rachel a faded blue container, no bigger than a shoebox, that was covered with stickers. As she accepted it, the other man— older and balding, with sunken brown eyes—spoke to her in their strange language. The man gestured toward Leda a few times while talking, but it was a while before he paused long enough for Rachel to translate what he was saying.
“The man who attacked us has been locked up,” she finally told Leda. “There were trace amounts of human blood all over that basement and the closet was full of knives and . . . other things. They were all designed for the purpose of opening a passage through dimensions via ritual murder.”
The two women locked eyes, a moment of horror frozen between them. They had come very close to joining those stains on the concrete.
“Who is he?” Leda whispered.
“He had eight or nine different IDs in his house, all of them fake, and the name on the deed of the house belongs to a man who hasn’t been seen in years. There’s no way to know for sure who he is unless he tells us.”
“And he’s not going to do that.” Leda sighed.
“Probably not,” Rachel confirmed. “It’s not our top priority anyway. Some colleagues of mine are working to repair the damage he did to the dimensional barrier, but it’ll take some time. Once that’s dealt with, they’ll figure out how best to alert Notan authorities about the girls who were murdered there. The Notan victims are for the police to deal with.”
“And . . . him?” Leda asked.
“He stays with us,” Rachel said firmly. “He claims he’s working with Arcanans to illegally open a passage, so there’s no way we’re turning him over to Notan authorities. He’ll face judgment for his crimes in our dimension.”
“When?”
“As soon as possible.”
“Will we have to testify at the trial?”
“There’s no trial,” said Rachel with a shake of her tired head. “He’s not a citizen, so he’s not entitled to one, but even if he was, there’s no defense he could possibly use to mitigate what we’ve got against him.” She leveled her gaze at Leda and drew her lips into a thin line. “There’s no trial, just sentencing and, believe me, he will get the maximum.” She closed her eyes and, gently nodding her head, exhaled slowly. “He’s taken his last breath of free air.”
An unwelcome flash of the kidnapper’s face crossed Leda’s mind; the sneer on his face stirred a nauseous panic in her. She shoved the image away and hugged her arms over her chest.
“Good,” she muttered. “I hope he never sees daylight again.”
The balding man addressed Rachel once again; Leda listened silently but intently, though she still couldn’t translate a single word.
“MS. WILDE,” MR. Vang said, “the Central Office still has some questions for you and your handling of this case.”
“My ‘handling’ of it?” Rachel cocked an eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”
“This woman,” he said, nodding at Miss Morley, “should never have been brought into this business. She’s Notan. Granted, she turned out to be a gatekeeper, but you could not have known that at the time you consulted her. Furthermore”—he pulled a phone from his pocket and checked its screen—“we had someone stop by your assigned residence, and there appears to be another Notan living there.” He turned the phone toward her, showing an image of a young blond man with electric blue eyes. “This man.”
“He’s an oracle.”
“Regardless, he doesn’t belong in that house.” He fixed her with a cold, accusatory stare. “Your interaction with these people is unacceptable.”
Rachel met his gaze without flinching. She blinked slowly and tilted her head just slightly. “You sent me after a serial killer,” she said, her voice pure steel. “You sent me after him unarmed, with no backup—and no way to call for help, since the offices were closed.”
They continued to stare into each other’s eyes as the seconds ticked by, neither yielding to the other’s will. After what felt like minutes, Mr. Vang cleared his throat and glanced away, breaking the tension.
“All right then,” he said casually. “Since the doctor wants you off your feet for a week, I’m assigning you to bring this woman and her family up to speed on gatekeeper history and protocol. I expect you to forward any information you gather on them to the records department.”
He focused his attention on his phone, scrolling through something that was seemingly of great interest, while the three collectors exchanged knowing glances. Wu hid a smirk behind his hand, and Suarez nodded sharply at Rachel, who shrugged and exhaled in a puff.
“Fine,” she said.
Mr. Vang nodded and sniffed, eyes still on his phone. “That just leaves the matter of this daemon,” he said, pointing at the crumpled old coat. “The prisoner has a sizable bite wound on his hand that seems to have come from a daemon’s mouth. As you know, a daemon cannot inf
lict physical injury unless it has at least partially crossed into this dimension. Was this daemon the culprit?”
“Yes.”
“And this is the daemon we charged you with safekeeping?”
“It is.”
“I see,” he mumbled. “Well, that means our assessment of the daemon may have been incorrect. If its defect is serious enough that it can bite a human, then it will need to be sent away immediately.”
“That’s fast,” Rachel said, surprised. “Doesn’t it usually take weeks to make a wastes-related decision?”
“Normally, yes. However . . .” He took a deep breath and lifted his gaze to meet hers. “During the systems check, we are shorthanded and low on resources, and now, with this prisoner claiming that he’s in league with a group of Arcanans, we can’t afford to waste time on a lengthy decision-making process.” A glint of concern shone in his eyes, startling Rachel. “If what the prisoner says is true and there really are Arcanans who are willing to commit murder to break down dimensional barriers, then we have bigger problems to deal with than one defective daemon. If the daemon is dangerous enough to physically attack a human, then it will have to be fast-tracked.”
“Right,” Rachel said. “But it’s not defective.”
Mr. Vang squinted at her; out of the corner of her eye, Rachel saw the peculiar expressions Wu and Suarez were casting in her direction.
“Oh?” Mr. Vang said.
“Well,” she backtracked, “it is defective, but . . .”
Rachel glanced at the coat-covered daemon. The invisible thing was hunkered down within its cloth armor, seemingly oblivious to the fateful conversation taking place just a few feet away. It had not spoken in hours, and Rachel had not said a word to it about what had happened in the basement, and yet she felt that they had reached an understanding. It hadn’t chosen to be defective, just like it hadn’t chosen to be placed in her care, but it had chosen to come to her rescue when she needed it. She hadn’t chosen this daemon as her assignment, and she hadn’t chosen to have it follow her around like a semi-tangible shadow, but she could choose to return the favor it had done her. Besides, after all she’d been through, she didn’t feel too guilty about lying to the Central Office right now.