The anomaly hit at nine forty three.
I felt it through the soles of my feet first, a low resonance moving up through the earth from the direction of the Gate. Deliberate and purposeful, it aimed directly at the house across the street like something reaching. It wasn’t a breach, not even close to a breach. But I had spent five centuries learning the difference between the Gate being dormant and the Gate being interested, and this was very much the latter.
I was across the street before I finished I could finish the thought.
Her kitchen was the epicenter, which made sense. The Gate ran in a direct line beneath the back of her property and the kitchen sat closest to that side of the house. I could feel the energy pooling there when I came through her front door, not dangerous yet but building steadily, and I was already reading the room when she came around the doorway in fuzzy socks with a coffee mug in her hand and stopped dead at the sight of me.
"Excuse me!" She pointed at the door I had just walked through. "You cannot just walk into my house!"
"Kitchen," I said.
She stared at me. "What?"
"The problem is in your kitchen."
"What problem? And how would you even know that? You just broke in, you haven't seen my kitchen."
The cabinet above her counter swung open behind her with a bang loud enough to rattle the hinges.
She turned around slowly and then even more slowly she turned to take me in, her gaze wide.
"Lucky guess," I offered with a shrug.
Something shifted in her expression then, a crack in the amusement she had been wearing since the moment she first saw me, something quieter underneath it that she covered quickly.
"Okay," she said. "That was weird."
I nodded. “Yes."
"Old house thing, probably."
"No."
She set her mug down on the counter. "Then what?"
"That is what I came to talk to you about." I held her gaze. "I need you to stay away from the backyard after dark."
She blinked. "Why?"
"There are things down there."
"Things”? She crossed her arms. "What kind of things?"
"Things that should not be interacted with."
She fronwned in confusion, “Like raccoons?"
"No."
She tried again. “Bears? Because I saw a warning sign on the way into town and I genuinely cannot handle a bear situation right now, I just moved in."
I sigheed because she was really not going to stop asking questions. “Not bears."
"Then what?"
I had never found a better approach than directness in five and a half centuries of dealing with complicated situations, so I said it plainly.
"Demons," I offered in an even tone.
