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“Be the one with the Council breathing down your neck, and tell me how much you’d be sleeping,” I shot back.
“That’s fair,” Gideon admitted. “What are you working on?”
“We—,” I started before catching myself. “Well,” I corrected, “I was going over the abductions and the place where the bones were found. And I just got a feeling about this park,” I told him, reaching for the map, and unfolding it, inwardly praying I hadn’t missed any notes Minos may have jotted down. Because Gideon would know the difference.
“Like what about it?” he asked, clearly not having it ring any bells for him.
“I don’t know. I can’t explain it. Haven’t you ever just had a gut instinct about something? There’s something here.”
“So you’re going through news articles to see if you can find something,” he said, turning to look at the Microfilm. “Nineteen-forties?” he asked, brows raising.
“Digging deep. Hence all the empties,” I said, waving at the desk.
“You really think something that far back has something to do with a demon creating havoc right now?”
“Well, it’s not like they have normal lifespans,” I reasoned.
“Sure, but there would have been more babies, more bodies.”
“But there haven’t been that many right now. If we hadn’t heard about the bones, we likely never would have thought twice about it. That could have been going on for years. Decades. Flying just under our radar.”
“You think this demon only feeds every year or so?” Gideon asked, dubious.
“Not all demons even need to eat at all,” I said, shrugging.
“Those kinds of demon are a whole different problem entirely,” Gideon said, shaking his head as he raised his own coffee mug to his lips.
That immediate urge to defend Minos?
Yep, you guessed it, we were just going to go ahead and ignore that too.
“What I’m saying is, sometimes we don’t get to know the types of demons well enough before we slay them. It’s possible there are ones who don’t feed often. Maybe especially when it is babies.”
“There was always a rumor about babies being a more powerful source of life force,” Gideon agreed, grimacing. “So, what, you’re waiting for first light to head out there to check shit out for yourself?” he asked.
“Pretty much.”
“I might have to put a slight kink in your plans,” Gideon told me.
“Ugh. What now?”
“Your mentees,” he said.
“I haven’t forgotten about them. I was busy today. And you didn’t always mentor me all day, every day,” I reminded him.
“Things are… different right now,” he said, confirming a suspicion I’d felt for a while.
It started when, all of a sudden, a lot more kids were getting their Call, and were showing up at The Academy.
In my time, the classes were small. Maybe eight or ten of us to each grade. Some grades had half that.
But all of a sudden, it was easily twenty to thirty each year.
Without a single word of explanation as to why.
“Different because too many kids are getting Called when we don’t have enough instructors for them all? Or different as in there is something going on up there,” I said, pointing toward where the sky would be if we weren’t in the basement. “Or down there?” I added, pointing toward hell beneath our feet.
“No one is confirming anything. Probably don’t want everyone to panic.”
“But if they don’t want that, there is definitely something to panic about,” I mused, “then we should all be freaking the fuck out, right?”
The worried look on his face had me stiffening.
Gideon was a serious guy. He always had been. He had a lot on his shoulders. But he always seemed to handle that weight with a sort of calm, collected efficiency.
He was decidedly unflappable.
But, well, he looked, you know, flapped.
“Gideon,” I said, voice serious. “What is it?”
“Nothing is confirmed,” he warned me. “And it can’t be getting around,” he added.
“Everyone hates me. Who the hell am I going to tell?”
“They don’t hate you,” he insisted.
“We both know they do. And we’re not changing the topic. What is going on?”
To that, he let out a deep sigh before leaning a little closer.
“The old gods are waking up.”
“Ah, excuse the fuck out of me. The old gods? What does that even mean?”
I mean, there was just God, right?
You know the Supreme being who created demonslayers in the first place.
Good old Sky Daddy.
At least that was what we’d all been taught about, trained on.
The whole Heaven and Hell and fallen angels and demons and all that shit.
One God. One Devil.
And, you know, that holy ghost and son thing, which, honestly, I wasn’t even sure I fully grasped all these years later. But, yeah, I believed in it all.
I had to.
I, essentially, worked for God.
“It means exactly what it sounds like it means.”
“That makes no sense,” I insisted. “The whole world is based on the whole God and Devil and Heaven and Hell thing.”
