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“What is wrong, angel?” He brushes his teeth gently over my shoulder, the way a sane man might use his lips. Cosmos always has edge, even when he is tender.
“I’m wondering what happens now. Do you want me to live here in this old manor, with your friends and their wives?”
Cosmos looks momentarily confused. I don’t think he actually thought this far ahead. When you start a relationship with a marriage, there’s not a lot of places to go. We’ve begun at the end of romance, and now we’re trying to reverse engineer our way into something real.
“Well, I was going to keep being a demon slayer, and I figured you could…”
“What? Be barefoot and pregnant?”
“Absolutely not!” He looks scandalized.
“Oh. Right. Of course. You had a vasectomy. So you want me to leave my job, sit in England, and rot into my old age?”
“No,” he frowns. “I’m going to train you as a demon hunter.”
“You’re going to… what now? What makes you think I’m capable of hunting demons? I’m a scientist. I’m a female scientist with no ability with weaponry, or…”
“Shhhhh…” He presses a finger to my lips. “I will find something for you to do. You may not necessarily dispatch demons yourself. You may track them via data. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
The truly twisted, kinky, absolutely fucked up thing is that it does sound like fun.
“How would that work?”
He sits up, his tattooed torso an immediate distraction. “Let me show you something. It’s a place sorely underutilized at Direview. Bryn is too busy with parish work, and Thor — I don’t even know what Thor does most of the time. But this place was actually built to do the job they forget to do these days. Come on. It’s upstairs.”
Tucked away at the upper corner of Direview, there is a room with a green door. It looks very different from the other doors, which are wood-toned in keeping with the rest of the old aesthetic. This one is wooden too, but someone took paint to it, tried to mark it as being special and apart from the rest of the place. It has been left to get covered in dust, almost like the demon servants don’t want to touch it. I am even more intrigued now.
“Why is this so much more dilapidated than every other dilapidated thing here?”
“Direview has had a cash flow problem for some time now. Bryn wouldn’t know how to make money if you gave him a lemonade stand. Thor’s barely a person. Demons don’t care about money as much as you’d think they would. Everything that stands here stand because of the brothers who don’t live here.”
I am listening to him until he unlocks the door with a little brass key. The door swings open. I expect to hear the creak of rusted hinges, but it opens smoothly and silently.
Every single window in this room is blacked out, but it is brightly lit by a verdant hue. The feeling I get stepping into this room is almost mystical. It’s like coming home to a home I’d forgotten I had.
I love a bank of computers more than I love almost anything. This is impressive. Very impressive. This draws me in, the glow of at least two dozen screens shining their data on me.
The tech is old. These aren’t flat screens. These are CRT monitors with blocky green text and big, thick cursors blinking at me. There are no nice WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interfaces displaying the information in cheerful charts and with bold text. There’s just the data. Beautiful data.
“What does this refer to?”
“Most of the upper echelons of governments around the world run on outdated technology. Well, most may be an exaggeration, but you’d be shocked how many government systems are run on early DOS platforms to this day. This bank of computers is linked to several international systems with access to older satellites. It’s not the best data. It needs to be interpreted and…”
I’m not listening. I’m sitting down in the older style office chair, low backed and covered in beige corduroy. Arm rests far too thin to provide any real resting potential. Lumbar support practically nonexistent. It feels correct.
The keyboard clacks when I touch it. It, like everything else, is incredibly dated. I bet if I pick up the mouse… yes. It has an actual physical ball rolling around inside it to function as a tracker.
“This is amazing,” I breathe. “Is there documentation?”
“Here,” he says, lifting the lid of a box full of printer paper. Not modern printer paper, all in separate sheets, but proper printer paper, the kind that has perforated edges with little holes in it the gears of the printer fit through so it moves through the mechanism at the right rate. And on this paper are endless screeds of information and documentation.
