Daniel was watching her as she paced. “I don’t know Bree, I honestly don’t know. I was preoccupied with staying open and allowing the working, so I didn’t sense any details. And I swear I wasn’t even sure it was taint.”
“And that’s another thing,” Bree said, facing him. He took a half step back from her as she continued. “How could you not sense that thing in you? I heard you battled the Keltoi, and I figure that makes you a Keeper. So you must have Demonsense. One that big should have registered with anyone with a lick of Demonsense.”
“Well it didn’t. Look, there’s obviously some mystery here, and I’m happy to discuss it, but can’t we do it inside?” he asked, holding his palm up to the rain.
Bree’s anger started to drain out of her as she realized the absurdity of ranting about outside. He was right, they should go in, and besides, she needed to get some food, pronto, to replenish her energy. Her legs were still shaking. “Okay, let’s go,” she conceded roughly.
Once inside, Daniel rounded up some towels for her, then disappeared upstairs to change into dry clothes. When he came down, rubbing at his hair with a towel, he had a blanket draped over one arm. Bree had a towel around her shoulders and had hung her wet coat up on the back of one of the chairs. She was cold and miserable.
“I could, um, loan you some clothes or something,” he said awkwardly. “Or maybe this blanket would help?” It was big enough to have been dragged off his bed.
“Yes to the blanket,” she said. She took it from him and put it around her shoulders on top of the towel. He rustled up some saltines and cheese and a package of chocolate covered graham crackers, the latter of which Bree began devouring immediately. Daniel didn’t try to talk to her until she’d had six of the cookies. One of the nice things about being around other powered was this unspoken understanding of what it took to recover from a working. You could be a total pig without worrying about a lick of judgment. He poured out more tea, then sat fiddling with his teacup and half-heartedly nibbled at a cracker until she paused in her decimation of his cookie supply and looked up.
“So I’m sorry for snapping at you out there,” Bree began a little sheepishly. “That thing, whatever it was, scared the crap out of me. I could tell when I did the reading that you really didn’t know you had something that serious going on, and I shouldn’t have implied you held something back from me.” Daniel's body relaxed quite suddenly, like strings holding him taut from the ceiling had been cut. “But I think we should try to figure out what that was and where you might have gotten it, because something that good at hiding itself is dangerous.”
Though visibly less tense, he still looked drawn. “You know, like I mentioned earlier, I dealt with an Utukku about two months ago. That’s the last exorcism I did. I can’t say I was the happiest camper you’ll ever see before, but things did kind of go downhill for me after that. You guessed right that I was a Keeper, and I’d been at it a long time. That exorcism just seemed like the last one I had in me.”
He paused and took a drink of his tea, seemed to consider for a moment, and Bree got the impression that he wasn’t sure how much more personal detail he wanted to disclose. But he seemed to decide it was relevant, because he continued in the same vein. “I knew I was pretty burned out before that. You know, Keepers get trainings on burnout, just like normal cops, but after the Utukku, I just felt done. And I guess that could be significant. Taint can certainly suck the hope right out of you.”
“But taint can take awhile to manifest to the level where you show significant behavior change, something serious like quitting your job,” Bree argued, hands clutching her cup for warmth. “And the way that thing reacted when my will energy touched it, it seemed more sentient than taint. It felt more like a demon, or rather a demon part that had nearly grown up. And yet I could have sworn you didn’t read as possessed.”
“I’m not sure I can say the desire to quit as Keeper was exactly sudden,” Daniel said slowly. “But, when I really think about it, I felt pretty, I don’t know, pessimistic right after the exorcism, and for some time after. Well,” he laughed shortly, “more pessimistic than usual. Like you might with taint.”
“What can you tell me about the Utukku?” Bree asked intently. She was surprised she was asking. Asking for details could start the nightmares again, and they'd just died down a couple of nights ago. They'd been bad since Jeremy's exorcism.
Daniel leaned back in his chair, teacup cradled against his chest. His eyes narrowed as he thought. Bree registered that the sweater he had put on was blue, as was the blanket draped around her. As had been his sweatshirt jacket and shirt. Keeper blue or something more personally symbolic?
“I got called in on the Utukku by a powered woman who thought her husband had been acting weird enough to be possessed.” Impatience crept into his voice. “She’d kept making excuses for him, I think, didn’t want it known he’d been taken, so his case was well advanced. Anyway, there’d been a rash of light powered tending dark in Boston and D.C. in the last year. It really had the M.O. of one demon jumping bodies. Definitely going mostly after prominent powered, but it never seemed to stay long in one body.”
“So, a smart demon,” Bree mused.
“Smart demon or Demon Master directing a lesser one,” Daniel replied. “But the pattern was strange. The possessed would get greedy, take up study of dark lore, get ruthless or violent in a minor way in business or personal life for a couple of weeks or months, but none of it seemed to add up to any master plan. No particular business seemed targeted, no one too high in government, normal or powered. So we were thinking free demon rather than mastered demon. Bailey, the Keeper I was working with on the case, helped me corner the demon in the husband. We got it controlled enough to talk to it a little before we exorcised it. We were surprised it was an Utukku. Neither of us had picked up that it was that big. Mostly all it would say were threats, you know, ‘I will eat you,’ ‘I will destroy you, and all your line,’ the usual stuff. But it also said, ‘I am a new kind. No one can find me, no one can master me.’ ”
“Did you get its name?”
“Yeah. Its name was Habakku.”
“Not one I know.”
“Me neither. And frankly, I didn’t try to find out more. We had a time of it exorcising the thing. I resigned pretty soon after that, let Bailey close up the case, and started making plans to move.”
She had watched him relax further as he spoke, focused on his memory and on the problem. His body still seemed to hold itself a little too ready for trouble at his core, but he seemed to be opening up. “So, was it hard to put down?” Bree asked, partly because she was on a roll with trying to figure this thing out, partly to see if Daniel would tell her.
“Yes, it was hard to put down,” he replied, and she saw the guardedness snap back into place.
“I guess I mean harder than usual,” she clarified. “Did anyone get hurt?”
“The husband got burned, but nothing major. Bailey got a little scorched. I think you’re asking how ugly it was. It was way up there. Probably in my top five,” Daniel said. “So… you’re thinking we misread it like we both misread the taint, or whatever it was I had?”
“Basically, yeah. So, personal question. How good is your Demonsense, usually? And Bailey’s? How likely was a misread?”
“Mine’s generally very good. I have misread how big one is, but not by much. You know that's not the hardest part of an exorcism. It was never enough to matter in getting rid of the demon, so never enough to pose any danger. And Bailey’s Demonsense is nearly as strong as mine.”
Bree felt a certain satisfaction as pieces fell into place for her, even though she didn’t like the conclusion. “I think what you had was some unusual type of taint from an unusual type of demon, with some kind of warding or masking properties. A much better than average ability to hide itself inside a host. And I think the taint was big enough to have nearly morphed into sentience. But not quite, because I was able to earth it, and if it was truly sentient, that wouldn’t have been enough. Have you ever heard of anything like that?”
He thought about it in silence for a moment. “No,” he replied at last. “I can’t remember anything specific. And this still doesn’t quite make sense. Something as big as you say it was should have shown itself more in my actions, not just my mood. I wasn’t acting darkish, if you know what I mean,” Daniel said with a touch of humor. “So even if it could hide to some degree from Demonsense, how could it not affect me more?”
Bree was tiring as they spoke. The adrenaline of the encounter with the taint was wearing off rapidly now, and tea and cookies weren’t enough to really feed her base energy. And she didn’t like the direction their conclusions were tending. Demons or taint that could truly hide would be a very bad thing. Of course, just because neither of them had heard of such a thing didn’t mean it wasn’t known
somewhere
. Even a Keeper might not be up on every scrap of demon lore. “I think maybe we should take this to the Ecclesias,” she said hesitantly.
Daniel leaned forward quickly and said softly, but intently, “Please, can we hold off on that? Can we maybe try to handle this more informally? Maybe run it by Kevin, and see if he knows a local Keeper we could bring it to?”
He looked so earnest, was making good eye contact, and sounded so reasonable, and yet she felt a little mole of suspicion crawling to the surface of her consciousness.
She probed her Reader sense, but couldn’t locate any specific tells that were triggering the suspicion. She wondered if he had some particular reason for not wanting to go to the Ecclesias. Not that she could, in all honestly, blame him if he didn’t want to go. She wouldn’t enjoy drawing such official attention either. But there was something else, something she could almost taste…
“In any case,” he continued, “we’re both exhausted, and the taint or whatever it was is banished, so there’s really nothing that has to be done right now. I’m willing to hit the books a bit to see if I can find anything that sounds like this, and maybe we can set a date with Kevin in the next couple of days, see what he thinks. He’s got a lot of lore in that brain of his, and he’s pretty well connected with the powered community out here. Shall I call and see when we can get together?”
“It would have to be Sunday night or later in the evening next week. I’ve got plans for tonight and Saturday, and clients most week nights until about seven.”
“So, clients like in the law? Or therapy?”
“Massage therapy. That’s my day job.” Bree winced inwardly as the “day job” comment slipped out. It was the kind of thing powered said when they considered their power work their real job, their real life. She hadn’t been doing power work since Seth died a year and a half ago, and she tried not to use that language. She really must be tired. “You know,” she continued, “I’m open to talking to Kevin about this, but I don’t really see why we don’t take it to the Ecclesias as well. If what we just experienced is some new demon talent emerging, they need to know about it.”
“I’m not saying they don’t need to know, I’m just suggesting that we go through channels. I’ve got to tell you, in my experience, you don’t really want to draw the interest of the Ecclesias. They tend to be a paranoid lot, and the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ maxim is not where they’re coming from.”
Bree 's uneasiness grew at Daniel’s words. She realized she truly didn’t want to go to the Ecclesias herself. Her exorcism work had always been done on the fringes of official powered society, usually arranged by Dion as part of the Seattle council of powered, or by Father Steuban at her church rather than by the Ecclesias itself. She could imagine the pressure to do more exorcisms she’d be in for if she got on the Ecclesias radar.
At the same time, her intuition was telling her there was something fishy with Daniel’s wanting to avoid the Ecclesias. But was that really any of her business? If they took the information to a Keeper, who then passed it off to the Ecclesias, wouldn’t her responsibility in the situation be met, perhaps without having to deal with the Ecclesias herself?
“All right,” she conceded, “I guess you would know better than I the best way to handle this. Let’s do the meet with Kevin.”
She got up and unwrapped herself from Daniel’s blanket, made polite departing small talk, including an agreement to try for the meeting with Kevin on Sunday, and headed for the door, putting on her coat as she went. As she said goodbye and turned to leave, she felt a brief touch on her hand, and turned back. Her stomach fluttered as he said quite seriously and with definite warmth in his eyes, “Thank you Bree, for the working.”
“Right, you’re welcome,” she answered a little breathlessly, and left.
As she walked out to her car, under rain that had backed off again to a light mist, she was assailed by doubt. She should know by now to trust her intuition when it was tugging at her that hard, but she’d been intimidated by Daniel having been a Keeper and, if she were honest with herself, a little by his high power status. She had the sense she’d been handily manipulated, and she didn’t like it. Now that she was out of the aura of attraction, she was able to reflect further on that strange, dark flavor to Daniel’s energy. He might not be truly dark powered, but there was definitely something amiss there. Bree firmly resolved to be wary and on alert when they met together with Kevin.
Chapter 3
Kevin
and his partner Steve lived in the sort of contemporary house that was in almost every way what Bree did not like in a house, though she would never tell Steve that, as he was the architect. She'd been good friends with the couple since before they'd built the place, and she'd managed to keep her mouth shut during the whole building and planning process about how little it was to her taste. While the spaces were well designed and full of lovely materials, there were too many windows, which made her feel vulnerable, the furniture was modern, sparse and square, and there was far too much grey and black in the color scheme. But the views of Lake Washington from the windows were fantastic, some wonderful color photos of the couple’s many travels provided some relief from the neutral color scheme, and best of all, the house had Hunter.