Page 14 of The Morning Star
I snorted and turned back to the gate guardian. “You were saying?”
“Well I try to take a sample and stamp them, anyway. Demons get really pissed off at that, so really it’s only the Lows.” The girl shot an apologetic grimace toward Gregory. “I try to keep those who won’t comply from coming through, or I try to get them to go back, but if they run for it I’m not supposed to chase them or anything. I call an enforcer and he tracks them down and informs them of the conditions they need to abide by to remain here among the humans. He asks them how long their stay is, where they intend to reside, what the purpose is of their visit. Then he collects the sample and stamps them.”
“What percentage are you successfully able to do this to?” I asked.
She shot another nervous glance at Gregory. “I register maybe ten percent of those who come through the gates, and the enforcers pick up another five percent or so.”
Fifteen percent. And as I’d said, those were the ones most likely to comply. Grigori were now in charge of issuing visas and stamping passports. Leave it to the angels to come up with more bureaucracy. Registering and tracking the somewhat law-abiding would do no good if the ones more likely and able to break the rules were easily slipping through.
But I couldn’t really blame Gregory or this gate guardian for that. It was my fault that I couldn’t enforce some basic rule of law among my own people. This should have been my responsibility to control who was coming through the gates from Hel, not the angels’.
But that problem was more than I could solve at the moment. Right now I needed to focus my efforts on who killed these enforcers.
“Is this what happened with the demon that Humiel went after?” I asked the girl. “The demon came through and took off, and you called an enforcer?”
She shuffled her feet, staring down at them. “I’m not allowed to leave my post any longer, not after the other gate guardian got jumped. He wasn’t anything special, this demon. I didn’t think he’d be too much of a problem, but after he got through he turned around and attacked me. Then he blew up three cars and a café. It was during the lunchtime rush. Twenty people were killed and fifty were injured.”
“And while all this was going on you were…” I raised my eyebrows.
She glared at me. “Mostly hiding behind that wall over there. I’m a gate guardian. I’ve got limited fighting skills. And this demon was very, very motivated. I’ve never had one come out swinging like that and I’ve been guarding gates for the last eighty years.”
We came out swinging lots of times. Well, others had. I’d always preferred the sneaky approach because in a one-on-one fight with a gate guardian, I’d never been a hundred percent confident that I would prevail. Other demons came through the gates planning to throw off the guardian with an attack, but usually used the surprise of that attack to then get the hell away. No one really wanted a battle on their hands, because enforcers were one quick cry for help away, and outside of a few high-level demons and Ancients, no one wanted to face an enforcer.
And no one wanted to come out of a gate and kill a bunch of humans. Humans were often used for support in sneaking through. If a demon had a cute, helpless physical form, then the humans would often gang up on the gate guardian and provide an opportunity for the demon to escape. Some homeless guy picking on a yelping puppy? Instant mob mentality. There was no reason to kill a bunch of humans. All that would do was bring the enforcers down quick.
Gregory turned to me. “Killing humans is the one of the few things that unties an enforcer’s hands. If a demon kills humans or an angel, the enforcers are allowed to respond with whatever force they deem necessary.”
Before he’d changed things, that force had always been allowed. And I worried that that’s what we were heading back to.
“I’m guessing they’re happy for any reason to dial that force up to eleven?” There were some angels who were eager to patch things up between us and them. Enforcers were not those angels. They’d seen the worst of demons over the millennia, and I didn’t imagine they were willing to give any of us the benefit of the doubt. Gregory’s newly implemented restrictions had probably chafed mightily.
“You are correct. I know they all hope for the chance, any chance, to catch a demon doing something that would spell his death sentence.”
“So this was a trap, just like with the previous gate guardian, only this trap was meant for one of your enforcers. And whoever did it, did it seven times.”
Gregory’s expression turned grim. “Yes, and whoever killed the enforcers, it wasn’t the one who they were chasing. You saw what happened to Humiel. There’s no way a mid-level demon could have done that to an enforcer.”
“So instead of leading the angel into a crowd of demons to take him out, he led him into a crowd of demons and an Ancient.”
The gate guardian shivered and wrapped her arms around her chest. “If the Fallen are going to start coming through the gates, if I have to deal with a battle-hardened former angel that we fought nearly three million years ago, I’ll be killed.”
“You’ll call for enforcers, and get out of the way,” Gregory told her. “I’ll have one right here with you, on high-alert and ready to immediately answer the call.”
“But the humans,” she looked around at the people strolling by, avoiding the sections with the police tape and blocked-off areas from the explosions. Even the recent violent events hadn’t kept the humans more than a hundred or so feet from the area.
“We can’t move the gate,” Gregory told her. “It would require too much power and the archangels cannot be weak right now. Is there something we can do to move the humans? To keep the humans at a greater distance?”
She shot him a disbelieving look. “Uh, no? They work here. They live here. You can’t just close down a city, saying it’s a quarantine or something.”
“What are they calling this?” I gestured toward the burned-out building and the blackened spots of pavement where the cars had exploded. “Terrorism, probably. Humans are twitchy right now. They’ve got bad guys of their own to deal with, and now they also have elves and dragons and angels and demons and harpies and shit. All you have to do is yell ‘bomb’ and these people are all going to instantly become Olympic sprinters.” It might not save them all, but I was willing to bet it would be hard for a demon to do some sort of mass murder with people scurrying away in panic.
“Then I guess that’s what we’ll have to do.”
Gregory and the gate guardian began discussing logistics, a bunch of protocols and how to discourage humans from being in the area. I looked around, feeling a twinge of nostalgia. I’d come through this gate so many times. That other gate guardian…I didn’t even remember his name. Did I even know his name? Dead. Seven enforcers dead. Thousands of angels dead—although I wasn’t quite ready to admit it was murder by demon.
Walking over to one of the blackened spots in the road, I knelt down and touched the scorched mark, feeling the faint trace of residual energy from the demon’s attack. It wasn’t much, but if I ever ran across this guy, maybe I’d recognize him. As I touched the spot, I felt as if all the air were sucked out of the street, felt as if the buildings were bowing down to close in on me. I swayed, nearly toppling over.
The energy. The demon. A tiny thread that extended from deep within my spirit-self outward, connecting us. In an instant I felt him, saw him—a demon in the form of a teenage punk, sprawled on a bench with his feet stretched out in front of him. There was a ratty black feather in his hand, and he stared at it intently, his eyes flaring orange behind the brown irises.
