On the Line (Alternate Places Book 3) (54 page)

“You know, I think we've all been told for so long that
Humans can't handle the truth that we keep not noticing how easily they all
keep accepting it when strange stuff happens.” Kate put an arm around the boy
for a moment, then realized that both of them were covered with blood.

Don still seemed like he was in shock, as would be expected,
but he stood up when they left the house, wearing Blaine's shirt, and
Cavendish's pants, since he still wore exercise shorts underneath. Leaning in,
Don looked through the rift without being asked and started pulling everyone
through one by one, into Kate's room. When he got there he sat on the bed, and
simply cried. Cavendish moved to the far side of the room, which seemed to help
a little, easing the sense of panic that had crawled up inside the boy.

Britney held him close, "It wasn't your fault. You
didn't do anything wrong. They did. Those
things
."

"I know." There was more darkness in the words than
was comfortable to hear

Britney moved to hold him, since it was what she would have
wanted if those things had happened to her.

"You couldn't have known this was going to happen. They
were bad people, and we stopped them."

“I
did
know. Kassandra, her inner self, told me. I
knew... It was the only way for us to catch them.” He cried for a while then,
everyone holding him, except Ken and Cavendish, almost piling people on the
bed. Luckily most of them were pretty light, or the whole thing would have
collapsed Kate thought. It didn't get her to move at all, of course. She could
feel how solid it was, made stronger by the box below where the Vampires slept.

Zack came into the room after a while and started taking
people away, back to the mansion. As the room started to empty, Ken said he
should get back to his own room, which wasn't too far away. Kate jumped up and
hugged him again and had him change into different clothes. She had some for
Kyle that fit decently enough for him, though they were sweats, not real
clothing like he'd been wearing.

“You're going to have questions and stuff. About what you saw
today. You can come here any time. I don't sleep, or find one of the others.
Don does sleep, but we'll be around when you need us. As someone once told me,
once you help bury the bodies you're pretty much part of the group. The same
goes for getting rid of the enemies I guess.” She kissed him, hard enough that
he stiffened a little. She let him go then, hoping he was one of those people
that could handle things like this. It could be hard to tell. But if he needed
help with it later, she'd make sure she was there.

The numbers in the room dropped a lot after that. Finally
Zack came back and didn't leave, holding Don closely for a while. Chris found his
own way through the line, having heard about what happened, coming through in a
blood rage that Kate hadn't even considered possible. After all, when he'd been
beaten nearly to death he just accepted that he was dead. Right now he looked
so intense that she was kind of glad the bad guys hadn't survived. She didn't
care about them, but Chris would have killed them all and who knows what that
would have done to his mind.

“They raped her? And killed her? Why didn't you tell me about
this?” He didn't look at Kate or Don then, but directly at Zack. He stared at
the head Line-Walker in a way that made her wonder if the boy was going to
attack him. That gave her pause, because she had no
clue
what tricks the
kid had picked up. There really wasn't any knowing what he could really do. There
wouldn't be until he learned how to do it. They were all too different for
anything else.

Zack swallowed, but didn't look away from him. There was
actual reluctance to his words when he spoke.

“Because I knew that if I told you, you would have killed
them all, and too many other people needed to kill them too.”

The room went silent as the boy broke into frustrated tears,
his skinny frame reminding her a lot of Zack. The hair color was similar. Even
the bones in his face, and the way he shrugged. For that matter, now that she
thought about it, that was who Don looked like too. Zack. Sitting right there
it was pretty clear.

After a while they all walked Don back to his room, though
everyone traipsed along. Claire asked Cavendish what he might be as they
walked. The man smiled still, having only stopped when Don discussed how he
felt. It wasn't a mocking thing, just a habit, Kate guessed, to try and
convince people that he wasn't a threat. A bit like a lion wearing a tutu she
thought, but then realized that a lion was a lot
less
dangerous. He
answered sounding friendly enough though.

“I'm just me. To claim anything else would just be
pretension.” He kept smiling as everyone, but Kate subtly moved further away
from him. She still felt the awareness that he could mean death at any time,
but she didn't associate him with a direct threat to her any more. Maybe they
just had to hang out long enough with him to get past that? She touched his arm
briefly, letting go only after he smiled at her directly.

Better
, she thought, only shaking slightly.

In the room they all talked for a while longer, Zack not
wanting to leave until he knew for a fact that Don would be all right. Kate had
a feeling that might take a while, but understood the sentiment. Cavendish
stayed near her, since she was the only one that
would
stand by him at
all, which meant they were both near the door when the knock came.

Standing to open it Kate got pushed to the side suddenly.

“Armor.” The very scary man told her. She called to the black
ooze which formed very quickly again, maybe even faster than before. Cavendish
did the same, and grabbed the door handle and pulled.

The shooting started before the door opened. Kate focused,
slowing things again, steeling herself. She realized that she had to get in
front of the bullets to give everyone else a chance to react. She moved into
the center of the door, Cavendish moving in front of her, taking the most
direct route that the gun wasn't pointing in. The man firing looked surprised that
two latex wearing freaks were darting at him, from his expression, but he
didn't stop firing. He got three shots off before he was disarmed. Zack called
out to the Cavendish to not kill him, if possible.

Instead, a single blow, barely a tap, rendered the man
unconscious. Then the scary seeming man pulled the shooter into the room before
anyone noticed exactly what happened.

Don looked at the man on the floor and kicked him with his
foot, getting a small sound from him as he laid on the black throw rug with its
multi-colored squares.

“Dad, everyone. Everyone, my father. Robert Karver.”

Claire grinned and picked him up with one hand, having
grabbed his thick leather belt. She walked with the man to the rift, which
would go to Don's room at the house and waited for Zack, who stared at the man
strangely for a while. Finally he took them all to the mansion, saying that he
didn't want the specifics of the shots fired to be known, if they could help
it.

Claire carried the man to the living room, then called everyone
to join them. Kate boggled for a moment, since there were a lot of people in
the room, suddenly. Twenty-four of them, and she thought a couple of them were
still missing. That didn't even include the jerk waking up on the carpet.

Standing, Zack moved to the man and looked at him hard. Then
he looked at Don and Chris.

“Well...
that
explains a lot.” He said to no one in
particular.

Kate turned to him and put a hand on her hip, a move that was
more aggressive than she'd normally get with him. Beatings and sexual advances
aside, of course.

“Zack... use your words.”

He shrugged at her and looked like he was searching for words
to explain what he thought.

“Well, two things really. First, as I'm sure Claire and Hilda
already know, he has a demon inside him. It's how he avoided the Vampire's. I'd
guess it hasn't been there that long, a few months at most. Second, I don't
know this for certain, but I think he may be my dad's brother.” He dropped that
on the room and went to the phone, tried to dial and finally had to ask Claire
if she had his grandparents number.

It took a while, but once he had them, they were able to
confirm that his father did indeed have a brother. One they didn't adopt
because he had already been taken in by a family named Karver when they'd been
going through the process or they would have taken him in as well, of course. Both
of the orphaned boys had been more than a little troubled after their parents
died, under strange circumstances that no one ever quite had the guts to call
murder.

Kate raised an eyebrow thinking things through. Several
things occurred to her at once, but Hilda voiced them out loud before anyone
else could speak, as always just a few steps ahead of almost everyone.

“Don and Chris are your cousins? Then it may be that not
every Human that goes into the void will be able to be a Line-Walker still. All
right. Is this a demon or an Arch-Demon do you think? And what do we do with
him? Has he actually killed anyone that we know of, or has he just tried and
failed to so far?”

Zack didn't know and Kate shrugged.

Don looked at them all but didn't speak, just shaking his
head. It was Chris who answered for them all in the end.

“He killed my father and took his place, then tried to kill
me. Then tried to kill a bunch of my friends and my brother. Let's see... I'd
have to say that's bad enough. How do we kill it? Merri told me Demons were
really hard to kill.” He looked at Zack and then oddly
Cavendish
.

Kate guessed that might make sense. The strange man
was
pretty good at killing things. Still, they knew for certain that Zack could do
it.

The whole thing seemed to take about an hour to her, but Zack
told them it hadn't taken much time at all in the void, since it was just a
regular Demon. Easy to kill in the nothingness between worlds, where they could
survive, but not fight back. Unlike Arch-Demons which could and often took
centuries to kill, if they were good fighters, and that provided they didn't
escape.

Libby whispered something to Don, but he shook his head and
told the Bat woman that he didn't want to talk about it right then. She nodded,
looking hurt, but backing off.

Don shook his head and rolled his eyes at her.

“Hey, silly! I said I didn't want to talk about it right
now
,
I didn't say you should go away. Come here.” He held the thin woman close to
him, wrapping her in his arms as if she were the one that had been hurt, not
him.

Cavendish yawned, “I need to get home soon, but does anyone
have any idea who attacked that place, Lesser Shia? They looked the same as the
ones that attacked here... I think the silver ones, the ones that looked like a
cross between monkeys and dragons with a metal exo-skeleton? I think those were
the young ones. The teens had a green tint to the scales and only the adults
really could go invisible, and were the biggest. It could be different, but
that's my guess. Anyone recognize them at all? If we have to fight a war, we
need as much intelligence as we can get. So far we know that energy and energy
weapons effect them, so we should make provisions for people to be outfitted
with weapons that can actually do something to them, and we need some way of
finding them that everyone can use. I don't really do tech stuff myself...”

Hilda nodded and made notes.

Betty, putting on her Secretary of State hat, addressed the
room very officially.

"This is bigger than one government. Especially a new
one that has most of their people sitting in a single room at the moment. We
need to get things set up, and work as a group. Anyone willing to go after
Lesser Shia is probably willing to go after the rest of us too."

Chris stood and asked Cavendish if he could stay awake for
another couple hours.

“Yes. Why?”

Chris stood and gestured for him to follow, explaining on the
way.

“Lesser Shia is like
the
place to get the weapons and
tech we need. It may even be why they attacked there like that. We need to get
with the leader guy there, Hathe, and see if he can arrange for people to come
up with and provide what we need. I want to take you along because it sounds
like one of those things would kick my ass if I met it. So, you're about
perfect for the job, you both know what we need
and
can keep me alive.”
He grinned weakly at the man.

Cavendish just followed him. He didn't even look at anyone
else in the room. He just went, trusting that Chris knew what he was talking
about, even if he did look fourteen.

Kate stood and looked at everyone, all of them, Vampires,
Alede, Humans and Were. Alfric, Trolleinkein and Mage. All part of her world
now. A lot more than she ever dreamed she'd have listed as personal friends.
There was even a Cavendish, whatever that was.

She didn't know why they were being attacked, or if the
attacks even had anything to do with them, but if someone was targeting them or
their friends, they were in for a fight.

She took a vote, a show of hands, of everyone present. The
vote wasn't unanimous, in fact several people abstained, not knowing what they
thought yet. One argued against it with all her heart, surprising everyone.
That was Nikki, but the final vote stood. Twenty-one to one.

The Nation of Line-Walkers, not even a month old, was going
to war.