The Eighth Gate

20 | Sealed With a Kiss

When it was time to check out of the ward, Mary’s father had showed up to fill out the release forms since Mary was still a seventeen year old minor. Mason’s lie had worked smoothly with Helen manning the front desk, and was helped by the fact that Mary’s dad seemed just as eager to get Mary out of there as she was. Soon she was getting into her dad’s Toyota Corolla, sitting at shotgun since that was where she always sat when she was alone in the car with him. She felt a bit bad leaving Noah alone in the backseat—they were both used to having Avery around, silent as she was—but the drive to the house was a mere ten minutes.

Mary reached over to the backseat where her bag of clothes and other things were, locking eyes with Noah as she got her phone from one of its pockets. She scrolled through a slew of text messages and phone calls from Tam and Mason—especially Mason—and even a few from Salazar. It was nice to know that there were people out there who cared about her well-being, even if they sometimes had strange ways of showing it (take Tam, for example, who refused to even look her way during school hours). Mary did just as Mason had asked before he had dropped her off and texted him to let him know her dad had picked her up from the ward, and she was now on her way home.

Mason had been silent pretty much the entire car ride back to the hospital as Mary caught Noah up with what had happened since he’d disappeared. Considering the hospital wasn’t very far from the cargo airport located across the street from Salazar’s trailer, and that Mason was a pretty fast driver, she didn’t get to finish telling Noah everything—she hadn’t gotten to the part about the object Salazar had found in the abandoned townhouse, and its significance. She didn’t get to tell him what she would have to do next, now that they knew just what that thing was.

Mary slipped her phone into the pocket of her trench coat, trying her best to mask her anxiety. The book Mason had found—the one explaining the significance of the wooden pentagram—was tucked safely in her bag, beneath the pile of clothes she’d packed for what should have been a five day stay. Just thinking about what she, Mason, and Salazar had learned from the book earlier was enough to make her nerves tighten. In an effort to distract herself from the subject, Mary turned to her dad, who was humming to some upbeat 80s song playing lowly on the radio. His fingers were tapping rhythmically on the steering wheel as he drove, his blue gaze unreadable as he gazed out into the road.

A portion of his bottom lip was red and slightly swollen, and Mary felt a pang of guilt, recalling the way she had head-butted him the night before in a desperate act of breaking free of his hold to attack the demon. She’d busted his lip—albeit unintentionally—but still. The last thing in the world she wanted was to hurt her parents, but it seemed like that was all she was doing these days. It had just never gotten physical until now.

“Dad?” Mary mumbled. Her father hadn’t spoken a word to her since they’d gotten into the car, but this wasn’t odd of him. He was the quiet one, the one who was more reserved and kept to himself, lost in his own thoughts. A lot like Mary. Her mother was the more outspoken one, but she was also more levelheaded—something Mary had inherited as opposed to her father’s short temper and tendency to get frustrated easily.

He glanced at her, the glare of the setting sun hitting his glasses. He was still in his suit from work (he worked at the headquarters for Cullis Port’s daily local newspaper), but the buttons were undone, exposing the fine white of his button-down shirt, and his checkered tie hung loosely around his neck.

“Everything all right?” he asked her.

Such a broad question. “Yeah,” Mary lied. She couldn’t even begin to list the many, many things that were not “all right” at the moment, but it wasn’t like she could talk to her father about it, as close as they were. Not unless she wanted him to turn the car around and take her back to the juvenile ward.