Chapter 32: Doubt
"WHAT’S WRONG?" CHRISTOPHER ASKED. KURT was silent by his side.
"The Demons were after her. They attacked the Athenaeum to get to her, not the Delegates, not even the Emblems. They were targeting her specifically." Seeing their confused looks, he explained as he began to pace around the office again, "After she woke up in the med bay, she told me that the Demon inside her was gone. It had disappeared overnight."
"How?" Kurt finally spoke. Both of the twins looked more shocked than he'd ever seen them before. "I haven't examined her mind before, but—"
"I have," he interrupted. No time to be ashamed of it now. "I took a peek at it once, where the Demon was in her head. It was a closed off space – she'd done her best to shut it out. But where they joined, she and it were so closely intertwined that I wouldn't have been able to tell them apart if I didn't know what to look for."
"Then why didn’t you tell her?" Calida questioned. Her eyes were narrowed. "If she knew that, she wouldn't have made such a fuss about it." He didn't look at her. After a pause the mocha-skinned girl shook her head. "You're too soft, Daniel. Even if there's only a tiny chance the Demon could be taken out, you might as well say that it's impossible."
"But if we go by what Amber said," Christopher countered, "that tiny chance succeeded. So the Demons came after her, as if they're claiming her as their own?"
Daniel shrugged. "Probably."
"Why was she in the med bay? She got hurt?" the telekinetic asked.
"Yeah." He nodded, then straightened abruptly as something occurred to him. Calida didn't know the full story, and neither did the Daron twins. Quickly, he summarized what Nicholas had told them, figuring that now it didn't really matter if they knew, since the Delegates were either destroyed or trying to recover, but could not be contacted to clear this with them either way. "So she escaped from the Athenaeum. I don't know how she was going to find Vortex, but I don't think she did either," he finished.
"It's possible," Kurt conceded. "But what I'm more concerned with now is who removed it. The Demon couldn't just disappear into thin air, and she wouldn't have been able to do it herself. Someone had to have taken it out of her. If we know that, then we can find out why Amber went through such a change, as described by Calida."
"A Mind Adept then," Daniel said, turning in a circle. His hands went to his jeans pocket as if they had a mind of their own, fingering the cool metal of the shuriken.
"But an Adept with a lot of power," Christopher pointed out. "For something like that to happen, a lot of magic would have been needed."
"But how do you make a Demon disappear from someone's mind, if it's already so ingrained?" Calida asked, sounding a little lost in the room with three other Mind Adepts.
"It's not so much as making it disappear," Kurt said.
"It's more like putting part of the mind into quarantine," Daniel continued from there. "You isolate it, close it off, like the way you would if there was a..." He blinked once, twice, then sat down hard. "A virus." The word slipped past his lips like a breath or a prayer.
"What?" Calida frowned at him.
"I... I did it, didn't I?" he asked himself slowly. His hands had already pulled the shuriken out of his pocket, turning it over and over in his palms, avoiding the sharp edges with a familiarity borne through having cut himself countless times before.
The Delegates had never told him when they'd found Amber. They'd never shown or told him anything that hinted at finding her at a specific location. And being confined in the Athenaeum under the guise of being trained, he'd never seen the place she'd been overwhelmed by Demons with his own eyes. Only the Delegates had.
Seeing Amber in the med bay, talking to her about the Delegates, about being an Emblem, it had been like having his own words chucked back in his face. Their roles had been reversed from all the times he'd spoken to her before. He'd looked at her and seen someone blinded by faith. And then came the doubt and that niggling feeling that said this is wrong, is this me? Is this what she thought of me the other times we talked? When he'd looked at her he'd doubted every single word that had come out of his mouth in the Athenaeum. The contentment, the smiles, the gratitude towards people he didn’t even know and yet trusted. And now... Now when he thought of Amber’s fake smile and her contentment and her gratitude, when he thought of her snarling and sneering and being suspicious and wary, he was doubting the Delegates themselves, doubting the we’ll help you, Daniel and listening to Amber’s feral growl and thinking was she right all along?
Leone had said that they were just going to have a little mental spar with him. Janna would set up the mind link and give him a simulation mind to work on. There'd be a virus he would have to get rid of. Just isolate it. Close it off. Just like what had been done to Amber. He didn't know what Janna was capable of, just that she could manipulate emotions. He'd never asked any further than that. But even that much should've given him a clue. If only he'd—
"Christopher!" A kid burst into the room without even knocking. He put his hands on his knees, panting heavily. Daniel recognized him as the Fire Adept Amber had almost killed. "The... The Delegates,” he wheezed.
"They're here?" Christopher stood up when the boy nodded in response. In a flash the Daron twins were striding out the door. Calida tried to get Robert to sit back down, but he insisted on getting up to follow them. The kid led them to the training grounds, where the Delegates had apparently teleported to. Young Adepts that had been training there were herded to the walls of the room, whispering among themselves and staring in the fashion of passers-by.
The Delegates hadn't escaped the Demon attack unscathed either. Not one of them didn't have scratches or bruises covering their skin, but it looked like no one was severely injured. He should've expected that – they were professionals, had been given a job in the organization for a reason. But he kind of wished that their numbers had been significantly reduced. Would've made what he felt like doing a lot easier.
When their entrance was noticed, one of them tapped Leone on the shoulder. She turned from where she was watching Felix getting healed by a Fire Adept and he got a good look at her face. A Demon had probably slashed her across her face, just over her left eye. There were bruises all along her skin, and he could see a faint red stain through the bandage wrapped around her right forearm.
Catching sight of them, she exclaimed, "Robert? Calida? Daniel!" She hurried over and engulfed him and Calida in a hug. "Oh, I was so worried! We were almost completely overwhelmed, to the extent that our teleporters had to pull us out. I thought we'd lost you, until our Mind Adepts managed to find your location." She drew back, a hand on one of their shoulders, looking them over with that scrutinizing gaze, then sighed in relief. "Thank god, both of you are fine," she breathed. Amber's words echoed in his mind. Does she care about us, or the Emblems?
Had she forgotten that there were supposed to be three Emblems here? He had to close his eyes in order to get his breathing back under control. I can't lose my shit yet. A little longer. Christopher stepped forward, clearing his throat a little. "Do you require use of our med bay? Almost all of you are injured.”
"No," Leone replied, shaking her head and giving the Camp leader a grateful smile. "Thank you for offering though. We just came to see if our Emblems had somehow made it back here, since Robert hasn't reported in yet." She turned to him. "You teleported in and saved them?"
"Ah, yeah," Robert said, though by the time he'd finished speaking he was yawning, almost slumped over. Calida put his arm over her shoulder and let him rest his weight on her with a whispered "You need to rest."
Leone touched his cheek, smiling gently. "Thank you for your bravery." She took Daniel's and Calida's hands in hers. "We have a safe house close by, prepared for emergencies like this. We'll go there now, rest a little and heal up, and then continue your training and have the Athenaeum rebuilt in no time. Come on, we have to go get Amber first."
She tried to pull them towards the amassed crowd of Delegates, but Calida dug her heels into the ground. He glanced at her. She exhaled, looking like she was steeling herself. "Amber's dead, Leone. She didn't escape with us."
The Delegate's gaze panned between the two of them, looking confused. "What? The Mind Adepts double-checked already. They sensed her just nearby."
"Near...by?" Daniel frowned, for a moment his attention wandered from the Delegates. If there was a chance that she was alive, he had to explain everything to her, get her back to the Amber that had talked to him on top of the Ferris wheel, to the girl whose eyes had been like steel, who didn’t smile often, but when she did they were geniune.
"Wait." Felix came forward, his entire right side wrapped in heavy bandages. Leone had told him to check Amber's mental signature again. Face grim, he said, "She's moving very, very fast. We didn't see it just now - didn't have enough power to do more than a shallow scan. She's almost on top of us already, and behind her—chasing her," he corrected himself, "is an army's worth of Demons."
Before Daniel could even start cursing, Christopher had straightened to his full height. "Adepts!" he ordered. "Arm yourselves. Prepare for battle!"
Daniel followed up with a mental message to the entire Camp, not just the training room. The Delegates turned and separated into their respective divisions – Human, Beast and Ethereal, getting into a triangular formation. Despite their wounds, all had their weapons out in a fraction of a second, as if they'd been ready to do battle at any given moment. "She's coming in and they're following right behind her," Felix reported. By then the older Adepts had rushed in, having secured their juniors. The arrival of Demons, probably the same ones that attacked the Athenaeum changed everything. He couldn't want to kill the Delegates when there was now a bigger threat to face. Just like last time, not one of my kouhais is going to get hurt.
A rumble sounded out, the pounding of hundreds of feet down the narrow entrance designed to thin numbers and disadvantage the enemy. He drew his katana, standing with Calida at the front of the Camp's Adept forces, side by side with the Daron twins. Their personal training with the Delegates had given them the right to take frontal assault, to stand side by side with the Daron twins.
In the shadow of the doorway, a lumbering figure came into view. A sudden silence came over their gathered forces – he knew what it was, that tightening, coiling feeling in your gut, just before a battle. Somehow all of them knew this would be different. It seemed that the giant Demon had stooped to half its height to get past the doorway, as when it stepped out of the corridor and straightened to its full height, holding a massive mace like it was a twig, he had to stop himself from stepping back out of sheer intimidation.
This was a berserker – a Demon out of the old Viking legends. His gaze travelled up, from the hairy legs to the torso and chest that had a width equal to his height, to the arms that bulged with muscle, to the massive black helmet protecting its head, and his grip on the sword tightened. He would've charged straight into battle, but before he even took a step a snarl rang out, "If you attack me, I swear I'll make sure you burn in hell."