The Gravedigger's Son - Darynda Jones Page 0,24

she asked, her voice a mere hiss. And yet, she hadn’t spoken. Not out loud.

“We sought refuge, Traveler. The one named Quinn gave it.”

“That’s not his name.”

“It is, and you know it.”

She did. That was his birth name. But how did they know that when even Quentin didn’t? She’d researched for years and found his birth parents.

“You do not know what he did for us.”

She raised her chin. Metaphorically. “Then tell me.”

“How about I show you?”

Before she could agree or disagree, the smoke and shadows parted, and memories rushed past her so fast, she could hardly keep up. Running. Fighting. Inhuman screaming. And then everything went silent. They had jumped into another dimension. One they called the House of the Founding Fathers. Washington DC. They lived there for centuries, but they were starving. Buildings rose and fell around them. Humans lived and died.

And then his face. He was different. Born of this world but from another. Quentin, only not. He absorbed them, not the other way around. He took them into his breast. Sheltered them. But it’d almost killed him. He ended up in the hospital. Rune remembered Amber being there, but those early days were disorienting. They could not see clearly. But they were nourished. For the first time in centuries, they were no longer starving.

Once Quentin was better, they returned to his school with him, but he started suspecting that they were there. He felt them. A twitch. A rustle. Until one day, he was out with his friends and heard one of them speak. He could talk better than the others, and Quentin heard him. He’d thought he was going crazy. Why could he suddenly hear?

“He’s hearing through you,” Amber said to them, astonished.

“Yes. But there is more, Traveler. Pay attention.”

She started to chastise them—she did not like being told what to do—but they showed her the nightmares that would leave him sweating and disoriented until he saw her face and calmed. He only wanted to get back to her. To finish out the semester and go home.

He’d already decided not to return to Gallaudet. He would go wherever she was. He would get a job. Take classes at night with an interpreter. Whatever it took to be with her. But, somehow, they found out about him. La Guardia Segreta. They came like thieves in the night.

Amber gasped as Rune showed her what they did to him. They knew he was possessed. They just had no clue that there was more than one entity inside him. Even Quentin didn’t know it at the time. They flew him halfway across the world and took him to an underground lab. It looked like a basement with both ancient and modern forms of technology. They tried to get the demon out. They wanted it alive. They wanted to study it.

A doctor named Tinari headed the project, and he was willing to kill Quentin to get to the demon. But then he discovered Quentin’s healing ability, and Tinari decided he wanted to study that, too. He and his team pushed Quentin to his physical and mental limits. How much pain could he take? How fast could he heal from a bullet wound?

Amber closed her eyes, but she could still see. The beatings. The starvation. The constant torture. All in the name of science.

After several weeks, they finally extracted a demon. Quentin and Rune were both dying and, in their weakened states, the men working on them were able to extract one of the entities with a compass similar to the one Quentin carried. But something went wrong. The extraction killed the massive beast. It died almost instantly and crumbled to dust.

That was when Quentin had had enough. He broke the metal cuffs securing him to a stainless surgical chair and killed every person in the room in a matter of seconds—five total. He saved the doctor for last. The one who’d tried to run but was so scared that he couldn’t get the code right on the keypad.

Alarms blared and lights flashed as Quentin towered behind the doctor. Quentin reached around the quivering man and said, “Here, let me help you.” After typing in the code, he stood back.

The door opened, and Tinari gaped up at him, his eyes like saucers. He started to make a run for it when Quentin grabbed him from behind and snapped his neck. The man crumpled to the floor, and Quentin looked at him for a long moment before glancing up and seeing his reflection