Chapter 38



Out, my heart breathed. Finally out.

Tom sighed deeply.  He couldn't believe I'd gone there, and to be honest, neither could I.

But I was done hiding. Done keeping secrets.  Secrets I'd kept all my life behind gloves and hollow eyes.

The revelation was not how I imagined it—especially here, before the Command, in front of my fragile friendships.  But a picture-perfect moment might never have come.  War was on the horizon, and tonight I could show everyone what I was capable of in one sitting.  One earthquake to shatter the windows and upheave our foundations.

"What is she on about?" demanded Long-Nose.

Tom and I stared each other down, and the room looked between us, confused and wary. But I wasn't backing down; I'd already plunged headfirst into madness.

Vexed, Tom set his jaw and turned to the officials once more. "Miss Kingsley has the ability to touch any object and see its past affiliations."  His gaze roamed over puzzled faces. "At the brush of her palm, she can watch memories like the Ancients' cinema.  I've witnessed it myself."

"...It's not limited to objects," I added.

The Command peered at us in skeptical silence, as if they were waiting for Tom to reveal an elaborate prank or deliver a gratifying punchline. But when no admission came, wide eyes narrowed in scorn.

"You expect us to believe that?" Long-Nose cried, and the room promptly exploded in protests and offhand jokes. 

"Is it really that far-fetched when we're discussing demons here, Colonel?" Tom countered.  He might have argued on my behalf, but I could tell I'd crossed a line.  He was not pleased with me.

"This is nonsense," hissed one of the many balding men. He flicked his hand at me in disgust, as if I were a stray dog wandering through his abode unannounced, mucking up the hardwood. "Someone escort this child from the room."

I glared at his invisible eyebrows and thin, turtle-like lips. It looked like his features were growing invertedly, toward his skull, and his eyes, nose, and mouth were being sucked into a black hole of idiocy. 

I supposed he would do. 

"Your pocket watch," I demanded.

He bristled. "Excuse me?"

"Pocket. Watch."

"What about it?"

"Give it to me."                

He looked at me like I'd grown another head.  He'd probably never been spoken to with such insolence before, especially from a woman, and I reveled in his outrage. Beckett didn't have the patience, though. He plucked the watch off the table and tossed it to me, shrugging at the man's appalled expression.

I unwound the strips of gauze around my hand like a spool of secrecy, acutely aware of the tumultuous path I'd carved. But if these men wouldn't respect me for my accomplishments, then perhaps they'd accept me for my faculty. 

After an apologetic glance in Tom's direction, I took the watch in my bare palm, wincing at the sharp twinge of pain it induced and the fascinating memories it harbored. 

"Your wife bought this for you in Lawrence, and she gave it to you maybe twenty years ago, when you still had hair." I paused, closing my eyes to enhance the glowing image in my head. "A wedding present, it looks like. There's an engraving on the inside in Latin. I can't read Latin, and neither can you, but she told you it meant 'yours, until the end and long after.' You keep this in your breast pocket when you sleep. But you don't want her to know that."

The man sputtered, flushing. "I've never told...this is...how?"

Rover whistled.

"You'd lost it recently," I continued.  My hand burned, and I thought the metal might have been eating away at my flesh as the memories flooded my brain. "Left it at the tavern...or was it a tavern?  That's what you told your wife, and yet—" 

"That's enough!" he cut in, ashen.  I slid the watch back to him, smirking at his distress. I'd never been able to show off before, not like this. It was the first time in my life I hadn't completely loathed my curse.

"Who's next?" I dared, and the room fell quiet again.  "I can do this all night if you'd like to keep wasting time."

Speechless, they looked from the wide-eyed general to me and my hands.  Fudge and Mason gaped at me from my left, but I couldn't focus on them right now.  And especially not on Will, whose dark eyes I could feel burning holes in my shoulder blades.

I needed to make my case!

Tom cleared his throat.  "Private, if you can see these images, a corpse isn't any different, is it?  You just saw the memories of the person's body. The corpse's past."

I shook my head.  "It doesn't work that way.  I see memories of any object.  But I can sense the feelings of living things. Emotions. And I felt the happiness and the anguish inside that Pan." That Pan I'd sent down the river rapids, before proceeding to slaughter the rest of his troop.  "In other words, the memories I saw came from a living thing."

"A living thing?" Beckett repeated, and his fellow officers turned to him in disbelief.  He swished his drink around, staring into it like it contained the absolute truths of the world.  "You must have just seen the demon's memories.  We know that some of those things are ghosts, right?  Like that one that saved you in the mountain?  Maybe Sterling commands them too, orders them to do his bidding. Or the evil ones sign up for free." He lifted the glass to his lips. "Who knows? My guess is you probably just saw the spirit's past."

My shoulders dropped. Could I really read a spirit's mind inside a foreign body?  I didn't know. 

"No. It was a demon," I decided, recalling the creature's blind, ghoulish eyes.  "And I don't think Godric Sterling has power over spiritual energy—otherwise my mother would have also tried to kill us."  

All this debate was diluting my argument. 

I had no choice.  I had to get it out, but I knew just saying it would either strip me of all standing or freak everyone out. Possibly both.

I kneaded the sore spaces of my palm, the fading crescent on my skin.  "In the mine, the Pans cornered me and ignored two other soldiers.  They said I smelled different. They were transfixed by me." My pulse quickened in my palmar arches.  "I think demons and spirits—these beings—they can sense each other."

The general sat forward.  "What are you implying?"

They thought I was nuts, surely, and I very well might have been.  But maybe neurotics could see the truths no one else could. Maybe we were the only ones willing to lift the veil of realism.

"I think...I think there's a spirit inside me."



The room capsized in a sea of arguments.

I was growing more confident by the minute, and I tried to speak over their rising voices. "It would explain the powers I have—the supernatural abilities, the wild animals and their behavior around me.  In the mine, I'd been skewered by a spear, but by the time I received any medical attention, it was reduced to a scratch."  I remembered fighting the demons, the way they always swarmed me.  The way Mason's sword sent shivers down my spine.  "The fact that I can sense the proximity of other demons and vanadium, there's got to be a reason.  I'm sure of it."

"She does eat enough for two people," Rover offered, and Tom scowled at him.

It was coming together now.  This verbalization turned fumbling, scattering thoughts into strings of beads.  Nova's theory about spirits and demons having more in common than we believed, the initial leak of energy from the portal...

What if the animals weren't the only ones affected?  What if there were other ghosts like my mother, but instead of using twigs and stones as a skeleton, they used human husks?

"I think a spirit tried to possess me when I was a child, knocked me into a well by our house. My ability can be traced back to that point in time," I said. A decade ago, the portal had been created, and spirits and demons had been released to the world. A decade ago, my life had changed forever. "Somehow I was able to master my control over this energy. But every now and then, its power leaks through. Just like it did with the river demon."

I could sense their agitation, their unwillingness to listen.  It was new.  It countered their dogmas. It was raw and unrefined and precarious.

"If this is true, then that means the others—those soldiers out there, possessed, labeled an enemy—they're still alive," I said, urging them to listen, pleading for their comprehension. "That's what I sensed in that man, his soul, his consciousness. Not eaten, not destroyed."

"Hold on a minute—"      

"They're being used," I pushed on, determined to finish my point.  "If we kill the Pans, we're killing our own men. We're killing them by the dozens."

The general held up his hands for the room to quiet, and the clamor died down with an impressive swiftness.  "So.  In short, your hypothesis argues that these demons are using living humans because they need the souls as...fuel? Sustenance? You're saying these soldiers are still alive somehow, inside the Pans...possessed.  And you're offering yourself as proof."

I let out a heavy breath. "Exactly."

"Miss Kingsley," he chuckled, and my confidence withered, "this is not a fresh topic you've brought forth tonight.  Groups have revisited the idea periodically, claiming their comrades weren't really gone. But sentimentality tends to cloud judgement.  And as a military unit, we do not conduct actions on the basis of supernatural elements and ideologies."

"On fiction," Long-Nose amended.

Another man felt the need to add his two cents. "And even if what you say is true, we have no way of separating the demons from the human hosts anyway. In the early years, we tried to come up with a remedy, but it's useless.  If someone's turned, he's as good as dead...if he isn't already."

"You'd just give up because you haven't found a solution yet?" I admonished.

Long-Nose sneered, and I never had a greater desire to punch someone in the throat.  "Don't you think if we could bring those men back, that they'd hate themselves for what they did?  For all the people they've killed?  If you ask me, killing them alongside the Pans is probably in their best interest.  They'd go mad if we managed to exorcise their demon counterparts.  Suicidal."

"You can't assume that," I argued.  "We can't just decide when to end their lives—they're our soldiers.  People willing to fight and die for this country.  And you want to write them all off as collateral damage? That's not right."

"That's just what we need, isn't it?  A child preaching to us about the morals of war."

"Did we learn nothing from last time? This is what happens when a breeder steps out of place—"

"That's enough," Tom interjected. He turned to me, anger throbbing in spheres of brown. The room was chaos again, discourse ringing in every corner, and I was at fault. "Alex, you've made some interesting points, but all it is right now is speculation.  We have no evidence that you're harboring another spirit inside of you.  Even if we did, spirits and demons are different, like you said—there might be no correlation between you and other soldiers. We have no proof that human souls and Pans can coexist inside one body.  Until we do, we stick to protocol."

My mouth turned to dust. Foul, weightless dust. "How can you say that?  We could be killing our own people."

Long-Nose scoffed. "That's nothing new. For millennia we've fought over something as simple as honor or territory. This is life or death. We don't have a choice.  It's us or them. Our soldiers know the risks."

The fear in the room had reached a lethal concentration.  All these men, the directors of war, too afraid to change the play, to write a new script. Too stubborn to even consider a revision.

Lazy, arrogant bastards.

Tom nodded.  "Alex, Burroughs is right.  We can't risk the safety of our people because of if's and maybe's. Now...I think you should leave."  Before this gets even more out of hand, his gaze emphasized.

I gaped at him, dismayed.  But he was my commanding officer, and I refused to undermine him here among his superiors—not again. I stalked out of the room without further comment, brushing past Will's studious gaze.

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