Ive let you hide from the paranormal investigation teams for this long, and hell Ive even joined you in the solitude more times than I should have. Storm held up his hand when Ren started to argue, Youve always claimed that you owed me one Im calling in the favor now.
And that favor would be, Rens voice had lost its edge due to his honor. Storm was right he owed him a life debt and Storm wouldnt call him on it for something frivolous.
Storm started pacing back and forth in front of the desk. The only real answer I can give you right now is youre here to help me fight. Im calling in many favors on this one. Ill be bringing in the best of the PIT teams here to the city and you have now been upgraded to second in command.
Lucky me. The fact that it was said with absolutely no emotion was ignored by both of them.
Zachary will be in charge if something happens to us, Storm made a point of adding. And sooner or later, you two will have to exchange information especially if I cant be contacted.
Well that doesnt sound good, Ren frowned silently wondering why Storm didnt already have the answers to his own questions. For someone who could bounce into the future, it was odd not to know who would be on the winning side of a battle.
I won't be around very much for a while because Ill have to hunt down most of the teams. Although they work in pairs, they do have the annoying habit of disappearing off radar and forming their own assignments as they run across them. He ran his hands through his bangs, Theyre going to be hard for even me to track down.
And as you drop them off here, I get to baby sit? Ren asked wanting clarification.
No, Storm shook his head and smiled at the thought. These people are not children. Their job is the same as yours to protect the city. Whether you communicate between each other is entirely up to you. But with your power, you can make a grid of the city to let them know where all the hot spots are. This is just the home base for now. You and Zachary will be the only ones who can contact me if Im not here.
Really? Ren rocked the chair back and forth becoming intrigued by all the mystery. And here I thought I was the antisocial one between the two of us, Ren pointed out. Do you plan on disappearing? It was supposed to be a joke, but when he noticed Storms flinch he stopped rocking the chair.
Storm rubbed his neck having to be very careful with his words, Im a time walker within this dimension, but if there is an area where the dimensional walls have thinned or ruptured it rejects my power. That was putting it mildly.
Reading Storm had become a science to him and Ren suddenly understood Storms reason behind not knowing who would win the battle. Im following you so far, he hinted.
Storm walked over to the huge window that was facing the ocean and tapped the glass. This glass is a step beyond bullet proof. He sighed as he turned around and leaned against it. But its not evil proof. He nodded his head toward the sofa he had just vacated and whispered words long forgotten by history.
Ren gasped when the ceiling and floor lit up in a wide circle surrounding a large area on the right side of the room with the sofa directly in the center of it. He could even see the luminescent barrier walls connecting the circle on the ceiling and the circle on the floor.
What is that? he tried to keep the amazement out of his voice but failed miserably.
In Laymans terms its a demon trap. Storm answered basking in the fact that he had officially awed Ren, which was a very hard thing to do. Go ahead walk through the barrier. It won't hurt you.
Ren reached out but paused before touching it. Am I expecting a demonic visitor?
Storm tilted his head, Let me remind you of something. If a child of the fallen comes near you, then it is you that becomes the demon. He lowered his voice making it creepy while saying the demon. He and Ren didnt quite agree on the subject. Ren was still prejudiced against anything he didnt understand.
Ren took a step back from it as what Storm said sank in. It even took him a few seconds to think of a good comeback, At least Ill be the one who knows where the key to the cage is. Question is how do I get them in it, put demon treats on the sofa?
Storm smiled and pushed Ren into the circle.
Ren whirled around and started back toward Storm but ran into what reminded him of ice. Backing up, he shoved his palms against it and blinked seeing the walls of the barriers ripple where he touched it as if the surface of the barrier was made of water.
Smacking it again he growled at Storm, I am not a demon!
Storm cocked an eyebrow, Well, Im glad we got that out of our system.
Ren smacked the wall of whatever.
Relax, I tweaked the spell enough to where it traps anything not human and since youre a succubus and Im within range he smiled again knowing this was one lessen Ren needed to learn, Unless you want to call me a demon?
I got it. Shove the thing in the circle and dont step in my own trap. Now let me out.
Storm said the spell again much the same way he did the first time with just a couple syllables difference.
Ren was a quick study and had already committed both spells to memory before he made it back to the safety of his desk. The silence stretched before Storm felt the humor of the prior moment fade and he began to talk again.
This castle used to be in Scotland. I had it brought here brick by brick and reconstructed during the land rush but the upgrades are more recent. There are demon traps in almost every room and you are the only one who can trigger them.
Its very beautiful, Ren nodded wondering what Storm was getting at. Sometimes his stories were longer than an old man's as he drifted through his timeless memories. He was allowed to talk about the past as much as he wanted but it was dangerous for him to say anything about the future.
Hed once asked Storm why he didnt spend his time going back in time and correcting all of mankinds mistakes like offing Hitler. Thats when Ren had told him that his powers had limits it seemed trying to change human history was one of them.
This castle was a wedding gift for a very close friend of mine. Storm looked out the window that held the view of open land falling off into the ocean it truly was breathtaking. He swallowed, pushing the haunting memory aside for now.
Gazing back at Ren, Storm realized that for once someone besides him needed a hint of what was coming. Since his power decided to come with annoying rules that kept him from seeing some of the most important things and barred him from tampering with affairs of the heart, he would have to come up with a very good reason for Ren to want to stay.
He could already feel the pain slice through his mind because of the rules he was about to break but he ignored it.
This place wont be here much longer unless I can make the future change. His voice took on the anger he was feeling as he fought the pain, Before I decided to bring you here, I stepped into the future several times only a couple years from now. Every time was a different outcome and its because of a dimensional shift or a lot of them, happening right here in LA.
Storm swiped at the blood that started dripping from his eyes and nose. The last time I tried to walk here part of the castle had collapsed and the walls that were left standing had sun dried blood baked into the brick.
Shut up, Ren glared at him not liking the way the color had just drained from Storms face as the bleeding started. Storm had always made jokes about not being able to tell anyone their future... saying it would kill him, but Ren didnt think it was funny seeing it was the truth. I get the gist of things and the rest Ill figure out on my own.
Storm staggered back to the chair holding his head, Im trying to even the odds by bringing LA as much backup as I can.
Ren got up and walked around the desk, gripping Storms shoulder and in an instant they were back on the island. If you ever try to tell me the future again, Im gonna kick your ass.
By the time Storm was steady enough to realize where he was, Ren was gone. Feeling the splitting headache that would probably last for days he smiled knowing it had been worth it. Ren was in place, and now that Angelica was within the city limits, she should draw in another hidden power that could turn the tables completely in their favor they needed the gods on their side.
*****
Ren had spent the last week mapping the city by walking the streets. He knew from the download of the PIT files where some of the non-humans were but as he walked or drove his motorcycle, he could feel power riding him that didnt belong to the things on that list.
He turned on the huge screen that covered one wall of the study, pulling the grid map up on it and leaned back in the chair behind the desk. To anyone else, the map might have resembled a Christmas decoration since it was littered with pinpricks of different colored lights.
It was the colors he was studying now. He could see exactly where the shifters were had even visited Moon Dance and Night Light. The corner of his lip twitched at the memory. Hed made the mistake of ordering Heat and had done fine until hed called it a night and come home. By the time hed made it half way home, he was way out of the range of the shifters and completely drunk.
The shifters territory was backlit mostly by green lights with a couple pinpricks of red and blue blue was the PIT team stationed in that area and everything that happened there he was leaving to them the same with the wolf pack.
Michael, Damon, and Kane were all loose cannons as far as he was concerned, which had earned them yellow and their soulless progeny that were slinking around in the shadows city wide were tastefully a blood red. At least that cowardly group was nice enough to bed down during the day in groups and tended to stay in groups at night which made it easier to track their feeding ground.
Now, the fallen were a different story. They had been hard to track at first, but recently they were so unstable that hed given up though he knew when they were close he could feel them. He thought back to the history lesson he had gotten from Storm.
The short version was the fallen had almost destroyed their own world by breaking through to our dimension and stealing some of our women because they thought they were beautiful. Stealing humans had only been their first mistake. Once they were back on the other side of the wormhole, the fallen had taken turns breeding with the stolen women.
The problem was the children that came from those unions were not what they expected and the birth always killed the human females.
Only a small percent of the children were born full-blooded fallen and only one out of hundreds were female. The rest were known as demons hybrids that didnt turn out to be full blooded anything. Most hybrids were what humans called monsters. As those monsters turned on their own creators, the fallen started eradicating their world of all the hybrids whether they were monsters or not.
Once they were finished with their genocide, they found there was now dozens of males to each female in their world. So the idiots had come back through the wormhole, this time keeping their creations on our side as they mated with as many women as they could as quickly as possible.
As the children were born and the mothers died, the fallen would pluck any full blooded fallen and take them back to their world, leaving the hybrids behind. Not needing the male children that were born, they took them and trained them to fight their half breed siblings.
Just before those boys hit puberty, the leaders of the fallen sent them back here and closed the wormhole between the two dimensions stranding all children here except for the female fallen for whom they had sacrificed so many lives.
The story hadnt ended there. Those young warriors had been trained to do the same thing their fathers had done rip openings into the bordering dimension just not the one leading to their home world. This new one existed so close to us that it was only a breath away. One could only presume this was where the theory of Hell originated. So close that humans with heightened senses could feel it and sometimes see it.
As the warriors sought out the hybrids, they found that many of their rivals were just as powerful as the full blood fallen. Bloodshed happened on both sides and it was also documented that some of the fallen were dragged into the alternate dimension with the hybrids.
The murdering masterminds that had sent their children here had known it was a death sentence. They had counted on the fact that their progeny would kill each other and clean up the mess theyd left behind.
Only a handful of those boys still roamed the earth and most were younger than the first batch, arriving after the war had died down and the surviving hybrids had scattered. In Rens opinion, this was where things got muddled. Not all hybrids were what you would call demonic and if undetected they could blend in with the humans and animals again breeding hybrids for over a millennium.
The big secret Storm was protecting was the fact that most paranormal creatures, shifters and weres, or humans with even the slightest abnormal ability were more than likely the descendant of one of these hybrids including the succubus powers hed been using to track them then turn against them. It still made Ren uneasy to think of himself as part hybrid.
In his own defense, Ren was pretty sure the demons hed killed in the past were not of the redeeming quality either that or he would call it self-defense because they had sure been trying to kill him.
To make matters worse, Storm just had to drop the bomb on him that some original hybrids are not evil, even though they give off the same aura as a high class demon would. And if that wasnt enough of a headache, then add the fact that a vampire is not a hybrid at all but something entirely different that had invaded earth.
Ren rubbed his left temple still staring at the grid map. All areas he found where hed felt a power boost were black-lighted and considering Misery never stayed in one place that was most of the city. But taking into account that she had a fetish for soulless vampires, he could only allow her to claim the areas that were near the vampire nest.
That left a lot of unlisted power and somewhere among it was the reason for Storms bloody prophecy. Speaking of Storm, he hadnt seen him since hed tossed his fortune telling butt back on the island and so far no one had shown up claiming to be part of PIT.
Ren smirked knowing exactly how to get Storms attention. He had become so in tune with the high-tech computer system that he no longer had to do anything but be in the same room with it. He watched the computer screen flash as it linked up to the main PIT system then fed the grid map behind the thick firewalls that only he and Storm could access.