A Despair of Demons (Travelers, Book 1) (18 page)

Liv frowned at him. “How do you know that?”

“I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Yes, but still.”

He turned back to the general. “She needs to sleep.”

“Granted. Go home, Dr. Greenwood. They can call you if they need anything.”

“But sir—”

“Do I have to make it an order?”

Liv slumped. “No.”

“I don’t think you should be driving, Liv. I’ll take you.” Jordan looked at
the general for permission, which he silently gave. Jordan nodded back his
thanks.

“Dismissed.”

Liv woke up the next morning, and bleary numbers swam into view. 6:03 am.
The alarm wasn’t set. That must mean she didn’t have to get up. The events of
yesterday drifted to the surface of her mind, and she decided today was
Saturday. She’d slept about twenty hours straight, and they hadn’t called her
about the brain modification device.

She suspected Jordan might have had something to do with that.

A
clunk
sounded from the living
room, as of somebody setting a glass on her end table.
Somebody’s in my house!
She grabbed her Rogue from its place in the
drawer of her bedside table and held it on the door. There was a clatter in the
kitchen and then a definite but indefinable sense of someone moving down her
hallway. The door opened and she put her finger on the trigger.

Jordan stepped through, and immediately put up his free hand. “Whoa!”

She lowered the gun and safed it. “Sorry.” She registered that he was
holding a cup of coffee in his other hand, and said, “Is that for me?”

“If you don’t shoot me first.”

“Sorry. What are you doing here?”

He walked over and handed her the coffee. “I brought you home yesterday,
remember?”

“Yeah. Actually, no.” She took a sip—lots of cream and sugar, just the
way she liked it—and sighed. Heaven in a cup.

“That’s because you fell asleep in the car, and you didn’t wake up when you
got home. I carried you in here.”

Which explained why she had slept in the bra and undershirt she’d been
wearing yesterday. “Oh. You haven’t been here this whole time, have you?”

“No. I spent most of yesterday working on test scenarios. I’ve got a couple
demon testing sites lined up.”

Liv tried to focus. She wasn’t all that awake yet, and her brain didn’t want
to absorb information. Jordan sat on the bed next to her, distracting her
further. He was wearing jeans and a plain blue t-shirt, but he looked like a
god in them. She took another sip of coffee.

“Why don’t you sit back and enjoy your coffee?”

“I’m enjoying, thanks.”

He bit his lip, something clearly bothering him.

“What’s up?”

When he didn’t answer, she nudged him with her knee. He looked at her out of
the corner of his eyes. “Who’s Nathan?”

She nearly spilled her coffee. “How do you know that name?”

He looked apologetic. “You talk in your sleep.”

She didn’t remember dreaming at all, but apparently she had. “What did I
say?”

“Mostly, leave you alone, and never ever speak to you again.”

“Ah. Then you must have inferred he’s an ex.”

“Just an ex?”

It was too early in the morning for this. She took another drink of coffee,
concentrating on making it absorb into her system faster. Jordan was still
staring expectantly. She decided to try a noncommittal head jerk.

He nodded as if that had answered his question. “So, he broke your heart?”

She scowled. “No.” He hadn’t. Bastard.

“But you haven’t dated anyone since.”

“That’s none of your business.”

Jordan’s eyes flashed, but his voice remained mild. “Actually, it is.”

“How?”

“Because you’re with me now. Right?”

Liv remembered what she had been going to do—two nights ago? Three?
Get out before it was too late. Was it too late now? Jordan was sitting here
talking with her after getting her home, taking care of her, bringing her
coffee in bed. She felt safe. Logically, she should end it before it turned as
messy as the thing with Nathan had—except that she was so incredibly
reluctant.

“Right?” Jordan prodded.

It was definitely too early for this. “I don’t know, Jordan. We slept
together once. We work together lots. What do you call that?”

She immediately regretted her words, expecting an outburst, but he didn’t
get mad. “I would call that ‘you’re mine.’”

That melted her heart a bit. Jesus, how did he do that? “You always turn me
around.”

His smile was puzzled. “What does that mean?”

She looked fully at him, trying to x-ray the inside of his mind the way he
always seemed to do hers. She got an eyeful of gorgeous male, but not a hint of
his thoughts. “I try to say something, I start to feel something, and you just
turn me a different way. Without even trying.”

“Oh, believe me, I try. So what did I make you feel this time?”

That I love you.

But she’d thought she’d loved Nathan too, had ignored the signs that he
wasn’t the man she’d given him credit for being. The worst part was, when he’d
shown her his true self, she hadn’t been surprised. Since it had ended, she’d
never once missed him. So it hadn’t been love.

She was obviously a bad judge of character. Nor did she know much about her
own feelings, apparently. She couldn’t stand to make the same mistake with
Jordan.

What if he wasn’t the caring, intuitive, brave, intelligent, honorable, and
moral man she thought he was? What if she didn’t understand love at all, and
this wasn’t it?

She tried another noncommittal jerk, but he nodded as if she’d spoken aloud.
Damn the man and his mind-reading intuition.

Then he smiled, and her insides melted. All at once.

Jordan took the cup of coffee out of her hands, put it on the bedside table,
and leaned in. He kissed her, and she took him in her arms as he pushed her
back against the pillows. She ran her hands over the firm muscles of his back
under his shirt. He nipped at her lip, and heat flashed through her, a far more
effective wake-up than the coffee.

Except now, her mind was awake enough to remember that she needed to get to
work. She managed to get a hand between them and pushed him away. “Jordan! Get
off. I’ve got to get to work.”

“No. They sent me home last night because Trent and the R & D team have
it under control.”

“But I still need to go in, finish up on some other things, and I’ll be
there in case they need me…”

He was smiling now. “It’s Saturday. Why don’t we sleep in?”

He kissed her again, setting off flash fires along her nerve endings. She
had to admit, he had a point.

When he finally released her mouth to trail kisses down her neck, she said,
a little breathlessly. “Oh all right, if you insist.”

He nipped her neck and she gasped, arching up to him. His laugh rumbled
through his chest and into hers. “I do.”

She gasped again as his hand slipped under her waistband, and surrendered
herself to the heat, and to him.

*
         
*
         
*

Jordan managed to keep her away all day Saturday, but Sunday, Liv insisted
on going in to the DEPOT to see what she’d missed.

Turned out, nothing.

R & D, along with Gin and Trent, had everything well in hand, and
practically pushed her out of the room when she wanted to look over their
shoulders at the emerging weapon. She went back to her office in case they
needed her, catching up on paperwork. Her heart jumped when the phone rang
once, and she hoped they would call her over to R & D, but they just had a
question which she easily answered.

Disappointed, she sat back to wait some more, double checking her results
and finishing her research notes.

By Monday, she was sick of waiting. By Tuesday, she could barely contain her
impatience and took Ben up on an offer to help him test fly a jet at the Ranch.
On the third loop-the-loop, she wished she had remembered her Dramamine and
vowed never again to let him talk her into something against her better
judgment.

When she told him as much, he said, “But I took it easy on you, Liv! We
didn’t roll or spin or anything!”

“And I only vomited after we were back on the ground. We’re even.”

Wednesday morning when she got to her office she finally found a memo
blinking on her computer:
Briefing at
0800 hours. T36 and R & D team.

It was finished!

Her heart leapt. She hurried down to the briefing room to find the rest of
her team already there. “It’s done?” she asked Trent as soon as she got to the
conference table.

He nodded gravely, or maybe just tiredly. He looked as exhausted as she’d
felt after her research marathon just before R & D had taken over.

Before she could ask more, General Mace arrived, followed by two of the R
& D team, wheeling a cart that held the world’s only prototype of Liv’s
brain modification device.

The R & D guys immediately launched into a spiel about how they had
developed the weapon and what the specs were. It was all as she and Gin and
Trent had designed it.

“Will it work?” Connor asked.

The taller R & D guy—was his name Pete?—froze. The other,
whose name might be Sam or Stan, frowned. “It appears to send out an energy
charge when activated. The same energy each time at each setting.”

“How was it tested?”

Pete recovered enough to answer, “Remotely, in an empty, shielded room.”

“How many cartridges did we get from LLNL?” Liv asked.

The idea of setting off a nuclear charge in the brain had made her realize
that the only way to excite the necessary brain molecules was, in fact, with a
microburst of radiation. For that, she’d needed to find a radioactive element
with a very short half life. Unfortunately, such elements were mostly
theoretical and incredibly unstable. She’d settled on ununpentium, with its
half-life of only 100 milliseconds, as the best candidate.

With the help of advanced particle physics research aided in part by
otherworld information, she had designed a cartridge that basically held the
isotope in suspended animation until the device fired, releasing the element
from its stasis and allowing it to decay in a microsecond burst. The Air Force
had enlisted Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California to create the
ununpentium, at incredible difficulty and expense. She knew she was stuck with
however many cartridges they’d sent, without hope of more anytime soon.

“Twenty-five,” Pete said.

Liv went numb. She had asked for two hundred cartridges. “How many times did
you fire it?”

“Eight.”

“Eight? You mean I only have seventeen shots left?”

“Fifteen, actually, because we also tested it on a lab rat and a rabbit.”

“Why wasn’t I informed?”

Trent answered, since her fury had frozen both the R & D guys. “We
needed to make sure it worked consistently. Two tests at each setting was the
bare minimum. And we needed to make sure it didn’t fry brains. Two tests for
that is not enough, but we worked with what we had.”

She subsided. She’d have to defer to Trent on this one, since her
weapons-building expertise was nonexistent.

General Mace said, “Is it ready for field testing?”

Sam or Stan looked relieved that Trent had diverted Liv’s fury. “It was
built to the required specs, and both test shots at each setting measured the
same, to an acceptable degree of error. The animals suffered no ill effects. That’s
all we can say for sure right now.”

General Mace nodded. “You may start the friendly fire test immediately.”

“Sir, I think that would be a mistake.”

General Mace gave Liv a sharp look. “Your protocol was to test it on human
volunteers and then field test on demons.”

“Yes, but I thought I’d have two hundred ununpentium cartridges. We won’t
get any more. I don’t want to waste any on our people.”

Trent spoke. “You’d waste more testing on demons. With an uncooperative
subject, you’ll get far less information about the actual effects. That means
more errors before the correct configuration is found, and more uncertainty
about the effects.”

Damn. He had a point.

“So we proceed with the original plan,” General Mace said. “One of the
jumpers has already volunteered.”

“Sir, what if it fries his brain? The brain modification device is
completely untested.”

“That’s not true,” Trent protested. “We tested it several times.”

“Let’s call it the brain ray,” Ben said.

Liv glared at him. “How is that relevant right now?”

“‘Brain modification device’ is way too hard to say. Brain ray.”

She sighed. “Fine.” Turning back to General Mace, she said, “What if the
brain ray
fries his brain?”

“It didn’t fry the rat’s or the rabbit’s,” Sam or Stan pointed out.

Trent said, “We don’t have a choice. We need to know if it works before we
test it on demons.”

General Mace agreed. “Not only for the experimental advantage, but also the
military one. You will not go out looking for demons until we know the machine
works in the first place. Are we clear, Dr. Greenwood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You may start trials immediately.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

Liv stood in front of Lieutenant Marcum, holding the brain ray gingerly in
both hands. Damn it, now Ben had her thinking of it as a brain ray too.

The rest of her team stood loosely around her, and the Medical team leaned
back against the wall. They were in one of the unused shielded R & D labs
for the weapon test.

Liv dialed the device to
will
, the
setting that should affect Marcum’s ability to Travel. “Okay,” she said to him.
“I’ve decided to try to repeat what Elachai did to Jordan and lock you out of
Travel. I think it’s the safest thing to start with.”

“And then free me to Travel again, right?” Marcum looked supremely
unconcerned, but he had to be at least a little nervous. It was one thing to
potentially jump into a world where the atmosphere would flay your skin off,
but entirely another to let someone mess around with your mind. She knew
firsthand.

“Of course, that’s the plan,” she said.

“General, we’re ready.”

“All nonessential personnel to the observation room,” General Mace said
while motioning everyone out.
 

“We’ll be watching on the camera,” Jordan said at the door. Then he was gone
and she was alone with Marcum.

She smiled brightly. “Ready?”

He grinned in what he probably considered a rakish way. “Yes, ma’am.”

She rechecked the brain ray’s settings one last time, pointed it at Marcum,
and depressed the trigger.

Nothing happened.

“That was a little anticlimactic,” Marcum said.

“It’s working.” The indicator on the side showed that it was finding the
requested mix of neurochemicals in his brain. When it hit zero, it beeped,
letting her know it had released the microsecond burst of radiation targeting
those cells, although it was nothing either of them could feel. “You will not
be able to Travel unless I tell you you may.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Did you feel anything?” Liv asked.

“No.”

The Medicals entered the room and swarmed toward the lieutenant, checking
all of his vitals, drawing blood, and generally trying to decide if Liv’s brain
ray had done any damage.

After a minute, one of them turned to her, and she recognized Dr. Brown. “We’re
all set here. He looks fine. Are you sure that machine does anything?”

Liv took a deep breath. “We’re about to find out.”

The Medicals trooped back outside, and Liv said, “Okay, the real test. Can
you Travel?”

“I dunno.”

Liv gritted her teeth. She’d always wondered how jumpers did what they did,
but in Marcum’s case at least, it was quite clear: he simply wasn’t smart
enough to grasp the terrible danger of being the first to a new world. “Try.”

“Where should I go?”

“Anywhere!” Check that. “Anywhere already explored.”

He smiled his rakish smile, then swirled and disappeared.

Liv’s heart sunk to her shoes.
Shit!
After all this, it didn’t work!

Seconds later, Marcum returned. She already knew it was a failure, but she
had to follow through, figure out why. “Where did you go?”

“Blue Beach.” Apparently everybody liked it there.

“And?”

“And what?”

“Was it normal Travel, harder to get there, anything different at all?”

“No. It was just like always.”

“All right. Thanks.”

Her team filed in, General Mace along with them. “What went wrong, Dr.
Greenwood?”

Jordan spoke before she could. “Wait a minute, Liv. Maybe it didn’t go
wrong, sir.”

She didn’t see how he could be right, but she felt a tiny spark of hope. Jordan
had that effect. “What are you talking about?”

“Your wording may have invalidated the experiment.”

Now she felt a spark of anger. “What are you talking about?”

“You said he couldn’t Travel unless you told him to, but then you told him
to. Maybe it worked and you just reversed it because of the words you used.”

“So what should I say?”

“I think it would be better if someone else entirely ordered him to Travel.”

She turned to General Mace. “He has a point, sir.”

General Mace nodded. “Try it.”

Jordan turned to Marcum. “Lieutenant. Go back to Blue Beach.”

“For how long?”

“The same as before.”

The infuriating man swirled in a whirlwind of color and disappeared.

Jordan leaned close. “Do you think jumping makes their brains dull, or is
that just the preferred mentality for a jumper to have?”

She grinned, but didn’t answer since Marcum had reappeared.

Jordan nodded at her. “Try the gun again.”

She was loath to waste another shot on the useless test, but it didn’t
matter if the stupid gun didn’t work anyway.

Connor said, “Clear the room again.”

“Actually,” Jordan said, “I think I should stay.”

Connor gave him an exasperated look, and he said, “No, listen. If we test
this in the field, and find out that it works on everybody in the area, we
might not have enough shots to put all of us back right, and we wouldn’t be
able to Travel away if Liv stops us. We need to know now.”

Liv hadn’t thought of that. “He’s right, sir.”

General Mace said, “All right. On your head be it.”

Everybody else left and Liv was alone with Jordan and her subject.

“Is this directional, Liv?” Jordan asked.

“I really don’t know. I wouldn’t think so, although the back of the
discharge module is shielded, so maybe.”

“Then I should stand in front of it.”

“No, you should stand back here. I’d rather confirm that I won’t affect
what’s behind the shielding than confirm that I can get multiple targets in
front of me. We can use the demon trials for that.”

“Okay.” Jordan remained at her side.

“All right, same as before.” She lifted the gun, pointed it at Marcum, depressed
the trigger, and waited for the beep. Again, nothing seemed to happen. “You
will be unable to Travel until I tell you you may.”

He looked at her, clearly questioning whether it had worked. Again, the
Medicals swarmed in, did their exam, pronounced him well, and left. Jordan
said, “Okay, Marcum. Travel to Blue Beach again.”

Marcum nodded, then just stood there.

“Go ahead,” Jordan said.

“I’m trying.”

The expression of intense concentration on his face made him look like he
was straining to do something else entirely, which made her laugh. She tried to
cover it by turning to Jordan. “It works!”

Jordan’s grin mirrored hers, but she could tell he knew what she was really
laughing at, and that made her laugh harder.

She had to get a grip. She faced the camera. “Dr. Brown, bring the PET
scanner!”

Her smile died as she looked back at Jordan. She didn’t want to tell him to
Travel, but she needed to see if he could. She raised an eyebrow, and he
startled. “Right! I’ll try Blue Beach too.”

He swirled into a multicolored whirlwind that vanished. She didn’t realize
she’d been holding her breath until she let it out.

He reappeared within seconds. “No change for me.”

Marcum glared. “How nice for you.”

Dr. Brown bustled in with the scanner, set it up next to Marcum, and
attached it to his head. Liv tried to help, but her hands were shaking with
excitement. Dr. Brown took one of the fragile leads out of her hands. “Maybe I
should just do this.”

Liv held up her hands and backed away. It worked! They could stop Woolfe!

Once the PET scan ran, including the part where Marcum tried to Travel, they
unhooked the machine. Marcum said, “So you’ll put me back now, right?”

“Sure. No worries.”

He looked at her expectantly.

“Right. You may now Travel at will.”

He just stared at her.

“Try it.”

“I am.”

“Oh.” Dammit! That meant that she’d have to waste another shot. “I guess the
effect is pretty short lived.”

“It would be nice to know how short,” Jordan said.

“We don’t have enough shots to find out,” she said. “We’re down to twelve as
it is, and we’ve still got to test it on demons. We know it’s at least a couple
minutes. That’ll have to do.”

Marcum cleared his throat. “Still waiting here.”

“Oh, all right.” She fired the weapon again, wondering if Marcum’s brain was
frying yet, although given his depth of intellect, it might be hard to tell. “You
may now Travel at will.”

He immediately disappeared into a whirlwind. Seconds later, he was back, a
huge relieved grin on his face. “I’m back, baby!”

Liv summoned up a smile. “Great. Go get a CT scan and an MRI now, please.”

Dr. Brown came back in and beckoned, and Marcum followed her out.

General Mace led her team back in. “That looked like a resounding success,”
he said.

Liv nodded. “So far as a single-test-subject trial can be used to predict
the efficacy of a previously nonexistent weapon on the general population.”

“We have no more subjects to test, and if I remember, you didn’t want to
waste the charges.” General Mace stared at her.

“All true, sir.”

“So are you ready for demon trials?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Excellent. We’ll meet in the briefing room in one hour. Apparently, Dr.
Jameson has some ideas about where you’ll be going tomorrow.”

General Mace left, and the rest of her team crowded around, slapping her on
the back and offering congratulations.

Ben held up his hand for a high five. “Score one for the brain ray.”

Liv followed his gaze to the heavy green steel device in her hand. “Yeah. Now
if it will just work on demons too.”

*
         
*
         
*

Liv and her team trailed through the transformed streets of Demon Rift. Where
before there had been only gray dust and damaged buildings, there were now huge
refuse piles from whole buildings that had been razed.

Aside from these reminders of the destruction the demons had caused, much of
the city had been cleaned and repaired.

People were out on the streets, and most nodded and smiled or even waved to
the Travelers. Mallet, leading them along the ‘least damaged ways’ as he put
it, talked nonstop about their renovations.

“As you can see, we have done a great deal in the short time since you left
us.”

As he paused to beam at the city around them, Connor finally found an
opening to speak. “Have you managed to hunt down all the demons?”

Mallet’s face darkened instantly. “None, actually. They have left the city
and found a cave up in the mountains. There are many of them, and they have
guards always on watch. But as they have left us alone, we have left them
alone, until such time as they are no longer content to ignore us.”

“Are you sure that will happen?” Jordan asked.

Mallet turned to him with a look of incredulity. “They are a greedy, wicked
and bloodthirsty race.”

Jordan stared steadily back. “They might have said the same of you when you
opened the Rift.”

“That is true. But we are not! We have learned the lesson.”

“Perhaps they have too.”

“Jordan…” Connor warned.

“What? I’m just saying.”

“Well, don’t.”

They trooped on toward the Institute, where they were told Polly had made
her seat. In addition to her scientific duties, the city had elected her as
leader to help rebuild.

When they finally reached the Institute, they were taken to a luxurious
meeting room.

“Why couldn’t there have been computers in this room so we could work here
while we fixed the rift?” Gin asked in an undertone.

Liv shrugged. It would have been a lot more comfortable, that was for sure.

Polly bustled through a door at the far end of the room, her teeth very
white in her dark face. “Welcome! Sit, sit. We have made marvelous progress,
have we not? Other than the few rogue demons, of course.”

Connor stepped forward. “That’s actually why we’re here. How many of them
are left?”

“We are unsure.”

“Mallet made it sound like all of them are holed up in a cave outside the
city.”

“We know that several crashed into the ocean many miles from here, and we
assume they were killed or lost beneath the waters. But we have been unable to
kill any of the remainder.”

“So, forty or more?”

“That is likely accurate,” Polly agreed.

Connor turned to Jordan. “This is beginning to look less and less like the
world we should target for testing.”

“Testing?” Polly was quick to ask.

Liv said, “We have a device. We’ve developed it to stop the leader of Hell. But
we need to make sure it works on demons before we Travel there. The demons here
are isolated and won’t be able to warn their leader of our plan. We came to ask
permission to test it on your demons.”

Polly laughed uncomfortably. “They are certainly not
our
demons. But if you have a device, could you perhaps give us
one? Or the plans for one?”

“Perhaps eventually,” Liv hedged. “But as you know, anything we leave here
won’t stay, and I don’t think your particle physics is up to making the
necessary component. Do you have particle accelerators?”

“Particle accelerators?”

“Miles-long devices to create artificial particles in high speed
collisions?”

Polly looked mystified. “No.”

“Then I’m afraid it’s probably beyond your capabilities at this point. It’s
very dangerous if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.”

“I’m sure,” Polly said dubiously.

“As for the demons?” Connor asked.

“Oh, certainly. Test your device. Does it kill them?”

“Not as far as we know,” Liv said. “We hope it will allow us some measure of
control.”

“Then perhaps you could use it to help us! Stop them from raiding our
cities.”

Jordan frowned. “Have they been?”

“No. But we feel it is only a matter of time.”

“If they haven’t done anything to you, why would you want us to attack them,
maybe provoke them?” Jordan asked.