Gatekeeper Read online

Another step took her out of the threshold space. Rachel emerged into a thin alleyway that ran between two houses. A whiff of freshly cut grass and engine exhaust tickled her face as a flickering streetlight assaulted her eyes. There was a distant shout, followed by a laugh, a slamming door, and the hum of a car passing by a block or two away.

  These new sights, sounds, and smells provided an anchor for her disoriented senses to latch on to. Her mind relaxed, her spirit settled, and the stress of that one step subsided, dormant until her next trip through the nothingness.

  RACHEL PASSED BY a Greek restaurant, trying not to smell the aromas drifting into the street. Her stomach rumbled anyway, reminding her that she had not eaten since lunch. Against her better judgment, she inhaled deeply. Hummus, lamb, so good . . .

  She turned the corner and, holding her breath, jogged to the back of the building. There were two doors before her, spread about five feet apart. One door was ajar, allowing the rich scents of spice and meat and the sounds of a busy kitchen to waft out into the back alley. The second door, a dull gray slab covered with splotches, was leaning against the wall, unattached to the building. That the door had been left alone by restaurant employees and passersby alike for so long was unsurprising: it was heavy and grimy, and creepy-crawlies scurried everywhere when it was disturbed.

  With a quick glance around to be sure no one was watching, Rachel quietly slipped between the hingeless door and the wall.

  When she crossed this threshold—one not unlike the one she’d passed through after leaving her house—she stepped into an entirely different place. The smells of the restaurant vanished immediately, replaced by the stagnant sterility of an office. Clattering dishes and bellowing chefs gave way to the echoes of footsteps on tile and muffled voices from behind closed doors.

  Rachel crossed the floor without bothering to look at the dozens of doors that lined the long hallway. Most of these doors had faded words painted on their glass panels, declaring the door to be the entrance to such-and-such street or this-or-that department. None of these were what she had come for. Her boots clunked with each step on the large, speckled white tiles, half of which were cracked or chipped, that led to her destination.

  At the far end of the hallway was a tall wooden desk, its surface dotted with stains. Behind it was a set of swinging double doors made of frosted green glass. The faded black letters on the door read SKIPTRACE & COLLECTION. Rachel came to a stop at the desk, glanced around, and, seeing no one, casually leaned her elbows on the rough surface.

  “Who’s on desk tonight?” she asked loudly.

  A gray-haired man bolted up from behind the counter, and Rachel, startled, let fly a string of colorful but unrelated curse words. She drew a breath to calm herself, silently reflecting that she sounded just like her grandfather.

  Heedless of her foul language, the gray-haired man squinted at her with wrinkled eyes. “Ms. Wilde,” he said hoarsely, “you are very late.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Rachel said. “I fell asleep.”

  “Asleep?” he exclaimed. “You slept through assignment?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, Mr. Creed.”

  He stared at her, slack-jawed, until she shrugged and added, “I’m an idiot.”

  That explanation seemed to satisfy him; he snorted and reached out to switch on the screen attached to the wall next to the desk. When it glowed to life, he touched a button that brought up a display of a long list of files, each with that day’s date attached to it.

  He pointed to the list with one large, callused finger. “There’s been quite a pileup lately. Means more work for you lot. Everything on this list has been assigned except for the top four.”

  “Four?” Rachel asked doubtfully. “That many jobs, I miss assignment, and I only get four?”

  “Yes. What does that tell you?”

  Her stomach sank as she read the look on Creed’s face. “That all four of them really, really suck.”

  “Exactly so.” He highlighted the top four files and held out his hand.

  With a resolute sigh, she handed him her phone.

  He touched it to the screen and then returned it. “Here you are.”

  Rachel thumbed through the new files on her phone. The first two jobs looked unpleasant, mostly because they would be time consuming, but they were pretty standard.

  “I’m gonna need some special equipment for the first one,” she said, waving her phone at Creed. “These things aren’t just hard to catch, they’re almost impossible to hold on to.”

  “Right, right,” he mumbled. “I knew that. Wait a moment.” He walked through the door behind the desk and disappeared for several long seconds. When he returned, he was carrying a box that resembled a small pet carrier, except for the barely perceptible shimmer of green that covered the tiny barred windows. “You’ve used these before, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said, taking the carrier by the shoulder strap. “Thanks.”

  She opened the third file and immediately wrinkled her nose. “This mark’s human.”

  “Correct.”

  “Is that really appropriate for our department?”

  “Not my call,” Creed said. “Not yours, either.”

  “I don’t like human marks,” she said. “Couldn’t I trade it for another job?”

  Creed laughed. “If you’d been here for assignment, you could have argued for a better caseload, but you’re late. And even if you’d been here, you would have had a hard time getting someone else to take that case. Every collector present this week avoided it.”

  “Shit,” she grumbled. “All this because I took a little nap.” She opened the last file and squinted at the contents. “‘Gatekeeper?’ Aren’t all gatekeepers monitored by the Central Office?”

  “Normally, yes.”

  “Well then, let the Central Office track them down.”

  “It’s a ‘her,’ actually. And it’s your job to track her down.”

  “How?” she exclaimed. “Unless there’s a name or address—”

  “There isn’t.”

  “Fuck!” Rachel kicked the desk. “It’ll take me more than a week to finish all this!”

  Creed shook his head at her like a parent silently scolding a whiny child. “Show up on time next week.”

  “Peachy.” Rachel snatched up her phone and the carrier and flashed a fake smile. “Thanks. See ya next week.”

  She turned, carrier in hand, and marched back down the hallway. She did not look back.

  2

  PETTY THEFT

  If she could finish at least one of the jobs on her docket that night, Rachel reasoned, then maybe, just maybe, she could finish the remaining three by the end of the week, before next assignment. After ducking out of the checkpoint office, she slung the carrier over her shoulder, tucked her phone into her pocket, and power walked up the avenue. She had a daemon to catch.

  Her journey brought her to a neighborhood heavily populated by failed businesses with boarded-up windows and padlocked doors sporting FOR SALE signs. Small groups of people loitered in front of the old store windows, some loud and jovial, others eyeing Rachel with suspicion. She ignored them all, even the group of young men who followed her for half a block making obscene comments. Her focus did not waver. She had a job to do.

  When she arrived at the address in the file, Rachel immediately saw why this subject had been labeled “defective”; the daemon was living in an empty building. Petty theft daemons were supposed to inhabit areas where shoplifting was a genuine temptation, such as supermarkets and shopping malls. Working properly, the daemon should have been loitering by a display shelf, whispering through the ether into the ears of unseeing humans, tempting them to snatch something and walk off with it. However, in an empty space like this one, there was simply nothing to steal. Clearly, though, the damaged daemon was still trying to perform its function: the unoccupied building had been broken into repeatedly by passersby who were lured by the daemon’s siren call.

  Those people were probably pr
etty disappointed and confused when they found there was nothing to steal here, Rachel thought with a chuckle.

  Every daemon had a function in the fabric of the universe, whether to draw humans to virtue or to vice, and when they malfunctioned, that natural order was disrupted. A theft daemon trying to lure people to an empty building wasn’t serving its purpose, and therefore needed to be repaired. For that to happen, Rachel had to catch it.

  She slipped on a pair of gloves made of thin but durable material before climbing through a broken window and pulling the carrier in after her. The carpet beneath her boots was stained and faded beyond color. The empty building smelled heavily of mold and urine. Gnaw marks in the drywall and feces in the corners told her there were animals living in the walls. Rats, she guessed as she set down the carrier. Or maybe squirrels.

  She pulled a pair of tinted glasses out of her pocket. When she put them on, the eyewear shifted her perception until she could see into the ether, the unseen layer of reality that permeated all. The image the glasses provided was slightly out of focus but clear enough for her to process what was before her.

  Pulsing colors and waves of visible air moved through the room everywhere she looked. Ghostly shapes shimmered in and out of existence like starlight. Thousands of churning particles swirled around her as she walked the perimeter, bouncing off her skin and clothes, slowly tumbling every which way in strange and intricate patterns. The wall that hid the probable rodent infestation was vibrating with orange tremors, humming with life, as the creatures behind it went about their business without regard to her presence.

  Rachel absentmindedly licked her lips. So far, all of this looked perfectly normal. She glanced at her hands; they were glowing slightly in the soupy, ethereal air now that the gloves had had time to draw on the energy within her body to charge the fabric.

  Over the tops of her fingers, she spotted the tracks—two parallel rows of tiny, iridescent spots in the far corner of the room. She crossed the floor, followed the tracks to a half-rotted door, and pushed her way into the neighboring room. A flash of relief hit her, followed quickly by a slow build of expectation for the challenge ahead.

  There, walking up the wall, was the petty theft daemon.

  Its wrinkly skin was a blue overlaid with a gold-glitter shine that sparkled when it moved its foot-long, larvae-like body. It had ten skinny, centipede-like legs along the sides of its tubular body that ended in sharp points rather than feet. Large, triangular eyes covered its bulbous, pug-faced head, making it damn near impossible to sneak up on. Rachel knew from experience that these daemons were squirmy, quick, and very nimble. She sighed. It was going to be hard to catch.

  The daemon blinked half of its eyes at Rachel and immediately began to grunt and hiss. It was speaking.

  Rachel, born with a rare ability to understand the chatter, felt a stab of annoyance. The daemon had recognized her as a collector and was protesting its innocence.

  “You have a defect,” she said.

  “No broke, no broke,” it insisted. “Working, working.”

  “Get in the crate.”

  “Working.”

  “Get in the crate!”

  Its ten sticklike legs trembled wildly and then it took off, scrambling across the wall as swiftly and deftly as a cockroach on steroids. Rachel groaned and charged after the creature.

  “I don’t want to chase you, you grubby-looking freak!” she shouted.

  “No broke.”

  “Yes, you are!”

  “Working.”

  “Shit!” she said. “Fine, we’ll do this the hard way. Hold still!”

  The daemon raced in erratic circles around that room, and then the next one, and then yet another one after that, but it never tried to leave the building. Rachel spent over an hour chasing it. She pounced on it various times, only to see it tirelessly wriggle through her gloved fingers. She was exhausted, starving, and pissed.

  She fumed as she watched the daemon scurry across the ceiling at an intimidating speed after escaping her grasp for the hundredth time. This is gonna take all night.

  But then, just when she was ready to collapse, the daemon was distracted by an elderly man hobbling by the building. Noticing him, it stopped in its tracks and instinctively began to whisper its temptations to its unsuspecting victim.

  While it whispered, Rachel pounced. Her charged gloves gripped the daemon’s wriggling body. The creature shrieked and fought to get free, each skinny leg waving and stabbing the air, but Rachel quickly thrust the thing into the carrier before it could escape.

  “There!”

  “No broke, no broke.”

  “Oh, shut up!” she hissed at the carrier.

  The daemon threw its body against the sides of the carrier, rocking it back and forth, but the thin layer of energy that coated the inside prevented its escape. Rachel watched through scowling eyes until the daemon subsided. True to its nature, it accepted the change of circumstances and became calm after just a few seconds. Just as the abandoned building had once been, the carrier now became its whole world.

  Rachel heaved a sigh of relief and wearily slung the carrier’s strap onto her shoulder. She took off her glasses and tucked them into her coat. Then she pulled back her left glove and checked her watch.

  “It’s not too late. I should scope out the next job, get a jump on my work for tomorrow. Hey you,” she said to the daemon as she headed for the broken window, “behave yourself.”

  The daemon didn’t move and didn’t make a noise.

  3

  THE STATION

  A bus arrived, its blazing headlights slicing through the darkness and its digital sign displaying the word DOWN-TOWN. Rachel rose from the bus stop bench, her weary muscles groaning, and stood on the curb as the vehicle approached.

  The bus driver held up his hand to stop her as she came up the steps. He pointed at the pet carrier. “Service animals only.”

  Rachel held up the carrier for him to see inside. He peered through the bars and saw nothing but a vacant box.

  “It’s empty,” she lied. “I’m just returning it to a friend.”

  Satisfied, he waved her inside. She sat down near the front and placed the carrier on the seat next to her. Inside, the daemon hummed contently, singing its song of enticement to the other passengers. Most ignored it, but one young lady, no more than fifteen years old, inched a little closer to Rachel and snuck a peek inside the carrier.

  Finding it empty, the girl frowned, looking confused and disappointed, and turned away. As the daemon’s whispers continued, she cast her eyes about the bus until they fell upon an older lady near the front. She had fallen asleep, and her arm had slipped off the purse in her lap, leaving the open top unguarded. The girl slid out of her seat and into the seat next to the sleeper, her eyes fixed on the purse.

  While the bus lumbered its way through the city, Rachel checked the file on her phone that described her next assignment. It wasn’t nearly as specific as the file describing the theft daemon. It contained a list of strange sightings and encounters that had taken place over the last week at The Station downtown: weird shadows, bodiless noises, objects moving on their own, and a handful of less obvious transdimensional episodes. Rachel groaned quietly. She now understood perfectly why no one else had wanted this assignment.

  She semi-consciously brushed her stomach, where a three-inch, lumpy scar commemorated her first encounter with a daemon that had been too much in this world. Facing this daemon made her nervous. She had been fortunate the last time because Suarez had been with her; they’d still been rookies then, working in pairs. This time, she was working alone.

  “Something tells me you’re not gonna help me if I get hurt,” she mumbled to the pet carrier.

  The daemon within crooned mindlessly.

  Rachel closed the file on her cell phone and quickly sent a text to Wu, Suarez, and Benny, the three collectors she had partnered with during training.

  Headed to The Station, she texted. Check in o
n me soon, okay?

  Within two minutes, each man had sent her an affirmative response. That eased her mind a bit. It wasn’t the same as working with a partner, but it was better than being alone. Her fingers left her scar and rested on her leg.

  IT WAS STARTING to get dark when Rachel walked up to The Station. Huge archways marked where the old railroad tracks had once brought travelers into the structure, though the tracks were now gone and their foundations had been paved into roads, driveways, and parking lots. Elegant gas lamps had long ago been converted to electric and decades of soot had been washed from the building’s stone exterior to bring the historical edifice into modern use as a business center and event venue. Rachel wrinkled her nose and clucked her tongue. What a waste.

  There was a wedding reception taking place inside. It was a lavish affair. The concourse area was packed to the brim with jovial wedding guests, all smiling happily, glasses in their hands. The already ornate walls were hung with flowers and banners, all of them very precisely arranged to add to the ambiance without detracting from the historical beauty of the room. Large, round tables covered in white cloth and expensive dishes were perfectly spaced to allow maximum seating while still providing a view of the antique marble floor. Above the impeccable room was a vaulted ceiling with a long, translucent skylight that, despite the cloudy sky, filled the room with indigo evening light. The guests mingled and laughed, making the room boom pleasantly with their talk.

  Rachel stood in the hallway just outside the concourse and scanned the room through the cracked-open door. Nothing looked out of place. She fished around in her pocket for her glasses, but before she could put them on, a slick black limousine pulled up outside. An excited ripple went through the crowd, and the guests pushed past Rachel with cameras in hand to get a picture of the newlyweds as they came into the building.

  All the extra movement was enough to persuade Rachel to wait a few minutes before putting on the glasses. Instead, she moved out of the way and watched as the glowing young bride and her new husband entered the room to claps and cheers. The bride immediately ran to embrace an older man, probably her father, while her husband shook hands with dozens of people. Everyone looked delightfully happy, but Rachel wrinkled her nose. She couldn’t help but wonder how much time and money had gone into this night.