Emblems

Chapter 32: Doubt

Chapter 32: Doubt

"WHAT’S WRONG?" CHRISTOPHER ASKED. KURT was silent by his side. 

"The Demons were after her. They attacked the Athenaeum to get to her, not the Delegates, not even the Emblems. They were targeting her specifically." Seeing their confused looks, he explained as he began to pace around the office again, "After she woke up in the med bay, she told me that the Demon inside her was gone. It had disappeared overnight."

"How?" Kurt finally spoke. Both of the twins looked more shocked than he'd ever seen them before. "I haven't examined her mind before, but—"

"I have," he interrupted. No time to be ashamed of it now. "I took a peek at it once, where the Demon was in her head. It was a closed off space – she'd done her best to shut it out. But where they joined, she and it were so closely intertwined that I wouldn't have been able to tell them apart if I didn't know what to look for."

"Then why didn’t you tell her?" Calida questioned. Her eyes were narrowed. "If she knew that, she wouldn't have made such a fuss about it." He didn't look at her. After a pause the mocha-skinned girl shook her head. "You're too soft, Daniel. Even if there's only a tiny chance the Demon could be taken out, you might as well say that it's impossible."

"But if we go by what Amber said," Christopher countered, "that tiny chance succeeded. So the Demons came after her, as if they're claiming her as their own?" 

Daniel shrugged. "Probably."

"Why was she in the med bay? She got hurt?" the telekinetic asked. 

"Yeah." He nodded, then straightened abruptly as something occurred to him. Calida didn't know the full story, and neither did the Daron twins. Quickly, he summarized what Nicholas had told them, figuring that now it didn't really matter if they knew, since the Delegates were either destroyed or trying to recover, but could not be contacted to clear this with them either way. "So she escaped from the Athenaeum. I don't know how she was going to find Vortex, but I don't think she did either," he finished. 

"It's possible," Kurt conceded. "But what I'm more concerned with now is who removed it. The Demon couldn't just disappear into thin air, and she wouldn't have been able to do it herself. Someone had to have taken it out of her. If we know that, then we can find out why Amber went through such a change, as described by Calida."

"A Mind Adept then," Daniel said, turning in a circle. His hands went to his jeans pocket as if they had a mind of their own, fingering the cool metal of the shuriken. 

"But an Adept with a lot of power," Christopher pointed out. "For something like that to happen,  a lot of magic would have been needed."

"But how do you make a Demon disappear from someone's mind, if it's already so ingrained?" Calida asked, sounding a little lost in the room with three other Mind Adepts. 

"It's not so much as making it disappear," Kurt said.