Reno came flying into the Infirmary not long afterwards, having somehow learned that Marc had returned.   He stood in the doorway, panting a bit, as he stared at Marc.  "Is he going to be okay?" he asked Tabitha.

"Yes. He is just exhausted."

"I, uhm, he sent me a message. Asked me to do something. Or I'd have been here sooner. So, uhm, is there anything I can do now?"

"Sit with him," Tabitha suggested.

"But I... okay."  There was no one sitting with Marc although there was Tabitha with Stephen.  So Reno sat.

Reno looked around watching the activity he could see in the Infirmary from his seat next to Marc. Tommy came in and out several times, and there was a healer who seemed to be lurking in the shadows, trying to see how Stephen was doing.

Stephen himself seemed to be doing just fine. He was napping, but there was a now empty tray of food next to him, and he was breathing comfortably.

Marc... Marc lay still and unmoving and if you didn't notice the slight movement of his chest with his breathing, you might mistake him for the dead.  He was pale, which made the darkness of his hair and eyebrows, not to mention a day-old growth of beard seem as black as pitch, and made the streak of nearly white hair on his temple seem chalk white and startling in its closeness in colour to how pale Marc was.

Reno was a bit disconcerted to realize how much smaller Marc seemed now than he did when he was alert. Then he always seemed, well, not hulking, but somehow larger than most other people. Perhaps it was the intense way he tended to regard people. Made them shrink up inside if he was angry about anything, that was for sure.

"So he..."

"He found Doni," Tabitha replied.

"So, they'll go get her back?"

Tabitha nodded.

"Cool."

Melly rubbed her eyes and shoved her hair back out of her face, stifling a yawn. She’d done this for hours yesterday and hours the day before and now hours today. Signing she clicked the next link in the list of demonology references just like she’d been doing and started scanning the page.

A couple of hours later Reno slipped into the room and sat next to her. “Here,” he said, recalling her to the mundane world, “fresh coffee. Found anything yet?”

“Thanks,” she said taking a drink before answering his question. “ Nope, nothing. I just wish I could remember where I’ve seen it. It would give me a clue about which demonology to check.”

“Demonology?” Was there a degree program for that?

“Yeah. They are books that list demons from various faith systems, like Christian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Hindu…they describe the demons and list known history in more or less detail. Sometimes they’re even illustrated.”

“So you’re looking at rap sheets and mug shots for demons?”

Melly laughed. “Sort of. Here, I’ll show you.”

Reno moved his chair closer and leaned in towards the monitor. The screen was displaying lists of names.

Melly clicked one and then they were looking at a web page devoted to some demon named Barbatos. “See,” she said, pointing, “This one is a horned demon, who hunts in the woods with four kings blowing the horns before him. Then there’s another source that says he is a great duke and commands 30 legions and understands animals. Our guy doesn’t appear to have had horns based on the skull, so he’s ruled out.”

She went to the next one, a demon named Cacus. “See, this one is from the Roman pantheon, son of Hercules. He’s not our guy either.”

The next demon was named Adramelech. Reno started reading aloud from the screen, “Adramelech was a high chancellor of hell and president of the high council of devils. He can sometimes appear with a mule or a peacock. It is said that the people of the city of Sepharvaim, the city of the Assyrians, sacrificed children to him. 

Melly clicked the link next to the entry. “This time there’s a picture.”

The new window opened showing a male figure, with a bird’s head, wings and a peacock tail. Melly leaned in closer. “You know, this could be…” She clicked another link and a photograph of cave drawings appeared.

Reno leaned in to look. They just looked like stick figures in various poses to him.

He was just moving closer when Melly reared back, exultant, “It’s him, it’s him! I told you I’d seen him before. That’s what was buried in our cemetery.”

Looking at the picture Reno wondered what else might be there.

Melly started downloading and printing. “I need to get this over to Charlie. Want to come with me?”

“Ah, sure, you mean out to the site?”

“Yeah, we can take the jeep, it isn’t that far. Have you been out there yet?”

“No, uhm…I’d like to see it. Did you, ah, know them…Richard and Lily?”

“Yes, at least Lily I knew fairly well…I don’t think anybody really knew Richard except Lily, certainly I didn’t, except to speak to or for work. Adam, over in the Ops Center was his aide for while he was here. He probably knew him better than anyone except maybe Stephen. He wasn’t an easy man to know.”

“Were you here when it happened?”

“Yes.” The word was clipped. Melly looked at him as she headed out the door. “You ready to go?”

Reno took the hint and stood up.

Ten minutes later they pulled up to the site.

There were now two tents pitched near the ruins, and a pile of construction debris neatly stacked beyond it and covered in tarps. The site was now resembled an archaeological dig that a crime scene. The area had been stacked into grids and Charlie’s helpers were methodically searching each grid and Adam photographing everything. Melly spotted Trevor and Charlie in the tent that had been set up as a temporary morgue.

She waved to them and headed in that direction, Reno dutifully behind her.

“Hey guys, how’s it going? You know Reno, right?”

Charlie nodded. “Yeah from the meeting with Marc.” He shook hands with him politely.

Trevor waved from where he was looking at the work so far on assembling the bones. “Hi Melly. I wondered where you’d gotten to. Hell of a thing about Doni. Any news there?”

“All I know is what you know. They think they know where she is and they’re going to get her. What have you all been doing? It looks like Stephen was right,” she said, as she moved closer to remains. They were laid out on several long trestle tables, various bits of skeleton in various sizes, most intact, some not so pristine. “How many bodies do you think you have?”

At least four so far,” Charlie said. “But it’s really early; it’ll take another week at least to finish the grid search of the site itself. I hadn’t realized how large this place was.”

“I heard someone say,” Reno replied as he bent over the skeletons, “that this was more like an enclave…there were three houses here, including the main one and some other buildings.”

“There were,” Melly agreed, “That was one of the main reasons it was thought that Lily pulled the place down when they left. That and the fact that no one heard anything to explain it, there was no sign of an explosion…nothing…just the ruins.

“You were here when it happened weren’t you?” Charlie made it a statement, not a question. He leaned back against the trestle “What happened that night? Exactly? It might help if I knew…”

Trevor nodded, “I’d like to hear it too. I’ll be talking to everyone in detail who was here, but an overview would be nice.  I was gone by then.”

"That's right.  I had forgotten you left before it happened."   Melly looked at the three men surrounding her, then at the bones, clearly reluctant. “Alright. Here’s the story, as I pieced it together afterwards from what I knew and what I was told. It all started before that day...though you may not know that.

“Lily was a Listener and Richard wasn’t even talented. But Lily was able to bond with him as if he were Awakened…fully, bi-directionally. That bond is and was unique and should have been impossible.” Melly shook her head, thinking about it. “Nobody knew what to make of it. But, truthfully, there has never been an empath like Lily…she did amazing things.”

“It frightened the Council. Liam told me later they hated having a non-Awakened so privy to our affairs and being so dependent upon him because he helped us to defend ourselves from whatever was hunting New Ones. I suppose as well that they were afraid that other Awakened, emboldened by Lily’s defiance of the Council when they demanded she break the bond, would also find non-Awakened bond mates, though that always seemed silly to me. Finding a bond-mate is not like shopping for a new suit of clothes. Still I think that may have been part of it, the fear that it was an encouragement to challenge their control.

“Then there was the whole power issue. Richard and Lily plus the situation, made Stephen more powerful in every way. Finally, there is no question they hated Richard because he’d made them see all the ways they’d failed to lead and to govern. In fact, he told them flat our that they had failed, that they had abdicated their responsibilities…I’m sure it didn’t sit well at all or Stephen forcing them to accept it.

“Anyway…Whatever the reason or reasons the Council was sufficiently provoked to take steps in regard to the two children born to Lily and Richard here at the Refuge. They were only able to do that because Lily was so petite and needed a healer to help birth her babies safely and both times the healer was Doni, assisted by Bella. I don’t know what happened but the result was both children were born Awakened, emergent and gifted. They were born Listeners. They were born with something else as well; gifted in some other way that was new to us. So the Council demanded that their abilities be blocked as if they were renegades and the parents never told.

Melly looked thoughtful for moment, as she scanned their faces. They seemed engrossed and why not…it was all scandal of the first order.

“Did Doni do it? Did Bella? Did both? Did Doni even know? That’s what everyone wanted to know afterwards…though I can guess that if Doni did it or helped it was because she believed she had no other option. Not that that excuses anything, it’s just that I knew…know her well enough to be sure of that. However it would take a lot to convince me she did know about it, much less had anything to do with it. But someone, to put it baldly, turned off a part of them.

“Well that day, the truth came out, as truth does, from the children themselves. Doni had been out with a team for a New One when this all started to unravel. The team was attacked and only Doni got back alive. So she was a bit emotional already, demanding on her return to see Richard and Stephen. But Stephen wasn’t here, and Lily and Richard were at their house preparing to leave. So that’s where Doni went. After that we know very little for sure.

“You know how it is with bond mates…the awareness of the other, almost like background music…well Stephen was at Home demanding that the Council undo what had been done to the children, and he suddenly lost all awareness of Doni. He returned to the Refuge and hearing where she’d gone, went after her. He’s the one who found the house and all the other buildings collapsed in upon themselves like demolished Lego™ structures, Richard and Lily and everyone else gone, and Doni dead, apparently of heart failure, sudden and catastrophic.

“After that the Council decided that the best thing we could do was to bury Doni and let Richard and Lily go. Given the shape Stephen was in for the next several months, it was, we all thought, a case of the least said the sooner mended. And for all the years since, that’s where it was left. Stephen has never been near the place since that night, I’ve heard. Clem, as the de facto person in charge of the valley decided, in the weeks afterwards to just let the forest reclaim the site. So, in a way, we all cooperated in trying to pretend it mostly hadn’t happened.

“The other thing about that day…there hasn’t been an attack since,” Melly concluded.

“Did anyone look for them?” Reno wanted to know.

“I know Stephen spent a lot of time and money trying to find them afterwards. He was, again, just recently. It certainly made no sense that seven adults and four children, plus belongings would just vanish that way…but Lily was an Awakened…she could have managed it.”

“It never became public knowledge?” Trevor asked.

“Parts did, like Doni being dead, as we thought and Richard and Lily gone. But the babies…no…that would have been too dangerous. The Council wasn’t about to risk it and Stephen, the only one who could have changed that, was in no shape to do anything for a long time afterwards. I imagine, though, it’ll all come out now…I hope so.”

Charlie shook his head, “I can’t believe those people. Why do you even…?”

Melly cut him off sharply, “You weren’t around before the Covenants. Yeah, it’s flawed, it’s badly flawed…but compared to what it was…Read the history, Charlie and then ask me that.  And then ask yourself why Stephen went out on a limb for you?” She drew breath and apologized, “I'm sorry, I just hate talking about all of it."  She smiled wryly.  "Why don't I show you what I found instead...ok?."

She moved to an empty trestle and laid out the printouts she made. “This is what we found in the grave."