Page 34 of Guardian

Logan shook his head. “He’s waiting for us at a place he believes I’ll go. Which means we’ll have to make sure not to show up there. I need a computer.” He pointed to the tray. “Eat something and be ready.”

He walked toward the wall that connected this room with the one next to them.

“What are you planning?”

Logan looked over his shoulder. “I’ll use another guest’s computer to check three possible addresses on Google street view. If one of them looks like the one you saw in your vision, we’ll avoid that address and go to one of the others.”

“What will we find at those addresses?”

“Portals.”

When her mouth opened for another question, he stopped her. “I’ll explain later.” Then he made himself invisible and stepped through the wall into the other room.

~ ~ ~

Logan had thought it safer to walk to the portal he’d chosen rather than take public transportation or steal a car. Safer to walk invisibly. Winter didn’t mind. At least the cool air helped her clear her head.

On the way, Logan explained what a portal was.

“You mentioned Star Trek yesterday. Think of it as the transporter room. The door to a portal is marked with a carved dagger. Only the hand of a Stealth Guardian can open it. You step inside, like you would step onto the pods in the transporter room in Star Trek. But our portals don’t need an engineer to work.”

“What do you mean?” Winter asked. “Then how do you beam from one place to another?”

Logan tipped his finger to his temple. “With my mind. I concentrate on my destination, and it takes me to the portal closest to that destination.”

“And the demons? How do they do it? In my visions I saw something different, yet strangely similar. Fog and smoke, all swirling around. And they disappear in it.” And it had scared her.

He nodded. “It’s a portal of sorts. We call them vortexes. But they are mobile, not tied to any specific place.”

She stopped walking for a moment, her heart pounding. “Are you telling me that they can appear anywhere?”

“Almost anywhere. They do have restrictions.”

“Such as?”

“A demon can only conjure a vortex on the ground.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the surface on which they project their vortex has to be directly connected to the earth. So, for example, it’s possible for them to project a vortex on the ground floor of a building, but not on a floor higher up.”

Winter thought about it for a moment. “In that hotel we had a room on the second floor.”

Logan nodded. “Otherwise a demon following us would have had a chance of entering our room without having to kick the door in.”

“Oh my God! So, really, nowhere is safe.”

“Not exactly. A demon has to have a visual of his destination to transport him there. Either he has to have been there before, or he needs a picture of it, needs to know what it looks like.”

“How do you know so much about them?”

“We observe, we analyze, we learn. Occasionally we get the opportunity to capture a demon and torture him for information.”

“And torture, it works?”

“Sometimes. But the demons have a very high tolerance for pain. It’s hard to get information out of them. They’d rather die. So we oblige them.”

There was something matter of fact in Logan’s voice, as if the killing of demons was a daily occurrence. Maybe it was. Just another day in the office. She almost laughed at that. Almost. But the situation was too dire.