Chapter One - A Helping Hand
“Sandy. I need your help.”
Danny’s voice was so sudden in the quiet of the computer room that it made Sandy jump where she had been hunched over the keyboard.
She whirled around, brown eyes huge, staring up at the seething dark-haired manifestation not a foot from her.
Danny raked his chin-length hair back from his face and looked strained to the limit that evening when he collapsed in the chair beside Sandy’s slender figure. The move bared the nine mill on his hip, securely holstered, and yet he could tell it still made her nervous.
Typically, that night, Sandy looked swaddled away from the universe. She was clad in a hugely oversized sweatshirt, sleeves covering her delicate hands. She was wearing her soft, petal-pink cotton gloves that day, light blue leggings, and ridiculously fuzzy purple and pink socks.
She swiftly pulled down her padded wireless headphones and settled them around her neck. “Sure, what’s up, Danny?”
Honestly, Danny wasn’t quite sure how to start this request off.
Usually, he felt discombobulated and tense, but this week, he was feeling doubly frazzled. “I need you to look at something for me.”
Her eyes tightened with something like pain. “Danny…”
He threw an immediately flustered hand. “Sandy, just do this for me. Father Donovan doesn’t have to know jack shit. Russell can suck my dick about it. You’re the only one that can fucking help me!”
For a week, Danny had been scouring the world on a missing person hunt, and this round, the individual in question was his cousin Scott.
He already knew what she and everyone else would think about it.
Sandy was sure to be wondering why he’d care about some dude, blood or not, that had so recently come back into his picture. He was sure the consensus would be that Scott was a drug addict. That he was renowned for being a piece of shit and getting arrested, going on benders that took him out of the city; that Scott was a gambler, flaky, and got into a lot of shit pretty regularly, but this time?
Danny couldn’t stress it enough that it felt different to him.
His apartment had been untouched for a week, but he had clearly packed his bags in preparation for some kind of travel somewhere. No note left, no calls, he wasn’t answering his phone. His work at the pizzeria in the Nightshade district had insisted that he was supposed to have been back last Friday.
That’s what Scott had told them, and it was now Monday evening.
The issue was that Danny was the only one who seemed to think it was suspicious.
He had even sucked it up and started asking around his less-than-savory out-of-church contacts, a pair of demons that ran Sixth Street who owed him a favor, and reached out to one of Scott’s “business associates”, Moshin, an Orc kingpin down off Burk Street.
The only one he had gotten any info from had been Scott’s friend, Tobias, at his job.
All Tobias had said was that Scott had been leaving to go, quote, “after a score that was going to change his life.”
Everything pointed to bad news, but their coordinator and Hangar’s lead man, Russell, had said point-blank that the cops handled the normie missing persons cases. That, unless the words “Other” and “Foul play” were in the same sentence, it was out of their jurisdiction.
Father Donovan had looked sympathetic, but reminded Danny very gently that Scott was very prone to binges and benders in the past.
Danny knew all that, but something was making his red flags go off.
Scott was a lot of things, but he had been trying to turn a new leaf, been clean for over six months, and Tobias’s very cryptic response made him feel like something…terrible had happened to his last surviving kinsmen.
Deep down, he also knew what the crux really was, spurring this. Simply put, he couldn’t handle another missing persons case. He just couldn’t go his entire life not knowing what happened last year to not just a man he had loved like a brother, but now, his literal last blood relation on the planet he had ever been in contact with had also just vanished.
His brother may not have been blood, but Caden may as well have been, and every single day, he couldn’t shake the deep-seated knowledge that he was out there. That he was alive, and it haunted him that he just…Danny just couldn’t reach him.
He was trying to get past it, but having it happen not once, but twice?
Danny couldn’t deal.
Sandy was his last bet.
“Look.” Danny exhaled and pulled out one of Scott’s rings. He had swiped it from the guy’s apartment just last night. “Off the books. Just tell me where to go, Sandy. I won’t say I found out from you.”
Sandy looked at the ring a little fearfully and then back at Danny’s imploring darker stare.
“I want to help you.” She whispered it harshly and glanced around the empty library. “I do, but you know I can’t just…” She swallowed and peered down at the ring warily. “You know I don’t touch anything that hasn’t been cleared by the upper brass.”
Danny stared at her for a long, long moment. He was so flustered while he held the ring between them like he was proposing that he almost cracked under the pressure.
To be fair, he hadn’t slept in two days, had barely eaten, and just…it was eating him alive.
Sandy exhaled, looked his stupid, handsome face over, and could see that the guy looked tortured. She supposed she did understand.
Out of everyone in their shared Hangar space of 634, Danny was the only one of them who still knew of or had any family. They were all orphans for various reasons, and while Scott was a total screw-up, he was literally the only blood relation Danny had known.
She had to think that if she had had a cousin, any kin left at all, she would have been desperate too.
After a moment, she nodded and drew her hands in before she began to tug off a glove, a little shaky, admittedly. It was so against the rules, but more than that, there was a reason she was prohibited from touching unsanctioned items. It was by choice, but also for her own protection to boot.
She didn’t want to touch Scott’s personal items, but for Danny?
“Okay. I’ll do it for you, Danny.” She whispered it, and the immediate release of tragedy in his face was worth the impending nightmare.
She hoped so at least.
“I’m sorry, Sandy. I know what this is for you, I—” Danny swallowed precariously. “I don’t know what else to do.”
She nodded, but before she accepted the offering, she looked up and met his exhausted gaze. “I’ll do this for you, but will you promise me something first?”
He looked a little distraught but nodded. “Sure. What do you need?”
Sandy’s lips curved sympathetically. “I want you to promise me that when you leave, you go straight to your room, get some sleep first before taking off wherever you need to go, okay? Maybe eat, and take a shower too.”
Danny blinked at her and barked a sharp laugh, eyes watering with high emotion when she put her gentle-eyed demands on him. He nodded quickly and swallowed. “Yeah. I will. I promise.”
She eyed him up and knew no one did stubborn like Danny Smith. For as mellow and quiet as he was, he was a resilient terrier, and one of the best killers they had in The New Mission Church’s fold.
He had saved a lot of people’s asses a few times, but Sandy knew a lot of things about Danny that she knew he didn’t want her or anyone else to know.
She had accidentally peered behind his looking glass by brushing his coffee mug in passing one day with her wrist.
Namely, he was incredibly unstable in almost every way a man could be. He was in a lot of inner pain. A lot of turmoil, and a lot of denial. Denial he put on himself in every way since he clearly knew his own truth.
Danny was pissed off that he had lost Caden, one day before they were due to go out on hunts together. He carried it like a shroud, especially since Caden had asked him that same night he had gone missing if he had needed help on his hunt that night. Danny had said no to give his brother a night off for a change, but that same night?
Caden had vanished with nothing but a trail of blood through the run-down parts of New Hudson. No body. No trace. Just gone.
He was confused because he was having a lot of doubts about the church after that. New Mission had written Caden off in less than a week, declared him dead, and had moved right along with the mission and expected the rest to just fall in line.
No services or offers for his family to take the time off. No consideration given that they were all devastated. No one upstairs gave a damn about another dead Hunter, and it had put a lot into perspective for all of them, but it had really lacerated Danny to the core.
Finally, he was in denial because he was trying to repress his bisexuality and wasn’t being very successful about it.
Part of that last was paranoia over the traditional church they were umbrellaed under, part of it was the terror of his peers finding out, no matter what they thought or were inclined toward personally. He didn’t want the stigma, and he didn’t want the looks when he went out in the field with big groups of dudes who might treat him differently because of it.
Beyond that, she knew there was something else there. It was more a feeling that there was something that had terrified him about it and spurred it all into hiding, and she was a little grateful she hadn’t seen what that was.
‘Barriers’ were a good descriptor of Danny’s inner workings, and everyone knew that much about the man.
So with all that going on for him, plus his amazingly bad drinking habit, Sandy imagined that Danny was about as close to breaking point as any one man had the right to be.
If she could help him, the better question was, why wouldn’t she?
Danny braced when Sandy tentatively took the small gold band, and got ready to catch her if she fell or God forbid cracked her skull off the table or something.
However, Sandy had been getting more control of her gifts lately, and he’d admit it was a little creepy to see her pretty, almond colored eyes fog over.
They glazed with some shimmering opalescent white before she went stock still, staring down at the item in her bare palm.
Out of everyone in the place, Danny did not envy Sandy’s talents.
Her voice was soft, dreamy when she finally opened her mouth.
“He went to the North—” She tilted her head a touch to the left. “Towards Kentucky—” She shut her mouth abruptly, eyeballs shaking in rapid twitches while God only knew passed in her inner vision. “I see a small…maybe an entry in the ground, black as pitch. Left, Left, Right, and then nothing.” Her lids flickered painfully like she was wincing. “It’s hot where he is right now but I can’t hear anything. It’s like he’s deaf, blind, and silenced…”
She shut her eyes, and none of anything she was saying made Danny feel anything but vague panic.
“I need a town name. Something, Sandy.”
She was quiet for a long time, lips moving soundlessly before her brows flicked. “He’s five miles outside of a town called Grizzly Point right on the border in the Cumberland Mountains.”
Danny could have kissed the woman.
Sure, he didn’t feel optimistic, but at least he had a direction to go, a place to sleuth, and the rest?
Underground? Heat?
His mind instantly turned to the demonic.
Danny’s anxiety spiked just thinking about it. There were two types of demons lurking out in the universe: the corporeal and incorporeal, but either way, demons weren’t fun to fight. They were less fun to go head-to-head on your own, but since the only way he could explain where he knew this location might have been was to out Sandy, it would seem asking for back up was going to be a pipedream.
After all the shit they had all gone through, he wouldn’t betray her like that, and wouldn’t have even before. They didn’t need more people thinking they were loose cannons, dangerous, or unpredictable…which they were, but while they weren't part of the military, they were considered private contractors.
So, Danny supposed he was taking this one on his own dime.
Fuck it.
He had done worse for the Church on his own. Demons, poltergeists, and the spiritual were his specialty after all.
He gently took the ring from her immobile hand, and almost instantly her vision cleared. Sandy slumped with a deep exhalation and blinked rapidly while she came out of whatever fog she occupied in those vulnerable times.
Immediately, she shivered and reached for her glove, flushed and shaking her head. “Danny, I know you don’t want to hear me say this…” She looked at him with a hugely imploring stare when he stood, pocketing the ring.
His brows furrowed before he cut her off. “Then don’t. I’m not leaving him wherever he is, Sandy.” He turned for the door and heard her spill up after him while he strode with purpose to the exit.
“Danny, I can’t see where he is, do you understand?” She sounded distressed when she chased after him on his heels into the hall, tone rising to a tense pitch. “The only thing that blocks my vision like that is powerful beyond the norm, do you get that?” When he said nothing, she finally reached out and gripped his arm, dragging him back to a stop. “Danny!”
He whipped around, expression so distressed she quickly let him go and just put her hands on her head. “You promised me. At least sleep on this. If it’s a demon or something, you need to at least talk to Father Donovan. You’ll need blessed bullets, you’ll need holy water and a blessing—”
“I know how to do my job!” Danny all but yelled in the quiet seclusion of the corridor and winced when she looked down, hugging herself under his harsh tone.
She held her ground, though, eyes flicking back up to his with concern bleeding out of her gaze.
He scrubbed his face, running tight fingers under his eyes, and felt bad. Fuck, but it wasn’t Sandy’s fault that he was feeling a little trapped in this situation. “I just…I’ll sleep on it. I will.” He assured the last when she gave him a skeptical expression.
Danny did know enough to know that he couldn’t go into some situation like this without being able to keep his eyes open. While yes, he was concerned and had his sights set forward on this new goal, he was also trained enough to know that he couldn’t make it to Kentucky in his current state without potentially falling asleep at the wheel.
So…that.
Sandy nodded and searched his expression. “Talk to Father Donovan. Let him do his job, too. I know you won’t talk to Russell, but maybe,” She waved a hand down the hall. “Maybe Jared or Sage will go with you? They have a lot of experience with the damned, too.”
Danny knew it would have been a smart play, but he shook his head. “Sage is still down in Memphis doing a lecture until tomorrow and Jared is up to his ass in hunts as it is. This isn’t their fight either way, Sandy.” He put up a hand to stop her protest and flexed a small smile. “I promise I’ll take what I need. If it looks too shady then I’ll call Russell and see if he can send some Crusaders or something out.”
Sandy looked less than impressed. In fact, she looked pretty annoyed, staring up at him. “Is this the whole ‘better to ask forgiveness than permission’ thing you all seem to live by?” She threw a hand up and scowled. “I swear to God, me and Sage are the only people in this fucking bunker who actually follow a rule!”
For the first time in weeks, the comment made Danny laugh out loud before he grinned and spread his hands helplessly. “Blame Caden. He’s the one who taught me and Jared how to tuck and roll out of sight.”
Sandy opened her mouth and then laughed abruptly when that truth resounded right into her heart. Shit, but how many times had their oldest sibling thrown the middle finger and shut down any demands of propriety, rules, and cautions?
It made her heart hurt to remember the blonde, not in a bad way, but just with a wistful ache that made her remember all over again all the little details. That Caden hadn’t been a perfect martyr, and was stubborn, and unruly, and pissed Russell off by refusing help on his hunts…
Not a saint, but sure to God above, they had all looked up to him and loved him endlessly.
She shook her head and, after a moment, just waved him in and hugged him.
Just in case.
Sandy made sure her cheek didn’t touch anything, but she still squeezed him as best she could. “I know you won’t do jack shit but what you want to do, Danny. Just be careful out there, okay?”
Danny rubbed her back and nodded.
He would, but for once in his life, he just couldn’t let something go.
Not this time.
