Chapter 109

“Jo….”
Damn it! She’d fallen asleep. And once again, it was someone she did not care to see hovering over her when she opened her eyes. Cadon.
“Dad wants to talk to you. If you’re done slobbering all over Martin, maybe you could go up front and sit with him while he flies the plane? Try not to break anything.”
She wasn’t sure whether she should be offended or horrified. Turning to look at Martin, her eyes were wide. She hardly knew the man, but Cadon was right. She was sleeping on his shoulder.
At least she wasn’t actually drooling.
“So sorry,” she said, hoping her horrified face was enough to convince him that she meant it.
“No problem,” Martin said with a shrug. “You seemed to need the sleep.”
He was right, so she didn’t argue with him. It was easier to just go gently into the night… or into the cockpit of the plane, anyway. She got up and stepped around her brother, giving him a wide berth, and made her way through the haul of the plane, trying not to fall over and further embarrass herself.
Her father looked very comfortable in the pilot’s seat, even though he probably hadn’t flown a plane of this size for years, as far as she knew. She didn’t know when he’d flown any plane recently, for that matter.
“Hi, Jo,” Aaron said as she sat down. He smiled at her but watched her carefully as she sat down in the copilot’s chair, making sure she didn’t bump anything. He would’ve done the same no matter who was taking Cadon’s place.
“Hey, Dad.” She was still groggy and was pretty sure he could tell she’d just woken up. “Where are we?”
“In a plane.” Jo raised an eyebrow at him, and he laughed. “Sorry. I guess Elliott is rubbing off on me a little bit. We are not quite across the Atlantic yet.”
“Gosh, I guess I was asleep for a longer amount of time than I thought.” She forgot that she was hoping he didn’t realize she’d been asleep.
“Do you feel better?” her father asked, “now that you’ve gotten some sleep?”
“I don’t know,” Jo admitted. “My neck is a little stiff.”
“Yeah, I can’t imagine it’s difficult to sleep in a cargo plane. It’s not like you have a comfortable seat to lie down in.”
Jo decided it was best to change the subject before he asked her enough questions to find out that she’s actually fallen asleep on a stranger’s shoulder. “How do you feel about being back?”
Aaron made a face. “Not great,” he said. “I mean, it’s always nice to see you and your brother… and the others.”
“All of them?” Jo asked, thinking some of the people in the back had to get on his nerves, too, even though they’d never know it.
Laughing, he said, “Yeah. Usually. But… Christian and I might’ve been on to something just before I got Brandon’s text, so I really wanted to stick around and see if it panned out.”
Jo felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. This might actually be important, even though her dad was trying to play it off a little bit. “What was it that you were on to?” she asked.
He cleared his throat and shrugged, which told her that he was afraid he was going to get her hopes up for no reason. While he knew that she was the most skeptical of anyone that her mother was still alive, he probably had also figured out that she was starting to come around to the idea that it was at least possible that her mom was out there somewhere.
“Well, we found a new portal, one that we didn’t know existed before.”
“A new portal?” Jo was a little confused. She was under the impression that there were probably hundreds of portals that they hadn’t mapped out yet.
“Yeah, this one is different from the others. It’s within the Blood Moon Portal.”
“A portal within a portal?” Jo was confused. She ran her hand through her hair and tried to figure out how that was possible. She had never been inside any of the portals, so it was difficult for her to comprehend exactly what he was talking about. “How can you find a portal within a portal?”
“It’s sort of complicated to explain, but basically, we found an opening in the Blood Moon Portal that opened to… a different area of the portal that we didn’t know existed before. We thought that all of the portal openings provided passage from the Blood Moon Portal to various places in the universe, most of them to earth, but not all of them. It turns out that one of them sort of doubles back and creates a tunnel into a different layer of the Blood Moon portal itself.”
“You’re right,” Jo said. “It is difficult to understand.”
Aaron chuckled, but it was clear he was still distracted. “Anyway, Christian was headed inside of this new portal to try to look for your mom, but we have no idea if it’s just a passage that leads to a large space like the main area of the portal, or if it’s got branches off of it, like the portal we’ve been familiar with all these years.”
“And you think there’s a chance Mom might be in there?” It wasn’t really a question.
“That’s a possibility,” her dad said, but he didn’t sound particularly hopeful. Jo had to assume that he was tired of getting his hopes up every time there was a new possibility. How many times over the years had he and Christian thought they had found the place where her mom had been hidden away only to discover that they were wrong?
Jo still didn’t understand why anyone would hide her mom when they could just kill her, and no one had been able to explain that to her throughout the years either.
“So… does that mean you’ll be headed back into the portal as soon as you drop us off?” Jo asked, dreading to hear the answer.
“I’m not sure,” Aaron said. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. It seems like you’re doing a great job of handling the responsibility I gave you.”
A scoff came out of her lips before she could control it. “I’ve gotten two Hunters killed, Dad.”
“You aren’t responsible for either one of those deaths, Jo. These scandium bullets are a huge game changer, something none of us could’ve anticipated. It sounds like you’ve dealt with that pretty effectively. And you weren’t even with Margie’s Hunter that was lost in this last fight.”
“That doesn’t mean that I’m not responsible. I was still in charge.”
“Jo, you have to learn to let things like that go. If you dwell on them, it’ll just come back to bite you later, and you won’t be able to make decisions anymore. You’ll be too caught up in the what-ifs.”
She knew he had a point, but that didn’t make it any easier for her to make her brain cooperate.
“If Lucas is fairly confident that Holland is cornered, then I might stay and see this through,” Aaron said. “I would like to end her once and for all--right after we find out if she knows anything about your mom.”
“She says she doesn’t,” Jo reminded him. “She also says that it’s Daunator calling the shots.”
“Daunator?” Aaron replied, his eyes widening. “That’s not possible.”
“She says that he went through a portal and didn’t actually explode.”
“She’s lying,” Aaron countered. “Daunator exploded. I saw it. Christian saw it. He was right there when it happened. If he had gone through a portal, your mom would’ve gone with him.”
Jo stared at her father for a moment. She hadn’t wanted to believe Holland when she’d told her that Daunator was pulling the strings, but it seemed like it had to be someone awfully powerful to be able to accomplish everything that had happened since the Revelation.
And it didn’t seem like it was Holland herself. After all, she’d been in hiding nearly this entire time, so how could she be the one making Crimson Crotch and the others do her bidding?
Was it possible that there could be someone else as powerful as Daunator would be if he hadn’t died all those years ago?
“Who do you think it is, then?” she asked her dad, hoping he had a logical answer.
“Who do I think is behind all of this? Holland. I think she’s been biding her time, waiting for the Vampires to have the upper hand all across the world, and then she’ll come out and claim her throne. Last time, she was too quick to act, and it cost her. This time… she’s been overly cautious.”
“How is she making people do what she wants when she’s not even on the same continent as them?” Jo asked, not sure how all of this worked.
“Well, she has always been able to manipulate people from long distances.” Her father made a face that made Jo wonder if there was more to the situation. He sighed and looked over to the side, away from her. When he looked back at her, he still looked bothered. “She was able to control me for several months once, when she was in Europe, and I was in Kansas City.”
“What?” Jo couldn’t believe what she was hearing. No one had ever mentioned this to her before. “She had control of you?”
Aaron nodded. “I don’t like to talk about it. It’s not one of my prouder moments, but yeah. She was that powerful then. Now, after spending all of this time in the portal, well, who knows the tricks she’s learned.”
“How did you know it was her controlling you?” she asked. There were a lot of other questions regarding this new information that she wanted to ask, but she wasn’t sure how many he’d be willing to answer.
“Jamie figured it out, and Cassidy was able to get into my head and set me free.”
“Did she… do anything… too horrible?”
“Holland? No. She just kept me from going after her. We had planned to wipe out all of the Vampires in the world at that time. We were calling it Annihilation. She knew that, and obviously, that didn’t work with her plans. So she found a way to get into my head and make sure it didn’t happen. Until Jamie found out what had happened, and Cassidy went into my brain and forced her out.”
“Wow.” Jo wasn’t sure what else to say. She doubted her dad would ever mention this again. And she knew he was trusting her not to tell anyone else, though it sounded like a few of the older LIGHTS members already knew about it.
“Jo, if I stay, I want you to continue to run things. I’ll chime in through your IAC if I need to, but I’m not planning to take over the entire mission.”
Jo’s heart began to hammer in her chest. “What? Why not?” she asked. “But you’re the Guardian Leader.”
“Is there really a Guardian Leader at the moment? There’s not really a LIGHTS, hasn’t been for years.”
“Well, if what Margie was just able to do counts for anything, I think there is.”
“That was mostly the Australian Army--of humans. It’s not like all of those troops were Guardians or Hunters.”
He had a point, but still, she wanted to believe that LIGHTS still existed and that he was the one in charge of it. Because she didn’t want to be. “Dad, people are going to naturally look to you to call the shots.”
“They didn’t naturally look to Elliott to do it, and he was my right hand man for a long time. You’re still in charge, Jo. I won’t be around forever, you know.”
She turned and looked at him, not sure why he’d said that. Did he mean because he was going back into the portal? Theoretically, he could be around forever, if he wanted to be. He was a Guardian, for crying out loud. Nothing could kill them--except for scandium and Hunters.
Except for in the portals. “Is there something dangerous in the portal that you think might prevent you from coming back?”
“Yeah,” Aaron said. “Me.”