Page 52 of Immortal Unveiled

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Manus felt relief flood him. It had taken a bit of time and effort, but now they were on the same page. There was lots more to impart on Kim, but the first step was done. Kim trusted him.

“Shall we sit down again, Kim?” he asked. “I need to tell you something about your mother.”

Slowly, Kim took her seat on the couch again, and Manus sat down opposite her.

“If you guys don’t need me anymore, then we’ll start preparing dinner,” Tessa said.

Manus cast her a glance. “Thanks for your help, Tessa.”

When she and Hamish walked into the kitchen, Manus took a deep breath and turned back to Kim. “Your mother worked for us. She was an emissarius, a messenger who’d alert us of anything that might be of importance to us or the demons. You might call it spying for us, but what she did helped us protect the human race.”

Kim’s lips parted. “My mother was a spy? But how? What would she know that could help you against the demons?”

“Her work in the museum often brought her in contact with artifacts that have significance to both us and our enemies. Whenever she came across something that she thought was important to us, she alerted us.”

Kim shook her head, visibly surprised by that revelation. “Why did she never tell me? I mean, we told each other everything.”

Manus sighed. “We made her promise not to. It’s important that our secrets are kept. And the more people are let in on them, the more likely we’ll be exposed. We can’t risk that. So much so that when you started questioning the police’s burglar theory and suspecting that there was a supernatural explanation for your mother’s death, I was charged with intervening. We needed you to stop talking about what you’d seen.”

Kim nodded in contemplation. “So, you told me that bogus story about the air conditioning system, and when I called bullshit, you planted fake evidence on that dead guy and somehow made the police connect the dots. But I identified the bracelet. It looked exactly like my mother’s.”

“Because it was identical,” Manus said. “I had it replicated from photos and the original drawings we found in your mother’s home.”

“You broke in?” She furrowed her forehead. “But there were no signs of a break-in.”

Manus exchanged a quick look with Aiden and Pearce. Both shrugged.

“Up to you,” Aiden said.

Kim tossed them all a quizzical look. “What’s going on?”

“I didn’t have to break in,” Manus finally said, having decided that there was no harm in telling her the truth, particularly since he’d have to use his preternatural skills in front of her soon anyway. “I can walk through solid objects such as a door or a wall.”

“What?” Kim blurted out, her mouth dropping open in stunned disbelief. “You mean like a ghost?”

“Kind of. Stealth Guardians can dematerialize their body in order to pass through solid objects, then materialize behind said object. To the human eye it would simply look like a person walking through a wall, as if the wall didn’t exist.”

The implications of his words seemed to sink in. “So, you’re saying you can enter any place, any building, any home?”

Manus nodded.

“So that’s how the demon got in? The front door was closed. He didn’t have to break in.”

Manus shook his head quickly. Kim wasn’t the first human to make the assumption that the demons had the same skills as the Stealth Guardians. “No, demons can’t walk through walls. But they can teleport into a home if they can see where they’re teleporting to, or if they’ve been there before. They use a vortex for that. That’s how he got into your mother’s home, and that’s how he left.”

Kim sighed and sank back into the cushion. “I always thought it would be a relief to find out who killed her and how he got in, but it’s not.” She met Manus’s eyes, and he noticed the resignation in them. “If they can do that, if they can get into any place with their vortexes, then nobody’s safe from them.”

“That’s why we do what we do, and that’s why your mother and so many other humans help us in our mission: to keep them in check, to thwart their efforts, and to eventually defeat and destroy them. Unfortunately, the demons are hard to recognize.”

“What do you mean? Surely, you can recognize a monster when you see one,” Kim said emphatically.

Manus sighed. “Look at me. Do I look human?”

She nodded.

“Yet I’m not. Same goes for the demons.”