Keeper Chronicles: Awakening Read Online Free Page A

They needed her. Lorek was old; his daughter, grown. Maybe he’d had a heart attack sitting in his tower watching television. There were worse ways for a Keeper to go.
    He grabbed his water-tight pack and shoved his spare ranger’s uniform, gun, and an extra clip of ammo inside. Almost as an afterthought, he added his phone and wallet. His wetsuit hung behind the orange-flowered curtain that sectioned off part of his wall, and he put it on as he’d done hundreds of times before. It’d do the demons a disservice if he caught cold and died in his bed.
    The Jet Ski had its own private dock off the side of the island, and he stepped over the bodies of a dozen different demons on his way to crank it down into the turbulent water. Rain pelted him, dripping down his face and into his eyes as the waves drenched his legs. So much for getting dry.
    Once the Jet Ski was in the water, he climbed on and unhooked the rope securing it to the metal pier. Rough waters were his favorite, and he backed away from the island he called home and headed south along the Pacific toward Cape Creek. A built-in GPS system guided him down the coastline as he jumped the waves, crouching on his feet to keep his center of gravity lower to the water. Despite the exhaustion—the energy drinks and protein bars hadn’t done much to revive his strength—he grinned.
    Sometimes when he went for long boat rides or took the Jet Ski out, he wondered just where the demon world was. Parallel dimensions and the multiverse were all well and good in the realms of theoretical physics or science fiction, but in the real world, few believed them possible. None but Keepers who spent their lives, quite literally, protecting mankind from the refuse that slipped between dimensions few believed existed. Some witches did, but covens varied widely. Every once in a while one of the Keepers had to venture inland and destroy whatever demon some naive coven had raised and then been unable to control. Even talking about demons or monsters or witches would earn him a one-way trip to the asylum if a normal person overheard. For them, it was well and good to watch television shows or movies that depicted the hidden reality of the world right under their noses—a world they refused to believe in. Gabe didn’t mind. It kept them out of his way.
    That still didn’t solve his conundrum of where, exactly, demons came from. The collision of elemental forces, such as those created when severe storms did the impossible and momentarily united the realms of air, fire, water, and earth in a strike of lightning near the ocean’s shore, allowed the creatures to cross over from a place the lore only named the Red. But the door was one way. Demons could enter our world under precise conditions, and had been doing so as long as there’d been life here—hence their frequency in the world’s mythology and folktales—but a person could never survive a trip going the other way. At least, not a normal one.
    Physicists claim that just as ours isn’t the only sun in existence, maybe our universe isn’t a singularity either. Could demons be what passed for conscious life in another universe, traveling across dimensions in a wormhole or other type of space rift? The thought was an intriguing one. Growing up, he’d always wanted to study physics at a university and find the answers for himself. Do research. However, that kind of life wasn’t in his destiny. Gabe had a duty, as his father liked to remind him, and tonight that duty was going to be more unpleasant than normal.
    The headlights of his Jet Ski illuminated the entrance to the sandy cove created where Cape Creek emptied into the Pacific Ocean. A favorite of sea lions and whales in the right season, the cove was normally a pleasant place and a destination for tourists or guests staying at the bed-n-breakfast. The sandy beach was the size of two football fields and lined on the north and east sides with storm-battered pines. Trails led up