Page 61 of Demon Hunter

“Your impression is correct. I suspect Dylan is referring to the tedious paperwork human governments insist upon.”

I nod. “Since SuperTask would very definitely not want to attract attention, they’d need to make sure everything looked as legal as possible. That means all their employees would need to be eligible to work in this country, paid on time, taxes up to date. When I first looked into the company, I checked most of that—there’s nothing suspicious. They even have a registered union rep on staff. They’ve done everything possible to make it look like they’re an ordinary business trying to do the right thing, but if their ‘employees’ are demons like we think, that means their tech person had to create legal identities, backgrounds, and paperwork for all of them. At a rate of two per month, plus the time needed to monitor us and make sure we weren’t noticing them, and the usual crap involved in running even a small IT department, that’s a more than full-time job.”

“Couldn’t they hire someone else to run the IT department?” Ian asks.

“Would you want to hire someone tech savvy when you were doing so many dodgy things?” I counter, and he grimaces.

“Point.”

“So SuperTask is using demons as slave labor… and I guess we can assume prostituting them, since I doubt their official services include anything a carnarius demon excels at.” Matt looks faintly sick, and I can’t say I blame him.

“I can find that out for sure, but their coder is good enough to eventually notice once I hack that far into their systems,” I admit. It burns my throat a little to say the words, but I can’t deny it. “There will be fail safes. It’s…” I stop and swallow bile. “It’s my fault Matt got attacked. They probably noticed I kept going back to look at their site, assumed I was suspicious or even that I knew more than I did, and decided to send a warning.”

“Which is why they left his phone and watch but took anything that would point to demonic connections.” Ian shakes his head. “They wanted us to get the warning, but they don’t want the authorities suspecting paranormal activity any more than we do.”

Matt stares directly at me, his gaze fierce. “It’s not your fault. You were doing your job—there’s no way you could have known about all this. I’m a hunter; risk is part of my life.None of thisis your fault.”

Marc stirs a little but says nothing, and I take a deep breath, then shake it off.

“It’s not important right now. What matters is that we have the company name and address, and I can use that to get into the necessary government databases to trace them back to the owners’ names. That will tell us if we’re dealing with someone within the Collective.”

“It would have to be generational,” Marc muses idly. “Since this has been occurring for nearly two hundred years.”

“That we can confirm,” Raum adds.

Matt and Ian exchange a glance. “If it’s a Collective family or network, is this even something that we could trace back through our archives?” Matt asks. “Recent GPS data, sure, but how could we prove that monthly visits to Columbus weren’t innocent? Especially if it’s a large group and the visits are randomized among them?”

“Or they have a reason to be there that’s not connected to the company,” Ian adds. “Another summoning or assignment. A friend or family member they visit. Fuck. I don’t know if the Collective will survive another betrayal like this. We need concrete proof.”

“My concern is that the family is so deeply rooted in the Collective that many will prefer to brush this aside,” Marc counters. “We’ve been working to show hunters that not all demons are vicious animals, but how many would truly care about demons being enslaved? Especially when there’s a long history to show they are contained and not causing harm to humans?”

I shift uncomfortably in my chair, because he’s a hundred percent right. If itisa Collective family, one of the ones that have been around for centuries and are well-liked… well, there’s a whole bunch of hunters who would care more about them than about nameless, faceless demons. And they might be willing to brush the whole situation under the rug—which will definitely endanger, if not destroy, the truce with Crmærdinesgh.

“Let’s all hope it’s not a Collective family, then,” Matt says grimly. “Personally, I’m hoping for a cult like the one I dealt with earlier this year—remember? They thought summoning demons to do farm labor was a clever idea until I re-educated them.”

If the situation were different, I’d laugh, because if I remember right, Matt’s idea of re-education was to rip away the connections of the summoners, prevent them from ever beingable to summon a demon again, and scare the remaining cultists so badly that they actually disbanded just a few months later.

“I’m surprised you haven’t already started looking, Dylan,” he adds, and I realize I left out one very important piece of information.

“I was going to, but then I thought it might be a good idea to open the email first.”

“How?” Raum asks Marc. “How do you live with these humans? Their brains meander freely with no logic.”

“It’s an acquired skill,” Marc replies. “I’m still acquiring it.”

“Rude,” Ian chides. “So rude.”

Marc ignores him. “To which email are you referring, Dylan?”

I quickly explain about the email and chat from earlier—was it just hours ago? It feels like a lifetime has passed. “I was checking how it got through my security filter when you called Ian and told us to come over,” I finish. “I never got the chance to open it.”

“You feel that is more important than finding the names of the people behind this atrocity?” Raum demands, outraged.

“I think the email’s from one of them.”

The squeak that comes from Ian’s mouth is the only thing that breaks the silence until Matt says, “I think I speak for everyone when I say, what the actual fucking fuck?”

“And non-actual fucking fucks,” Raum adds. “All the fucks.”

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