Chapter 9: The Plan
The stone hearth in Marcus Thompson’s private study held a fire, but it did nothing to warm the room. The air was gelid, thick with the scent of old leather, treated steel, and dread.
Tara stood before his desk, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. She hadn’t slept. The vision of Ben being swallowed by the maw of the earth, the sound of JT’s choked cry being cut off, played on a loop behind her eyes. She’d run for hours, fueled by pure terror, until her legs gave out and she vomited bile onto the pine needles.
“Start from the beginning again,” Marcus said. His voice was a controlled flatline, but a muscle in his jaw twitched. “The clearing. Describe everything. Even what you think is irrelevant.”
She did. Again. Her words were toneless, hollowed out. When she got to the part about the shadow with the stag-skull head, the one whose voice made her bones feel brittle, Marcus closed his eyes. He didn’t look like the legendary hunter then. He looked like an old man.
“Kane,” he breathed, the word a curse and a prayer. “It’s him. After all these decades of silence.”
“Sir, we have to go now,” Tara implored, her composure cracking. “We have to get him back. He’s… he’s still alive. He has to be.” The alternative was unthinkable, but it hung in the room anyway, a ghost between them.
Marcus opened his eyes. They were the color of flint. “If it is Kane, and he wanted JT dead, he would be dead. Instantly. The demon doesn’t toy with food. He consumes. The fact that he took him… it’s a message. Or a perversion.” He leaned forward, his massive hands flat on the desk. “JT is leverage. Bait. He’s using my son to draw me out. To finish a grudge that’s older than your grandparents.”
“So we’re just leaving him there?” Tara’s voice rose, sharp with disbelief.
“We are planning,” Marcus snapped, the authority slamming back into his tone. “Charging into that creature’s domain with a handful of grief-stricken novices is a suicide run. It’s what he expects. A raw, emotional response. We deny him that.” He stood, pacing to the fire. “We wait. A few days. Let the demon’s vigilance slip. Let him believe we’ve written the boy off as lost. He’ll grow complacent. He’ll relax his guard.”
“And what is JT enduring in those few days?” Tara asked, her voice trembling.
Marcus’s back was to her, his shoulders rigid. The truth was a physical weight on him. “Whatever it is, it will be worse if we fail because we were impulsive. We mobilize the full society. We bring the relics. We plan the approach down to the inch. We hit with overwhelming, silent force when he least expects it. That is how we get my son back alive.” He turned, and his eyes were terrifying in their absolute conviction. “You are to speak of this to no one. The official story is that the patrol was lost to a sinkhole. A tragic accident. Understood?”
Tara nodded, numb. The lies were already coiling around the truth, burying it.
“Good. Dismissed. Get some rest. You’ll need it.”
When she left, Marcus Thompson did not move. He stared into the flames, seeing not fire, but the face of his boy, ten years old, struggling to lift a practice sword too heavy for him. He saw the determined set of his jaw, so like his mother’s. He saw the constant, gaping distance between them, a canyon carved by his own inability to say the right thing, to offer a scrap of praise that wasn’t laced with correction.
His hands clenched into fists so tight the knuckles popped. The thought of what a centuries-old demon of wrath and desire might be doing to his child was a white-hot spike driven through his gut. The waiting would be its own form of torture. But it was the only play he had.