Chapter 150 - The Council

The note, instead of throwing away, I carefully folded and put in my purse. This was a memory. This held history, just like the antique relics I bought and sold for living. I smiled again at that memory as I went on with the day.

The thoughtfulness with which JJ set an alarm on my phone gave me just enough time to prepare and freshen up before someone—a young woman in serving staff uniform—was sent to call me to a conference room.

By the time I walked in, Elena was already there, sitting at the head of a long table, perusing a stack of papers, sometimes making notes. A small camera stood on the table, pointing at her with its lens. At the opposite end of the room, a projector shot an image of a screensaver on a white screen. Next to a smaller table in a corner, a guy who looked like a stereotypical technician IT nerd sat with a somewhat bored expression.

Elena perked up at my arrival. "Diana. Come in." She gestured at a seat next to her. "Sit. You look much better—this is good. The conference will start in a few more minutes. Do you remember what you will have to say?"

"Totally." My voice was unhappy when I said that. I sat down and propped my head on my palm. While it was true that I remembered the terrible trace of the demon Malakbel, I didn't want to remember it if I could avoid it. The images danced in the back of my mind, offset for now by more recent events, but I knew that speaking or even just thinking about them closer would bring them forward.

"Sit silently until I call for you. Understood?"

"Yes, sure."

"Well then," Elena said and returned to her notes, leaving me to count minutes until the brief interlude will end and the bad things will start to happen again—or at least, I will be brought face to face with these things.

The conference began exactly on schedule. The technician became alert; the screensaver disappeared from the wall, and instead, faces of people appeared until they filled the entire screen and became too small to distinguish the features. I sat straighter, looking at these people, some familiar and some not, and happy that I wasn't in the camera's eye.

Just as I expected, the conference began with some general clamour until a single speaker overwhelmed them all. The technician enlarged her shot, and I saw a familiar face of Eternalroot's replacement Elder, or Spider-Woman, as I called her. Her eyes darted across the room—or across her own screen, I imagined, with ire bordering on fury. She looked ready to growl and so twitchy she must've drunk a couple of entire pots of coffee.

"Enough, enough, enough! I had enough of that arguing. Tell me, what is being done to stop the demon?"

"The demon your Elder summoned," someone just had to say. I huffed through my nose.

Spider-Woman did actually growl, but then, thankfully, was cut off by someone else.

"We should start with pulling together the information from our sources and summarising current situation in the city," someone much better said and his face replaced Spider-Woman's. "The demon moved to…"

The man droned on and on, throwing names of the streets and statistics of people evacuated from the city, people mutated, people trampled to injury and death in panic, and people who died because of something connected with their mutations. At least, according to him, vampires did a great job in focusing efforts of the city's government on evacuation instead of sending police force to attack the demon.

It would've been much more engaging—and horrible—to read if the man didn't speak mostly in numbers. These just vent over my head, and the only things I could understand is that they weren't zero. While the demon, as far as I understood, didn't kill anyone directly—even those who attacked him, he just put into a state of paralysis that wore off in a few hours—people still died.

Then, the speaker changed, and I had something more given to think than numbers and a hollow feeling of sorrow for all who were unlucky enough to become the demon's victim.

"Our coven's sentries spotted several shapeshifters moving toward the Central District. They were in animal forms: a wolf, a snow leopard, and a badger. These three packs rarely come together, and badgers specifically, as far as my sources tell me, only presented by a single family tree. I tried to contact a leader of one of the wolf packs of the city, but got no response. I find the sudden activity of shapeshifters alarming and want to alert all present to the possibility that might become a threat, too."

"Shapeshifters? They don't have enough of them in here to be a threat," someone said with a scoff. "But it's no good to let the mongrels just run around whenever they want, too, even now. We should keep up the guard at our territories and not show them they can just stroll whenever they like. Their place is on the fringes, and this is where it should be."

"I find it more alarming that a wolf and a leopard were together. Dogs and cats never mixed well. Did the threat of a demon pulled them together?"

"If they felt afraid of the demon, then why would they walk towards it, not away from it?"

"Fellow witches, we didn't gather today for speculation. Thank you for the information about the shifters, but we should concentrate on an actual threat that's right before our noses, and not on the one that's possibly something entirely harmless. The demon. I was made aware that the teams sent to Eternalroot found out its name—Malakbel. There was no mention of it in our coven's books, though."

"Neither was there in ours, but," Elena spoke up, turned to me, "I'd like to let speak the person who had a key role in discovering this precious information. Diana, please."