3. The case of the chinese whispers

We lay low for a while. I redo Vincent’s tattoos and can practically hear the demon growl under his skin as I do so. Henry has his eyes seen to, and then goes away for a while to recuperate. Then they split us up to do different tasks. They send Cassie to Nanga to fetch back Niall for our next assignment. Max and MacKenzie are also given different secrets tasks to perform, while Vincent and I are sent on a long journey west to China. I take this as a sign of trust in us – particularly in my much improved ability to be discreet. Vincent’s task is to locate and escort a nurse from China back to Bretonia, while I have a secret rendezvous with M.

Vincent got a bit lost, he tells me later. The chinese part of town is a maze of roads and alleys and backways. The note he has with him is not much use, as it apparently means different things whether you turn it one way or another. The scriblings meant ‘sea horse’ – or something – and it turns out that it is a guest house for white people in the middle of the chinese sector. There he does in deed find the nurse, and escorts her back to our ship at the harbour.

Meanwhile I find the teahouse where I am to meet M for our covert meeting. I stand descreetly in the doorway and look around, trying to spot M. But he is being so discreet I can’t see him anywhere. What I can see is a table with a group of rather mysteriously looking characters – one of them with tattoos on his neck. I would like to study them, but I had better not. At another table sits 3 elderly ladies, very proper and demure. A pretty, young girl comes over to me – taking tiny steps in her tight chinese dress. She has flowers and chopsticks in her hair. She bows to me, and I try to shoo her away. She bows again and says ‘I am you hostess. I find you table?’. ‘No no’ I say ‘No need. I am here to meet someone’ I whisper the last part. She looks a bit confused and I try in a louder voice, which sometimes helps when you speak to foreigners ‘I am here to meet someone! Ah, I see them now!’ I point at the old ladies and go to their table and sit down. I figure it will be easier to spot M, if I sit quietly somewhere. I smile to the ladies, but they do not smile back. They say nothing, but shortly after they all leave. I decide I might as well have a cup of tea. I look for the milk and find a small jug of white liquid, which I pour into the cup. And then I add the tea. I look around and smile friendlylike to the people around me. Many of them stare at me. It is quite difficult to be discreet, when you stick out like a sore thumb. I pretend to be normal and take a sip of my tea. Ugh! It tastes terrible and I spit it out all over the table! I guess the white liquid wasn’t milk at all, but some sort of alcohol. The little hostess runs over as fast as she can with her tiny footsteps to ask if she can help. I wave her away and wipe my tongue with the tablecloth to get that godsawful taste off. Then, over the distressed chatter of the hostess, I hear a voice ‘Pssst!’ and I look up and see M motioning to me from a booth at a higher level. I wave at him and hurry up to him. When I arrive he is hiding his face in one hand. I sit down very quietly next to him and whisper ‘It is I! Grace!’. He makes a strangled sound and then sighs deeply ‘Yes, I know’ he says and looks up. He looks tired. He must be working too hard. I smile encouragingly at him.

He then tells me of our assignment: We are to get the politician Gladstone to withdraw from his post in the hiring commitee. ‘Is he a demon?!’ I ask, quite in shock. M looks at me a long time ‘No’, he then says and continue: Gladstone is sick and has hired a nurse to take care of him. We are to switch out the nurse with the one Vincent has found. Gladstone must be stopped at all costs, and if we can do it without using the nurse, it will be good. I try to get specifications as to why we are to do this, and M only tells me that it will be a good thing for the Organization to have someone in Gladstone’s position, so we can get influence over who gets hired to work for the government. ‘And he is not a demon or possessed by a demon?’ I ask (admittedly a little dissapointed). M sighs and says ‘No’. ‘Is he likely to hire someone who IS a demon?’ I ask, and M looks even more tired ‘Will you stop with the demons? There are no demons involved!’ I look at him and nod and smile. Off course he would never say so in a public teahouse, so I wink at him and say ‘Off course, Sir. No demons at all’. Of course there must be demons involved or they would not give this task to us! He waves me away and as I get up I accidently hit the lacquered room divider that seperates our booth from the next. It fall right onto the guy sitting there and his rather sharp eating knife pierces the wall. I apologizes to him and try to help him up – it turns out the be the tattood fellow from before, who has apparently left his friends to sit by himself. M says he will handle it, and sends me away. I find Vincent and the nurse right outside and we board the ship and sail home the next morning. Fortunately I still have my rocks in my pocket, so I don’t get too seasick.

By the time we get home, everyone are together again: Cassie and Niall are back from Nanga, and MacKenzie and Max are in the house as well. I show Cassie my chinese silken dress and the lucky cat-figurine that I bought. When we all sit down together MacKenzie tells us she has been to a Artemis festival, where she met Gladstone’s secretary, who goes by the name Tempel, because he grew up in a temple. He is from the northern part of Nanga, where they are lighter skinned than the true nangarians. She became friendly with him, and he might be a way into Gladstone’s house. Max was at a boxing fight (difficult to imagine) to foil some bet Gladstones chief of security had made. I think he failed. Niall was supposed to have intercepted the nurse from Nanga, that Gladstone has hired, but failed in this task. Caroline Mathilde had been at the party, where the interception was to have taken place, and she distracted him somewhat. He appeared to be a little bit embarressed about that. Well, I would too, if I had failed my task! I told them about my secret meeting with M, and explained the plan to them, and asked everyone to be on the look out for possible demons.

Cassie later told me privately about locating Niall: how she had searched for him in a village, and everybody had called him the Great White Boom-boom. The whole village had then led her to him – mostly the children, but also men and women, who was probably fascinated by her blond hair and pale skin. She found him in a bar, where he was sitting barechested with a bunch of friends, drinking. He appeared to have been drinking for quite a while. Cassie told me he has a tattoo on his chest. Of a lion! I would like to see that! But I am a bit daunted to ask. Well, she got him to come back with her, and even attended the ball, where he was to stop the nurse from going on her ship. When they failed to stop her, they took a faster ship home, and now we all have the task of stopping her from getting off her ship again. It is supposed to dock tomorrow.

We have a plan: Niall has reported to the Health Department that the ship the nurse is on is most likely infested with some sort of nangan typhoid that only affects females. Cassie is the expert doctor on the field (or has said that she is) and she and Vincent are to go to the ship while it is in quarantine – Cassie to examine the women and Vincent to examine their papers (and steal the papers from the nurse, so she can’t enter Bretonia). They do well; Vincent gets the papers and the nurse is put in prison for travelling without papers. So far so good.

We decide to investigate a bit about this Gladstone, whom we are suppose to get out of the political business. I, for one, wants to know what kind of demons might be involved. One have to be prepared. We find nothing of demons, but we find out this: He is about 60 years old, a widower with no children. He only has a niece who is currently abroad working as a nurse. He was previously the Minister of Infrastructure, got knighted and got elected to the House of Lords. He is popular and has a rather good reputation. How much easier would this not be if he had been a scoundrel, who treated people cruelly? But that does not seem to be the case. We go to a pub to discuss how to proceed. I feel uncomfortable with the task. I know it is our assignment, but it smells like corruption if we are to get rid of a good man, so the Organization can get a man they can control in his place. Is this a test? Vincent wonders. And a test of what? Our loyalty or our morale? Cassie is adamant: this is our task and we must perform it! Niall is in the opposite end: he thinks we should not destroy a good man, just because the Organization says so. The rest of us are caught in between. And I must say that though it makes me feel really bad: if the Organization gives me a direct order (or if Cassie does) to do him in, I will have to do so.

In the middle of our discussion a group of men burst into the pub: chinese men, 8 of them, and armed to the teeth! I recognize one of them as the tattooed man I saw in the teahouse in China! One of the others seem to call him ‘Yu Dai’ which sounds a bit ominous to me. They attack us and MacKenzie and I jump up to defend our friends. We do the shield thing that has worked for us before, using wooden chairs as shields and our batons as weapons. Max, Cassie and Vincent run for the exit, and we cover their escape. The chinese men throws some rather ingenious metal stars at us, which we fortunately catch with the chairs. They outnumber us, but they are no match for MacKenzie, Niall and me. When one of them raise some big tube to his shoulder and points it at us, we manage to turn it aside and whatever it was fires into the bar. A bar full of whisky and gin with light up in quite a blaze and won’t die down before great amounts of beer is poured over the fire. In the confusion we all escaped. I told the others that I recognized one of our attackers from the teahouse in China, and someone mentioned that I may not have been as discreet as I thought I had. I don’t know. It might have been a coincidence…

The tension is still there when we get home. So we decide to get more information to base our actions on. We only have 7 days, so we can only afford to spend one day investigating. We find out this:

• The Hiring Commitee has several cases up to debate in 7 days. The only significant one is the appointing of a new Chief of Police – a very powerful position obviously.
• There are two candidates: Clint Hilton, who is the conservative candidate, and Andrew Triumph, who is the liberal candidate. Neither one of them seem suspicious in any way. Hilton was named as a candidate by the House of Commons, and Triumph was named by Philip MacCallister, the minister of Justice.
• Gladstone often goes for the liberal candidates. There does not seem to be anything strange about these former appointments.
• A search of Gladstone’s office reveals nothing strange or suspicious.
• Gladstone’s finances seem healthy and he has not recently come into a large amount that might suggest a bribe.
• Gladstone is generally not a religious man. He is the member of a secular group, that does not seem to pose any threat. Other than their unfortunate disbelief in demons and other pecularities.

None of these facts gives us a clear picture of the problem the Organisation wants us to prevent, so now it comes down to one thing: Do we trust the Organisation or not?

Is is a dreadful fight! The anger and the yelling, the futile reasoning and the accusasions! My heart is beating super fast, and I constantly fight the urge to crawl into a corner with my hands over my ears. I have to stand with the Organisation. Without Cassie, her father and ultimately the Organisation I would still be locked up in the asylum. That is if one of the demons had not had luck to kill me by now. They have saved my life. And they have never ever asked me to do something that was wrong. They have lectured me every time I have been in the grey zone myself. I trust Cassie. I trust her family. And I trust the Organisation.

Niall and MacKenzie does not. Niall says he suspects the whole Organisation is corrupt and in the wrong. He wants us to betray the Organisation, and tell Gladstone that the Organisation is trying to get him killed. He says that I should be put in prison for killing demons. I cannot understand that he feels this way about me, so I ask him if that is truly how he feels, and he repeats that he does. I cannot believe this! My throat is tight and I really, really want to sit in that corner now! I thought he was my friend! Why is he even here, working for the Organisation if he does not believe in it’s cause? How he must dislike me, if he would condemn me to a life behind bars. He scares me! And MacKenzie, who have always defended me against cruel and snide remarks, says nothing. Does she too believe I belong in prison or in an asylum? Oh oh oh, I can’t bear this!

Cassie is off course all for the Organisation, having grown up in it and being part of it her entire life. Cassie’s sense of right and wrong is always so strong, and I cannot believe she should be wrong about this. And as she stresses over and over again: We are asked to remove the man from his post, not to kill him!

Vincent can see Nialls and MacKenzie’s points, but like me he owes his life to the Organisation, and finds it hard to believe we should be ordered to do something truly foul. He stand with me and Cassie.

Max looks like he would rather sit in a corner with his hands over his ears too. He looks pale and every bit as uncomfortable with this as I am. All this yelling and confrontation. I get yelled at, and I yell back, and I hate it! It breaks my heart. Give me a demon any day! Those I know how to fight. But how do I fight this? How do I fight my friends? I cannot fight with words. And I would never fight them physically. What if I hurt them? That would be terrible!

They leave in anger. It feels like a terrible tear in the fabric of reality. They do not just leave the house, but the Organisation. With their parting words they say that they will fight our effort to fullfil our order. Oh oh oh!

Vincent and I retreat to the safety of our room. Cassie joins us, and soon Max knocks on the door as well. He looks positively shell shocked! We are all shaken, but we have to move fast! MacKenzie and Niall can destroy everything, if we do not – the mission, the Organisation, us. Cassie and Vincent goes to get Gladstone’s niece (apparently the nurse from Nanga is his niece – that fact went completely over my head). We will try to get her to convince Gladstone to retire early (as in right now) – this I actually think is way better than any other plan we have made so far to curb Gladstone! Max goes to try and contact somebody – ANYBODY – from the Organisation to find out more about the Why of our mission.

Meanwhile I run to Gladstone’s house to warn the nurse there, that Niall and MacKenzie might try to hurt her or blow her cover. Also I must somehow prevent them from revealing the existance of the Organisation to Gladstone. I know I will have to get past the chief of security, so I bring a bottle of gin. It seems the best way in – knowing his reputation. I knock on Gladstone’s door. The door is opened by the chief of security, and I say “HellocouldIspeaktothenurseplease?”. He gives me a look, so I smile friendlylike at him, and say “Gin?”. I show him the bottle of gin that should make him let me pass. He likes the bottle, but does not let me pass. He suggests that I should take a drink with him, and I think that I can trick him into getting drunk. We go to the antechamber on the first floor and I sit on a bench with my back against the wall. He pours me a drink. When he upends his glas I throw the contents of my glass over my right shoulder, splashing gin on the wall and soaking my shoulder in the stuff. He tuts at me and pours me another drink, and this time he looks sharply at me, so I have no other choice but to drink up. Faw! It tastes awful! It burns in my mouth and stings all the way down my throat, and I am sure it tries to burn through my stomach wall! ‘Cheers’ he says ‘Allways a pleasure to drink wi’ a pretty gal’. I salute him and drink the terrible stuff he has refilled my glass with. It’s less terrible this time. By the fourth glass isno so ba’. I lean ba’ an’ ‘e says ‘Wotcha, lady, yar in the wall kinda!’. And I am: halfway in the wall – like I was with my feet back at the entrance to Tartaros. It feels soft and cozylike and I like it. I lean further back and my upper body is outside. It is raining, so I sit up straight in a hurry, whiping my face. He stares at me, and I smile at him and cheer once more. Good stuff, this gin! Then his head spin around and he looks almost sober – there is some commotion downstairs. He races out, and I hear him talking to Niall and MacKenzie by the stairs, ordering them to give him their weapons. I pour myself another drink, and I lean back to swill it down and then there is a huge bang and a flash of lightning. I am so surprised that I fall back through the wall – somersaulting back into thin air and I fall into a crouch at Cassie’s feet on the street. What the hell?

The fall sobers me up a little bit and I look up at Cassie. She looks like she is in shock. “Grace!” she says “How did you…? What…? How?!”. *Wha’ was that bang?” I ask. Max raises a hand and waves “A bomb. Just a bit of smoke and noise, nothing more”. He smiles at me reasuringly as masses of smoke billows out of the doorway behind him. “W’should take t’ backdoor” I say and start to wonder why I talk so weird. My teeth are buzzing – that might be it. Difficult to enunciate with buzzing teeth. A maid opens the backdoor, when we knock, and she seems completly willing to let us in, when we ask for the nurse. She tells us that the nurse is upstairs waiting for Mr. Gladstone to come home. So apparently he isn’t home. Doggonnit! I yell very loudly “Miss Nurse! Someone’s come to hurt you. S’not us. We’re comin'”. We run up the servants’ stairs. Vincent overtake me on the way and accuse me of being drunk. “Am not!” I say, but his look makes me think. Drinking gin had not been the plan, and drinking gin makes people drunk. So maybe I was a bit drunk. “Mebbe” I say “My plan kinda backfired”. He nods and then shakes his head at me with a croocked grin. Well, we are in a right hurry, so we split up in our efforts to find the nurse and stop the siblings. I run along the servants’ backway and run into something hard and very noisy, when it drops. Why would anyone put a suit of armour in a servants’ hall? Plain silly if you ask me! I run up some stairs and down some stairs, and then I run into Max, who appears to be lost in the basement. We hear noises from up above, so we find some stairs going up (come to think of it: all stairs go up, when you are at the bottom of them). I run up and into a hallway and smack into a naked man, who is yelling at me: What is going on? Someone has taken his washcloth. What the hell! And who the heck am I? “I’m the one looking for t’nurse” I say and open every door I can find. I find a broomcloset of the dark and spooky kind, but with no nurse, so I continue opening other doors. Finally I find myself with all of the others near a room with a nurse in it. Vincent is in the room with the nurse, Niall stand by the door with a drawn pistol, Cassie is trying to persuade him to put the pistol away and finally he does. Then he dives for the nurse’s bag, but she gets it first, so he falls on his face. Max tries to subdue him by sitting on him. I look out the window and see an airballoon. I am admittedly a little surprised, especially since it is coming this way, but I yell at the nurse to get into the balloon, and quite unexpectedly she does. MacKenzie races to the balloon and holds on to it with one hand and onto the balcony with the other.Her muscles are bulging in a most impressive way! She yells that the nurse has poisoned Gladstone and that the antidote is in the bag. Now Vincent dives for the bag, but falls between the balcony and the balloon to the street below. Fortunately it is not a long drop. I see chinamen in the balloon – one of them is the tattooed one who keeps yelling Yu Dai, every time he sees me (maybe it is my chineese name? That’s sorta sweet). Niall says from carpetlevel “M is corrupt. He ordered the nurse to poison Gladstone”. Suddenly many things make more sense: it was of course never the Organisation that was corrupt – it was M all along! And M couldn’t wait for our peaceful plan to play out, so he ordered the nurse to poison Gladstone! Max lets Niall up, and he grabs his rifle and shoots a hole in the balloon. A high hissing noise emits from the balloon and it slowly starts to descend. I jump into the balloon to fight the chinamen, MacKenzie joins me, and I toss the Yu Dai guy over the side of it. I see him get up and limp down the street in a hurry. Once the balloon is at groundlevel, the nurse is subdued and her bag confiscated. We need to get the antidote to Gladstone in a hurry – we really do not want him to die! Then Max tells us what Dr. Edwards (Cassie’s father) told him, when he finally found someone from the Organization: that the seers – several of them – had forseen that if Gladstone was left on his post, he would cause the downfall of the Empire. Well, that would truly suck, but we would still not want him to die.

It may turn out that M, corrupt though he is, saves the empire. Gladstone must be saved – he must get the antidote in time – but with a little luck he is too ill to keep his post in the Hiring Commitee. His niece could take him to the countryside for the fresh air and the calm surroundings. But M is going down for sure! He so broke our laws of ethics. I am glad that his attempts to corrupt us failed – we would not have killed Gladstone either way. Or you know… maybe I would have, if the Empire was at stake. Don’t tell Niall that.

Once again we race through a city – this time towards instead of away from. We have had to leave Niall behind – he was hurt during the fight. Gladstone’s servants told us that he was at the Zoological Garden for some event concerning the Zoo’s new animals: the giraffes. We accidently tip over a chestnut booth, but keep running. Once at the Zoo there are guards at the entrance, but Vincent race past them and yell insults at them in the process. They promptly take off after him. I follow, but run face first into a lamppost. The iron stings and a lumb the size of an egg blooms on my forhead. My head is spinning, but I continue running, this time after MacKenzie, Cassie and Max. We can see a large crowd of people to our left, so we head right to get to the giraffes faster. We pass the monkey, who get very exited when they see us, and they start flinging stuff at us as we pass. Urgh, I’m hit on the shoulder and I can smell the nature of their ammunition: monkey poo. Gross! On the other side of the cage with the distasteful monkeys we find the giraffes. In front of their cage is a stage with dignitaries and a in front of that a lot of people come to see the giraffes and, I suppose, the dignitaries. On the other side of the crowd we spot Vincent, who looks a bit wild. Suddenly MacKenzie goes wild: she waves and whistles and calls out for Vincent. She has spotted something that we have not: the chinamen from earlier who is sneaking up on Vincent. MacKenzie fights her way through the crowd to help him with them. Cassie, Max and I dicreetly elbows through the crowd to get to Gladstone, who is on the stage giving a speech. He does not look well: sweaty, pale and a little woozy. The poison must be setting in. Cassie goes behind the stage, but some guards stop her. There are a lot of guards! I aproach the stage from the side and discreetly try to get Gladstone’s attention. “Psst! Sir! You need antidote!”. Some guards grab me and try to drag me away. I hold on to the foofarah that decorates the stage and it starts to tear away. Suddenly there is a loud bang and a lot of smoke surrounds us. Did Max just throw one of his bombs into a crowd of people?! Well, the guards let me go, now that this new and more pressing danger has presented itself, and I jump onto the stage. I grab hold of Gladstone and drags him over to Cassie. Suddenly MacKenzie is on the stage too. She has thrown herself at some lady to protect her from the blast of the bomb. Within seconds MacKenzie is at the bottom of a pile of guards and policemen. She manages to point out Yu Dai, who looks busy trying to get a rocket looking object out of his bag. He looks up, and when he sees he has the attention of the guards, the dignitaries and half the crowd, he turns and runs. I hear MacKenzie cry out “Are You all right, your Majesty” at a young lady surrounded by protective people. Oh! So the queen is here! Max is going to be in so much trouble for trowning a bomb at the queen! Cassie gets Gladstone to drink the antidote, and I tell him that he should go to the countryside as soon as possible to get some fresh air, as he looks like shit and certainly won’t be able to handle his job the next couple of days. All looks to be in good hands now, so I stand away. I look straight into the face of Lady Sibyl! She apparently is one of the dignitaries. “You!” she says “You were on the ship”. That’s no lie, I was on the ship with her. I know my own ability of lying, so I try to run her down, but she elegantly steps aside, and I fall down over the side of the stage. I get up and flee. I am not proud of this. I leave my friends behind. Out of the corner of my eye I see Max walk away with Gladstone, and I see Cassie, MacKenzie and Vincent scatter in all directions. I speed up and look behind me to see if Lady Sibyl follows and suddenly I find myself on the other side of a wall, entwined in rambler rose, that tears at my coat. I am on the outside of the Zoo. I ran through a stone wall. The wall looks fine and intact, and I remember falling through the wall at Gladstone’s house. What is going on?! I try to disengage myself from the thorny rosebush, but it tears and ruins my coat. I head home.

The others, apart from Max, is also at home. Vincent looks terrible. He has tiny holes all over and I pull a strange quill out of his coat. He says he had a run in with a huge porcupins at the Zoo. Cassie daps all his little cuts with disinfectant and he winces at each dap. His coat is ruined too. A messanger from Max shows up with a note saying that we should come at once to Skt Agatha’s Hospital. So we go. Limping and tired.

Skt. Agatha’s is not a very nice place. It’s a tall, looming building, with a dark and gloomy hallway. It’s hard to imagine that this was once the home of some noble family, who left the house, because it was too small for them, and turned into a hospital. I see things I would rather not see. I see things that remind me of the asylum: people in straight jackets. People getting electro shock (I shudder at the memory of it). We go up a wide marple staircase to the upper floor that is quite different. Here the halls and the rooms are light and friendly. This is were the rich people are cared for. We enter Gladstone’s room that is four times as big as the room Vincent and I share at the Organisation. Dr. Cassie ordinates rest and fresh air for the next couple of months, and Gladstone complies. He is out of the way and the empire is saved. All is well!

Cassie reads from the newspaper: “Nonpolitical countess takes over Lord Gladstone’s place in the Hiring Comitee, while the MP rests at his country manor. Both sides of the parliament salutes Countess Sibyl’s work for the common good”. Erhm… This can’t be good…

We are alerted that our new M will come by this afternoon to meet us and debrief us. We wait in the salon, when she turns up. She is a stern looking elderly lady, about 60 years old with grey hair and a no nonsense way about her. She looks us all over, and MacKenzie exclaims “Mom?!” Mrs. MacKenzie’s Mom nods at MacKenzie and starts telling us that there will be more changes coming, but first she wants to tall to each of us in turn. She seems very strict and she scares me. She goes into M’s office, which is off course now her office and calls us in one by one. Cassie and MacKenzie warns us to say as little as possible. She is indeed strict, but she is fair. We are warned not to lie, as she seems able to see through untruths. I am a rotten liar anyway, so saying as little as possible is probably best. When it is MacKenzie’s turn to talk to her, we can hear her yelling through the door. MacKenzies Mom, not MacKenzie. We can hardly hear MacKenzie’s voice. Max goes in with his hair on end, but when he comes out it lies slick over his head. My turn. I knock my chair over, before I sit in it. I try to smile, but I only manage a grimace. She looks at me sternly, and I feel compelled to tell her everything I know about everything, but I don’t, since she starts to talk first. Most of the words are lost on me, but I do hear and understand one thing: she wants me to evaluate Cassie. A written report and an oral summary in the morning.

I go straight to Cassie afterwards. “She want’s me to write a report on you! What should I write? Should I write about the dark thing?”. We talk it over. Cassie thinks it is best I mention the dark thing, as this is probably information Cassie’s parents have shared with Mrs. MacKenzie’s Mom. I ask Cassie if she can help me write the report, but Cassie thinks it is best if it is written with my own words. Otherwise Mrs MacKenzie’s Mom will know that we talked it over first.

This is what I write:
Dear Mrs. MacKenzie’s Mom.
My evalution of Cassie: she has somthing darc inside, but it is only dangerus if you are a crook. It does not feel evil. Not like a deamon. They feel evil. But Cassie dos not. She is ever so nice and kind and sweet and good. She always dos what is right and she has helped me many times, when I have done something wrong. I dont do so many wrong things now that Cassie help me. So she is not evil. It only comes out when we are attagged or someones in danger. She has never hurt me. But I am no crook and it is only crooks that get hurt when Cassie is angry. So there is nothing to be afraid of. No worries. She is quite alright.
Best regards Grace Hunter
ps. I am not a deamon. Just so you know.

Later Max comes over to me and starts asking questions about how my demon sight works. Apparently he is to write a report on me. I don’t know how the demon sight works. I know I can see demons and other otherworldly things. Sometimes it is like a light around them (not the demon – the other otherworldlies), and sometimes it is like I see their true nature: the fangs and boils and scaly skin and extra arms and eyes and such. Each demon is different. Some hide it really well. Max starts to talk about making a device so that other people can see what I see, and he talks about it at great lenght. I say nothing. I am afraid that Mrs MacKenzie’s Mom will throw me out if she starts to think that I am demonic or something. I know that something is wrong – what with the falling and running through walls and all that. Then Max says “I don’t have to ask about your loyalties, because I know just where they lie” I look at him scared. How can he know? Will he tell on me? He looks at me friendly like “I know you are against the demons” I exhale. Yes, off course I am against the demons. But I am sure Mrs M wanted to know where in the Organisation my loyalty lie, and I am not sure she would be happy to know that it lies with Cassie and Vincent foremost, and secondly with the Organisation itself. I just smile and nod. I don’t think Max’ report on me will show much of the truth. That is probably best.

Vincent and I agree to visit Niall at the hospital. It turns out he is not really hurt. He is only here for observation for the imaginary women’s cholera, which he doesn’t have. The talk is not encouraging. I leave the talking mostly to Vincent. Niall still scares me. He assures us that he still thinks that my work would eventually put me in prison or in an asylum, but he reassures us, that it is not only I who belong there, but all of us. “A risk that goes with the job” he says. I disagree, but cannot get the words over my lips. Our work has merit. We work for the good of the empire: to preserve balance and keep the titans and their kin at bay. I truly believe we should be cut some slack, even if our methods are sometimes… unconventional. I doubt that Niall and I will ever agree on that point, and I decide to keep my distance from him.