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Is this reveal getting old for you yet?
It had been almost a year since Kinsey had shown Angela magic and had used the Memory Key on her.
Angela was practically part of the family. And when Nina and Josh had married, and Bode had acted like a smartass about it, Angela, to Kinsey’s surprise, had gotten him to come around to it.
She had pointed out to Bode, that she knew that he missed his father. And that it felt like Nina was replacing his father by marrying Josh or forgetting Bode’s father. But Angela said that Nina would never really be able to forget Rendell. But she deserved to be happy. Like everyone else.
Kinsey had watched this interaction and was surprised how calm Angela had been, even with Bode’s snippy comments.
Angela had calmly pointed out to Bode, that expecting his mother to never move on again and never find someone that might love her like Rendell loved her, was understandable, because Bode felt like his father was being replaced, but selfish.
At this, Bode had looked like Angela had slapped him and Angela had simply asked Bode, “You want your mom to be happy, don’t you?”
Bode had nodded, granted, begrudgingly.
Angela had said, “And I’m sorry that you feel like your father is being replaced. But he’s not. You know that no one can replace your father. But your mom deserves to be happy. And do you think she’ll be happy if one of her children is trying to keep her from someone that loves her?”
Bode had lowered his head, looking sad.
Kinsey was stunned. Because Angela was startlingly good at using Bode’s guilt against him. Angela had then said gently that she hadn’t said that to make Bode feel guilty, just to help him understand that his mother needed to move on. And be happy.
It was because of Angela, that Bode hadn’t thrown a fuss at Nina and Josh’s wedding, but instead had tried to be supportive.
And Kinsey and Angela had used a lot of the keys together.
Like the Animal Key. The two of them had run together through the woods, Kinsey as a lynx and Angela, as a wolf.
And Kinsey couldn’t quite believe how much she had come to love the other woman. Angela was caring, considerate, gentle and sweet and always enthusiastic about everything.
But more and more? Kinsey was beginning to feel that there was something………off.
She would notice things. Little things that Angela did. Little things that………………Gabe used to do.
Angela would bring up mugs of hot chocolate if it was cold out and Kinsey didn’t want to go outside for a while. She would stroke her thumb against Kinsey’s forehead soon after sex, just smiling at her and staring. Before sex, she would pull Kinsey onto her lap, having Kinsey’s legs wrap around her, stroking her hand along Kinsey’s spine.
These were all things that Gabe had had a tendency of doing.
Kinsey didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but those were just some of the many things that Angela did that Gabe had used to do.
And the more time went on and the more Kinsey looked at it, she found herself looking at things more closely, almost obsessively.
Like Angela’s name, for starters. “Angela.” Who would think that someone with that name, would be a threat? Like someone with the name, “Gabe.”
Then there was the fact that when Kinsey approached Brian, asking him if anyone from work knew about Angela, he had said no.
That? That wasn’t too weird, because maybe whoever had known Angela and had invited Angela to the wedding, no longer worked with Brian.
But there were………..other things that happened that stuck out to Kinsey.
Like Angela’s parents never being mentioned. At least, not all that much. Angela said that they died in a car crash in Arizona, and she showed Kinsey a picture of them. However, Kinsey didn’t miss how most of the pictures Angela had, were of her supposed mother and her supposed father, or sometimes of them together.
But Angela never showed up in the pictures.
Then there were other things.
Like some of the keys disappearing.
It was small at first. They had somehow lost the Mirror Key and the Echo Key soon after disposing of Dodge over the cliffs of the Drowning Caves. But more and more months went by, since Kinsey had first met Angela. And now there were two more keys missing.
Not the Omega Key, thankfully. But other keys.
The Great Lock and its key were missing.
The Shadow Key and the Crown of shadows had been missing for a while, so it was no surprise that they hadn’t found those items yet.
So had the Matchstick Key.
To be frank, there were unfortunately, a lot of keys that Dodge had before, and they couldn’t find now, because Dodge had stored them away somewhere, before her death.
And the Echo Key and the Mirror Key had gone missing.
And the final two keys that had gone missing recently, were the Hercules Key and the Timeshift Key.
Kinsey thought about all the keys that Dodge had had before she and Tyler had thrown her off of the cliffs.
Dodge had kept the keys somewhere, but they couldn’t find those keys. And the keys that Dodge had had, were the Anywhere Key, the Head Key, the Matchstick Key, the Identity Key, the Plant Key, the Music Box Key and the Shadow Key.
Basically, way more keys than any of the Lockes had felt comfortable with her having and not being able to find.
They still didn’t know where those keys were.
And now the Great Lock and its key and the Hercules Key and its belt were missing? The same two items that Kinsey and Tyler had used to stop Dodge before?
Kinsey, Bode and Tyler hoarded away the keys that they did have. The Animal Key, which they’d found a few months ago, the Omega Key and the Memory Key-definitely, without question, the Ghost Key, the Mending Key, and a few other, but unfortunately, not that important keys.
It still made Kinsey increasingly uneasy, that there were several keys out there, that they didn’t know the location of.
Then something very, very weird had happened, one time while Kinsey and Angela were out running as a lynx and a wolf. A pack of wolves came by them and at first, Kinsey had worried that they would attack. However, instead, as soon as Angela had snapped her head in the direction of the wolves, growling, all of the wolves in the pack had whined and had backed away, as if instantly being confronted with a much more dangerous and much more dominant predator.
That alone, had made Kinsey suspicious and had made her begin to start analyzing everything that Angela did.
Because Kinsey remembered what one of the keys were that Dodge had had access to.
The Identity Key.
The key that allowed people to change into different people. Disguise yourself as someone new.
Angela could very easily be Dodge. And Kinsey knew it.
But then, she knew that by that logic? Almost anyone that she met on the streets outside of her family, or her friends, could be Dodge.
And that was ridiculous. She couldn’t start pointing a finger at everyone, claiming they were possessed by a demon.
So, she tried to calm her worries for a while.
But the more time she spent around Angela, the more traits she saw that Angela had in common with Gabe.
And in the end, she had discovered who exactly Gabe really was.
Was Angela just another mask to conceal the demon underneath? The demon that had ordered her father killed and who had made her and her brothers’ and mother’s life hell for so long?
Kinsey tried to think what she could do, if it turned out that Angela was Dodge. On one hand, if she confronted Angela about it and it turned out that Angela wasn’t in fact, Dodge, then Kinsey would have to apologize over and over and she was sure that Angela would forgive her.
On the other hand, if Angela was in fact, Dodge? Then what? Kinsey shivered at the thought, thinking that she might just have slept with that same demon for so long.
But a new thought struck her then. If it was Dodge behind Angela’s face, then what was Dodge waiting for? Angela had access to the Omega Key now for a long time. Yet, the Omega Key hadn’t gone missing.
If Angela actually was Dodge? Then she’d had more than ample opportunity to grab the Omega Key and open up the Black Door.
So, if Angela was Dodge, why hadn’t she done it by now? That was the one thing that made Kinsey question her growing suspicion that Angela was Dodge.
Still, Kinsey came up with the idea. She had her mom and Josh, go out, taking Bode and Jamie with them to a diner. And she suggested that Tyler and Jackie go out, leaving her and Angela alone for a while.
Was it a stupid idea? Yes. Most likely.
But if it was the truth that Angela was Dodge? Then Kinsey had a feeling that she might be the only one that could confront Dodge, and live. She might be the only one that Dodge wouldn’t kill.
Because why else did Dodge keep coming back to her-if it was actually Dodge, anyway.
However, as it often happened, in the Lockes’ time of need, Kinsey heard whispering.
She followed the whispering. Followed the whispers calling out to her. She went up the stairs, to a chimney.
She then heard the whispers again. She kneeled down and looked up into the chimney.
The whispers were coming from above her. In the chimney.
She reached up into the chimney, and grabbed at where she heard the whispers. She felt something leathery.
She grabbed it and pulled it out of the chimney. She looked at it in her hands. It was a holster of some type. And there was a key dangling from it. A key with angel wings at the top.
Kinsey decided to do the only logical thing there was. She tested the key out.
She put the holster on, used the key on where she saw a keyhole and turned it and wings emerged from the holster. She gasped, grinning, seeing these huge wings. She tested them out too, of course. She leapt off of a large rock, when she went outside and flew around for an hour.
It was amazing. And she knew it might be here only chance, should she find out she’d been dating Dodge for a year-again.
That was why she took the harness off, put it and the Angel Key away in a shuttered room and got ready that night.
So, later on, tonight, at Key House, she and Angela were alone, having just finished up their dinner, drinking a bit.
Angela snuggled into Kinsey’s neck, smiling at her sweetly.
“So,” she said, “What’s the occasion?”
Kinsey chuckled, getting up to grab some more alcohol for Angela. That was another thing about Angela that made Kinsey suspicious. Whenever Angela got…….drunk, it felt fake. Like Angela was “faking” getting drunk. Even if Kinsey had seen Angela down several bottles of one thing or another. Which got Kinsey to start thinking that Angela couldn’t get drunk, or had almost endless metabolism.
“Do we need an occasion to get drunk?” Kinsey asked, smirking.
Angela paused. “I can’t say I can argue with that,” Angela confessed, smiling and taking the glass that Kinsey handed to her, “Where are your mom and brothers?”
“Mom and Josh right now,” Kinsey said, “Took Bode and Jamie to a diner for tonight. And Tyler and Jackie are out at dinner too.” She added, grinning playfully, “Which leaves the two of us alone.”
She had made sure to not drink that much alcohol. She would need to be sober and alert for whatever came next.
“Oh,” Angela said, almost laughing, “I like the sound of this. But I’ve noticed you haven’t drunk that much. You know that you don’t have to get me drunk to get me into bed with you, right?”
“I know,” Kinsey said, “It’s just funny to watch.”
Angela narrowed her eyebrows at Kinsey, grumbling, with no real acid in her voice, “Well, screw you too.”
Kinsey chuckled as Angela smirked again.
Kinsey started inching towards the stairs, which led up to the Angel Key and its harness upstairs, and as she did, she said, “Angela, there’s something I have to ask.”
Angela raised her head, looking at Kinsey curiously. “Yeah?” She asked.
Kinsey took a breath and knew that it was now or never.
She looked right at Angela and asked the question that would either make her apologize several times to Angela, or reveal a potential threat to Kinsey and her family.
She asked Angela, “Who are you?”
Angela frowned as she heard that. “What?” She asked, sounding like she couldn’t help but ask the question, “Kins, is this some game?”
Kinsey shook her head. “No game,” she said, “I just want to know. Who are you?”
Angela chuckled, looking confused, “Babe, you know who I am. You’ve met me. I’m Angela Ribeiro. You’ve seen pictures of my parents. I’ve told you their names. And that my family and I used to live in Arizona and that’s where the accident happened.”
“I know, I know,” Kinsey sighed, “I know all that, but………..Angela, you remember what I told you? That there’s this demon that my brothers and I had to fight off? Well, they had a key with them. The Identity Key. And they could take any form they wanted with it.”
Angela’s eyes widened. “And you think I am this demon? Kinsey, that’s jumping to a pretty big conclusion,” she said, appearing offended.
“I know it is,” Kinsey confessed, “But please, Angela? It would make me feel better if you showed me whether or not you had any keys on you, or not.”
Angela actually looked hurt. “That’s why you invited me to be alone with you here?” She asked, “So you could interrogate me?”
Kinsey winced, but didn’t move. Angela then nodded, putting her drink down onto the table next to the couch and got up from the couch.
“Fine, then,” she said, reaching into her pockets, “Have it your way, then, Kins.” She then looked right at Kinsey, her eyes turning dark and Kinsey stepped back, suddenly almost positive of Angela’s true identity as Angela said, “You know, I really didn’t want it to be this way. Again.”
Angela’s right hand came out of her pocket, revealing a very familiar looking item. A key. But not one that Kinsey had seen before. Angela raised the key to below her chin, inserted it and smirked, turning the key.
Kinsey gasped, stepping back, when she saw Angela’s form melt away, revealing a taller and more intimidating figure.
The same figure that she and Tyler had fought before, using the Chain Key and the Hercules Key.
It was Dodge.
“Dodge,” Kinsey whispered, staring at the demon that now grinned at her.
“Hello, Kinsey,” Dodge crooned, “Is this reveal getting old for you yet?”
Kinsey turned on her heel and went bolting to the stairs, running up them, running as fast as her legs could take her.
She heard Dodge run after her.
“Kinsey,” Dodge called out, her words almost a sing-song as she gave chase, “Kinsey, you know you can’t run away. One way or another, I’ll have you forever.”
Kinsey ran, trying to ignore how her heart froze at Dodge’s horrifying promise, jumping into the room with the Angel Key and the harness. She didn’t have to run away.
She would have to fly away.
She ran for the key and the harness and got ready to fly.