Chapter 7: Aunt Carol's Confession

The morning light streaming through Ethan's apartment windows felt like a mockery of safety. Carol had spent the night on his couch, surrounded by iron charms and salt circles, maintaining a vigilant watch while he caught fragments of exhausted sleep in his bedroom chair. Neither of them had been willing to risk the vulnerability of deep sleep.

Now, with his father's journals spread across the kitchen table like evidence in a murder trial, Carol looked older than her sixty-plus years. The weight of decades-old secrets had carved deep lines around her eyes, and her hands shook slightly as she poured coffee from the pot that had been brewing since dawn.

"There's more," she said without preamble, settling into the chair across from him. "Things I didn't tell you yesterday, things your father made me promise to keep buried."

Ethan looked up from the journal he'd been studying—Thomas Hayes's original documentation of the first shadow walker encounter in 1897. "More family secrets?"

"The biggest one." Carol opened one of the leather-bound volumes, flipping to a page marked with a faded red ribbon. "Your father wasn't just a victim, Ethan. He was a guardian. The last in a line that stretches back five generations."

She pointed to a family tree drawn in meticulous detail across two pages. Names and dates connected by careful lines, but it was the symbols next to certain names that caught Ethan's attention—small marks that looked like a combination of Celtic knots and something older, more primitive.

"Every generation, one member of the Hayes family is chosen," Carol continued, her voice taking on the cadence of someone reciting a well-rehearsed explanation. "Not born to it, exactly, but... selected by circumstances. They become the anchor point, the one who maintains the barriers between our world and theirs."

"Chosen how?"

Carol's finger traced the family tree, stopping at names marked with those strange symbols. "Thomas Hayes, 1897. His son Robert, 1923. Robert's youngest son William in 1951. And your father, Daniel, starting in 1987."

The dates were ominous in their precision—each roughly a generation apart, each corresponding to what the journals described as a "breach event," when the barriers between worlds grew thin enough for entities to cross over.

"What happened in 1987?" Ethan asked, though part of him already knew he wouldn't like the answer.

Carol flipped to another section of the journal, revealing newspaper clippings carefully pasted alongside handwritten notes. The headlines were mundane—missing persons cases, unexplained deaths, a handful of what the papers dismissed as tragic accidents or unsolved crimes. But the locations formed a pattern, a rough circle around the Chicago metropolitan area with the Hayes family home at its center.

"Seventeen people disappeared over the course of three months," Carol said. "All of them recently bereaved, all of them reporting strange encounters with deceased family members in the weeks before they vanished. Your father was twenty-six, just starting his career as a data analyst. He had no idea why his family's old journals were suddenly relevant."

She pulled out a photograph—Daniel Hayes in his mid-twenties, looking impossibly young and overwhelmed, standing next to an older man Ethan didn't recognize.

"That's William, your grandfather's brother. He was the guardian before your father, and he trained Daniel in the old ways. Taught him the rituals, the protections, the price of keeping the barriers intact."

"What price?"

Carol's expression grew haunted. "The guardian becomes a beacon, a focal point for supernatural attention. Everything drawn to our world is drawn to them first. They have to be strong enough to hold the line, smart enough to understand the enemy, and isolated enough that their death won't create too much collateral damage."

The words hit Ethan like a physical blow. "Isolated?"

"Your father's marriage to your mother wasn't just love, though it was that too. It was strategy. Linda was normal, purely mundane, with no psychic sensitivity whatsoever. She couldn't see the entities, couldn't be used as leverage against him. And for twenty years, it worked."

Carol turned several pages, revealing entries in his father's handwriting that Ethan recognized from the locked journal. But these were earlier entries, dating back to his childhood:

"E is showing signs of sensitivity. Found him talking to 'the shadow man' in his closet yesterday. Linda thinks it's an imaginary friend, but I know better. The bloodline gifts are manifesting early—he's only six years old."

"The protections around the house are holding, but E keeps asking why the 'sad people' can't come inside. He can see them gathering at the property line, drawn by his emerging abilities. I need to strengthen the barriers before he gets old enough to invite them in out of simple compassion."

"E's twelfth birthday. The entity activity is increasing—they know he's approaching the age where he could potentially serve as an anchor point. Linda refuses to let me explain the danger to him. She thinks I'm becoming obsessed with 'morbid fantasies.' Maybe she's right, but the alternative is leaving him defenseless."

Ethan stared at the entries, fragments of childhood memories suddenly making terrible sense. The imaginary friends his mother had dismissed. The nightmares about sad people who wanted to come inside. The way shadows seemed deeper in their house, the way electronic devices failed at crucial moments.

"He was protecting me," Ethan whispered. "All those years, he knew what I might become."

"He was trying to spare you the burden," Carol said. "But bloodline gifts don't skip generations. When Daniel died and the protections failed, you became the natural successor whether you wanted it or not."

She reached into her purse and pulled out a small leather pouch, setting it on the table with reverent care. Inside were what looked like antique coins, but the metal was wrong—too dark, too heavy, covered with symbols that seemed to shift when viewed directly.

"Guardian tokens," Carol explained. "Each one represents a successful defense, a barrier maintained, a line held against the darkness. Your great-great-grandfather Thomas earned the first one. William earned twelve over his forty-year tenure as guardian."

Ethan counted the tokens: twenty-three in total, representing over a century of secret warfare. "How many did Dad earn?"

Carol's silence was answer enough.

"He was trying to break the cycle," she said finally. "Thought if he could perform one final ritual, one perfect binding, he could end the family's obligation permanently. No more guardians, no more chosen ones, no more children growing up with the weight of supernatural warfare on their shoulders."

"The ritual at Blackwood Chapel."

"Yes. But something went wrong." Carol's voice was barely above a whisper. "The entity he was trying to bind—the one that's been hunting your family for generations—it was stronger than he anticipated. More intelligent. It had been preparing for that night as carefully as he had."

She opened the final journal, revealing pages of increasingly frantic calculations and diagrams. Ethan's father had been planning his assault on the shadow walker with military precision, accounting for every variable he could imagine.

Except one.

"He underestimated how much it knew about our family," Carol continued. "The thing that killed him—it had been studying the Hayes line for decades, learning our patterns, our weaknesses, our deepest fears. When Daniel arrived at the chapel that night, it was waiting for him."

"With a trap."

"With bait." Carol's finger traced a passage near the end of the journal: "It wore Linda's face tonight, called to me from the woods beyond the chapel. I know it's not really her—she's safe at home with E—but the voice was perfect. Even knowing what it was, I almost... God help me, I almost went to it."

The final entry was a single line, written in shaking handwriting: "If I don't come home, tell E I'm sorry I couldn't be the father he deserved."

Ethan closed the journal, his vision blurring with tears he'd been holding back for eight years. His father hadn't died of a heart attack. He'd died trying to end a supernatural war that had claimed Hayes men for generations, trying to free his son from a destiny he'd never asked for.

"The ritual," Ethan said, his voice hoarse. "Do we know what went wrong? Can we fix it?"

Carol nodded toward the research box, where dozens of journals and loose papers documented decades of accumulated knowledge. "William left detailed notes about the binding process. Combined with your father's research, we should be able to avoid the mistakes that got him killed."

"Should?"

"This isn't an exact science, Ethan. Every guardian has added to the knowledge base, but each encounter with these entities is unique. They learn, they adapt, they evolve their strategies based on previous failures."

Carol stood up, moving to the window where the morning light was already beginning to fade toward afternoon. "The thing that killed your father has had eight years to study that failure, to understand exactly how to counter our defenses. It knows our family's history better than we do now. It knows our weaknesses, our fears, the precise words that will make us doubt ourselves at crucial moments."

As if summoned by her words, a shadow moved past the window—just a flicker, too quick to be certain, but enough to make both of them freeze.

"It's getting bolder," Carol observed. "Testing our defenses in daylight now. That's not a good sign."

Ethan stared at the window, remembering the thing that had worn his father's face the night before, remembering how close he'd come to opening that window and letting it inside. "What if we're wrong? What if it really is him somehow, and we're preparing to destroy what's left of my father?"

Carol's expression was gentle but implacable. "Your father is dead, Ethan. He died eight years ago trying to protect you from exactly this kind of doubt. What's wearing his face now is a predator that feeds on grief and love and desperate hope. The kindest thing we can do for Daniel's memory is to put that abomination to rest."

She began packing the journals back into their box, her movements quick and efficient. "We have two days to prepare. Two days to gather materials, study the ritual, and steel ourselves for what's coming. Because make no mistake—when we go to Blackwood Chapel, we'll be walking into the same trap that killed your father."

"Then why go at all?"

Carol's smile was sharp and humorless. "Because this time, we know it's a trap. And sometimes, the best way to spring a trap is to walk into it with your eyes wide open and a plan of your own."

Outside, the shadows were growing longer as afternoon faded toward evening. Somewhere in that darkness, the thing that had killed Daniel Hayes was preparing for its final assault on the family it had been hunting for over a century.

But for the first time since this nightmare began, Ethan felt something other than helpless terror. He felt purpose. He felt the weight of five generations of Hayes guardians standing behind him, their accumulated knowledge and sacrifice pointing toward one final confrontation.

The war that had claimed his father was about to end, one way or another.