Stone Cold Lover

by Christine Warren

  Or the gargoyles.

  She could feel Spar’s presence lurking behind her as she cut through a narrow alley to save herself some time. It occurred to her that he might not exactly blend in this neighborhood, but at just before four in the morning, the chances of anyone being out on the street and getting past the police to see him were slim. She decided dealing with freaked-out bystanders was his problem. As was the potential for getting his enormous ass wedged between the centuries-old buildings that pressed close on either side.

  A vindictive thought, perhaps, but one Fil found quite satisfying in the moment.

  Spotting her bike parked just where she’d left it, Fil fumbled in her pockets for her keys, grateful they’d been buttoned safe inside. The last thing she needed right now was to discover that her keys had tumbled out and landed at the bottom of the St. Lawrence at some point during her little adventure. Not that it would have surprised her. Not after tonight.

  “Come on,” she said, slinging her leg over the motorcycle and settling into the worn leather seat. “I’m not quite sure you’re actually going to fit on here with me, but I’ve given up hope that I get to go home alone after all this. Right?”

  “You are correct. I believe Kees spoke the truth when he said that there is too great a chance the Order will seek you out after the events of this evening. You require protection, and as a Guardian it is my duty to provide it.”

  “Oh, goody.” Fil sighed. “Okay, then. Climb on, if you can manage it.”

  When Spar didn’t move, she glanced over to see him frowning down at her with his brawny arms crossed over his massive chest. Now that she thought about it, she could have skipped inviting him to ride with her. She doubted he could fit so much as one foot on the pillion of her restored Triumph Tiger.

  “Ooookay, so that’s not gonna work, then.” She shrugged. “If you can’t squeeze onto the back there, you’ll have to fly, I guess. Just keep an eye on me, and I’ll lead you back to my place.”

  Spar shook his head and refused to budge. “To be separated from you by the necessary distance required to remain unseen as I fly puts you at too great a risk. You could be attacked before I was able to reach you.”

  Exasperation made Fil snap, though she supposed the exhaustion didn’t help either. Damn it, she wasn’t wild about overbearing males at this best of times, and this damned sure didn’t qualify for that distinction.

  “Look, Rocky, if you won’t fly, your only other choice is to get on the damned bike. You got a shrink ray in your pocket so we can move this along, maybe?”

  “A shrink ray?” Spar shook his head, his expression indicating that maybe he was considering lumping her mental state in with that of the exploding cultist earlier. “I do not even wish to know what such a thing might be, so I feel certain that I do not have one in my possession. However, if this is indeed our only mode of transportation to your living space, perhaps this might help?”

  A waspish demand fizzled on the tip of Fil’s tongue as she watched yet another impossibility occur before her very eyes. For an instant the air around Spar seemed to shimmer, but before she could focus on the strange phenomenon, her eyes were too busy focusing on the drop-dead-gorgeous specimen of apparently human man candy that stood in the gargoyle’s place.

  “Wha-huh?” she stuttered.

  Who could blame her? Fil might have found something compelling about the gargoyle statue that had drawn her back to the abbey that evening. It had possessed a kind of inhuman beauty in its ferocious strength and unwavering stance. This, though, this man who stared back at her from Spar’s bright black eyes … this man’s beauty was entirely human.

  “Spar?”

  Her voice wavered, and she felt ridiculous asking, but she had to be sure she wasn’t hallucinating. Or, you know, having a stroke. The man nodded, a short, proud dip of his chin, and the gesture solidified her first impression—that this was a gargoyle in human’s clothing.

  He still towered over her, but at six foot and three or four inches, he no longer loomed high enough to draw immediate attention. His hair was cropped close to his scalp, dark and barely too long to be called a buzz. The style appeared vaguely gladiatorial, the way his clothing had been in his other form, but it suited him and his almost military bearing.

  The wings were gone, of course—where, she couldn’t even hazard a guess—and his legs, clad in ordinary, faded blue jeans, appeared jointed in the normal human manner. She could only assume the feet in his heavy, battered boots no longer sported the kind of talons that could disembowel a bison with one swipe, because his hands looked claw-free, strong, and entirely normal.

  His features, she realized, appeared almost the same, maybe a little less severe, softened even more by the shadow of stubble that covered his jaw, but recognizable from his statue form. His eyes still shone as if lit from within, but that could be a trick of the light. Spar the Guardian now looked like Spar the perfectly ordinary human man.

  Only about fifty times hotter.

  “Is this acceptable?” he asked, his voice still low enough to rumble through her, but not as booming now. “Have I erred with my appearance in some manner?”

  Yeah, you made yourself so sexy, I want to lick my way from your forehead to your heels, you big hunk of man, you.

  Quickly, Fil shook her head and cleared her throat. “Um, no. Not at all. You look, uh, you look fine.” She had to tear her gaze away, something that took more willpower than she wanted to admit, and she covered her discomfort by starting the bike’s engine and lifting the kickstand.

  “Come on,” she said, desperately hoping her voice didn’t sound as husky to Spar as it did to her own ears. “I’d like to get home before sunrise, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course.”

  Fil stared straight ahead and gritted her teeth while her newly gorgeous companion moved to straddle the motorcycle behind her. She just hoped he wouldn’t notice her fingers curled so tightly around the handlebars that her knuckles had turned white.

  The Triumph had been a gift from her grandfather, a project the two of them had worked together to restore before his death, and it was her most prized possession. For the first time in her life, she wished she hadn’t driven the damned thing. If she’d taken the van she used mostly for business and in driving rainstorms, she could have put some distance between the two of them.

  Instead she found herself holding her breath and praying for strength while the most attractive man she’d met in at least a year pressed himself tight against her back and wrapped his thick, muscular arms around her waist. His thighs nestled along the back of hers, and she swore there wasn’t room between them for so much as an impure thought.

  Which was fine, because every single one of those that had ever been invented had just taken up residence inside Fil’s head.

  Oh, but she felt like a dirty, dirty girl.

  “I have never ridden on a machine like this.” The saddle of the motorcycle might have been built for two passengers in theory, but apparently the Brits had never accounted for one of those two being the size of Spar, because it forced them closer than Siamese twins. “I believe I must hold on to you in order to maintain my seat, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  Resorting to cursing under her breath in Lithuanian—Pisam rugsti is cia!—was a sure sign Fil had reached the end of her rope, so she revved the engine and put actions to words.

  It was so past time to get the fuck out of here.

  * * *

  Fil opened her eyes and blinked up at the ceiling above her bed. Bright sunlight reflected off the smooth white paint and bounced around the room in cheerful beams. Clearly, the sun had better sense than to spend the night sneaking into museums, getting attacked by mad cultists, and arguing with men whose skulls were literally hard as a rock.

  Because that’s what Fil remembered doing before she crawled into bed, and her mood upon waking definitely did not count as cheerful.

  “I have been thinking.”


  Aaaanndd … there went any hope that her memories of last night had been nothing more than the remnant of a very bad dream. She recognized that voice, damn it, but what was it doing coming from inside her bedroom?

  No. You know what? She didn’t care. Grabbing a spare pillow from the other side of the mattress, Fil thumped the feathery softness over her face to stifle her aggravated scream.

  “Aaarrrrggghhh!”

  “I cannot understand your words,” the voice continued. “Perhaps if you uncovered your face, we might speak more clearly.”

  The pillow went flying toward the voice, making the second scream much more audible. Fil sat up in a tangle of sheets and blankets and glared at the man sitting in the corner chair.

  “I wasn’t using words, stone face,” she snapped. “I was expressing my frustration using nonverbal articulation.”

  Spar, still looking human and gorgeous and oh-so-annoying, caught the cushiony projectile in one hand and frowned at her. “What have you to be frustrated over, Felicity? You have only just awoken.”

  “What are you doing in my bedroom, Spar?” she asked instead of even attempting an explanation that would adequately sum up her current state of mind. “Didn’t we have this conversation last night? I agreed you could stay to ‘protect’ me, but you were supposed to sleep on the sofa. In the living room.”

  “I did. I am finished sleeping.” He shrugged and set the pillow aside. “Guardians need very little of it during our waking periods. I could have gone without easily, but I thought it best to try to adapt to human customs while we are working together. Did you have an adequate rest period?”

  “Peachy, but if you’ve going to adapt to my customs while you’re here, you might want to remember that my ‘custom’ is not to wake up with uninvited guests in my bedroom, okay?”

  He looked genuinely puzzled. “But I could not observe you from the other room, so how I was I know when you awoke without entering this room?”

  “You could preserve your little granite soul in patience and wait until I got up and came out to tell you I was awake, Einstein.”

  “That seems much less efficient than my way, but while we are speaking, I would like to address the issue of these names you keep giving me. I told you, I am called Spar, not Rocky, not stone face, and not Einstein. You will cease to refer to me in this manner.”

  Fil rolled her eyes and threw back the covers. “Haven’t you ever had a nickname, Spar? It’s something we humans give to people we spend time with. Why don’t you accustom yourself to that, too? I’m going to go take a shower.”

  When he rose as if to follow her, she shot him a look of disbelief. “Alone, boulder boy. You can wait out here. Sheesh.”

  Spar didn’t look happy, but he obeyed her. At least for the time being.

  Fil stomped into the bathroom and closed the door with a snap, or about two decibels short of a slam. Damned overbearing gargoyle. She seriously wondered if English was the guy’s first language; he had that much trouble listening. If Ella had faced half this much aggravation when she’d met Kees, Fil was prepared to feel some genuine pity.

  Her reflection in the bathroom mirror only served to remind her that having the Guardian’s hulking presence in her apartment had completely thrown her off schedule. The dark circles under her eyes and the tangled mess of hair she hadn’t remembered to braid before falling into bed just went to show that no woman should ever be forced to gaze at her own reflection before at least one cup of coffee.

  Grabbing her toothbrush, Fil slathered on the paste and went to work scrubbing the last of the gritty residue of the night before out of her mouth. There really had been a moment, just before she’d fully woken up, when her poor, confused little mind had her half convinced that the events of the previous evening must have been a dream. A vivid, confusing, disturbing, and surreal sort of dream, but a dream nonetheless. Catching sight of Spar, however, had put the kibosh on that feeble hope. He wasn’t the sort of sight a girl could explain away easily, or forget. He tended to stick with you.

  She spat into the sink and groaned. Why, oh why, had she not listened to her brain instead of her gut and stayed away from that damned statue? If she’d just dug in her heels and ignored the strange compulsion the thing exerted over her, she wouldn’t be here in this mess—and more important, Spar wouldn’t be here in her home.

  Which meant she wouldn’t have to stand here and admit to herself that the fascination she’d felt for the inanimate hunk of stone couldn’t compare with the draw she felt toward the flesh-and-blood man.

  Gargoyle.

  Guardian.

  Whatever.

  Fil rinsed her mouth and reached into the shower to turn on the water. She wished to hell she could figure out why she had this ridiculous reaction every time she got within ten feet of the man. When she’d thought him nothing more than a sculpture, the compulsion had still confused her, but she’d been able to rationalize it. It had, after all, appeared to be an impressive work of art, not just well made but rather remarkably preserved, too, given its estimated age. As both an artist and an art restorer, she’d could admire another artist’s creation, along with its ability to withstand the ravages of time and the elements.

  Now, though, when she was faced not with a statue but with a breathtaking example of male physical beauty, chalking up her reaction to professional admiration had started to ring a little false. What Fil experienced when she looked at Spar’s stubbled jaw and chiseled muscles had less to do with her trained eye and more to do with her uncontrollable hormones.

  The man just turned her on. Hard.

  Wasn’t that a hell of a pill to try to choke down, Fil reflected as she stepped behind the shower curtain and turned her face up to the warm spray. Like she didn’t have enough on her plate in her everyday life without now discovering she might be the target of a mad cult, her old college pal wanted to recruit her to help save the world, and she needed a supernatural, immortal bodyguard to protect her from magical attacks? Now her body had started screaming that she ought to end her long sexual dry spell by climbing said inhuman Guardian like the Swiss Alps and planting her flag right in his tight, bitable backside.

  Oh, she so didn’t need this.

  Didn’t need and wouldn’t worry about, she decided, sleeking her hair back from her face. She saw no point in getting tied up in knots over things she couldn’t control. She’d be much better off if she just focused on the things she could actually accomplish, like finding out how big a threat this Order of Eternal Darkness cult was actually likely to be.

  She had a few ideas about that, beginning with finding out whether the bomber from last night had survived the blast. After all, if the guy never made it out of the abbey, chances were he hadn’t gone blabbing about her to any of his demon-worshipping buddies. That would mean the risk to Fil was relatively small, and she might just be able to get out from under the protection of Spar and back to her life.

  Let him and his buddy Kees worry about saving the world. She just wanted to save her own sanity.

  Keeping that hope firmly in the forefront of her mind, Fil flipped open the cap to her shampoo bottle and squirted a dollop into her palm. Then she yelped, and the bottle slipped from her suddenly limp fingers and thudded against the fiberglass floor of the tub. What the hell was going on?

  A question she repeated when the door burst open and Spar flung the shower curtain aside to glare down at her, wings and stony skin very much in evidence.

  “What is wrong?” he demanded, his gaze searching the small room as if he expected crazed cultists to start jumping out of the steam around them. “I heard you cry out. Are you hurt? Was someone here? What happened?”

  The unheralded interruption had been bad enough, but when the gargoyle reached for her with a huge, clawed hand, she slapped it hard and backed away, tugging the corner of the shower curtain with her.

  “Hey, naked here!” she snapped, trying to cover herself with white fabric that rapidly began to lose its opacit
y as it soaked the water up off her skin. “What did I tell you about barging in on me in private rooms, huh? Get the hell out of here and go wait in the living room, žioplys!”

  He ignored her, except to continue glowering. “I heard you scream, and there was a banging noise. I believed you to be in danger. Tell me what disturbed you.”

  “You’re disturbing me right now.” But she glanced down at her hand and felt a fresh jolt of shock at what she saw there.

  On her left palm, the one she’d instinctively thrown up to block the lunatic’s magical attack the night before, something disturbing had begun to take shape. Last night, the skin had just looked a little red, like she’d incurred a mild burn, so she’d figured whatever the jerk had tried to do to her had failed. It hadn’t pained her, after all, so how serious could it be?

  Now she began to wonder.

  Spar followed her gaze to the source of her distraction and gently seized her hand, lifting and angling it into the light from the bathroom window. He studied the faint pink pattern for a moment, then cursed. From the sound of it, Fil was willing to bet it beat the Lithuanian version of “fucker” she’d called him a few seconds ago by a nautical mile.

  “What is it?” she asked. Anxiety clawed at her belly, but she needed to know. How much more trouble did this mean she was in?

  “I am not certain, because it appears not to have fully formed,” he told her, “but it seems that the spell the nocturnis cast upon you may still be affecting you. This pattern is faint, but it looks to be the symbol of Uhlthor.”

  “A symbol of what? Was that supposed to be a word, or were you just clearing your throat?”

  Spar traced the strange lines and curves with the tip of one claw, the sharp point barely grazing her skin, and Fil had to work to suppress the shiver that passed through her.

  “Uhlthor,” he repeated, enunciating through gritted teeth, which tipped her off that this news wasn’t making him very happy. “The Defiler. It is the name given to one of the Seven, the demons worshipped by the nocturnis.”