Stone Cold Lover

by Christine Warren

  Taking a step back, she dropped her hand and forced a casual smile. “I’m good. Promise. But heading home sounds like a really good idea. We still need to go over this stuff from Onslow, remember? I’d prefer to do that somewhere we can be pretty sure we’re not going to be attacked again.”

  Spar’s jaw tightened. He stopped her before she could lead the way into the yard and scanned the area for threats before allowing her to step outside.

  “When you think of a place like that, be certain to inform me,” he grumbled. “Maybe we could visit.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Spar stood watch at the window of Felicity’s apartment and brooded. Despite her protestations, he could detect the hesitation in her movements that spoke of pain. She might not have bloody wounds or broken bones this time, but he did not like the idea of her being in the slightest discomfort. Immediately upon reaching her home, he had snatched the envelope out of her hand and sent her to the bathroom. A warm soak in a hot tub should ease some of her aches, and the time apart provided him time to think.

  He could feel her pulling away, or at least making the attempt. He had noticed it immediately after the golem attack, but he had written it off to the shock of yet another attempt on her life in just a few short days. The ride back on her motorcycle had afforded him no opportunity to comfort her, aside from holding her in his arms, but even then she had held herself stiffly in his embrace. She kept trying to create distance between them, and Spar would not allow that to happen.

  He had known from the beginning that he reacted to Felicity in a way he had experienced with no other woman, no other person, in all his long life. That alone fascinated him, but once he had touched her intimately, he had begun to suspect that something greater than mere attraction might be at work.

  He had believed the stories to be only that—stories. He’d heard the tales of the first Guardians, as all of his kind had. History, after all, was one of the Light’s greatest teachers.

  When the first Guardians had been summoned by the Guild to battle the seven demons, they had awed the world with their terrible might. For days and weeks they had battled until finally the Seven were ripped apart and cast out of the mortal realm to their abysmal prisons. Duty fulfilled, the Guardians had slept until once again the Darkness stirred and the Wardens summoned them to their task.

  Over and over, the cycle repeated, but as fierce and powerful as the Guardians were, they existed only to fight a battle they did not even claim as their own. They felt no connection to the humans they defended or to the world in which they made war, and so eventually they ceased to answer the summons of the Guild. Without anger or pain or protectiveness to make them fight, they had no reason to wake, and Darkness threatened to take over the whole of the world.

  Eventually, a woman stepped forward and defied the Guild by offering her aid in waking the Guardians. Despite their protests she went to the feet of the first statue and knelt, and there she prayed to the Light to aid her and return the Guardians to the mortal world to save humanity. Before the prayer even finished, a mighty crack split the air and the Guardian leapt from the stone and seized the woman, claiming her as his. She was his mate, he vowed, and for her sake and the sake of her people he would once again take up his struggle against the Seven.

  One by one, women of power appeared, and one by one each Guardian found his destined mate. Each fought for her sake to banish the Darkness once more from the world, and when the threat had passed, each one demanded that the Guild release him from his duty so that he could spend the rest of his existence with his chosen mate.

  From that time forward, the Guild had given each summoned Guardian the ability to feel at least the most basic of emotions—hatred for the evil of the Darkness. Canny as they were, the Guild preferred not to have to replace their warriors every waking cycle, and so in the past several thousands of years Spar had heard whispers of only a handful of additional Guardians who had found their true mates. It had become a kind of legend among his brethren, a fairy tale each of them knew yet none of them truly believed. Until now.

  Spar believed Felicity might be his true mate.

  He almost feared to think the words. Never had he believed he would find her. By the Light, he had not truly believed she existed, or ever would. He had looked into his future and seen war and sleep in an infinite cycle of sameness. Then one day, he would lose a battle and be destroyed, and another Guardian would be called to take his place. He had known this the way he knew how to fight or fly, something not to be questioned. But now, a different sort of future had begun to dance at the edge of his vision, and he found himself longing for it with a painful intensity.

  Spar wanted Felicity, in a way that bordered on obsession. He wanted not just her body, but her clever mind, and her fierce heart, and her generous soul. Last night, he had felt as if he had tasted them, touched them, as if she had welcomed him into her and shown him the possibilities of a world without bloodshed, without the endlessly tainting blackness of the Dark. He wanted more of that, of her.

  The sound of her footsteps pulled him from his thoughts, and he turned to see her emerge from the short hallway, clad head-to-toe in baggy, shapeless fabric that hid every one of her curves from his gaze. He fought the desire to smile at her tactic. Did she think every inch of her beautiful body was not already printed on his brain, ready to be called up at a moment’s notice? He did not need the sight of her skin to make him want her. He didn’t even need her to be present. He would want her if she were on another plane of existence, because he had already touched her, and he knew she was his.

  “You ready to find out what’s in that envelope?” she asked.

  He watched her toes wiggle nervously inside a ridiculously fluffy pair of brightly striped socks and nodded. “Let us see what the Warden thought we should know.”

  For more than an hour they worked together, sorting through the thick stack of papers, skimming through the contents, and laying them out across the surface of the coffee table. When they finished, Spar stepped back to take in the story they told.

  Fil sat at one end of the sofa with her legs curled up beneath her doing much the same thing. After several minutes, she leaned back and shook her head. “The only thing I get from looking at all that is creeped out. If Onslow thought this would send us some kind of coherent message, it’s flown right over my head and out the window.” She glanced up at him. “Do you know what it’s supposed to mean?”

  Spar only wished he did not. To call the envelope’s contents disturbing would do them a disservice. The missing Warden had clearly spent weeks, if not months, pulling together a seemingly random collection of information. Photocopied pages of obscure texts on demonology overlapped lined pages of handwritten notes on books so old, no library would let them near the harsh light of a copy machine. Other texts appeared as printouts from online library collections, most of which possessed margins filled with questions, conclusions, and clarifications.

  A handful of photographs included specimens in sepia tones, creased and faded over time, as well as at least one faded Polaroid and several computer-printed five-by-sevens. A few showed people in either posed or candid settings, while others appeared to focus on locations, either urban or scenic. A copy of what looked like an article from an academic journal called The Psychology of the Supernatural sat next to a handful of newspaper clippings in English, French, Spanish, German, and Arabic.

  It all added up to an eclectic and puzzling collection. Unless, of course, one examined the whole through the eyes of a Warden. Or a Guardian.

  Rage and dread rose within him, and Spar fought the urge to scoop Felicity up in his arms and fly her to safety. He burned with the need to find her a sanctuary, somewhere not even the slightest hint of Darkness could penetrate. But if Onslow’s theory was correct, no such place existed, especially not for a human with powers beyond the ordinary and the mark of the Defiler on her skin.

  He felt Felicity’s gaze on him, sensed her concern, and turn
ed to her knowing his expression would appear grim. Better to worry her than to terrify her. At least, for now.

  “What is it? You understand what’s here, I can see it in your face. So tell me.”

  Her tone was implacable, but he caught the trace of worry threaded through it. What he was about to reveal would offer no comfort.

  He drew a deep breath. “The Warden wished us to know that he believes we have already failed in at least a part of our task,” he said gravely. “According to what he is trying to tell us, the Order’s plans have advanced farther than we feared.

  “One of the Seven is already free.”

  * * *

  Fil blinked. For a frozen moment, it was all she could do. She didn’t even think she drew breath, but she knew her heart hadn’t stopped, because it beat in her ears like echoing thunder, deafening her to anything else. The skin of her palm began to tingle, and she hoped like hell it was a psychosomatic reaction.

  “How is that possible? I thought a Guardian was supposed to sense when one of the bad guys started to stir and step in before it got that far.” Her voice cracked and croaked, but she got the question out and clenched her fists while she waited for an answer.

  Spar shook his head. “I do not know. What you say is true, and the Wardens are meant to summon us from our sleep at the first sign of such a threat, and yet neither of those things happened. I can only theorize that this is why the Order has launched its war against the Guild. By thinning the ranks of the Wardens, they may have disrupted what binds us together and made it possible for them to call one of their Masters forth unnoticed.”

  She felt a laugh bubbling up in her throat, knew it came out just this side of hysterical. “Unnoticed? I have a hard time believing that one of the seven embodiments of ultimate evil in the universe popped up in Saskatoon or someplace one day and nobody noticed.”

  “And that is to our advantage.”

  Spar lowered himself to the sofa beside her and reached for her hand. She fought to keep it from him, but his strength easily overwhelmed her. His gentle concern, though, was what really threatened to push her over the edge.

  “We have an advantage?”

  “If one of the Seven had broken free of its prison of its own free will, it would have been at the peak of its strength. Nothing else could shatter the wards and safeguards that keep it contained, and a demon of the Darkness at full strength could have passed no one’s notice. Without the Guardians there to battle against it, its path of destruction would already have swept wide and bloody across the land. We would have heard about it.”

  Fil looked up at him, at his dark, serious eyes glinting with inner fire, and struggled not to climb into his lap, curl up into a ball, and hide. She didn’t know how much longer she could take this. Every time she thought she got a handle on this nightmare, something else happened to make things even worse. If she thought pinching herself would wake her up into a different, saner reality, she’d be nothing but a giant walking bruise.

  Of course, after her run-in with the golem, she sort of felt that way already.

  “Maybe that means Onslow was wrong, then.” She tried to make the hope in her voice come off as something other than pathetic, but had a feeling she hadn’t succeeded. “If we haven’t seen any evidence of activity by the Seven, maybe they’re still locked up where they belong.”

  “The evidence is here.” Spar gestured to the paperwork, making her stomach sink into her ankles. “I believe the Warden invested a great deal of time into his research, and it appears he was thorough. His theory, and I agree with him, is that the nocturnis either discovered or developed a spell that works like the one the Wardens use to summon us from our sleep, only instead of waking the Guardians, they attempted to pull a demon onto our plane of existence. It would require a tremendous amount of power, but it could work.”

  “And you think it did.”

  “It makes sense.” He picked up newspaper clipping and spread it open on her lap. “I assume that you do not read Arabic—”

  “Not so much.”

  “—so I will tell you that this article relates the tale of a massacre in the mountains on the northern border of Afghanistan.”

  “Considering there’s a war on there, do you really think that has anything to do with demons? I mean, I’ve always considered the groups who want to subjugate their women and make war on the West to be pretty evil, but—”

  He shushed her with a glance. “A place like that is the perfect cover for the nocturnis. As you see, the media reports that a group of militant rebels attacked a small village in the dead of night. Fifty people were slaughtered, every man, woman, and child in the village. The eldest was almost eighty, the youngest only weeks from its mother’s womb.”

  Fil felt her heart clench. “That’s unspeakably awful, but things like that happen during wars.”

  “And they happen when doers of evil need to raise tremendous amounts of power through the sacrifice of blood,” he insisted in clear, cold words. “Nothing in the universe raises more Dark power than the spilling of human blood and the draining of a human life force. Nothing. It is the most unforgivable of acts, and one that feeds the Darkness like nothing else. Even the nocturnis reserve it for the rarest and most important of their rituals. The lifeblood of a single human will nourish a demon at full strength for days. Perhaps weeks. To sacrifice fifty of them could have broken through the wards of one’s prison and allowed the Order to call it forth.”

  Fil shook her head. She understood what Spar was telling her, but she didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to believe it. “If that’s all it takes, then why don’t they just bomb a city and break all of the Seven out at once? Why waste time lurking in the shadows when they could have already taken over the world a thousand times by now?”

  Spar gaped at her for a moment.

  “What?”

  He squeezed her hand. “I think we are very lucky that you are on the side of the Light, my fierce little human.” He sighed. “Thankfully it is not so simple. A device like a bomb does not have the same effect. It is not simply the death of a human that is required. There is a ritual that must be performed, and the death requires the draining of blood. A bladed weapon must be used, one dedicated to the Darkness. Wholesale destruction may please the Seven, but it does not feed them the power they require. For that, each life must be taken individually, and that requires either a great deal of time, or a great many killers.”

  “That still sounds like something they could have tried before.”

  “With the Wardens and the Guardians looking on? We would never have allowed it.”

  Fil thought back on the things she had learned from Ella and Kees since this weird roller-coaster ride had begun. Parts of it began to click into place. “That’s why they started their big recruitment drive, and why they went after the Guild.” She cursed. “They were getting the manpower in place to be able to perform large-scale sacrifices, in the first case. And in the second, by taking out the Wardens, they ensured fewer people were able to interfere and made it nearly impossible to summon the Guardians to stop them completely.”

  Spar nodded grimly. “So I am sure they believed.”

  “That’s almost elegant.”

  Fil could see the beauty of the plan. It would have required years of planning, maybe even decades. Calculating the numbers required, finding suitable recruits, and swaying them to the Dark side couldn’t have been easy. At least she hoped not. She would like to think it took more than the promise of cookies to make the average person dedicate his soul to serving the ultimate evil.

  Then there would have been training for all the new little minions. They would have to learn not only the proper use of magic, but also the rituals required of the Order’s demonic Masters. Add in the time it took to cause as much damage to the Guild as Ella had begun to suspect, and this was no strike of blind fury. Someone had to have orchestrated it like a chess match, and that person was playing a very long game.

  �
�The Hierophant.” She snapped back to focus and looked up at Spar. “He’s got to be running this, right? There has to be an architect, and if he’s the leader of the Order, it has to be him behind it.”

  “That is my assumption.”

  “Then we have to find him.” Resolve and weariness warred inside her. According to what Onslow had uncovered, the force behind this plot appeared to possess both patience and cunning. He wouldn’t make an easy opponent. “It’s like a snake. That’s what the old saying says. The head is the dangerous part. Cut that off, and all you’ve got is dead snake.”

  Spar gazed at her, looking bemused. “That is an old saying?”

  “Close enough.” She raised a hand to stifle a yawn. “So that’s what we do. We find the Hierophant, and we stop him. Simple. We can start tomorrow.”

  “Simple.” He chuckled. “As I said, I am grateful you choose to work with the Light rather than against us. I do not think you have set us an easy task.”

  “We know where to start, at least. I’ve seen the Hierophant, remember. I know what he looks like. That’s something we can work with.”

  “How?”

  Fatigue had begun to tug on her eyelids, making them droop. “Can I figure that out in the morning? I could really use some sleep.” Another yawn threatened to crack her jaw.

  If Spar nodded, she didn’t see it. She didn’t hear him agree, either. It didn’t matter. Nothing short of the hand of God could have kept her awake in that moment. Apparently, a road trip, a fight with a golem, and coming up with a plan to save the world could really take it out of a girl.

  Who knew?

  Chapter Thirteen

  Fil slept like the dead. Not a dream, not a snore, not a minion of evil disturbed her slumber. Not for the first six hours. When the seventh hit sometime after three in the morning, the heavy blanket of unconsciousness lifted, and she stirred enough to roll onto her back. The wall there didn’t bother to protest.